Photo Credit: Devon Divine
Hormone balance is a great place to start when talking about fertility.
To put it simply, hormones are messengers that carry information from one part of the body to another. If there is an imbalance, the information is not relayed, causing disruption and, eventually, pathology.
The Importance of Blood Sugar Regulation
The key to hormone health is proper blood sugar regulation. There is just no way around it. So, how do you balance your blood sugar? Of course, limiting sugar intake helps. But that's not the full picture. There are many other factors that impact blood sugar. Did you know that not getting enough protein in your diet, being dehydrated, and having unstable emotions (among other factors) can negatively impact your blood sugar?
Once your sugar becomes imbalanced, it throws off some of the following:
1. High sugar levels suppress your thyroid hormone - without proper thyroid hormone function you cannot sustain a viable pregnancy because thyroid regulates progesterone levels.
2. Sugar imbalance affects your reproductive organs - these organs are responsible for secreting estrogen and progesterone in women and testosterone in men.
3. Sugar imbalance also impacts your adrenal glands - your adrenals produce androgens, which convert into estrogen and testosterone. So, if your adrenal glands are impacted by irregular sugar cycles, your hormones take a hit.
4. Sugar imbalance paralyzes your gut function (stay tuned for the next blog about gut health tomorrow) - sugar imbalance slows down your liver, which is responsible for processing estrogen in women. It also slows down your colon, which is responsible for eliminating hormone byproducts. If hormone byproducts aren't eliminated, they are reabsorbed back into your system, throwing off your hormone balance. Your gut (small intestine) also produces hormones. So, as you can see, gut stress can prevent your body from both processing and producing hormones.
Those are just some basic examples of the fundamental importance of sugar balance, and how it impacts your hormones. What I’m trying to say is that it's not always about the hormones themselves. Although hormone imbalance may be the presentation, it is often secondary to another underlying disturbance in the body. It's important not to fixate on the surface issue (hormone imbalance) and miss WHY there is an imbalance in the body in the first place.
Restoring Balance in the Body
Fertility can be impacted by any number of different aspects of hormone imbalance. With my patients, I typically look at a triad of hormone glands: the thyroid, adrenal and gonads (reproductive organs for both sexes). All of these glands are interrelated. If there is a weakness in one, the other two will suffer. For example, if you have low or under active thyroid, you might be feeling great taking thyroid hormone. However, your thyroid could be under active due to high sugar levels. If your adrenal glands are struggling, they also bring down the thyroid function with them. So, it is important to not only give thyroid hormone, but address the UNDERLYING issue so balance can be restored. In practice, we utilize muscle testing to identify which gland is primary to restore the balance in all three.
In the office, we are able to perform a simple and quick blood sugar correction, which enables your body to regulate blood sugar properly and optimize the function of all of the hormones better. Ultimately, this supports healthy fertility status, enabling higher odds of fertilization to occur as well as sustaining the pregnancy to full term.
It is my goal to get my audience and my patients to think more holistically about their health. Thinking locally and with blinders on causes us to miss what matters most. Let's fix the root cause of issues!
Tomorrow we will talk more about the impact of gut health. Stay tuned! If you missed it, yesterday I briefly mentioned some outside the box evaluations I do with my infertility cases (don’t worry I still evaluate blood work), read that blog here.
If you or someone you love have been struggling with infertility and would like to try a natural approach to supporting infertility, click the link below to schedule your first appointment.
If you are interested in further addressing this topic, please feel free to reach out and schedule an appointment. Dr. V is a Chiropractor and Functional Medicine Doctor in Elmhurst, Illinois who evaluates patients from the inside out, focusing on areas including hormone imbalance, digestive health, anxiety/depression, autoimmune disease, and many others.