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Daniel Vitalis – How To Build A Strong Foundation For Your Hormone Health In 4 Simple Steps
2024-06-18
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[include file=get-in-itunes.html] Mr. Daniel Vitalis from Surthrival.com delivers once again.If you are interested in how to rebuild your hormones naturally this interview with Daniel Vitalis is something you don’t want to miss. We discussed how to build a foundation in your life that supports healthy hormone balance.
Many times people run to synthetic hormone replacement therapy without doing any research or changing their unhealthy lifestyle that’s depleting their hormone levels. They’ll end up running to the doctor to get prescribed bio identical hormones like Premarin or take compound hormone creams topically without finding out if they’re damaging to the body.
In this show Daniel Vitalis talks about what it takes to build a foundational lifestyle that support the glandular systems of the body and the endocrine systems. Much of the time this includes no supplements at all. It’s so simple. We often forget that when we support the health with the intention of building one area of the body, every other area of the body benefits as well.
The body is entirely connected at every level. We cannot support good hormone health without also at the same time prevent cancer or heart attacks. All the systems work together as one unit energetically as well as hormonally.
We talked about androgens, testosterone, estrogen and how these hormones get out of balance and some practical ways of balancing them. We talked about certain foods and how they can affect your hormones.
Basically the 4 keys to hormone health that we discussed were:
- Getting enough sleep
- Increasing Vitamin D (which is not a vitamin by the way) levels
- Lowering stress in our lives
- Creating a supplementation plan that supports your foundation
There’s much more that can be said but Daniel Vitalis gives a nice practical approach for rebuilding your hormones that is easy to understand and simple to follow. Personally I believe that if you take supplements like Pine Pollen, and Velvet Deer Antler without getting enough sleep, decreasing your stress or increasing your Vitamin D levels, they simply won’t be as effective as they could be.
I hope you enjoy this episode with Daniel Vitalis and if you did would you be so kind as to share it socially with your friends using the Facebook or Twitter buttons above?
Kate and I GREATLY appreciate your support so much! 🙂
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- Surthrival Pine Pollen
- Surthrival Velvet Deer Antler
- Idiocracy – Trailer
- Episode 127 – Qigong
- Episode 139 – Qigong
- Elena Tonetti Birthing
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Podcast Transcript:
Episode 178—Daniel Vitalis—11-14-2013
Bradley: This is Dr. Bradley Nelson, author of The Emotion Code: How to Release Your Trapped Emotions for Abundant Health, Love and Happiness. You’re listening to Justin and Kate on Extreme Health Radio. For more information about the Body Code, visit ExtremeHealthRadio.com/BodyCode.
Justin: Oh, Kate, you’re so funny. You’re dancing. So you like the new music, huh?
Kate: You threw a curve ball at me this morning. Gosh, I love this music. I feel like we’re back to our roots.
Justin: Back to our roots.
Kate: Yeah.
Justin: Yeah, it’s good, isn’t it?
Kate: I love it. Good for you.
Justin: Yeah, you know, I just felt the old intro was a little explosive and like the pyrotechnics that we should have been…
Kate: It wasn’t really us.
Justin: I feel like we should be an ‘80s rock band, like Twisted Sister or something like that.
Kate: Some hair? Hair bands?
Justin: Hair bands. So my name is Justin. Thank you, everybody, for joining us. This is going to be a really, really great show with Daniel Vitalis today. We’re going to be talking about hormone health. I don’t know how we go from Twisted Sister and Quiet Riot to hormone health.
Kate: Maybe they needed more. Maybe they had a lot because they had a lot of hair.
Justin: Maybe they were dominant in estrogen. Who knows, right?
Kate: Right. Spandex pants. You never know.
Justin: So we’ll be talking with Daniel Vitalis and introduce him in just a moment. It’s going to be a great show. If you have any hormone issues or if you’re trying to regulate your hormones, you’re definitely going to want to stay tuned to this show. And this is Episode 178, so you can check out the show page and make any comments, anything like that, in the future on ExtremeHealthRadio.com/178 and we’d be honored to have you do that. If you like to follow what we’re doing on Facebook, we’d love to have you join our community. You can go to ExtremeHealthRadio.com/Facebook, oddly enough.
Kate: Oddly.
Justin: Shockingly enough. And you can click the “like” button on there and join our community and stay up to date with our shows. And for reference… What is this—Thursday…?
Kate: November 14.
Justin: November 14, 2013.
Kate: You got it.
Justin: Yeah, time is flying by, isn’t it?
Kate: As always.
Justin: It does not feel like Thanksgiving though, does it?
Kate: It’s probably 80 degrees here. We’re having a heat wave. And yesterday we laid out on our patio, in our swimwear.
Justin: Yep.
Kate: So yeah, this is not feeling like…
Justin: Not feeling like November.
Kate: No. But I’ll take it.
Justin: But we’ll take it. We love it.
Kate: We’re thankful.
