In this Episode of The Thermo Diet Podcast Christopher Walker and Jayton Miller sit down and talk about some of the misconceptions of Low T, some ways that you can improve your T levels, and more.
Check it out and let us know what you think in the comments below!
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Full Transcript:
Chris:
Hey everyone. Welcome back to the Thermo Diet Podcast. My name's Christopher Walker, and I'm here with the love doctor, Jayton Miller.
Jayton Miller:
Oo, yeah. I like that one.
Chris:
Today we're going to be talking about low T. We're going to go into a little detail about the concept of low T, what the conventional wisdom is that you hear everywhere when you talk about it or search for information about it and that sort of thing and then take a more focused look at some things that you can do to help turn it around. If you're experiencing some of these issues or if you know somebody who is, this will be a very helpful episode to shed some light on to-dos essentially of what people can get into in terms of increasing their T levels naturally and not having go toward using the pharmaceutical treatments that are commonly explained to the people that that's their only option, which is not true at all.
Chris:
You know what was interesting is what I hear everywhere with people talking about testosterone and low T is that they always just say the same thing. They always say that it naturally declines over time as if time itself is the problem. It seems like a really convenient thing for the pharmaceutical industry to put it that way. Time is not something that you can really control, like it marches onward and so forth, so most people just think, "Oh, if that's true, then I can't do anything about it, so I have to take this drug."
Jayton Miller:
I think one interesting aspect of it is the actual history of whenever they started using polyunsaturated fats in the commercial industry, so whenever they started putting it into our food, you see a lot of these studies that show testosterone has decreased 1% by every year since the 1980s, like the average testosterone level of males. They actually started using a lot of these polyunsaturated fats in our food in the '70s, and so I think that impact has just been pretty dramatic over the years, too.
Chris:
If you look for more causal relationships over a population-wide decline in androgen levels, it makes a lot more sense rather than time. Clearly time happened during that period, and clearly the more you expose yourself to these actual causes of low T over time you can have lower testosterone obviously, but time itself is not what's doing it. It's those things. It's things like the food supply drastically changing really over the last 100 years. The introduction of PUFAs into the food supply I think first happened in the '20s and '30s, and then by the '70s, it became so common in the '80s that it was just normal. There was a lot of marketing push around heart healthiness and whatever with using these vegetable oils and margarine and shortening and that sort of stuff, I Can't Believe It's Not Butter, that sort of marketing really had a huge push then in the '70s and '80s. That was a big part of it.
Chris:
You also see over the last 100 years the rapid cash crop growth of an industry of soy. Then probably one of the most insidious things being the rise of the endocrine-disrupting chemicals in terms of food packaging, basically all plastics, personal care items, there's so much stuff in all this, sunscreen, pesticide use widespread across the entire food supply. A lot of pesticides are just very, very harmful endocrine-disrupting chemicals. It makes a lot of sense really how this can happen.
Chris:
But most people, especially doctors or popular media, don't ever really talk about that stuff. They just say, "Oh, low T's an issue. As you get older it goes down." Well, that's not entirely true. It's not entirely false. It's just this half truth or whatever. It doesn't give you any really information. Clearly if you expose yourself to pesticides and endocrine-disrupting chemicals and you have nutrient deficiencies that develop chronically over time, which that's how it works. If you're not eating magnesium in your diet and you're not supplementing with magnesium from the time you're 20 till the time you're 75, clearly you're going to become more chronically deficient in magnesium. That's a logical thing to think. But nobody talks about these underlying real causes of low T. They just say, "Eh, it's outside of your control. You can't really do anything about it. It's just time marching forward. It's normal with age." But we're hopefully going to help you guys out. For the people that want to know the real causes, that's what we're going to get into today.
Jayton Miller:
Whenever it comes to a lot of these endocrine disruptors, they have the ability to attach to the androgen receptor and make it active so the testosterone to estrogen ratio within the body becomes very unbalanced. There's a lot of correlative studies seeing that whenever estrogen is high, cortisol is also high so the testosterone and cortisol ratio is also unbalanced, too. So testosterone is kind of getting attacked from all these different aspects especially whenever you have a high amount of body fat, and then the aromatase enzyme is increased dramatically and then you have SHBG attaching to it so it can't attach to the androgen receptors. It just becomes a downward spiral that leads you to these deficient testosterone states over time.
