While many guys are obsessed with increasing their testosterone levels, I like to take a different approach to male hormonal health. The most important aspect being, balanced estrogen levels. If you get estrogen right, you are guaranteed to have it easier maximizing your testosterone, sometimes even without much more effort than that. Even further, most of us know that more testosterone translates into more muscle mass, less body fat, and increased performance on all levels.
The damaging effects of excess levels of estrogen can be seen in everything from erectile dysfunction and obesity to even hair loss, gynecomastia, and prostate cancer. It does not paint a beautiful picture. Estrogen in men is serious business and if you ever find yourself struggling with your fitness goals or even in feeling manly, excess estrogen might be at play.
As an athlete, hormones become even more important because of the ergogenic effects that optimal hormone levels can give you over the competition. But in all honesty, no matter if you’re an athlete, fitness professional, bodybuilder or just a regular joe, you are living in the modern age, and you owe it to yourself and others to educate yourself on how to avoid hormone-related health problems. They can spell the end for not only your professional and fitness career but even your relationships such as with the far to common case of erectile dysfunction.
Time to man up and take control over your health, your gains will thank you for it!
Toxins & Hormones: Detoxification 101
Today our environments are filled with xenoestrogens (compounds with estrogenic effects such as BPA in plastics), pollutants and other toxins that inhibits our bodies detoxifying functions and can further promote hormone imbalances.
Even the most healthy of us are guaranteed to have amounts of these substances circulating in our bodies, even while we try our best to avoid them. It’s enviable. We can scrub ourselves clean every day, but we still live and breathe these pollutants through our air and unhealthy diets. This is the major contributor to the many issues we men face with our health in the modern age.
One thing that toxins and hormones have in common is that they share the same pathway when they are excreted out from the body. This detoxification process is called conjugation, and it is the process when carcinogens, toxins and used up hormones are bound together with water-soluble compounds so that the liver can easily process and remove them from the body.
There is, however, a damaging process that can inhibit this detoxification pathway, and this process is called beta-glucuronidase. Beta-glucuronidase is an enzyme that breaks down the bonds between hormones and toxins and allows them to be reabsorbed and recirculated into the bloodstream rather than be detoxified by the liver. This allows these hormones (such as estrogen), toxins and tumor promoters to remain in the body where they can further cause damage to cells.
In fact, even unhealthy gut bacteria such as E. coli HGU-3 can be responsible for increasing the levels of this enzyme in the body. Further proving how important probiotics and gut health also is in overall health.
Obviously, beta-glucuronidase is not a good thing, and if estrogen hormones keep being recirculated in men, the levels grow larger and larger over time and eventually will be present in excess which can trigger a wide array of health problems and hamper your performance.
Even worse, when high levels of the beta-glucuronidase enzyme are present, levels of estrogen receptors in the body also increase. This enables all those extra hormones and toxins that are being recirculated to bind to these receptors and influence the body’s processes, further fueling worse things such as tumor growth.
Luckily for us, there are dietary nutrients out there that can help and as you will soon find out, maybe all those health nuts juicing green drinks were not all that crazy to begin with!
Benefits of Calcium D-Glucarate
Calcium D-Glucarate is a nutrient found in fruits and vegetables such as:
- Apples
- Oranges
- Grapefruit
- Spinach
- Brussel sprouts
- Broccoli
It is also produced in minuscule amounts naturally in the body and has been proven to be able to offer immense benefits regarding detoxification. Does that mean you should eat more fruits and veggies? Of course, yes, but to get an effective dose of Calcium D-Glucarate from foods, you would have to consume a staggering 82 pounds of it. In other words, supplementation is key here.
Improving Detoxification:
So how does Calcium D-Glucarate benefit detoxification of estrogen?
D-Glucarate promotes the conjugation process of toxins, and together with D-glucarate, the process is called glucuronidation. Basically, ingested Calcium D-Glucarate is metabolized into glucaric acid (also the primary acid in the detox tea Kombucha) which then bind to carcinogens and toxins to promote conjugation that safely brings them out of the body through urine or the bowels.
Another interesting fact is that D-Glucarate can help your kidneys and liver process byproducts such as ammonia from a high protein diet at a faster rate. This is something that can be very beneficial when you are cutting and trying to lose weight by consuming the majority of your calories from proteins such as meat.
But wait there is more! Even better, it just so happens that Calcium D-Glucarate can also inhibit the beta-glucuronidase enzyme. Studies have shown that by inhibiting this enzyme the glucuronidation process cannot be reversed and detoxification processes keep rolling on as intended, decreasing the toxins and estrogenic load in the body.
In a study done in 1988, it was found that supplementation with Calcium D-Glucarate could lower the number of estrogen receptor sites by 48% and reverse/halt the growth of breast tumors.
Simply put, this is why Calcium D-Glucarate is indeed one of the best nutraceuticals to help detox and restore estrogen levels down into healthy ranges.