Justin: And this is, like I said, Episode 178. If you’d like to join the show, there are lots of different ways to do that. We are now live. We’re not sure how good we sound live yet, but we are live. If you go to ExtremeHealthRadio.com/Live, there is a chat room there. You can ask your questions on that page and listen to the show live as well. So make sure to do that. if you’d like to send an email to us, you can just do that at justin@ExtremeHealthRadio.com.
Kate: Or kate@ExtremeHealthRadio.com.
Justin: And if you’d like to support our work and make purchases on Amazon—I know a lot of you guys are doing that now for Christmas—feel free to go through our link. That would be a really, really great thing. You go to ExtremeHealthRadio.com/Amazon and that would be very, very helpful. And we’ve got some great guests coming up, Kate—Katie-Kate.
Kate: I know. Katie-Kate.
Justin: Dr. Morton Walker is going to be talking about cancer and he is a prolific guy—Dr. Morton Walker. And then we’ve got… I’m not sure how we say her name—Vani Hari from FoodBabe.com—and we’ll be talking about a lot of the toxic ingredients and she does a lot of almost like investigative work on what’s going on with our food supply and all that kind of stuff. And then we’ve got Sydney Ross Singer and we have to raise our beds, don’t we?
Kate: Oh gosh.
Justin: We’re supposed to be doing an experiment and we haven’t done it yet.
Kate: Oh.
Justin: So he’s going to be talking about sleep and that will be Part 2 of his sleep series that he’s doing. He’s got a lot to say about sleep, so that will be a great show. And today, we have Daniel Vitalis and his website is DanielVitalis.com, as well as Surthrival.com, and my favorite one, FindASpring.com—so really, really great websites. He’s a leading health motivator, nutritionist, herbalist, educator, and creator of those websites I just mentioned, and he teaches people all over the world, doing lectures and seminars. He’s spoken at the Longevity Now Conference and there’s probably no end to the things he’s doing. He’s always working on new things and researching and just a really great guy, and he’s going to be talking to us today about hormone health. So thank you, Mr. Vitalis, for being on the show today.
Daniel: You’re quite welcome. I’ve got to say, we’ve been doing shows somewhat regularly and as we have the season has been progressing and you guys just keep reporting the same weather there, and here it’s kind of like Game of Thrones, man. It’s like winter’s coming. It’s getting dark at 2:00 in the afternoon here. We’re starting to batten down the hatches. So listening to you guys over there talking 80s and bikinis, man.
Justin: Oh, we’ve got to invite you over and go to the beach.
Daniel: I know. That sounds pretty juicy, I’ve got to tell you.
Kate: I get kind of upset about it, to be honest. Like we haven’t had any seasons since… It’s been the same since about February.
Daniel:
Justin: Yeah, of last year.
Kate: Weirdest year ever.
Justin:
Daniel: You know, there’s like that “grass is greener” thing that really… I mean you can apply to almost every aspect of life and I’m sure you’re wanting to wear sweaters and feel cozy, but I’ll tell you, grass is always greener.
Kate: No, I know. You’re right, and I’m trying to embrace it, so…
Justin: Hey, are you going to be going to Arizona this year?
Daniel: You know, I think… You know what? It’s really… This is a very up in the air year for me, so I’ve got no definitive statements to make about my whereabouts.
Justin: Oh, okay.
Kate: You never know where you’re going to be.
Justin: Yeah, never know where you’re going to end up.
Kate: It shouldn’t be FindASpring—it’s FindDaniel.com.
Daniel: It’s like Where’s Waldo?
Kate: Where’s Waldo? Where in the world?
Justin: I love it. I love it. So what have you been up to lately with your work?
Daniel: You know, I’m really in a phase, I think, of consolidating my work and really… I’ve really touched in on so many areas over the last six or seven years, talking about so many different aspects of health. Now I’m looking at it and just asking, “How do I simplify this so that I can hand it off to people?” I personally feel that a lot of the little details are just not that important. I think that we overanalyze so much of what we do in health, and so I… A metaphor that I like, I love to talk about paintings and how the impression a painting makes on us… When we’re looking at a painting that really affects us emotionally, we’re not really thinking about technical things that that painter did, right? We’re taking the whole thing in. Health is like that. It’s like we need a whole health approach and we sometimes get caught up in the little details, and I know I’ve done that over the years, so I’m looking at “How do I hand this information to average soccer mom? How do I hand it to average football dad? And give them something that’s useful to them?” And so I’m really in a consolidation phase, I’d say.
Justin: Interesting that you would say a lot of the technical details, because it seems like a lot of the stuff going around in the health world these days, especially in the circles we run in, the same kind of thing is going on, you know? People are becoming less polarized and sort of meeting more in the middle, aren’t they?
