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Estrogen Excess and Gut Dysfunction (How They Are Connected)
14 Plays3 months ago
Ready to resolve your constipation, gas, bloating, and other digestive problems for good? Watch my free Gut Recovery Masterclass to learn more about how I help women in your situation: https://gutrecoverymethod.com/register
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Hosted by functional health practitioner and longevity author, Christian Yordanov, this podcast is dedicated to helping women struggling with gastrointestinal problems such as gas, bloating, constipation, and other digestive distress.
Whether you have a diagnosis such as IBS (irritable bowel syndrome), IBD (inflammatory bowel disease; Crohn's disease or ulcerative colitis), SIBO (small intestinal bacterial overgrowth), GERD (gastroesophageal reflux disease) or not, you will benefit from the insights we'll share.
Join us as we explore the intricate connections between gut health and overall well-being, addressing common issues like fatigue, poor sleep, hormonal imbalances, and anxiety.
Learn how stress impacts your digestive system and discover effective strategies to reduce inflammation, improve digestion, and enhance your quality of life.
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Transcript
Estrogen as a Toxin
00:00:43
chrisyzen
Hi, so today we're going to talk a little bit about estrogen excess and how gut dysfunction plays a role in it. So to give you a very basic synopsis, basically the body treats estrogen like a toxin. It needs to be sent to the liver where it's transformed and detoxified, basically neutralized ideally, and then excreted. And the way we excrete toxins is either through the urine, And other but you know we can breathe them out, we can sweat them out, but major
00:01:16
chrisyzen
routes of detoxification are urine and ah poop through through the poop. And the way we get toxins into the poop is through the bio. So in the liver cells, they they do their magic in terms of you know transforming it, attaching things to it like ah amino acids, methyl groups, glucuronic acid, right? So the toxin, estrogen being one of those, right? is then pushed into the bile and then the the intention of the body is for that bile to go down the bile ducts into the small intestine and eventually it will kind of get out of the body. So here is where things can start to go a little bit awry. So we have something known as enterohepatic
00:02:04
chrisyzen
circulation or recirculation so we recycle a lot of the bio that the body creates because the body doesn't want to waste things that it spent precious nutrients and energy to create so a lot of the stuff gets recycled the problem is that nowadays there's a lot of toxins that we are exposed to constantly on a daily basis so our liver is constantly working to detoxify these things so a lot of them are getting pushed into the bio and the thing is a lot of these like from plastics and certain other like from exhausts and air pollution and um quite quite a lot of
00:02:43
chrisyzen
Toxins are known as lipophilic. So they have an affinity towards fatty tissue So they're very difficult to make water soluble and if something is difficult to make water soluble it becomes difficult for the body to excrete it efficiently.
Health Risks of Excess Estrogen
00:02:59
chrisyzen
So a lot of these toxins they get Sequestered in our fatty tissue in our organs and stuff like that, right which is not good So this is one of the reasons why a lot of these lipophilic toxins they will recirculate back into enterohepatic circulation and they can damage the liver, right? So if the if the liver becomes dysfunctional, damaged, if we don't support our detoxification capacities with the nutrients required, then that can you know cause liver dysfunction and that
00:03:34
chrisyzen
can then cause estrogen to not be detoxified as efficiently as it should. And if estrogen builds up in the tissues, it can cause problems down the line like fibrosis, you know ah cancer, really just uncontrolled growth, uncontrolled undifferentiated growth, which is at the end of the day, the end stage is obviously the big C, but there's other intermediary periods or intermediary sort of stages up to there that are still going to cause a lot of dysfunction and and poor health. Not to mention that um estrogen, I think pretty much all women know symptoms of estrogen excess and how that feels. It's very induce anxiety inducing, irritability,
00:04:26
chrisyzen
um just insomnia just very it's very stressful and the what's interesting is the reason it's stressful is because estrogen acts like a stress hormone and it also causes a rise in certain other stress hormones, right? For example, cortisol with estrogen causes the rise in cortisol and actually cortisol can also do the same. So the stress hormones can sort of cause each other to rise. So if you have one that rises and brings up the other ones, you can then imagine why then, why, yeah you know, let's say when a woman
00:05:07
chrisyzen
