The Dr. Hyman Show - Longevity Roadmap: The Functional Medicine Approach To Balancing Hormones

Episode Date: January 16, 2021

In this special episode, you will hear a sneak peek into episode 4 of my new docu-series, Longevity Roadmap. In this episode, we examine all things hormones, muscle, and bones. We can take steps today to manage the changes that come with aging and remain strong and resilient. Learn more and sign up to watch the Longevity Roadmap docu-series at longevityfilm.com In the Longevity Roadmap docuseries, we will walk you through the latest research on longevity, healthspan, and how to live better, longer. We also dive into the science behind preventing the most prevalent diseases of aging, and we’ll talk about what it means to build a resilient body. Each episode will take on a specific focus to help you understand the diseases of aging and what Functional Medicine teaches us about prevention, testing, nutrition, and more. 

Hi, my name is Kea Perowit. I'm one of the producers of the Doctors Pharmacy podcast and the director of Dr. Mark Hyman's new Longevity Roadmap docuseries, which is now live. Today, we wanted to give you a sneak peek of episode four. In today's episode, Dr. Hyman and his team discussed the functional medicine approach to balancing hormones and preventing muscle and bone loss. Did you know that falls are a leading cause of injury and death in older adults? How do we prevent the rapid changes that come with aging and things like sarcopenia? How do we maintain strength and balance our hormones throughout different life cycles? You'll learn more in this episode. Here are the first 15 minutes of episode 4 of the Longevity

Roadmap docuseries. Now, as we age, our hormones change and they get out of balance, leading to faster aging. Sex hormones go down, stress hormones go up, growth hormones go down, thyroid problems increase, and insulin goes up, all leading to a steady decline in energy, function, and vitality. And it kind of happens slowly, almost imperceptibly, so we barely notice. And one day, we wake up just feeling older. Things that should go up go down, and things that should go down go up. These hormones are all connected in a finely choreographed

dynamic dance. And when they're in balance, you feel young and strong and healthy. And when they're out of balance, you feel tired, weak, and old. And while it's common for these imbalances to occur, it's not inevitable. And getting your hormones in balance and in harmony is a key part of aging well. And yeah, it takes a little more work as you get older, but it's doable. To keep your insulin low, for example, you have to really limit starches and sugars as you age,

and you have to exercise more. You need to do things like meditate and do yoga to regulate your stress hormones. You need to lift weights and build muscle to keep testosterone and sex drive up. Hormones are the great communicators of your body and they send signals and instructions everywhere. Your cells talk to each other through different messengers or languages. There's the endocrine language, which is your hormones. There's the immune language, which is your cytokines. And there's the nervous system language, also known as neurotransmitters. Your hormones are

produced and controlled by your endocrine glands. These are the conductors or the command and control centers for all your hormonal functions. These glands in your brain are the hypothalamus and the pituitary, and they send signals from your brain to different parts of your body. For example, your stress response goes through your adrenal glands. Your blood sugar balance is through your pancreas. Your thyroid hormone is through your thyroid gland.

Your sexual function and behavior is controlled through your reproductive organs like ovaries and testicles. Now this network of glands sends and receives messages in a finely orchestrated symphony, and they have their effects for the whole body. Now if we have imbalances in our hormones, we can experience advanced aging. And this looks like difficult and debilitating symptoms during perimenopause and menopause.

It looks like a severe drop in testosterone, otherwise known as andropause in men. It can lead to increased belly fat, to fatigue, to low libido or sex drive, and lots more in men and women. And this isn't just something we need to worry about when we're 40 or 50 or 60. Imbalances in our hormones can occur in our 20s and 30s, and they cause infertility and weight gain and muscle loss, fatigue, acne, severe PMS, and lots more. In this episode, we're going to discuss the wide array of hormones that influence everything from our blood sugar, to to our mood to our sex drive to thyroid health to stress response and lots more. So one of the keys to successful aging is

to understand your hormones, to understand how they get out of balance and how to get them back in balance. And it's so common to have these problems. You know, one in five women and one in 10 men have low thyroid function and often it's not treated and diagnosed. You know, one in five women and one in ten men have low thyroid function and often it's not treated and diagnosed. In fact, over half of them are not diagnosed and probably 90% are not optimally treated or balanced. Sex hormones obviously get different as we get older. Men's testosterone levels drop. Women also have lower testosterone levels. They go through menopause and estrogen levels and progesterone levels drop. And that affects their well-being and their vitality and their energy,