Daniel: Yeah. Well, and that’s one of the wonderful things that I’ve seen happen in my own journey through this information. So when I first got into the health world… When I first got into it, it was the no-fat phase. That was like the stage of nutritional excellence at the time. And that was prior to the explosion of the internet, so information didn’t get out as quickly. And then over time, I watched that move into a vegetarian dominated sort of health paradigm and a grain dominated paradigm, and then I watched the carbohydrate paradigm shift to the protein paradigm and then I watched that shift to the fat paradigm and I watched the primal thing come in and the Paleo thing come in, and finally, I think, we’ve exasperated all this. It’s like starting to find some kind of peace in what makes sense and I think what we’re seeing is that modern living has a lot of flaws to it that we haven’t adapted to yet and we have to figure out how to adapt to it. We’ve got to take into account how our ancestors lived and we’ve got to filter that into our modern lifestyle, and we’ve got to accept that our modern lifestyle is not going anywhere. So we have to learn how to adapt to it and how to make it healthier.
And it should be really simple. It should be simple, like we’ve got to make sure we’re putting the right stuff in; we’ve got to make sure we’re keeping the bad stuff out; and we’ve got to do the things to keep building and moving towards our goals. It should be that simple. And anything else that gets too technical, unless we’re having a very specific health crisis, can really send us far off track and we can actually find ourselves really far away from our goals, like moving away from our goals, because we’re getting too obsessed with a rabbit trail. So we’ve got to keep our eyes on the big picture. So if we get too close to the beautiful painting and we start looking at each brush stroke, we lose the ability to take in the whole thing. And that’s really important when we’re talking about our hormones today, right? Because hormones… these are very specific molecules with very specific functions, and we can get really caught up in it. Most of us who are listening… I myself—not an endocrinologist, right? I’m not a biochemist. And so I need a big picture approach that works wen it comes to hormones and I can’t get caught up in all the little details because I’ll actually lose sight of the big picture and the goals.
Justin: Do you think that a lot of these different diets that have come out—like the raw food diet and the Paleo and the primal—do you think some of these are damaging, in terms of if someone switches on from one diet to the other diet, do you think…? Obviously, that’s got to affect hormones, just switching from one diet to the next, couldn’t it?
Daniel: Certainly does, especially when we want to talk abut nutritional extremes. And so the two extremes that I’d like to give would be on the one hand, raw food veganism is a total nutritional extreme, and some people might be offended by that, but I’m willing to go there and just say, hey, this is a really extreme approach. It’s never appeared on the planet before. It’s totally new. It’s untested in 200,000 years. It’s really extreme. The other extreme, let’s say right now, currently, would be the Paleo kind of diet extreme that people are taking that one to. And so let’s say we’re just eating raw meat, drinking milk and eating bone marrow. That’s another nutritional extreme, right? That hasn’t existed on the planet since our cousin species Neanderthal did something even less extreme, actually. But these are two extremes. And yes, swaying ourselves from like all fat to no fat, plant fat to animal fat, all protein, no protein—those things throw our chemistry way out of balance and all over the place. The other thing is those diets aren’t sustainable for anybody long term. They are too extreme. So we’ve got to find… It’s like the Buddha, right? He first lived in total opulence and then he lived without anything as an aesthetic, and then he brought an approach forward and said, “Hey, there’s a middle path.” And that middle path has endured. So we see 1,000+ years later people still walking that path rather than trying to follow the extremes that he did.
Justin: What are you finding in your work that damages hormones the most, do you think?
Daniel: Well, I think… All right. So let’s actually back that up for a sec, Justin, because I think that we could go almost a little too fast here. When we say… I don’t know if you guys have ever seen… There is a fabulous movie called “Idiocracy,” and I don’t know if you’ve gotten the chance to see it, but if you haven’t, I really want to recommend it to you or the listener. If you haven’t seen this film, the guy who made Beavis and Butthead made this film and I think it’s like what he finally, after all the damage he did in the world, he wanted to give something back, and so he gives us this great film. The concept is like a zombie movie, except instead of zombies, everybody has just been dumbed down. It takes place 500 years in the future and people have become so stupid and their language has become so dumbed down, that a really average person today would be the smartest person in the world then. And when you watch the film, what you realize it’s about is actually… It’s about being a smart person in the world today and how rare that is and how a thinking person is very rare and an educated person is very rare. There is a theme in there that reminds me of this thing with hormones. It’s this. When a person says “hormones,” they don’t usually really know what hormones are.
Kate: I agree with that.
Daniel: It’s like saying “Smurf,” right? It’s like if you’re a Smurf and you just say “Smurf,” it’s just a filler word. It’s just a generic placeholder. So if you ask somebody… I mean this would be fun. Next time somebody’s telling you about their hormones, be like, “Which hormones?”
Kate: Totally.
