Episode 6, Part 2
trading fertility for fantasy part 2: The Prosperous Power of Progesterone & the Double-Edged Sword of Estrogen
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Transcript
Welcome back to the Fully Nourished podcast. I'm your host, Jessica Ash, Functional Nutritionist and Integrative Health Coach, coming to you with a scientific and spiritual exploration of what it looks like to awaken our feminine radiance by becoming deeply and fully nourished in a world that wants to dull us down. You ready?
As a reminder, everything in this podcast is for education and inspiration only and is not intended as medical advice. Please talk to the appropriate professional when necessary, and please use common sense before making any changes to your diet and lifestyle.
Estrogen and Progesterone
So let's switch gears a little bit and talk about how important our understanding progesterone and the power of progesterone is because a lot of women even in the functional space are under the assumption and the lie that estrogen is the female hormone. That has been kind of the push of the century: that estrogen is the female hormone and you just need more and more and more estrogen. But when you look at the female cycle, and you look at how much estrogen we create and then at how much progesterone we create, you see that estrogen is a part of the female cycle but it is not the female hormone. It is not what the cycle is centered around. Our rhythm, our cycle, which we touched on in the last episode, is really centered around the biological drive to co-create or procreate, to kind of be in that constant creative energy. We have, as cycling woman, if you're a cycling women's still, you have the first half of your cycle (which is just dedicated to sloughing off the uterine lining, preparing the uterus for another cycle) and then the slow build during the follicular phase of estrogen, Luteinizing hormone, Follicle Stimulating Hormone, towards ovulation.
But once ovulation happens and the potential of pregnancy occurs, the possible fertilization takes place, the egg drops out of the egg sack. The egg sack itself becomes this hormone-producing gland. It's this really amazing gland that's full of the antioxidant lutein, which is why it's so orangey yellow, and it starts producing immense amounts of progesterone for us. It doesn't just produce progesterone, though, there are other hormones involved like leptin, but it's specifically there to produce progesterone. The gland is called the corpus luteum and so that's why it's called the luteal phase. The luteal phase is the time between ovulation and possible implantation or menstruation, either the fertilized egg implants into the uterine lining, and then we continue on into pregnancy, or that didn't happen. If it didn’t happen, our uterine lining starts sloughing off and we start the cycle over again.
You see that the whole cycle is centered, you know, the first half of the cycle is in the slow build towards ovulation, and then once ovulation occurs, now the cycle shifts and is focused on the possible pregnancy that's going to take place. That's why our temperatures raise. that's why everything starts to shift, our protein metabolism shifts, our glucose metabolism shifts – we are completely focused on this possible creation of new life. And progesterone is what is required to make that happen. Which is why if we do get pregnant, the corpus luteum goes on to continue to create progesterone until the placenta can take over. But without progesterone, there is no life, there are no metabolic shifts, there is no expansion of the human race or the expansion of human consciousness. Because without progesterone, you cannot sustain a pregnancy.
But remember, our co-creation or procreation doesn't just have to do with reproduction, right? We have creative energy that flows through us continuously. Some women believe that hormones are just for reproduction, or progesterone is just for reproduction, or they almost resent the ability to procreate. I've seen that kind of pop up a lot in our society lately, or I always get pushback on social media, when I say that our biological drive is to reproduce. There's a lot of angry women in the comments that are really resentful of that fact. But what we have to understand is, no matter how we feel about our nature, it is our nature, and we don't have to “comply.” We have choices now. But hormones are really just a physical expression of the energy that's flowing through us. And when we are aligned, they are aligned. No matter how you feel about it, there is this constant harmony and this constant communication between your brain, your ovaries, your uterus, they are constantly communicating back and forth, right? Because the womb is the center of our feminine and creative energy. And so therefore, the brain has to take it in our environment and make sure that there's a communication and open communication there.
We see so many women right now with irregular cycles. They're stuck in long follicular phases. They're getting, you know, told that they have cysts on the ovaries or the follicles are not maturing, they're stuck in a long follicular phase, their body does not feel safe enough to drop that egg, it does not have the energy required to ovulate and then go ahead and create this hormone producing gland that shifts energy potential completely, shifts the metabolism completely mid cycle. And what has happened is with so much focus on estrogen, progesterone has kind of become this forgotten hormone. I'm loving seeing how so many women are waking up to the power of progesterone and how important it is to ovulate, and what the impacts for our metabolism and libido and sleep are. But for so long, we've been convinced that estrogen is a female hormone that we've kind of brushed progesterone to the corner like, “Oh yeah, that pro-gestation hormone over there.”