their brain function even. Thyroid often starts to dwindle as we get older because it's influenced by so many things, our diet, toxins, stress, and lots more. And of course, insulin is the most important hormone of aging, which we've talked about in the docuseries, and needs to be aggressively managed so that you keep your insulin levels low and your health high, your belly fat low, and your muscle high. As you actually drive the changes around hormones, you see a lot of them have to do with something that we call sarcopenia, which is we lose muscle. And as we lose muscle, our sex hormones get worse. Our adrenal hormones start to get worse because when you have low muscle, you have increased

stress hormones like cortisol. You get lower growth hormone, which is a repair hormone. You get more insulin. So everything is going the wrong direction. And the key to balancing your hormones, and they're different for each one, is understanding what causes them to be out of balance and what helps them get back in balance, and then systematically tweaking and applying it. Sarcopenia is the loss of lean muscle mass and strength and agility that occurs with aging, but it doesn't have to. Sarcopenia is a major cause of increased aging and something we really want to work against. We know that when we maintain good, strong, lean muscle mass, that helps with our mobility and it helps with keeping our joints stable and strong

and without pain, and it helps us so we can get up and down off the floor and play with our grandkids. Maintaining good lean muscle mass is critical for overall health. When we are at rest, let's say we were an astronaut and went into space, or maybe we were just laying in bed because we weren't feeling well, we will lose one to two percent of our bone density every month and of course with less bone density that increases our risk for bone fractures. Lean muscle mass is critically important for your bone density. Your muscles are pulling on your bones all the time and that stimulation that when your muscles pull on your bones it

stimulates your bones to say I better absorb absorb more calcium. I've got to get stronger. So keeping your muscles strong is one of the best things we can do to keep our bone density strong. Diet plays a big role. Exercise is a very important thing, especially resistance training. Managing stress to lower cortisol is important. All these things are important. But diet plays a huge role. And here's what happens as we age. We need more protein in our diet to build muscle. And here's what the science shows. Even if people can get away with it when they're younger, when they're older, they can't. And even studies that show, for example, improvements in health with lower animal protein when they're younger, when they're older, if they don't

have adequate animal protein, they can't build muscle. And here's why. All protein is not equal. Protein from a lentil is not the same as protein from a cow. And the protein from animal protein has a high level of a very important amino acid called leucine. Now, this amino acid is so important because you cannot build adequate muscle unless you eat about two and a half grams of leucine in a serving of protein and you need about 20 to 30 grams of protein to build muscle after you eat. If you eat let's say 10 or 15 grams of protein your body can't turn that very effectively into muscle. That's why you see these guys who are weightlifters they have this big whey protein shake after they work out because that gets turned into muscle. So

you can use these strategies. You don't have to be like a giant bodybuilder, Mr. Universe or Miss Universe, but you have to use a strategy of strength training with protein intake and the right kind of protein intake to build muscle. It's so, so important. So this is a really critical strategy. Muscle building, muscle strength, muscle quality, protein quality are all things we don't pay attention to as we age. And they're more important than anything because the reason people end up in nursing homes is not because they have a disease. It's because they can't get up out of bed. They can't get up out of a chair. They can't tie their shoes anymore. They lose function. And I've seen

people at 80, 90 years old who are strong and can function at a much higher level. My dad was 80 years old and I saw him and he was dwindling. He couldn't get up out of a chair anymore. He was struggling with his daily functions of life. He couldn't tie his shoes. I said, dad, I'm going to, for your birthday, give you training sessions. Now he's 88 years old already, but I sent him to the gym. I paid for his trainer. He worked out three times a week and it was amazing to see the gains in his strength. I saw the videos that his trainer would send. It was just incredible. And he noticed how much more functional and happy and energetic he was. So we have the potential at any age to impact

this. Now it's important to understand that if you wait too long, it's harder, and you may not be able to gain the full amount of muscle. So it's important to start early. I mean, I didn't. I mean, I started when I was 60, but I think I'm making up for it now. And I feel like I'm able to actually gain strength that I never knew I had. I mean, I used to try to do, you know, 10 push-ups at 50 years old, and I could barely do 10 push-ups. And then I started, you know, 10 push-ups at 50 years old and I could barely do 10 push-ups. And then I started, you know, working out a little bit, doing push-ups and that was my strength training. And I could do like 30 push-ups, but by, you know, 29, I was like feeling it. And the other day, I just like dropped down into 30 push-ups. It was like doing three push-ups. I could have kept