Daniel: “What hormone? What is a hormone?” So we hear this all the time. In the nutrition world people talk about “minerals.” “Oh, you’ve got to get more minerals.” Really? What is a mineral? Which mineral are you talking about? Right? You see how that works? It’s sort of like the same thing we hear with “toxins.” “Oh, we’ve got to avoid toxins.” Oh? What’s a toxin? Which toxin? What toxin are we talking about? Interestingly, all medicines are toxins, so obviously we don’t want to just… That doesn’t really make sense. We’ve got to get more specific. So hormones are chemical messengers in our body and they’re produced by our endocrine glands. You remember when you were younger, you’d hear this thing—you don’t hear it so much anymore—but Grandma would see an overweight person and say, “Oh, they have a gland problem.” And they were talking about our endocrine glands, which we’ll get into a little bit more here as we go along.
But our glandular system is a sort of loosely organized system, so when we look in the body and we see the different anatomical zones of the body… We could see the skeletal system is really easy to look at and see how it’s all connected. The vascular system—the veins, arteries, heart—it’s easy to look at that and see how that’s all connected. Even the respiratory system, with the lungs. But when we look at the endocrine glands—the pituitary, the pineal—those are in the brain—the thymus, the thyroid, the parathyroid, the adrenal glands—those are like the little hats that sit on our kidneys—the pancreas—that’s sort of wedged up near our stomach—the testes and the ovaries, right? For the man, the testes are an external body organ. How weird is that? We have basically… a man’s ovaries hang on the outside of his body. How strange. And the female version of the testes—the ovaries—they’re tucked up inside the pelvic cavity.
So we don’t look at these organs and see how they’re all connected. The way they are connected is through hormones, which are the chemical messengers. They’re almost like emails and text messages being sent from these master glands to different places in the body, causing different effects. And it’s a whole communication pathway. And I’ll tell you this up front—I don’t understand it very well, and I would say because we don’t understand it very well. So people at large, science at large, medicine at large does not well understand the endocrine system yet. We’re in the infancy of our understanding and we need to be very humble as we approach the topic because we are still learning about it. In fact, when it comes to this whole idea of excessive estrogen or low testosterone or low progesterone, we’re just learning about that. In the last decade or so that information has become publically available.
Justin: Gosh, that’s crazy. With all the science and all of the testing and all the doctors and everything, it’s crazy that we are just becoming into this knowledge now. Isn’t that crazy?
Kate: Yeah.
Daniel: So it’s very new for us and what we don’t understand well are the effects of adding in artificial hormones or what happens when we become deficient. We’re just starting to understand that. And if you think about the application or the use in medicine of bioidentical hormones, that’s very new. When did you guys start hearing about men getting bioidentical testosterone or women getting bioidentical estrogen or progesterone? Like how long ago did you start hearing about that?
Justin: I mean… You know, within the last… less than ten years.
Daniel: You got it. So we’re just sort of learning what the effects of that are and bodies are so different and so diverse. And the thing is too is we don’t have like a control group of people living a perfect lifestyle we can test upon, right? So we’re not like lab rats. So everybody who gets given these things, of course scientists are recording data, but we don’t know what factors are also affecting a person’s health. Do they get a lot of sunlight? Do they get a lot of exercise? Are they having a robust sex life? Are they getting enough sleep? So without that, we don’t really know. So here’s my point. We want to be careful going into this thinking too specifically about hormones and we want to be thinking more about “How do we create balanced hormonal health in our bodies?” So not “How do I crank this one up and turn this one down?” That’s getting into some very specific science and that’s above most of our pay grades.
Justin: It’s almost as if we get out of the entire idea of hormones altogether and live the kind of life we’re supposed to live, and it’s almost as if if we do those things, we’re going to naturally fix our hormones and balance out our hormones altogether, isn’t it?
Daniel: Wow. I mean is that why I love coming on this show or what?
Kate: Because we get it?
Daniel: Because you guys are so smart. That is really what it is, because even if we see an elevation in a specific hormone, we may associate that with a health issue, but it might not actually be the cause. So for instance, if I’m trying to figure out what causes bar fights and I start traveling around cities to bars to see what causes bar fights and I start to notice that there always seem to be cops there right after the fight, I could come to the conclusion that cops cause bar fights, but you guys know that would be inaccurate, right? The cops are responding to the bar fight. So it would be silly for me to draw the conclusion “Oh my God. Every time I see these cops, there must be a fight about to happen.” That’s sort of backwards, right? If I associate skid marks in the road with causing car accidents, that would be a mistake because the skid marks are there as a result of the car accident, not causing it. So we need to be really careful too of saying, “Oh, every time this cancer is present, this hormone is there.” We don’t know if that hormone is there as a result of or if it’s a causative factor. We would be smarter, unless we really want to delve specifically into this subject, doing the things that build health and trusting that our hormones are going to follow suit. But then with that said, there are some good general guidelines that we know build hormonal health and balance.
Kate: Well, that sure paints a great picture of what’s going on, truly.
Justin: We have a lot of people on the show that will say things like “There is a relationship between this and that” or “this disease and this particular hormone” or whatever, and I’m always trying to figure out, like you just said Daniel, “How do we know that this thing actually is the causative factor?” because that’s the real thing. Just because, like you said, there are firemen at a house that’s burning down, doesn’t mean that they caused the fire.