coming up to kind of the, you know, the, the cycle. If there's a drop in progesterone that is, that causes a relative estrogen excess, for just as an example, that estrogen excess unopposed by progesterone, sufficient amounts of progesterone will cause, you know, all the, all the symptoms of estrogen excess that, you know, anyone can think of pain, um, tender breasts, Again, the the mood type symptoms, the physical symptoms, the water retention, edema, these kind of things. So the the there's a couple of ways to get into that state. Obviously, one is just ah ah an of estrogen, obviously. And then, of course, like I mentioned, is when there is a ah relative lowering of progesterone, which can be in that sort of luteal phase drop, like in a cycling woman, or it could be in ah in a
00:06:02
chrisyzen
post-menopausal women because the you know the ovaries are not creating ah a lot of progesterone like in the earlier years. And then there's a lot of sort of, I want to say residual estrogen in the tissues because don't forget that you know the ovaries create the estradiol, the E2, but the rest of the tissues, the rest of the cells, they they continue to be able to make E1 or estrone. um throughout life and men just just as much can create just as much of that type of E1 as women so the whole and they can interconvert between each other right so there's the whole notion that you know in menopause
00:06:47
chrisyzen
there's a deficiency of estrogen that's kind of BS because all of our cells can make ah estrogen, a type of estrogen called estrone through the enzyme aromatase. right So that that that whole notion is a little bit bunk. So it personally um I would never let my wife you know be ah given or tricked into taking some kind of exogenous estrogen type ah drug or whatever you know that's just very very harmful and part of the reason why estrogen ah sort of can mess with liver and digestive function is because
Impact of Estrogen on Liver Function
00:07:29
chrisyzen
It can actually make the liver sluggish now. I know it sounds like BS that something can make the liver sluggish or you know sluck like the whole notion sounds like quackery like some sort of um something that like ah the natural space people in the natural space came up, but in fact there is a known classified condition, and you can go on Wikipedia right now and check for yourself, called cholestasis. So cholestasis is like you know stagnant and staying in one place, and chole refers to bio. So basically, cholestasis is where the bio flow is impeded in the liver. And if you again, if you go on Wikipedia right now,
00:08:18
chrisyzen
you can see that um various drugs are known to contribute to cholestasis including and ah estrogen. So obviously estrogen being in like a drug form like birth control but also estrogen the hormone can cause cholestasis or basically can impede bio flow in the liver. now Impeded bioflow can lead to a number of different different problems. So first of all, it can cause gallstones to form, right? These are clumps of bile pigments, cholesterol, the toxins that are in the bile that kind of are designed ah were supposed to make it to the poop and be pooped out, and a number of other kind of compounds, right? Billy Rubin, which is um kind of a breakdown product of red blood cells and so on.
00:09:06
chrisyzen
and So these can clump up And they can so they can form in the gallbladder, and they can form in the liver, in the bile ducts. So in the liver, their name is intrahepatic stone. So that's ah that's the medical term. This is not some kind of stuff we're sucking out of our thumb. These things have technical medical names. ah these This is reality. This is happening. The fact that you know the medical system does nothing about these things until it's time to remove a woman's gallbladder
00:09:39
chrisyzen
Uh, is a whole separate story because they can charge, you know, tens of thousands of dollars for a procedure like that. But helping a woman get these stones out of her liver and gallbladder naturally, um, you know, is, there's no money in that. So, that but that's beside the point. So these intrahepatic stones can form, they're kind of made of cholesterol
Gallstones and Liver Health
00:10:01
chrisyzen
again. So various bile acids, bile, Toxins and stuff like that clumped up and but the thing is that when they form in the gallbladder That's where they can actually become calcified so they can actually become rock like okay So I've had clients that will send me like pictures that I because I tell them as part of my gut recovery method program We get these stones out of out of them um and Excuse me
00:10:28
chrisyzen
And I tell them, you know, make sure you take pictures and you send me pictures for my totally not weird collection of gallstones and liver stones that my clients have passed. And what I've seen is the like, ah ah one of for example, one client she had on a piece of toilet paper, the kind of the clumpy greenish brownish liver stones, right? Clumps of those. And then there was in the middle, there was one which was almost it was almost round like a stone, almost like a eggshell type of color. So kind of calcified like calcium mineral mineral really very smooth as well, right?