Chris:
Because SHBG basically increases as your liver gets overworked. If you look at the accumulated toxic load essentially of all this stuff that the average person really puts into their body, these foreign chemicals that aren't meant to go into your body. Especially if you look chronically over 10, 20, 30 years, a lot of people have these habits and these dietary habits and exposures, it makes a lot of sense why their SHBG would be go up quite a bit and then their T levels go down especially bioactive, bioavailable testosterone. SHBG is binding to it, and it's being overproduced so you have too much of it. Also things like even Tylenol, chronic Tylenol usage has been shown to drastically increase SHBG.
Jayton Miller:
That stuff is terrible, too. There's all kinds of studies showing that it's related to age-related cognitive decline, not including all the stuff it has to do with the liver, too.
Chris:
NSAIDs typically. I don't know if Tylenol's actually an NSAID, but Advil, for example, would be an NSAID, a nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drug.
Jayton Miller:
Ibuprofen.
Chris:
Ibuprofen. They cause ulcers. They cause a lot of gastric problems. I actually had three ulcers when I was 18 from Advil use.
Jayton Miller:
Really?
Chris:
Yeah, internally bleeding. It was pretty serious. It was really serious. It was from Advil, so I'll never use that shit again. So some symptoms of low testosterone. I think a lot of people know if they have it, but we'll cover some right here, basically if you have low sex drive, low libido, chronic fatigue, poor sleep, hair loss, increased body fat, muscle loss or inability to gain muscle. Even psychological symptoms like depression and anxiety are really common signs of low testosterone. I think probably the most noticeable one that people will go to the doctor for is the libido. If you wake up, you stop having a morning wood and you haven't had one for six months and then you're like, "Oh, shoot," you have no interest in sex or anything and then it starts turning into this noticeable issue, I think that's what drives a lot of guys into the doctor. Then the doctors typically will say, "Oh, it's common as you get older," and then, "Here take this."
Jayton Miller:
You see it more commonly with a lot of young men nowadays, too. You see 20, 21, 22 years old. That's supposed to be the peak of your sexual health in a lot of cases.
Chris:
The studies I've seen, the peak testosterone levels are supposed to happen at age 19 or 20 in a guy because you see this huge jump through puberty and maturation. Obviously, male children don't have super high testosterone levels, but you do have a lot of testosterone present because of the sexual differentiation. That's how the fetus basically either becomes a male or a female is the presence of testosterone in the womb. But then you see that through puberty that the levels just jump way, way up through about age 19 or 20 in a guy. That's really where a lot of the, I guess, masculine development happens in terms of becoming a man versus a boy.
Chris:
One thing I found that was really interesting is I was doing this video on low T and the history of it, and the concept of castration I thought was really interesting. Because if you look through history, humans have known for so long about the power contained within the testicles because that's where you produce testosterone. So in old, ancient cultures forever, Egypt, China, Islamic cultures, they've been using castration as a tool for controlling men for thousands of years.
Jayton Miller:
Interesting.
Chris:
Especially in China, they basically built it into the culture where there would be thousands of imperial eunuchs who they would castrate not only their testicles but also the penis. Brutal, fuck.
Jayton Miller:
Dang.
Chris:
They would use them in the imperial court because they could control them. They would also control them with wealth, so it was common for these imperial eunuchs to grow extremely wealthy and very powerful. But they lacked... Basically, we were talking about this yesterday, I don't care how much gold or silver you're going to give me, like, no way. That's crazy. But culturally that was a thing. That's what they did. Actually they did it for a really, really long time. The last Chinese imperial eunuch died in 1996-
Jayton Miller:
Oh, dang.
Chris:
... so it was right up until, I think, the early 1900s, the end of the Chinese imperial age, yeah, 1912. Basically he was the last guy that was a castrate, and he lived up until 90 something years old and died in 1996. So pretty interesting. That was one way that they used the eunuchs culturally over the last thousands of years. They always would use them for elite soldiers.
Jayton Miller:
Really?
