What To Eat When Your Main Hormone Levels Are Too High

When in balance, your hormones are like text messages in your body from a wise mentor. Each hormone sends a “do this” or “do that” task to specific cells all across your body in an effort to create homeostasis. You’ll feel this balance as a full head of hair, strong nails, clear skin, stable mood and weight, stress resilience, robust digestion and satisfying libido. Unfortunately, the hormonal system is quite vulnerable to your environment – particularly toxins, poor sleep, the wrong foods or drinks, wayward microbes in the gut, and even limiting thoughts.

I advocate a “food first” philosophy when it comes to restoring balance, rather than immediately jumping to a prescription or even a supplement that contains isolated compounds of a beneficial food. In this vein, I’ve listed below the top 5 hormones that create homeostasis in your body, followed by my favorite foods to bring that hormone back into balance.

Cortisol

Job: Cortisol is the primary hormone of the stress response, and is secreted by the adrenal glands. When elevated, it raises blood pressure and blood sugar so that you can take “fight or flight” on the rare need for an emergency situation. But when cortisol is chronically elevated, it can lead to a heightened sense of “rev” or unease in the body, depression, accelerated aging, weight gain, blood sugar problems, and metabolic syndrome.

You may notice:

• You feel like you’re constantly racing from one task to the next
• Difficulty losing weight, especially at your waist
• Moodiness or depression
• Quickness to anger or rage
• Trouble winding down before bedtime or difficulty staying asleep
• Weak nails or skin conditions like eczema or thin skin (sometime literally and figuratively)
• High blood pressure or blood sugar (or both)
• Memory lapses or attention deficit, especially under stress
• Craving salty or sugary foods
• Low libido

Lab Tests: Serum cortisol, diurnal dried urine (tracks your cortisol levels at four points throughout the day, and reflects the quality of your Hypothalamic-Pituitary-Adrenal axis (HPA, i.e., brain-adrenal conversation), “Complete Hormones” urine test, available from Genova. Old school testing includes saliva testing, but I find dried urine to be more informative.

Eat This Food: Extra dark chocolate (at least 70% cocoa), shown to lower cortisol levels. 

Honorable mention foods: Cold water wild-caught fish. My latest favorite is cod from Alaska, baked in a miso paste in parchment paper on a bed of asparagus or other vegetable.

Insulin

Job: Insulin regulates the amount of glucose in your blood. The main problem with insulin is chronic elevation, leading to insulin resistance (when cells become numb to insulin, raising blood glucose to pre-diabetes or diabetes levels.)

You May Notice:

• Cravings for sweet foods
• Difficulty not eating (or stopping after one serving) carbohydrate-rich foods, such as chocolate, ice cream, or french fries
• Fasting blood sugar higher than normal (greater than 85 mg/dl)
• Feeling feel shaky, anxious, or irritable between meals
• For women, waist measurement 35 inches or greater (at the belly button). For men, greater than 40 inches
• Body mass index greater than 25
• Polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOs), a condition that includes irregular periods, acne, increased hair growth, and sometimes infertility and cysts on the ovaries
• Low HDL (good) cholesterol and/or high triglycerides
• High blood pressure (systolic greater than 140 or diastolic greater than 90)
• Fasting insulin level that is greater than 5 μiu/ml (micro international units per milliliter)

Lab Test: Fasting blood sugar, fasting insulin, HgbA1c.

Eat This Food: Sauerkraut (or kimchi, or any fermented vegetable), shown in studies to lower fasting glucose.

Testosterone

Job: Testosterone is a hormone produced in the ovaries of women and testicles of men, and in the adrenal glands. It is important for a sense of well-being, confidence, muscle tone, bone growth, and sexual function. When elevated excessively (a problem facing 30 percent of American women), it can lead to problems.

You May Notice:

• Acne
• Excess hair on your face, chest, or arms
• Greasy skin and/or hair
• Thinning head hair (sometimes combined with excess hair growth elsewhere)
• Discoloration of your armpits (darker and thicker than your normal skin)
• Skin tags, especially on your neck and upper torso
• Hyperglycemia or hypoglycemia and/or unstable blood sugar
• Reactivity and/or irritability, or excessively aggressive or authoritarian episodes (also known as roid rage)
• Depression or anxiety
• Polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS), usually with ovarian cysts (called a “string of pearls” on ultrasound), infertility, or menstrual cycles occurring more than every thirty-five 
days

Lab Tests: Serum free and total testosterone, sometimes bioavailable testosterone

Eat This Food: Green beans, which are rich in zinc. (Zinc plays an important role in sexual development, menstruation, and ovulation. Zinc deficiency is associated with higher androgens, the family of hormones to which testosterone belongs, and acne.)