00:11:12
chrisyzen
like a rock, like a pebble in a river kind of thing, you know? And um that one was clearly something that came out of the gallbladder because these things don't really calcify and form like that in the in the liver, which is good because they could cause some serious horrendous injury to the liver if they did indeed form there like that. um In fact, i when I passed, ah in one of the cleanses that I did, when I passed these blacks, about maybe it was four or five or six um that I passed, among a bunch of kind of there were pitch black amongst a bunch of kind of the regular greenish
00:11:51
chrisyzen
brownish ones and I could see them and I actually kind of scooped one out and it was hard it was super hard right um and it took me many cleanses actually for those to come out which means they were probably like at the bottom of my gallbladder like ah you know one mass that was there and maybe over over the months and the years as as I kind of persisted with these cleanses that I teach my clients how to do um they must have slowly softened maybe cracked at one point or maybe they were just separate stones always to begin with but they were just kind of so congealed on the bottom of my gallbladder that they just took so long to actually get out right and just after after that one particular cleanse man I felt absolutely like I was floating kind of
00:12:43
chrisyzen
on as levitating on air, you know, you just feel so amazing. Right. And just to, to say this is only a minor, it's ah a small part of the entire gut recovery method program. Right. So it's important, but it's, there's a hell of a lot more in the program. It's like, I genuinely believe this is probably the best thing you could ever do. If you have gut problems, hormonal imbalances, You can't sleep, skin issues, you know mood stuff, irritability, anxiety, blood sugar, dysregulation. All of these things get addressed even though you may only you know decide to join just to get your gut issues resolved.
00:13:31
chrisyzen
when you actually resolve When we resolve the gut issues, a lot of these ancillary things like the hormone balance, the water retention, so tender breasts or sore breasts straight up, you know um skin stuff again, you know sleep problems, waking up in the middle of the night, ah fatigue, energy issues, all of these things, they get they get systematically and gradually but systematically resolved once you improve the gut and improve a lot of these other things other ancillary systems because at the end of the day the liver is part of the gastrointestinal system actually because and and so is the gallbladder of course because you need bile that's made in the liver
00:14:16
chrisyzen
that's also some of it is stored in the gallbladder you need that to digest food and then a bunch of those nutrients that you um ah digest and absorb they go to the liver for processing and the liver will send them out to where it's right so the liver is actually a big part of the gastrointestinal system so if you have a gut issue you'd see it would kind of it should go without saying that you are going to sooner or later develop a detoxification issue because of the liver is involved there. Then if you have a detoxification issue that can cause estrogen excess type stuff, not not to mention all the all the other toxins that are not getting detoxified um you know efficiently, effectively. And that over time, what does that lead to? Well, first of all, it's going to lead to like fatigue and a lot of just breakdown of the body, a lot of inflammation, oxidative stress. But over time, the straight up the the the end result is
00:15:13
chrisyzen
faster aging, less resilience to stress and disease, and faster, um you know, you you kind of, if you if you allow yourself to get into that, on that track, that's a fast track to to earlier disease and and and a shorter lifespan. Really, at the end of the day, that's what that means, unfortunately. You know, it's kind of unfortunate, but, yeah you know, we really have to take this stuff seriously, right? kind of ah um i A lot of people, they don't really understand that if you have a gut issue, you don't just have a gut issue. it's the longer The longer this gets stays unaddressed, the more health complication a person will develop. It's just as simple as that. In the with the case with these gold stones in the intrahepatic stones in the liver, so they're they're small to begin with,
00:16:11
chrisyzen
But as the bio kind of flows down the bio ducts, it either gets stored in the gallbladder or it goes to to the intestine directly to help digest fats. And this helps to kind of, you know, um ah helps us absorb but fat soluble vitamins. So if there's obstructions along the way of gallstones, that bio is hitting hitting those gallstones and they kind of basically snowball. They become bigger and bigger enough past. and My clients have passed massive ones, you know massive, massive ones. The size of half of a pinky, this is what we're talking about, or the diameter of a thumbnail, um you know half an inch or more in terms of diameter. So they snowball. and then ah So less bile, so they're getting bigger, they're obstructing the bile flow, you know causing you know dysfunction in the liver.
00:17:01
chrisyzen
um but also less bile is making it down to help you digest your food. So that's the other problem, right? And over the years it can really snowball, like I said. Now, the other thing is that the bile has the sort of ah antibacterial action in the small intestine. The small intestine should be pretty much sterile in terms of having, that it shouldn't have like fungi, yeast, candida, bacteria, shouldn't they shouldn't be overgrowing in there. So if less bio was making it down there, you can potentially have more bacterial overgrowth, which is, I honestly believe this is a big reason why conditions like SIBO and CFO are so prevalent nowadays, small but small intestinal bacterial overgrowth and small small intestinal
00:17:55
chrisyzen
fungal overgrowth. It's because a lot of people have gallstones. I absolutely guarantee it.