But when you look at estrogen and look at estrogen’s nature, really its job is to pull water into cells and cause immense building and growth. It is an anabolic hormone, meaning that it encourages growth and building within the body. I like to think of estrogen almost as a hormone of potential. It's also the hormone of imaginative drive. So when women are super prone to fantasies, and they cannot come down to reality, can't cannot come down to the present moment, it often is actually being driven by estrogen. You see estrogen overload or estrogen dominance or estrogen-driven psyches everywhere, where women are in constant need to seek and seek and seek and seek and build and build and build and build. They cannot stick within the present moment, they cannot calm themselves down, they cannot feel peace. They're just constantly seeking, constantly searching, constantly kind of building that inner world in their head. And it really starts to drive them crazy.
The thing about estrogen that's interesting is we have three different types, right? We have estrone, estradiol, and estriol, and estradiol is mostly produced within the ovaries. But estrone is a powerful form of estrogen as well, that can be synthesized in almost any tissue in our body. That's what a lot of people don't recognize, is that not only is estrogen fat soluble, and can store up in our fat cells very easily, but the fat cells themselves plus many of the other tissues of our body, our skin or pancreas, our bones, many different tissues of our body can produce estrogen through the process of aromatization. So aromatase is an enzyme that allows us to turn one hormone into estrogen and we often can turn testosterone into estrogen, and we can actually aromatize progesterone into estrogen as well. And estrogen really does drive the proliferation of cellular growth. So the proliferation of cells, like I said, by drawing water into the cells, that's causing the swelling of the cells. And it really shows up at times where we need explosive growth, right? So you see estrogen spikes in our cycle, it's at its very peak right before we ovulate to kind of bring on the growth and maturation of follicles. And then you see another smaller peak mid-luteal phase when you really start to see the uterine lining building in thickness to prepare for a potential implantation to get it plump and bring the blood flow and vascularisation.
But what a lot of people don't tell women is that estrogen without progesterone is dangerous. They are meant to operate within a balance of each other. They are a yin and yang. Too much growth, too much proliferation that goes unchecked is absolutely a recipe for disaster. Not only on a physical level, right, which causes massive amounts of building and growth which is why your fibroids are associated with estrogen and breast cancers and uterine cancers and ovarian cysts and endometriosis and PCOS. And so when you look at progesterone, which again, we're supposed to be dominant in in the second half of the cycle, once the corpus luteum starts creating progesterone progesterone should shoot up and overpower estrogen.
And keep in mind, I mentioned this in the last episode, but I'm gonna highlight it again, is that the way that estrogen is measured within the serum within the blood serum and the way that progesterone is measured within the serum should tell us everything that we need to know about the importance of each of these hormones. Estrogen is usually measured in picograms per milliliter or picomoles per liter, whereas progesterone is measured in nanograms per milliliter or nanomoles per liter. And if you don't really get what that means that's okay. But just to give you reference, a picogram or picomole, which estrogen is measured in, is 1000 times smaller than a nanogram or nanomol, which is what progesterone is measured in very often. And so when you look at progesterone, its job is very interesting, it’s almost a chameleon-type hormone because It's not quite just anabolic, or not just quite catabolic in nature. Catabolic means to break tissue down or you know, remove it so the new tissue can grow. Anabolic just means, like I said before, building.
So progesterone is kind of this interesting chameleon hormone because not only does it kind of protect us from stress, but really when you look at what it does when in balance with estrogen, is it really is the hormone of channeling energy. It focuses potential, it fine tunes or almost guides the action of energy. So estrogen drives this kind of unstoppable growth, right this unchecked growth, but progesterone comes in and fine tunes the actions of estrogen. It's really the hormone of presence, the hormone of mindfulness. And if you think of hormones, in a way, their responsibility is really just to direct energy by directing the utilization of fuel and minerals. They move minerals around, they move nutrients around. This really means that they drive human consciousness, they drive energy, that force behind all that is forward. But progesterone plays a very important role in channeling energy. And as women, we need to understand our hormones to understand that they need to operate within balance.