Chris:
Like in Game of Thrones, like the Unsullied. The Unsullied were all castrated. That's why the sex scenes in Game of Thrones was so awkward between that one guy, what was his name, Grey Worm and-
Jayton Miller:
I don't know.
Chris:
... Missandei or whatever.
Jayton Miller:
I didn't watch it.
Chris:
Oh, you didn't?
Jayton Miller:
Huh-uh.
Chris:
Okay. I was like, how's this going to work?
Jayton Miller:
Man, you would think that that would lead to less effective warriors in the long run.
Chris:
That's what I thought. That's why, when I was watching that show, I was like, that's kind of weird.
Jayton Miller:
Maybe that's why they had to have so many of them.
Chris:
Yeah. They were elite troops. They were like these very... like the Navy Seals kind of thing. That was my first thought, too. I was like, you would think this would make them worse. But I guess it's easier to control them. You don't have that testosterone flowing through your veins, then you just become an it. You're not a man. You're not a woman. You're just an it.
Jayton Miller:
Whenever you look at a lot of these primitive cultures, too, you see a lot of the organs, like the testicles and the heart especially, as delicacies. What's interesting is that the organ that has the second most amount of testosterone in the body is the heart because it's so protective for the heart. What's interesting is that it's pro-inotropic and lusitropic, so it helps with the contraction and the relaxation of the heart to make it more powerful so it's more effectively pushing blood around the body. Then whenever you have estrogen, estrogen is actually antagonistic to that, and it also promotes the leakage of different of fluids that are in the blood from the system as well. So it's really interesting to see the different hormonal aspects that testosterone can have as well, like the protective effects that it can have.
Chris:
It's interesting that especially.... I wonder if there were... Oh, actually there are, so a lot of links to cardiovascular disease or dysfunction in some kind of people that have chronically low testosterone. One thing that's interesting that I came upon was a lot of issues with TRT, testosterone replacement therapy, are almost identical to having low T.
Jayton Miller:
I've actually looked into this a lot. One of the reasons that people who are on steroids and taking an excessive amount of testosterone in a lot of cases, the reason that their aggressiveness is so high and they have these different psychological challenges is because it's the rapid aromatization of that testosterone into estrogen-
Chris:
Into estrogen.
Jayton Miller:
... that just completely throws their mind out of whack. I think that happens with TRT, too, is it's just rapidly aromatized because you're getting this giant burst of testosterone out of nowhere, and it leads to all these downstream effects.
Chris:
And when you're body is naturally producing the testosterone, it's naturally also regulating estrogen and aromatization because it has a feedback loop that's kind of built in there. When you have a normal, healthy level that's being produced naturally, there's going to be a balance, and there's going to be a healthy ratio that's achieved between the estrogen levels and testosterone. But then when you take TRT, the natural production of your own testosterone shuts down because it shuts down the signaling first of GnRH to the hypothalamus to the pituitary, and then consequentially LH and FSH go down. So it's not only shutting down the natural testosterone production, but it's shutting down spermatogenesis. So people that go on to TRT, it's actually a really common and well-known medical phenomenon that they become impotent over time or there's a high risk for impotence because their body stops producing sperm which also, again, it's like a trade... Why are you doing that?
Jayton Miller:
I also think that the oils that the testosterone is suspended in as a polyunsaturated fat which leads to oxidation in the area that it's going to be in which is going to increase the [prostaglandins 00:16:37] synthesis and the estrogen synthesis within that area. Then it's going to convert even more of that testosterone into estrogen, too, which is really interesting. I think that in a lot of these cases, the guys who are on TRT, their lifestyle and their habits are very bad, too, in a lot of cases. They take this because of all the things leading up to the low T, like their diet and their exercise regimen and stuff like this and a lot of the psychological aspects. Then they have this, quote, unquote, fix, so to speak, and they don't change any other aspect of their life, and it leads to-
Chris:
The habits stay the same.
Jayton Miller:
... all of it, yeah, mm-hmm (affirmative).
Chris:
When you find or search for a quick fix like that, a band-aid really to put over the real problem, most people don't do the work to figure out why. They don't even make the connection somehow: "Why do I have this in the first place, this problem?" Then they're given something that's like, "Oh, this'll solve your problem." But it doesn't because they keep doing the same stuff. Now it's causing more of a problem.