Daniel: Sometimes they do, but usually they’re responding. I work at a fire department part time, so I…
Kate: Okay, bad example.
Justin: Bad analogy.
Daniel: No, great analogy, actually. Perfect analogy. So I just totally agree with that. We need to be really careful about this and the thing is too is we need to step back again, look at the big picture, right? It’s almost cliché. It’s like if I’m standing on a mountaintop, looking out at the vista, maybe it’s less important that I focus on individual trees in the distance and instead try to take in the whole panorama, right? We’ve got to be careful of that. So let’s take a step back, look at the big picture, and what we’ll find is that dealing with hormone health isn’t really different than dealing with other kinds of health. That wouldn’t make any sense. Like imagine if the things that built bone health didn’t affect hormone health and the things that affected hormone health didn’t affect bone health, like they were in opposition to each other, and you had to like pick one like, “Well, this is bad for my hormones, but it’s good for my bones.” That wouldn’t make any sense, right? Doesn’t it make sense that what builds health in the body should be congruent throughout all the systems?
Justin: Yeah, we have this idea in our culture, as you know, where everything is separated and categorized and put into a little box and everything is like a discipline, sort of like doctors, like oh, you’ve got one doctor that deals with your left toe and you have another doctor that deals with your right toe. But in actuality, everything works together is what you are saying.
Daniel: It is. Now here is the thing about hormones, right? So here is the caveat. Certain areas of our health are a little faster to respond to good living. Certain aspects of our health are faster to respond. It’s maybe a little easier to clean up our digestion than it is to get our hormones back into balance. So what can happen a lot of times is that we start making changes to our health approach because we changed our paradigm about health, and that’s how changes get made, right? They don’t get made by forcing things into existence. They get made by changing what we believe about the world and that changes how we behave and that’s the only thing that’s really going to last. So we make a health paradigm shift and we start to live a little bit differently, and then what we notice is “Okay, I’m starting to lose the weight. Wow, my digestion is getting a little better.” But we might feel a little lag time in the hormone health piece.
So we’ll get more specific about it, but people need to be patient with this piece and right now you need to be aware that right now, more than ever before—this has never been like this before that I am aware of, at least in my memory—right now there is so much focus on hormones that everybody’s promoting things that really get in there and change your hormones and more than ever, doctors are prescribing bioidentical hormone therapy. Now that kind of therapy is not well tested. The results are not in on that. They will make you think they are in on that because it’s a sales program for those products. So we have to be really careful and know that your doctor has been enlisted into a marketing program for bioidentical hormones and you’ve stepped onto a car lot and they’re going to try to sell you the car. So be cautious. If you get too focused on hormone health, it could be really easy to fall into some of these sales schemes right now, particularly bioidentical hormones, and you would be a guinea pig with that. So we just need to tread really lightly here.
Now there are some supplements that I believe can really help us with this, but the big stuff isn’t in supplements. There are supplements that can really help us, but the big lifestyle pieces are never going to be… The supplements can’t just cover for a lack of sleep; they can’t cover for a lack of vitamin D; they can’t cover for a lack of minerals, right? They can only assist us once we put all the other pieces in place.
Justin: Wow. Good stuff. We’re going to take a little break and after the break, I want to talk a little bit about some of the individual hormones that we’re dealing with that people want to modulate and some of the factors in our lives that are causing this imbalance. So good stuff, Mr. Daniel Vitalis. His website is Surthrival.com, DanielVitalis.com, and FindASpring.com. We’ll be right back after this break.
[ADVERTISEMENT]Justin: I have to say I have been absolutely loving this product by Tristan Truscott and Peter Ragnar called Good Morning Good Evening Qigong. If you want to listen to the interview we did with Tristan, you can go to www.ExtremeHealthRadio.com/127. And Qigong is a great way to distress the body and as you know, there is a huge component to disease caused by stress and stress is a huge factor in how we live our lives and the amount of energy we have and the amount of vitality we have. And so Dr. Shade, what do you think about Qigong?
Shade: People come to me and they’re really sick and they’ve got this blown-out neurological system and all this toxicity and I tell them “You need to do Qigong Tai Chi. You need to do these things that settle down and restore your neurology because it puts together all the parts. It puts you back into that state where you can start to detoxify. And so I highly, highly recommend all that.
Justin: And what about you, Kit Campbell? What do you think about Qigong? Do you like it as well?
Kit: Qigong is amazing and the reason that I believe it to be amazing is everything here is energy. That is a scientific fact if there ever is one. So when you’re practicing Qigong, you’re actually drawing energy into your body. Your intention—whatever your intention is behind any action—will determine the level of energy… type of energy… that you absorb into your body. So your intention behind you is very important, just like thought. So when you’re practicing Qigong, you’re actually bringing energy in and you’re bringing out the stuff that might be a bit stale. With Tai Chi it’s totally different. The energy runs underneath the skin because it’s more of a—this is a Chinese understanding, by the way—it’s more of a martial art. So Qigong is very, very good for bringing that energy into the body and just fantastic.