I'm not going to be condescended to or treated like oh, that you know that estrogen is the female hormone, you only need that progesterone when you want to have a baby. Don't worry your pretty little head. I am very capable of looking at my own physiology and understanding. In the many research studies that you can find, the many things that you can read for understanding your own physiology, how damn important progesterone is for my peace, for my well-being, to feel in my own skin and present and connected to my own experience to be fertile. I can look at the clear function, I don't even need to really look at research. But I can just look at the clear function of these two hormones and understand how their receptors work and understand that estrogen and progesterone both work in harmony or in sync, and one does not do the job it's supposed to do without the other.
If I want to truly be able to embody all that I am, I absolutely need to be making enough progesterone. And I need to be concerned with my progesterone levels. It's of utmost importance. But the thing is, when we look around the stress and other factors are depleting us of the nutrients we need to be able to create progesterone, creating progesterone is much more difficult than creating estrogen. Our tissues create estrogen. We only create progesterone if we ovulate. The corpus luteum is what creates progesterone for us. Obviously, you can make a little bit in our adrenal glands, but not enough to really create the balance that is required to protect us from estrogen. And I never ever want to demonize estrogen. I think sometimes that it can be taken too far and I have seen people really demonizing estrogen. Estrogen is important for growth, it is important in context, I think that's the most important thing to understand is that estrogen is important within the context that it's in. But the thing that we have to understand is our exposure to estrogen, and our body's creation of estrogen is very, very skewed in the modern world.
If you look at the father of stress, Hans Selye, he's the one that really defined stress and stress within the organism. I think the exact phrase he used - don't quote me on this - was the “nonspecific demand.” He defined stress as - don't quote me perfectly on this, but - I think it was “the nonspecific response of the body to any demand.” I believe that's how he defined it. And he did a series of experiments to really understand what the state of stress was, and in doing his experiments to study stress, he eventually came up with what he called general adaptation syndrome, which we'll talk about in a second. He had to induce states of shock and stress into the animals he was working with mainly rodents and the way he induced shock was very, very interesting. He would subject the animals to different types of stressors: loud noises, bright strobe type lights, extremely cold water. He would put them through really hard living situations, starvation, things like that. And what he discovered was very interesting to him.
When he was inducing shock into these animals, he tested their blood to see what types of hormones the body would create. And of course, he saw things like cortisol and adrenaline. But he also saw things that, interestingly enough, we seem to think are very good things in today's day and age. Compounds like serotonin, for example. And one of the main things I want to highlight is he saw a lot of estrogen being produced when these animals were in states of shock. Their bodies would uptick the aromatase enzyme and tissues would be producing massive amounts of this hormone as a protection, because remember, estrogen is anabolic in nature, it can have some antioxidant effects. And so he was theorizing that it was as a protection against the more catabolic hormones, the hormones of tissue breakdown, like adrenaline and cortisol.
And so it’s that double edged sword again, right, where sometimes our physiology in an effort to protect us or our nature and effort to protect us and keep us safe, can actually perform behaviors that end up hurting us. And through his experiments, he ended up defining what he called GAS or general adaptation syndrome, which was really the states of stress that people go in. And the first state of shock is a state of alarm. So people go into a state of alarm, they're stressed out, it's that kind of acute phase of stress, where we recognize there's a stressor or something's wrong. And that is really when you start producing these hormones of shock, a lot of estrogen, serotonin, adrenaline, cortisol. And then we kind of move into this new phase of stress, which is called resistance, where our body was previously trying to kind of respond to the stressor kind of acute “red alert, red alert, red alert,” and then now we're kind of in the state of resistance, where our body's using energy and resources and directing them trying to get the body back to a state of balance or back to a state of homeostasis. But it can only do that so long, right, because we only have so many resources. And if we're using more resources than we're taking in, right, looking back at the different definition of stress, which is really just the nonspecific response to any demand that's placed upon the body, so how the body is responding to any type of demand.
He observed that eventually the body would go into just a state of exhaustion, that third state, where the body slowed everything down, stopped using its resources, and actually kind of switched to a more frozen kind of numbed-out conservation mode. And so the reason I bring Dr. Hans Selye’s experiments up is really just because he showed how we can produce tons and tons of estrogen just by being in a state of alarm or a state of shock. I think about right now how many people are in a constant state of alarm from all of the fear mongering that's going on from every different avenue, not just the media, but social media, we have a lot of different forms of fear mongering going on kind of keeping us in this chronic state of alarm, constantly this chronic state of shock.