Chris:
There's a lot of research showing the risks over the... It's been coming out basically, I think, since about the '80s showing the risks of testosterone replacement therapy. Unfortunately, a lot of doctors don't inform people of the risks that are involved with it. It's interesting because a lot of people just don't think about the history of things, but really the history of testosterone replacement therapy is less than a hundred years old, so it's very young. It's a new thing. You mentioned the delicacy of eating testicles in a lot of cultures. That was at first the prescription by a lot of doctors in different cultures over the last couple thousand years. They'd be like, "Eat these bull testicles or this tiger penis." That was a Chinese thing that they would do.
Chris:
The very first drug was called Testifortan. It was actually in, I think, Germany where they made that. It essentially was yohimbin, this was in the 1920s when this was made, so yohimbin and extracts from testicles. That triggered in the pharmaceutical industry a rapid development of other types of drugs just like that. However, the issue is that the oral testosterone itself was essentially inactivated by the first-pass effect of the liver. So it would go into the liver, and the liver would see it as a foreign substance and deactivate it, so it wasn't useful whatsoever. It was just a placebo.
Chris:
Whereas opposed to... basically the testes because they produce testosterone, but they don't store it. They send it out into the bloodstream. This as a hormone... testosterone is not in these extracts from the testicles. The body can't actively use those if they're a foreign substance like that. So they found that out eventually that these were just useless placebo supplements. But things like the thyroid gland can actually store the thyroid hormone. So eating a glandular from thyroid actually can have an effect, same with the pancreas. For whatever reason, it doesn't work that way for the testicles. So certain organs will work that way, certain ones won't for certain hormones. So what happened was they eventually figured out what a... I think it was in the '40s or '30s. It was 1935. They figured out the actual molecular structure of the steroid hormone.
Jayton Miller:
Then they were able to produce it synthetically from then on out?
Chris:
Yeah.
Jayton Miller:
Okay.
Chris:
That's where it was born, but that's 90 years ago, 85 years ago. So it's such a young thing that we're now in... Since the '80s really, so for the last 30 years, people have been, I guess, doing research on TRT in the sense of, what are the side effects of this? What are the long-term effects of this whole thing? It's a very controversial thing, but they've found a lot of evidence that should be known as a risk factor to people that are considering doing it. For example, TRT, it's been shown to increase prostate size by 12%. It's also been shown many times to accelerate prostate cancer to make it way worse. That's likely because of the aromatization of the extra T, unnatural testosterone that's in the system. It turns into estrogen. Estrogen is well known to fuel tumor growth and make cancers more aggressive.
Jayton Miller:
Definitely, because it's in a very reductive state, and they've shown that a lot of different tumors are reductive. So cortisol and estrogen specifically tend to surround and be within the tumor and kind of protect it and keep it within that reductive state so it can keep promoting the cellular growth within that tumor.
Jayton Miller:
I think another interesting aspect is the perspective that the masses have on testosterone, so like their perception of a high amount of testosterone leading to a bunch of different bad aspects within the male personality, in the masculine, like aggressiveness and all these different behaviors that aren't actually really correlated to high testosterone levels. Usually whenever men have higher testosterone levels, they're a lot more calm. They're a lot more slow to react to a lot of different things. But they're also a lot more driven and ambitious and resilient to authority. I think that a lot of this propaganda especially that's coming out with veganism and stuff like that is to promote the demasculinization of men in order to allow them to be pushed in a direction that the leaders want them to go in.
Chris:
Yeah, mass control is a real thing, and it's been practiced for thousands of years by governing bodies of whatever area. It sounds like conspiracy, but it's real. I mean it's very, very real that these sorts of things could truly be happening because of mass control, like a population control type of thing. Especially with cultural movements like masculinity stuff, they can just take on life of their own eventually. People just get so emotional and blah, blah, blah. They just feed these media cycles and philosophies and whatever, and eventually it can run rampant. That's why it's always good for people to look back at what are the facts about this, and stop taking assumptions as facts. Stop believing propaganda as fact. Use your brain and figure out what's real about this stuff.