Justin: If you’re interested in picking up this Qigong course by Tristan Truscott and Peter Ragnar, go to www.ExtremeHealthRadio.com/Qigong and you can learn more about it. There is a great video on that page and you can learn more about it on that page and I highly, highly recommend this product. I love it myself, so go ahead and check that out at www.ExtremeHealthRadio.com/Qigong.
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Justin: So we’re doing a little experiment and now we’re keeping Maggie in the studio and if she pipes up and barks, we’re going to have to kick her out.
Kate: She gets kicked out, yeah.
Justin: She’s going to get kicked out.
Kate: She loves laying on the BioMat. It’s adorable.
Justin: So if you guys are interested in that Qigong course and you have any questions about it, please let me know. You can listen to ExtremeHealthRadio.com/127, as well as 139, I think, are the two episodes we did with Tristan and Peter Ragnar—a great, great course. So make sure to check that out. And as the lady said, don’t forget to follow us on Facebook and keep up to date with our shows and all that good stuff. We’d love to have you join our community that’s growing every single day, so don’t forget to do that. And Daniel, before the break, you were making some good points about how there’s not really a supplement or dietary nutritional thing that can account for poor lifestyle habits, and I thought that was really interesting because a lot of times people want to make up for their poor lifestyle by taking a supplement or by taking a vitamin or a mineral or something like that, but these things are the most critical, right? Like a good sleep and living in a healthy way—all these things are the most critical things we could do, aren’t they?
Daniel: Yeah, they are the foundation upon which our nutritional house is built, so if we don’t have those things in place, we have a poor foundation. We can’t really build the house of good nutrition on top of a poor foundation. So we can try. It’s attractive, the idea that you could just purchase this instead of having to do anything. I mean who is not attracted to that idea? We’ve been sold on instant gratification for a long time. But realistically, yeah, we’ve got to be conscientious. And here is what I like about this. I’m going to share some of the things that really, I think, build the foundations of hormone balance, and I’m pretty sure you guys will have a show on just about any of these topics so that we don’t have to spend the whole show exploring these individual topics. Again, they’re just brush strokes in the painting. We’re trying to see the painting right now. We’re not trying to figure out technically how the painter did it. We’re not trying to figure out which direction the brush strokes went in or which colors were chosen. We’re trying to see the big picture right now on this subject of hormones. So when we step back and we look at “What do we need to know about in order to have good hormone production and good hormone balance?” I think the first piece I really want to hit home—this is really an important one—our hormones are made out of something, right? They’re not made of pixie dust. They’re not made out of stardust. Well, I guess technically, we’re all stardust.
Justin: Yeah, right.
Daniel: They’re made out of cholesterol. I’m going to say that again. Your hormones, your sex hormones, they’re made out of cholesterol. There is a great saying in the Weston Price Foundation community where they say, “Cholesterol is for lovers.” Cholesterol is present in cardiovascular disease the way police are present in bar fights.
Justin: I see.
Daniel: And because people see cholesterol present when there is damage to the cardiovascular system, it got assumed at some point that it was responsible for cardiovascular disease, when in fact, it’s like saying Band-Aids are responsible for cuts.
Justin: Okay, that makes sense.
Daniel: Cholesterol is a fantastic tissue repair molecule. And so when we damage our cardiovascular system, cholesterol shows up. Cholesterol got demonized and there was a lot more to it as well, because there was a movement away from good quality animal fats like tallows and lards, which were heat stable, towards these really rancid, light and heat instable fats—polyunsaturated fats—like vegetable oil. And in order to sell crappy vegetable oil to people, they needed to demonize cholesterol, and they did that, and they did it effectively. To this day, people hear the term “cholesterol” and they immediately… It’s like that thing before. People don’t know what cholesterol is. Who knows what cholesterol…? Who do you know who could define cholesterol? Who can even define that? It’s like asking a Smurf what “Smurf” means, right? It’s just a word people use. I saw a film recently that really had me laughing, where a guy was talking about gluten and the other guy said, “Do you even know what gluten is?” and he said, “Yeah, gluten is a generic term for stuff that’s bad. Fat’s are a gluten. Salt’s a gluten. Toxins are a gluten.” So I think that’s what people are doing. They’re using cholesterol as a catch phrase for things they think are bad in their body, when in reality, cholesterol is crucial.
Kate: Right. But they all run out and stop… They don’t buy eggs anymore and they cut out all these things and they don’t have a clue.
Justin: Yeah, because if you can change the levels of your cholesterol with a pharmaceutical chemical, then why not demonize it? You can make a lot of money there, you know.
Daniel: Right. So if I convince you that toenails are bad… If I just start removing your toenails, that’s going to seem weird. If I convince you that toenails are causing diseases, then I could implement a toenail removal program, and if I did it well enough, I could go around the world selling my toenail removal program and people will never ask why. If they think toenails are bad, they’re not even going to look into why they should have them.