Cancer Prevention:
An indirect effect of healthy detoxification processes is cancer prevention, and in fact, Calcium D-Glucarate has been shown to be able to do just that.
In a study done on breast cancer in rats, D-Glucarate was shown to reduce cancer rates by an incredible 70%. Another study in rats with colon cancer showed a 60% reduction in cancer rates as well. The mechanism for these beneficial effects on cancer is the increased detoxification of carcinogens and tumor promoting compounds by inhibition of the beta-glucuronidase enzyme.
If you are a smoker and don’t plan on quitting anytime soon, you might be interested to hear that Calcium D-Glucarate might be extra beneficial for you. Smokers have been shown in studies to have around 30% less glucaric acid in their bodies than nonsmokers, which hints at impeded detoxification being a contributing factor for developing lung cancer. However nothing is guaranteed, and by all means, D-Glucarate could never counteract the harms of smoking to a 100%, but everything helps.
Lowering Cholesterol
While cholesterol is a healthy and crucial substance in a body that is functioning optimally, excess levels of LDL cholesterol (aka bad cholesterol) is something you want to avoid.
While LDL cholesterol is not always a bad thing in itself, it is rather a sign that something else is not working optimally in your body. LDL cholesterol is used by the body to repair tissues, and high levels can hint at stressed or damaged cells. This clearly shows the mechanism by which overtraining and excess levels of stress can increase your LDL cholesterol numbers and how diet is not always implicated.
In studies on humans, Calcium D-Glucarate lowered total cholesterol by 12%, LDL cholesterol by 28%, and also triglycerides by an astounding 43%. It does this by the unique mechanism we have previously talked about, by inhibiting beta-glucuronidase which enhances blood circulation to the liver which decreases stress on the liver and in the end, lowers the body’s need for cholesterol.
The Estrogen Detox Protocol:
If you are already struggling with a bad case of estrogen dominance, all is not lost yet. It is important to take action as quick as possible before your issues start developing into something more severe and permanent such as gynecomastia (man boobs).
The following is our recommended nutrient protocol to clean out excess levels of estrogen effectively:
- DIM or Indole-3-carbinol (best dietary source: broccoli)
- Green Tea (EGCG is what you want)
- Calcium D-Glucarate
Dosages should be maximum recommended ones for the products you are using. Keep track of your estrogen levels by performing regular blood tests every 3-4 weeks, if detox progress is too slow you can often go higher on the dosages.
Concerning green tea, drink as much as you feel comfortable with, the more is often, the merrier when it comes to tea consumption. Green tea is preferred over black tea in this regard since it contains more of the antioxidants such as EGCG which has proven benefits on estrogen metabolism. If you are sensitive to caffeine, however, keep it in the 1-3 cups per day range, or you might cause more harm than good. Stress is also often implicated in estrogen dominance; hence too much caffeine will increase stress levels. Alternatively get EGCG in isolated form as a supplement.
And guys, we know broccoli is not the tastiest thing in the world but if you are really serious about getting back your manhood we recommend you consume it on a daily basis. If you can’t stomach it, invest in a supplement providing either DIM or Indole-3-carbinol in isolated forms. The type of DIM that’s bound to phosphatidylcholine together with Vitamin E is the most absorbed form.
Conclusion:
While estrogen is needed in men in normal amounts to support bone growth and sexual health, balance is critical. In today’s age, it is close to impossible to avoid all the estrogenic chemicals that are rampant in our immediate environments.
Calcium D-Glucarate offer a simple turnkey solution to make sure that your body are actually processing and riding itself of these substances on a daily basis. It also provides an easier and more natural solution to inhibiting estrogen without the use of pharmaceutical aromatase inhibitors; which would be more like shutting off the entire river, when all you really needed to do was open up the dam.
Regarding male hormonal balance, eating your broccoli, a daily cup of tea and a tablet or two of Calcium D-Glucarate is all you need as a plan of action to counteract the pitfalls of modern living, as well as keeping your manliness and fit physique intact.
References:
- (J National Cancer Inst, 1989;81:1820-3 and Bio Chem Pharmacol, 1991;41 (10):1471-7)
- Walaszek Z, Hanausek-Walaszek M, Minton J, Webb TE. Dietary Glucarate as anti-promoter of 7,12-dimethylbenz[a]anthracene-induced mammary tumorigenesis. Carcinogenesis 1986;7:1463-1466
- Walaszek Z, Hanausek-Walaszek M,. Cholesterol lowering effects of dietary D-Glucarate. FASEB 1991;5:A930.
- Walaszek, Z., E. Flores. Effect of dietary glucarate on estrogen receptors of 7,12 dimethylbenz(a)anthracene-induced rat mammary carcinomas. Breast Cancer Research and Treatment 12:128
- Walaszek, Z. 1993. Chemopreventive properties of D-Glucaric acid derivatives. Cancer Bulletin 45:453-7