Chris:
I was giving a talk once at an all men's conference with male entrepreneurs. I was doing a Q&A. I was talking about testosterone and how to naturally improve your testosterone for these guys. One of the questions that this guy asks was like, "Well, why would I want to increase my testosterone? Isn't that proven to give me prostate cancer?" I was like, "No. No, there's no evidence that natural testosterone levels, natural testosterone production at any level as long as it's natural will lead to any sort of prostate issues. There's literally no evidence of that." The evidence is actually all in the TRT having that sort of effect. Then the TRT itself accelerating prostate cancer development, making it more aggressive.
Jayton Miller:
A little extra context behind that is that the average young male usually produces around five milligrams of testosterone a day. Usually whenever you take a shot, it's anywhere from 100 to 200 milligrams at once. So your body's like, "Oh, shit, what is this? I've got to get rid of it and balance things back out." That's why the promotion of estrogen from that testosterone is usually accelerated.
Chris:
Which makes a lot of sense. It's a compensation effect. Your body's trying to regulate the ratios. It's all about these ratios. The excess estrogen is a pretty predictable byproduct of using something like this. But most people don't talk about it. Doctors don't warn against it. I think most doctors don't even think about it. That's why you see people that are really experienced bodybuilders who are using steroids and use very super physiological doses of testosterone, if they know what they're doing in terms of the steroids they're using, also estrogen blockers to regulate that. Doing that stuff just leads to a whole host of other issues.
Jayton Miller:
Yeah, bye-bye liver.
Chris:
Well, that's why you see a lot of these high-level bodybuilder guys, they die very early.
Jayton Miller:
Mm-hmm (affirmative), very young.
Chris:
They look really old, like their skin... They look like old guys, and they're 28, but they look like they're in their 40s. That's probably another topic for a different episode though.
Jayton Miller:
Whenever it comes to the prostate cancer thing, I've seen some really interesting studies that are coming out actually using DHT to get rid of the cancer and actually prevent a lot of the cancer from taking over the prostate itself. That's actually one of the main theories right now is that DHT promotes the synthesis of prostate cancer, and they're actually using DHT specifically to fight against it in a lot of these studies, which is really fascinating to me.
Chris:
DHT is an extremely powerful androgen, and it can't be reduced. So I guess it makes sense. It would lower estrogen. It would influence that ratio, too, the DHT to estrogen ratio. Interesting.
Jayton Miller:
There's actually a lot of interesting correlative studies that also show that whenever you're deficient in DHT that hypothyroidism is pronounced and actually becomes a lot more aggressive in a lot of cases. So the more DHT that you have, the higher functioning thyroid that you probably have as well.
Chris:
There's a whole lot of myths around DHT as well, like people thinking that it causes hair loss. It doesn't. That would be another good episode we could talk about, and we'll definitely go into more detail about that. Suffice it to say, it's a little more complicated than low T being caused by a clock moving forward.
Chris:
Let's talk about like what people can do. If people have read Master Your T, that's basically a pretty comprehensive look at everything you could do and all the information you'd ever want about how to increase your testosterone levels naturally. I think a couple of the big things, though, are just basically... The number one most foundational thing is essentially overcoming micronutrient deficiencies. Then the second huge thing is basically lowering your exposure to endocrine-disrupting chemicals. If you take those two things and if that's all you focused on, you would definitely have a huge, huge impact on your natural testosterone because you're basically eliminating blockers.
Jayton Miller:
Not only your testosterone but whenever you begin to focus on these things, all areas of your health typically tend to be enhanced and increase dramatically because whenever you are fighting to increase one protective hormone, you're typically going to be increasing all protective hormones within the body.
Chris:
And lowering stress hormones. Again, those ratios are really important between stress and protective hormones. I tend to think of testosterone as a leverage scenario. If you're just focused on that, what you're doing, though, is actually supporting all those protective hormones at the same time, but leverage-wise, it's a matter of focus: "Okay, I'm a guy. I'm going to focus on my testosterone." Boom. Then it has a really big impact on all everything else. Same with thyroid, if you were to focus on thyroid, that'll have a huge impact across the board.