Justin: Right.
Daniel: So similarly, as absurd as that sounds, people are trying to remove the cholesterol from their body when it is the substance that you build… It’s the play dough that you build your hormones out of. How ridiculous. So what happens is as they do that, their sex drive goes down. As they do that, their hormone production goes down. As they do that, the body tries to scrape together what it needs to make progesterone, what it needs to make testosterone. You know, when we look at vegetarian diets through time, we see that they are primarily monastic. You guys know what I mean by that? Monks use them, right? And why do they do that? Because it reduces your sex drive. Obviously, right, if we’re going to be sitting around meditating all day, probably don’t want a jammin’ libido, right?
Justin: What a good way to put it.
Daniel: If we’re going to be a bunch of dudes in a monastery, if we’re going to be a bunch of women in a monastery—a bunch of monks or nuns—we probably don’t want a raging libido. So through time we see things like vegetarian diets employed for their low cholesterol, their low hormone producing qualities. We see foods like soybean being used because it’s rich in estrogens and it reduces testosterone, right? Does that make sense?
Justin: Yeah.
Kate: Yeah.
Daniel: Now here’s what happened. Again, because people just love sound bites. They just bought into it. Vegetarian diets are better for you. Hey, of course—they’re low in cholesterol, and we all know cholesterol is bad. They’re low in fat. We all know that’s bad. So people got on that and they don’t realize that they’ve taken a libido reducing diet on, and then they spend a lot of time later on down the road, because it takes a while for the hormone stuff to start working… Like I said before, there is lag time, so people start trying to figure out “Oh my God. How am I going to get my sex drive back? How do I get my hormone levels back up? Wow, I feel like I’m really out of balance. Wow, I’m not having a menstrual cycle anymore. What’s wrong with me? I’m on this great vegetarian diet.” See how that could work?
Justin: Right.
Daniel: So we need to be really conscientious about making sure we get enough cholesterol. Along with that, we’ve got to make sure we’re getting enough vitamin D. I mean this is just so obvious. Let yourself get pale this winter. See how you feel. See how people respond to you. See how your sex drive is when you are pale. How is your hormone production? You don’t need a doctor to tell you this. How is your hormone production when you’re pale and pasty? Not real good. You can feel it, right? You can feel it. So we need to make sure we’re getting sufficient sun exposure and we’re cranking up our vitamin D levels. Our liver is like this amazing bank where we deposit… We literally put deposits, like cash deposits, of vitamin D. Now here is the thing about vitamin D. Listen up, folks. Vitamin D is a hormone. It is no longer considered a vitamin. We just call it vitamin D. It’s like a crappy name that got stuck onto it, because a vitamin is something that you’ve got to put in your body because you don’t make it. Vitamin D is a hormone. It’s a chemical messenger that travels around the body doing all types of things and we need to start understanding that it’s a hormone.
So again, like I said before, hormones are like this catchall phrase. People don’t really know what they’re talking about. So some people, when they say “hormones,” they might mean their melatonin and serotonin. Somebody else might be struggling with thyroid issues, so they’re actually talking about metabolic stuff like thyroid hormone. Somebody else is talking about hormones and they’re talking about getting pregnant; they’re talking about progesterone. A guy is talking about hormones; he’s talking about testosterone and his sex drive. So there is a lot to this subject of hormones. Vitamin D is crucial to not only producing that hormone but also insuring that our body keeps its hormone production high. I think of it like this. When nature sees you’re getting pasty and pale and your vitamin D is low, it starts weeding you out of the gene pool.
Justin: Right.
Daniel: You’re not even fit enough to get sunlight? We’ve got to weed you out of the gene pool. Does that make sense?
Justin: Right. And so what are the main hormones? Like you just mentioned a few—testosterone…
Kate: Progesterone, estrogen…
Justin: Are there many others? I’m sure there are many of them, right?
Daniel: Well, there are, and there are far more than I am an expert on, for sure.
Justin: Yeah.
Daniel: But yeah, there are a lot of classes of hormones. So again, this is the field of endocrinology and this is like me showing you a beautiful painting and you asking me how many colors there are.
Justin: Okay.
Daniel: Does that make sense?
Justin: Yeah.
Daniel: So it would get us a little bit off track. But to give some general guidelines, like I said before, vitamin D is a hormone; it’s a master hormone. We have the neurotransmitter hormones, right? So those would be like melatonin and serotonin—those are hormones, but we think of them as neurotransmitters. There are the gonadal hormones—those are our androgens and our estrogens, right? So androgens are a big class of what we typically think of as male sexual hormones, but they are in both bodies, and our estrogens are a big class of molecules of what we tend to typically think of as female gonadal hormones or sex hormones, but there are many of them and they are in male and female bodies. So there is a lot going on in the hormone realm. There is the thyroid thing. So we’re hearing a lot more about that, right? Our thyroid hormone, which regulates our metabolism. So that’s a whole other class. Again, if we get too focused in on specific hormones, we’ll lose the greater plot, so let’s back out. We’ll zoom out a layer and we’ll look at things that help to insure that we’re getting good hormone production.
