Channel: Christopher Walker

Category: Education

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Description: Learn more about UMZU's mission to make the world healthy again at umzu.com What Are Hormones? The easiest way to think about hormones, is to see them as chemical messengers. Think of a paper boy, riding around the neighborhood on his bicycle, bringing newspapers to everyone’s house. Endocrine hormones are like the bicycle-riding paperboy, riding along the bloodstream to deliver the message they were sent for, by entering the “front door” of a receptor site on the surface of a target cell. Paracrine hormones are similar, but they stay closer to home, more like if you were walking over to your next-door neighbor’s house to give them a tray of cookies as a Christmas gift. Some hormones have a long-distance job to accomplish, and others stay local, usually just signaling to adjacent cells. Now here’s the really cool thing… picture yourself going online to a shopping website like Amazon. Maybe you need to order some cleaning supplies regularly to clean your home, so you pay to “subscribe” to some different sprays, soaps, and paper towels to be delivered to your house every month. Amazon processes the order, packages the products in their warehouse, and sends out a delivery van to bring them to your house, possibly over hundreds of miles. A few months from now, you realize that you overestimated how many cleaning supplies you needed, so now you have a surplus… enough soap stockpiled in your storage closet to last you another few months. You don’t need to reorder any more for a while. Now you go back to Amazon and “pause” your subscription. You just participated in a tangible feedback loop. By starting a subscription, you told Amazon that you needed soap. So they produced and delivered the products to you. By later pausing your subscription, you told Amazon to stop sending you so much soap. Your endocrine organs work the same way! It’s really quite simple to understand. But let’s say, a couple months later, you start running out of soap again. You’ve been cleaning a lot, and now it’s time to turn your subscription back on to restock your supplies. You go to Amazon’s website, log in to your account, and see a message on the screen saying, “We’re sorry, due to manufacturing & supplier problems, we no longer sell cleaning supplies.” Now what? Now you have to go find them somewhere else, maybe drive to the local store. It’s way less convenient and more expensive, not to mention it’s costing you additional gas money and time out of your day. To make things worse, when you get to your local store, they don’t have all the exact cleaning supplies you need. You’ll just have to make-due, you don’t want your house to turn into a disgusting cesspit after all. After a few months of this, you make your routine trip to the local store, and walk up to an empty shelf. No cleaning supplies. Everyone else in your town was facing the same problem, so eventually the store ran out of cleaning supplies and the clerk tells you more won’t be back in stock for a few weeks. While this is obviously merely a metaphorical demonstration, very similar feedback patterns happen with your hormones inside your body all the time, including issues with production and raw material supply. To be produced properly, hormones need raw materials. This is why we see rapid drops in some hormones’ production when the body is deficient in vitamins, minerals, and amino acids. Or why we see over-production of certain hormones when too much raw material is flooded into the system without the proper regulation from other hormonal feedback, for example in cases of estrogen excess with too much exposure to environmental estrogenics and unbalanced methionine and tryptophan levels. Another common situation with hormone imbalance occurs when an organ in the feedback loop system is not functioning properly. One easy example is when your liver is overproducing the protein SHBG (sex hormone binding globulin), which can occur for a range of different reasons. With too much SHBG in the blood, your sex hormones, like testosterone, become over-bound, and cannot get through “the front door” of the receptor sites they need to enter. This would be akin to someone walking up to your front door and stealing the Amazon box full of cleaning supplies off your front porch. Now that we have a basic grasp on the concept of hormone feedback loops within your endocrine system, let’s take a deeper look at the two main classes of hormones you need to start focusing on for proper hormonal balance: protective hormones and stress hormones.