Jayton Miller:
That's what I'd like to dig in to is the thyroid.
Chris:
Just some facts about micronutrient deficiencies. There was a study done a few years ago on a population-wide study in the US. A lot of people think, "Oh, yeah, I'm not deficient in whatever, in any vitamins and minerals. I eat healthy." No, you don't. Population-wide statistically, 92% of people are deficient in choline, which is also probably completely correlated to the prevalence of fatty liver issues in people. 35% of people are deficient in vitamin A, 31% in vitamin C, 67% in vitamin E, 74% in vitamin D, 67% in vitamin K, 100% in potassium, which is interesting, 39% in calcium, and 46% in magnesium.
Chris:
The first thing that pops out is the electrolytes, such important minerals. Obviously, this is a population statistical study. They didn't measure everybody in the US, but they measured a large group and then took the data there and extrapolated it. But a 100% deficiency in potassium, 39% in calcium, 46% in magnesium. I don't see sodium in here, but sodium's also definitely very high in deficiency. I mean those are significant electrolyte deficiencies that people have when you wouldn't think so. You would think like, "Oh, I get salt or whatever in my food." But, no, mostly there's this huge trend of low salt: "Don't eat salt. It causes these problems." Most people aren't consuming foods that are rich in these sorts of things. Clearly if potassium is that high-
Jayton Miller:
You can go to the backside of that, too, whenever we have soil depletion and less nutrients within our actual food because the soil that we grow it in-
Chris:
It doesn't really-
Jayton Miller:
... doesn't have the nutrients that are necessary.
Chris:
Poor, yeah.
Jayton Miller:
I think it's interesting that vitamin A was deficient because that's necessary for steroid synthesis. A lot of people, whenever they don't have the active form of vitamin A, which is retinol which comes from animal sources, they lack the ability to properly convert cholesterol and different things into the steroid hormones to be converted into all the downstream.
Chris:
I read a study about deficiencies in vegan and vegetarian diets that were really common, and that was one of them. The conclusion of that study was that essentially that most testosterone issues that a vegan or vegetarian would have would come down to deficiencies that they have in the diet as well as obviously also exposure to estrogenic or phytoestrogens because phytoestrogens are extremely common in that sort of diet. Essentially people don't get enough of these vitamins and minerals at the most basic level. I explained this on the Order of Man podcast, too. I think it helped some people turn on a light bulb in terms of the way they think about it.
Chris:
If you're deficient in these things, they're raw materials that your body needs to produce these hormones properly and do the signaling properly and even neuro-transmitters. Everything functions better when you have all the raw materials that are needed for those processes to actually take place. When you're deficient in them, your body starts to find other ways to get them, and it's going to pull from other areas. It's going to take things and convert them into that raw material that it needs. But eventually you hit a dead end because you stop functioning at, I guess, the healthy, thriving level because essentially just your body's just stripping from other areas of the body. It's taking other raw materials, converting them into whatever it needs.
Chris:
Eventually you run out if you're not actively providing more into your body, if you're practicing poor dietary habits, if you're exposing yourself to estrogenic chemicals that are cascading a sequence of events that leads to these imbalanced feedback loops in the body. If your body, just quite frankly, doesn't have the raw materials it needs, it's going to eventually show signs of the suffering that is involved with that. Eventually for guys, low T is a extremely common side effect or symptom.
Jayton Miller:
What are some of the protective effects of testosterone specifically that we can look at?
Chris:
Well, I mean obviously it basically protects all your male reproductive function, period. It's also, like you mentioned, protective in the heart, in the blood. The blood is an interesting thing that most people don't think about. It's basically how you get all the nutrients. I mean that's where the testosterone goes to be able to hit the receptor sites and uses proteins to travel through the blood. If any of these things aren't working properly in this big, closed system of your body, then it's all going to go out of whack, out of balance. I would also venture to guess that the thyroid and testosterone, like T3 and testosterone also have a nice interplay in terms of protecting your thyroid gland and your liver because they both go through the liver in terms of the functioning. There is a small amount of testosterone produced in the liver, but T3 is obviously made active in the liver.