Honorable mention foods: Pumpkin and sesame seeds, also rich in zinc. 

Estrogen

Job: Estrogen refers to a family of sex hormones that are responsible for female characteristics in the body, including the development of breasts and hips. But sometimes you can get too much of a good thing: more than 700 known toxins from the environment can mimic estrogen and lead to excess estrogen pollution in the body.

You May Notice:

• Bloating, puffiness, or fluid retention
• Abnormal Pap smears
• Heavy bleeding or postmenopausal bleeding (see your doctor!)
• Rapid weight gain, particularly in the hips and butt
• Increased bra-cup size or breast tenderness
• Fibroids, endometriosis, or painful periods. 
• Mood swings, PMS, irritability, weepiness, mini breakdowns, or anxiety
• Migraines or other headaches
• A red flush on your face (or a diagnosis of rosacea)
• Gallbladder problems

Lab Tests: Dried urine testing (see cortisol) with all estrogen metabolites, or salivary female hormone panel. Body burden testing in the blood and urine.

Eat This Food: Cruciferous vegetables, for example, broccoli and cauliflower, and even cabbage, because people don’t always remember what a gem of a food it is. These vegetables block estrogen, the fiber helps you excrete excess estrogens, and overall the crucifers help cells with programmed cell death, so that senescent cells don’t keep circulating and loitering like zombies, wreaking havoc and accelerating the aging process. Today, I’m eating a salad at lunch with red cabbage, broccoli sprouts, grated carrots, and basil – topped with avocado oil and Meyer lemon. Scrumptious!

Thyroid

Job: The thyroid is in charge of metabolism, or the rate at which your biochemical reactions run in the body, including the rate of calories burned. About 10 percent of women lack sufficient thyroid hormone from a slow thyroid gland, so that energy is triaged to the most vital functions and away from many bodily functions.

You May Notice:

• Dry, strawlike hair that tangles easily and/or falls out (hair loss may include eyelashes or the outer third of your eyebrows)
• Dry skin; decreased sweating; thin, brittle fingernails
• An additional few pounds (or twenty) that you just can’t lose.
• Fluid retention
• Bowel movements less  than once a day, or you feel you don’t completely evacuate
• Muscle or joint aches (you became an old lady overnight)
• Cold or tingling in hands and feet, or intolerance of cold or heat, maybe a sensitivity to cold (you shiver more easily than others and are always wearing layers)
• Slow speech, perhaps with a hoarse or halting voice, slow brain, slow thoughts; difficulty concentrating; sluggish reflexes and diminished reaction time
• Lethargy (you feel like you’re moving through molasses) or fatigue, particularly in the morning; depression or moodiness (the world is not as rosy as it used 
to be), or a prescription for the latest antidepressant but you’re still not feeling like yourself
• Heavy periods or other menstrual problems (see your doctor!), infertility, miscarriage, or preterm birth
• An enlarged thyroid or goiter, or difficulty swallowing

Lab Tests: Mainstream medicine usually runs only a serum TSH and T4 to determine thyroid function. A functional medicine thyroid panel includes several other labs such as free and total T3 (active thyroid hormone), reverse T3, and thyroid antibodies to rule out autoimmune thyroid problems.

Eat This Food: Brazil nuts. In addition to iodine, you need selenium, zinc, and copper for proper thyroid function.Brazil nuts are the richest source of selenium from food. Sometimes people with Hashimoto’s are advised to avoid selenium. You need selenium for glutathione production to help decrease thyroid antibodies. Eat 1-3 Brazil nuts per day.

In large part, hormones run your body, and their delicate balance means you are in balance. By eating certain foods methodically, you can encourage your body to have a healthy hormonal balance, leading you to live life to its fullest.

For more tips and lifestyle habits that will help you age gracefully and beautifully, order your copy of Younger: A Breakthrough Program to Reset Your Genes, Reverse Aging, and Turn Back the Clock 10 Years.