Digestive Issues from Reduced Bile Flow
00:18:02
chrisyzen
All of my clients, every single every single one of my clients, men and women that have done the liver cleanses that i that I have as part of my programs, every single one of them has passed stones. Maybe not on the first try, but on the second, third, and and more, they absolutely do. okay so Excuse me. So now think about it this way. So you don't have, maybe you might have a small intestinal bacterial overgrowth that can cause gas, bloating, pain, distention, belching, heartburn, a lot of problems because these bacteria, when we eat, we're feeding them and they're fermenting or putrefying our food. And that that that sort of causes um gases to be released, right? These gases can be
00:18:54
chrisyzen
you know, uncomfortable, they can cause again pain, distension, stuff like that. So on top of that, you know, you you might not be digesting fat. So if you have floating stool, right? If your stool floats on the water, that's indicative of fat malabsorption. That could be a bioinsufficiency, okay? That's another major sign right there. um And then on top of that, Because the fat's not getting emulsified, broken down, digested, we are not absorbing
00:19:30
chrisyzen
a lot of the fat soluble vitamins, which are super critical to health and, um you know, vitamin K, a lot of us are eating very little of it. So the more, you know, the the more of this problem we have, the more ah likely we are to be vitamin K insufficient or or straight up deficient, right? Similarly, ah vitamin E. ah the These are, I think, probably the the two most important ones. but Excuse me. because the vitamin E protects us from polyunsaturated fat and the vitamin K really helps to, ah it can help basically prevent things like atherosclerosis, calcification of soft tissues and stuff like that. And look how prevalent atherosclerosis is nowadays, right? So there's, again, these things are all very much interconnected and it really, again, it's another example of of disease
00:20:27
chrisyzen
ah beginning in the gut, right? Now in terms of other things that can happen, we also have, there's certain bacteria in the gut that produce an enzyme called beta glucuronidase. So remember, like I said, estrogen can be bound up to certain amino acids, but also to something called glucuronic acid. And then, so this estrogen with the glucuronic acid, travels down the gut and then the idea is of course to poop it out. But these if they we if we have an overgrowth of these bacteria that ex the express this enzyme beta-glucuronidase, it cleaves the glucuronic acid off of the estrogen right and that um estrogen can then be absorbed back. right It's free estrogen that can be absorbed back into systemic circulation and that can
00:21:23
chrisyzen
contribute to the overall estrogenic tone of a woman, right? And it can happen in men, of course. So this this is this is why the stool test that I run with my clients that choose to do it, there's a marker for this beta glucuronidase enzyme that we can see if it's high, it's likely there's an overgrowth of these bacteria. So knowing that quickly and early, allows us to catch it and do something about it early on rather than like for many women they these things go unidentified and unaddressed for years and years and sometimes decades like a couple of decades plus right so this is my strategies my strategies invest get some data on you know on yourself right because at the end of the day
00:22:11
chrisyzen
If you don't invest in yourself, right, a few hundred dollars for a test, you know, if you don't invest that in yourself, what's more important for you to invest it in? Certainly not a slightly better version of your phone or your TV, even if it's if it if your car is like 10, 15 years old, you know, is investing in a newer car when the what the previous one still works, is investing in a newer car, should that take priority and precedence over your own health, right?
Prioritizing Health Over Material Goods
00:22:43
chrisyzen
It's like that saying, if you don't make time for your health now, you will be forced to make time for your illness later. A lot of people, not so much women, but a lot of men, um they kind of live this sort of just not thinking about the future and then the the damage, the undercurrent of damage
00:23:07
chrisyzen
under the surface builds up so much that they finally you know start having symptoms, problems. And for a lot of men, they leave it until it's a heart attack you know or a stroke. But lot of women a lot of women are doing a lot of a lot more for their health. right This is why I really love Working with women so much because they're more in tune with their body They feel when things are like ah out of balance right instead of just stiff upper lip Let's just crack on and continue on you know soldiering on um This is why I love working with women but the problem for a lot of women out there is They just are not aware of so many of these things like this stuff with the gold stones I so sometimes a client will tell me oh my god the stuff that you taught me as part of the program I wish
00:23:53
chrisyzen
I had known this, it could have saved my mother's gallbladder or my grandmother's gallbladder or my friend's gallbladder. So many women. ah Like literally hundreds of thousands of operations are conducted every year to remove gallbladder organs called cystectomies, I think they're called. So, um you know, just a lot of women are at the mercy of the medical system, which is designed just to extract profit from people and ideally keep them sick for life.