Jayton Miller:
It's very important in the Leydig cells to have energy production in order to produce testosterone, and T3 is intimately tied into that. It's also extremely important for bone density, too.
Chris:
Actually in the eunuchs, the castrated guys, they all had osteoporosis.
Jayton Miller:
Really?
Chris:
Yeah.
Jayton Miller:
Wow, interesting.
Chris:
So the calcium interplay there is interesting as well because calcium is one of those things that's not typically correlated with testosterone, but you do find a lot of calcium-related issues with low testosterone guys. Obviously, it's like really important for normal signaling, like neurotransmitter signaling because Ca2+ basically acts as a... It's an electrolyte. It's a signaling trigger essentially for the action potentials and any sort of ionic signaling.
Jayton Miller:
Mm-hmm (affirmative), definitely.
Chris:
Actually, so here's a study. 1976, a group of researchers found that calcium stimulates testosterone synthesis in isolated Leydig cells. 33 years later, another study saw that calcium supplementation increased T levels post-exercise by 18%.
Jayton Miller:
Wow, interesting. So get your milk.
Chris:
Or calcium supplement or something, mineral water.
Jayton Miller:
The form of calcium is very important, too. You want to make sure that you have a calcium carbonate. The other forms typically cause a lot of digestive distress, and they tend to basically back up the system in a lot of cases. So making sure that the form of calcium that you're supplementing with, if you're not getting it from food sources, is very important as well.
Chris:
That's the micronutrient deficiencies. So the next aspect of this whole thing that you can do that you can take action on immediately is basically endocrine-disrupting chemicals. In the Thermo philosophy, we call these things blockers, getting rid of blockers, things that are taking you away from health. A good way to think is get rid of blockers, introduce activators, so introduce more micronutrients, measure your micronutrients, figure out what your deficiencies are, correct those. Get rid of blockers.
Chris:
Blockers in terms of endocrine disruptors are crazy common, like everywhere, even in places most people don't think about, like pesticides. Since the organic food movement has taken place in the last 10 years or so, there's been a lot of arguing in the fitness world of like, "Oh, organic food's no different than regular, conventionally grown food." But all the people I've ever seen arguing about it, they tie it back to weight loss. I'm like, "Well, we're not talking about weight loss here. We're talking about other stuff." Eventually, especially those studies that talk about weight loss with that sort of stuff, they're so short term. It doesn't make any sense if you were to look at the endocrine load or the EDC load over time of consuming a lot of these pesticides. It's just undeniable that it's going to disrupt your hormonal balance. It might take longer, but it's still doing it. If you go 10, 20, 30 years of just eating this stuff and not paying much attention to it, it can be dangerous.
Chris:
It's good that people pay attention to it because then this stuff can be banned. We shouldn't be using a lot of this stuff. A lot of things that are banned in other countries, the US still uses it. Then there are certain things that even the US eventually bands the use of, and then it's still being used in other countries that are growing food that's imported into the US, like bananas. What was it? There was some crop in Malaysia. I think there was a banana farm in Malaysia. I saw a documentary on this stuff. They imported a lot of their bananas to the US and Australia and stuff. The workers on the farm were suing the overall food company or whatever it was because their kids had birth defects. They developed all these cancers and all this stuff. So the workers were basically seeking compensation for their negative health effects of working with all these chemicals that they were still spraying on the plants and on the fruit.
Chris:
So it's something to be mindful of. It's very real. That story is common all over the world in terms of farms that are using this stuff. It's common for the workers to have all sorts of really serious health problems that span generations. If you have a child with a birth defect because of the chemicals that the woman was exposed to picking some sort of crop on the farm that's being sprayed by these heavy pesticides, that's tragic. That sucks. But a lot of these foods, they're still being imported into the US.
Jayton Miller:
A lot of these chemicals are actually neurotoxic as well, so they tend to mess with brain development in the fetus. Then also over time, whenever you're exposed to them, they tend to promote things like Alzheimer's disease and a lot of age-related cognitive decline. So whenever you mitigate your exposure to this, then you're mitigating your risk of having those later on in life because they've shown that only... I think it was 5% of cognitive decline diseases are genetic. The rest of them are epigenetic, so they're expressed through environmental factors.
