Channel: Christopher Walker

Category: Education

Description: Use code YOUTUBE for 10% off your UMZU order at umzu.com UMZU Blog: umzu.com/blogs/hormones/how-steroid-hormones-are-made-in-the-body 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. As you walk out the door, you see a newspaper on the stand with the headline reading, “Nationwide Soap Shortage: Major Cleaning Chemical Manufacturers Go Bankrupt.” In this case, your feedback loop was noticeably disturbed: you needed more supplies, but the most convenient, efficient, and affordable supplier could no longer give you what you needed. You had to make an additional effort to find sub-par resources to get the original job done. Then your sub-par supplier ran out of supplies. You realize this is a much bigger issue than you originally thought - there’s a systemic, nationwide shortage of the raw materials needed to make cleaning supplies. Now what are you supposed to do to keep your home clean? 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.