You guys—and I hear you talk a lot about it on this show and I know you have upcoming shows on it as well—sleep is crucial. Sleep is crucial. If we’re running a sleep deficit, our overall hormone production goes down. Our overall hormone production goes down. Now again, there is always lag time. So that’s the thing, right? The guy who sleeps five hours a night because he’s a super driven, workaholic doesn’t feel it in the first little while. It’s ten years in that he starts to see his hormone production go down. And he’s been living on this schedule so long he doesn’t make the connection.
Justin: Right.
Daniel: We need to make that connection now, so we need to understand how important getting sufficient sleep is. Now we all keep hearing it. I know it’s a very popular topic now. It’s really important that we go to bed before midnight. But here’s the thing. I’ve realized realistically, in my own life and for a lot of people I know, we just don’t. We just don’t. So if you don’t, you’ve got to make sure you’ve got that time in the morning to sleep in. If you’re going to stay up late, you’d better be sleeping in. If you’re going to go to bed early, you can get up earlier. But don’t think you can go to bed late and get up early and maintain that for very long. Your health will deteriorate and your hormone production will deteriorate and you’ll be spending time one day wondering where all the belly fat is coming from, “Why don’t I have any energy? Where is my drive? I can’t come up with goals. I have no motivation. What’s happening?” Well, you’ve gotten into a bit of an estrogen dominance there. So we need to be careful with that.
Justin: Yeah, I’ve heard recently that every hour of sleep before midnight is worth two as opposed to the one after midnight, like it’s really important to get those hours before midnight, from what I understand, isn’t it? If you can.
Daniel: Yeah. The thing is that midnight is not an arbitrary, made-up thing. Clock time is a bit arbitrary, but true midnight is when the sun passes 180 degrees from where you are on the planet. So it’s when the new cycle begins. It’s an actual, astronomical event. It’s not an astrological event. It’s an astronomical event. It’s when the sun passes the nadir point on the planet for you, where you are. So your midnight is important to you and so yeah, I would second that. But I’d also say I know that it’s not always easy, especially for us who are excited and doing things all the time and living fun lives. Let’s face it—we stay up late. So we’ve got to make sure that we’ve got sufficient darkness to sleep in and that we give ourselves sufficient time to sleep. Personally, for me, anything less than eight hours has never been enough.
Justin: Yeah, that’s how I am too.
Kate: Yeah. I can attest to that.
Justin: Yeah. Gotta have more than eight… at least eight hours, for me.
Daniel: Yeah, I agree. And a lot of health gurus will tell you otherwise. They’ll claim… I think a lot of health gurus love to claim that they sleep less than that and I don’t know what that’s about, but I’m here to tell you that I think they’re lying. So the next piece is making sure that we reduce our stress level, that we reduce our cortisol level, that we reduce that level of inflammation in our body that’s all related to our stress. Again, I know this is something that you guys have talked a lot about on the show, and I heard the commercial at the break about Qigong and Tai Chi and I would fit those into a broader category of parasympathetic nervous system stimulating practices.
So we have this thing—our sympathetic nervous system—that’s our fight/flight/freeze kind of pathway. That’s what happens when we get jacked up and excited. We activate the sympathetic nervous system. When we relax, we activate the parasympathetic nervous system. We do that with things like real yoga. We do it with things like meditation. We do it with things like Qigong or Tai Chi. We do it with things like breathing exercises. We do it with things like sauna. All of those things activate parasympathetic nervous system. That relaxes the body. Think about for a moment this word “relax.” It means “to make something lax again” or “to take the tension off of something again.”
So the idea is like you couldn’t live relaxed. That wouldn’t be relaxed—that would be “lax.” We don’t want to live lax, right? So imagine right now if the two of you were holding a cord between you—a piece of rope—there needs to be dynamic tension to keep you both interested in this game of holding the rope. So if Justin pulls a little bit one direction and Kate pulls back a little bit, there is some push and pull. Now if one of you just goes lax and just stays limp and lax, well, it’s no fun. And if one of you just keeps pulling and pulling and pulling, well, it’s no fun either. We need to be able to be in tension and then relax, in tension and then relax. That’s the dynamism of life, right? So we need both the sympathetic nervous system… We’ve got to get jacked up. We’ve got to get excited. We’ve got to go for runs. We’ve got to do explosive things. We’ve got to tackle projects. We have to learn how to relax as well. Our culture doesn’t promote that as much. It promotes staying jacked up and that reduces our hormone balance and our hormone production, so we need to be careful about it.
Justin: Wow, interesting stuff. We’re going to take a little break here. Sorry, Daniel. This is time for a break here. This is really, really good stuff. We’re with Daniel Vitalis, Surthrival.com, DanielVitalis.com, FindASpring.com. Really great stuff. We’ll be right back, right after this break.
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