Chris:
I think most things are epigenetic in terms of disease. Obviously, we have genes, and they can turn on or off in terms of expression based on environmental influence.
Jayton Miller:
Definitely.
Chris:
So most diseases aren't genetic in nature. They have a root in the genes, but they were turned on by some sort of exposure environmentally. Pesticides are one of the most common and widespread especially in food supply obviously. Then you have other things like parabens and phthalates and triclosan, the BP class of chemicals. Typically, they're in food packaging. They're in personal care items like shampoos and toothpastes and deodorants, soaps, all this stuff that we're putting all over our bodies and on our skin, which is highly absorbent, obviously, and the largest organ in the body, straight into your bloodstream. And it adds up. It creates a toxic load. Your liver has to handle everything, and eventually your liver gets overworked, too. A lot of these chemicals can bind to estrogen receptors, so they start to express estrogenic cascades.
Chris:
To some people it might not seem like a big deal, but if you think about over the next 30 years of exposing yourself to this, there's no way it can be a good thing for your body. So just bringing awareness into your own life about how can I make some better choices about the deodorant that I use or the soaps or whatever, the foods that I eat. Are they being sprayed with these pesticides? Can I just pick a slightly more expensive but better option for my long-term health? I said that in a video in the Thermo Diet shopping spree. A lot of people complain about the expense of better quality food, but then they're not going to complain about buying new video games or spending money on going out to the bar and spend 100 bucks that night on something just drinking or whatever. But they won't spend an extra dollar on a pound of grass fed-finished beef rather than like some shitty beef.
Jayton Miller:
Or some good eggs.
Chris:
Good eggs or good butter or something like that. It's really not that hard to budget for these things. Especially nowadays it's so much more common and much more affordable to buy good food. A lot of people just wrote it off because originally when this higher quality organic food was introduced into the marketplace, it was significantly more expensive. Nowadays it's not really at all.
Jayton Miller:
It's not terrible, and it's a lot more accessible to so many more people now.
Chris:
Major grocery store chains carry it. Target has their whole line of organic stuff now. It's just very common. Walmart sells grass fed beef. It's a common thing now culturally to be able to get access to better food.
Jayton Miller:
And if you don't have ability to go to the store and get it, then you can usually order it online somehow to you.
Chris:
Oh, yeah. That's even easier than going to the store. It's [crosstalk 00:44:55].
Jayton Miller:
It's 2020.
Chris:
Yeah, you can order stuff online. So we'll wrap it up there with just some basic, really high leverage tips for increasing your testosterone if you have low T, the real causes of low T, reexamining that for yourself. Look in your own life. If you have low T problems, before you jump on the TRT train, you need to know the risks involved as well as the... Try to find the real cause in your life. Just examine your habits. What have you been doing for the last 10, 20 years in terms of what do you eat? What kind of exercise are you doing or lack of it? What deficiencies do you have? What endocrine-disrupting chemicals do you expose yourself to on a regular basis? These are really simple ways to start reversing this issue naturally.
Jayton Miller:
It's definitely possible. Just realize that it took your entire life to get to where you are now, so it's going to take a little bit of time for you to get out of that state. It's not going to take nearly as much time. I think in the estimation than I saw one time was for every year that you've been doing that, it takes about three months to get out of it. So that's just something to keep in mind, too. It's not an overnight fix.
Chris:
But the benefit is the habitual process that gets developed because it is a progression. So in your first three months, you might not be all the way where you want to be, but you're going to see results. You're going to feel a little bit better. For six months, you're going to feel better, nine, 12, but you're going to just progressively feel better. Then you're going to be developing habits that support it long term. We still have people writing in to UMZU and with Thermo and stuff and older age, especially guys with UMZU that are in their 70s that bring their T levels back up to 800. So I just don't buy this idea that it's something that naturally has to go way down the older you get and you have to just resolve yourself to that. It just doesn't make any sense.
Jayton Miller:
Definitely, mm-hmm (affirmative).
Chris:
Thanks for listening. We'll catch you on the next podcast.
Jayton Miller:
Have a good one.
Chris:
Catch you on the flipity flip.