going simply because I've been training myself to get stronger. And I think as we age, it's more important than ever. We know that when we're at rest, if we're sick and we're laying in bed, or if we're an astronaut and we go into space, we lose about one to two percent of our bone density every month. So staying active and keeping our lean muscles strong is one of the best things we can do both for overall health, for our joint health, for our strength, for our agility, as well as for our bone density. Nutrition is critical for strong bone density as well. And so we're always thinking about things like calcium, magnesium, boron, vitamin D, vitamin K, and a good protein source. All of these nutrients are really critical

for building strong bones. So we've heard a lot about calcium over the years, and calcium is important for strong bone density, but we probably don't need to be supplementing with as much calcium as we used to supplement with. When I'm working with somebody who has osteopenia or osteoporosis, and we need to make sure they're getting in enough calcium, one of the first things I do, or one of my nutritionists does, is we add up all of the calcium that they're getting in their diet. So if the recommendation for their age and their bone density is to get 1,200 milligrams of calcium a day, we look to see how much are they getting from food, and then subtract

that from how much they need and then maybe supplement with the rest. So you don't necessarily need to supplement with all of those 1,200 milligrams. And you can get calcium from lots of different foods. People are always focused on dairy, but lots of foods have calcium. Sardines are a wonderful source of calcium. Salmon in a can, also a great source of calcium. All of your green, dark green leafy vegetables, collard greens, broccoli, almonds, all very good sources of calcium. So you don't need to always get it from dairy, or even if you can't tolerate dairy, there's many, many foods that you can get your calcium from. If you do supplement with calcium, I usually go with a calcium citrate,

and as I said, calculate the amount you need based on how much you are not getting from your food in a day. For men, we don't typically use calcium supplementation unless they really are having problems with digestion, absorption, or a very low bone density. And that's because there's been some association with calcium supplementation and prostate cancer and even heart disease. So we want to be careful with overusing calcium supplementation for both men and women. We also want to make sure that the calcium is going to the bones and it's not going to the arteries, right? We know that if calcium gets deposited around the arteries, it can make the arteries less flexible, and there could be more plaque production and increased risk of heart disease. So it's important that the calcium gets directed to where it needs to go and there's two nutrients

that really help the calcium go where it needs to go. The first is vitamin D. Vitamin D is critical for absorption of calcium so you need to have enough vitamin D to absorb your calcium. We typically want somebody's 25-hydroxy vitamin D level in their blood to be around 50 to 70. That's a good range, especially if we're dealing with bone density issues. So if you have issues with bone density, make sure they're checking your vitamin D level and then supplement as needed. People need anywhere between 500 to 2,000 to sometimes 5,000 or even higher I use a day of vitamin D to achieve a normal vitamin D level. And everybody is different. So if for you, it may be something you want to check periodically

to make sure you're getting the right supplementation of vitamin D. And then the second nutrient we're really paying attention to is vitamin K. Vitamin K is a fat soluble vitamin that helps make sure that the calcium goes to your bones and not to your arteries. And so typically we want about 180 micrograms of vitamin K2 in a supplement. And there are many vitamin D supplements that have that K with it. You can also get, your body will make K2, which is the best form of vitamin K for your bones, in your gut. So it gets converted by some of the bacteria in your gut. So that's actually why changes in the gut microbiota influence vitamin K2 levels. You can get vitamin K2 naturally from things like natto, which is a fermented soy. They eat it a lot in Japan. It's a strong taste. And we also get vitamin K from our leafy green vegetables,

collard greens, kale, spinach, broccoli. Those are typically vitamin K1, and then the body needs to convert it into vitamin K2. But when you're looking for a supplement, go for the K2 form most of the time. So collagen is a really important nutrient for bone density, and we sometimes don't realize how important it is. One of the things we know about collagen is that vitamin C is important for good collagen production, which is important for our skin and our bone density. So we want to make sure we're getting enough vitamin C. We get vitamin C from our vegetables, our fruits. We're always thinking about citrus fruits, but it's also in many other fruits like kiwi and in many vegetables like your peppers and your broccoli.

Vitamin C is really rich in a lot of our citrus and non-citrus fruits and vegetables. You just heard the first 15 minutes of episode four of Dr. Hyman's brand new Longevity Roadmap docuseries. To watch this full episode, visit longevityfilm.com and sign up for this free event. Between January 13th through the 24th we'll be airing the longevity roadmap episodes for free if you miss an episode don't worry we'll be airing the entire docuseries on the weekend of the 22nd again to sign up for this docuseries visit longevityfilm.com thanks for tuning in.