00:24:25
chrisyzen
so that they can keep extracting profit from them. That is how it was designed. it's not The system is not broken. It's working impeccably well the way it's been designed. And it's making billions, probably trillions and trillions for the few that are kind of pulling the strings under the you know behind the behind the scenes and getting a bunch of money from the drugs or the treatments, the the various surgeries and stuff like that. And a lot of these things we can avoid them. We don't have to get into those kind of end stage states of disease and dysfunction in order to learn the lesson and you know ah start start living slightly differently, changing a few things, investing in ourselves a little bit more. The earlier we do it, the more benefits we'll reap and the the longer we'll be our sort of our
Extending Health Span
00:25:18
chrisyzen
our health span. So the period of time where we are healthy and don't require sort of medical attention or a lot of help from kind of what whatever third-party sources. um So that's kind of my goal. my My goal is to teach people not just how to you know restore their health and you know all the good stuff but how to maintain it long term So they are just remain functional, living, living and loving life and thriving for as long as possible. And not like my grandmother, who the last, you know, the last three decades of her life was on drugs. The last 10 years of her life was pure hell, you know, and especially the last four or five years, I see sort of degenerated really badly. Like the the last 15 years of that of that life
00:26:12
chrisyzen
to me it was like okay she lived to the age of 84 higher than the life expectancy much higher than the Bulgarian life expectancy which is where I'm from much much higher than her life expectancy at birth which was like I don't know 50 59 years right so she lived like two and a half decades longer than the life expectancy when she was born but Was it living? No, it was pure hell. It was pure torture. I could see it, you know. So that's what kind one of the things that made me realize, no, hell no. I cannot end up like that. I cannot let my wife end up like that or me being a burden on her in the last 10 years of my life, you know. So to not end up like my grandmother, which is where most of the population is headed the way they're living, right? um To not end up like that, we have to
00:27:03
chrisyzen
educate ourselves and invest in our health as if it's the most important freaking thing, which it is, which it freaking is, right? Seriously, like people out there, I swear to God, there's so many people out there, they spend more on gadgets or on handbags or on their car every year. And they they won't even spend a couple hundred bucks on on on some supplements. or some organic food extra because it's a little bit more expensive. this is And I'm sure a lot ah lot of the so a lot of the clients I've been attracting lately, they they're already taking good care of themselves. They just need they just need kind of that next level knowledge that you know that I provide. So I'm sure a lot of people that are gonna end up listening to this, they're already on on you're already on this um bandwagon. you know You're on already on the right path
00:27:59
chrisyzen
But it's still like, I'm just shocked where people, you know, they can spend how much money every month on clothes and and every year, you know, thousands and thousands on vacations. But then when it comes to like investing in their vehicle, in their most important thing, right? Where if you don't, you could literally, the the last one, two decades of your life could be pure hell and suffering. ah the hands also of the medical system where they will poison you with chemicals and and you know cut you up with all their surgeries and butchery. right So that's kind of the path people prefer to stay on just because it's maybe a little bit hard to change their diet or or adding a few supplements would be a bit inconvenient or maybe they they feel like it's not it's too expensive, it's not worth the investment. you know Or maybe doing a little bit of stress reduction stuff, meditation, maybe breath work,
00:28:53
chrisyzen
That's a little bit too much. I'd rather you know just like vegetate on the couch and watch Netflix or some other BS like that. you know or Or maybe spending $200 on an air pure ah purifier for the bedroom. I'd rather spend that on a new phone. And I'm not saying i'm not trying to i'm not judging because I was like that for so long before I kind of copped on. But it's it's almost it's still shocking every every once in a while when I look at the disease statistics.
Societal Health Priorities
00:29:22
chrisyzen
and what people are kind of investing their time and money and attention in, it's kind of it's kind of shocking. and At the end of the day, it um it also kind of explains why the disease statistics are like that and the trends are like that because genuinely people are not investing in their health the way they should be. This is your, at least I believe this is your number one priority in terms of investment, terms of
00:29:52
chrisyzen
how much time you spend and um you know if you do understand that and you're here, well, great job because you're going to learn a lot. you know At least listening to me, obviously working with me is a whole other level, but um at least you're on the right path. So you know that's I really respect that and thank you for you know being a listener and tuning in. So I hope to continue serving you with future um content like this. Sorry for the rant. I am a little bit ranty at times. I could have ended this 10 minutes ago. um So if you're still here, big respect and I hope to see you on the next episode and give you um more good valuable information. Thanks for listening or watching.