This production of estrogen is not gender specific, it can happen in men too. Men can turn on their aromatase enzyme and start producing estrogen out of their own testosterone or converting their DHEA into estrogen. But as women, we're already making estrogen on a cyclical basis, our ovaries are making estrogen. And this estrogen that we make under a state of shock is separate from the estrogen that our tissues synthesize or aromatize. When we're in certain survival states or stress states, and remember this goes back to survival our body is trying to protect us but in doing so, it can actually harm us. And it does in a way go back to what I think I mentioned in episode two or episode three - how the thyroid in a way acts as the metabolic regulator. It's that deep hum right, it comes from our throat, there's this kind of deep hum. It's the driver of energetic potential and it's the driver of the cell's ability to take in glucose and create energy and heat from it.
What you see is that estrogen and progesterone have a direct impact on thyroid health. A lot of women don't understand how progesterone is thyroid stimulating, whereas estrogen, when out of balance with progesterone, can be very thyroid suppressing. It doesn't just necessarily suppress our production of thyroid hormone, it can also suppress our conversion of inactive thyroid hormone into active thyroid hormone within the liver. Estrogen really, really can bog down the liver, which is why women are so much more likely to get gallbladder removal surgeries and have liver stagnation. Estrogen has been proven again and again to put immense amounts of stress on the liver. And that's primarily where our thyroid hormones get converted into their active form.
But that's not all. If we have a ton of estrogen stored up in our tissues, we can also have a very hard time receiving thyroid hormone and utilizing that energy, because remember, thyroid hormone really directs the utilization of glucose. And so part of progesterone’s role, you know, we see estrogen build in the follicular phase and peak. But then, once progesterone comes into the picture, we see that progesterone actually has the ability to displace estrogen from the tissues. So what a lot of women don't realize or don't know yet is that their blood serum is just a representation of hormones that are actually moving, what is in our blood is not an accurate depiction of what's going on within our tissues, it can give us insights, but it doesn't tell us exactly what the tissues are doing.
There's a lot of people, a lot of doctors I've talked to, a lot of even functional doctors and functional practitioners, that don't quite understand how much estrogen we produce in our tissues. When we are in a state of constant stress or a state of constant shock and how suppressive to the metabolism it can be. And this is not something that just kind of writes itself, all of a sudden, we can strip a lot of estrogen from heavy metal overload, having lots of iron in our tissues, having lots of free copper in our tissues, other free metals, our body can store up estrogen for a lot of different reasons within the tissues. Part of progesterone’s role is once it peaks and once it becomes a dominant hormone, it can displace some of that estrogen, our body can metabolize it in the liver, package it up and then carry it out via the bile and therefore the bowels and allow us removal of this estrogen. Estrogen came, did its job and now it gets removed from the body.
But how many women are not ovulating right now, are not ovulating well, not making enough progesterone? And so instead of having their cycle be this harmonious balance between having estrogen become dominant before ovulation and then afterwards having progesterone become dominant, women are spending their whole lives or their whole cycles, estrogen dominant, and each cycle they go into the next cycle just a little bit more estrogen dominant. I call this the rollover effect, because every cycle if we're not getting that progesterone displacement of estrogen, we're just storing up more and more estrogen within our tissues, and specifically our fat cells.
Both progesterone and thyroid hormone play a very large role in both calming the action of aromatase so we're not producing as much in our tissues, but also to get estrogen moving and get it to take action and it directs the thyroid and the progesterone. So in some scientific circles, the thyroid is even considered or called the third ovary, because really, both the thyroid and progesterone really direct how estrogen is used within the body, if it moves, where it moves, what it does. I highlight these things, because not only are we making plenty of estrogen, not only are we manufacturing estrogen within our ovaries and within our tissues, but we're also being exposed to massive amounts of estrogen mimicking chemicals right now, there's a ton in our environment. You know, PFA, forever chemicals, silicones, and microplastics and all these kinds of endocrine disrupting chemicals, they often act as estrogens or act upon our tissues in a similar way that estrogen does.
And then we've also had a ton of estrogenic foods really entered the space, we have access because of the Industrial Revolution. And because of the food industry, we really have access to massive amounts of food that we wouldn't have necessarily consumed in high amounts before. Some things that come to mind are things like seeds where you can buy them by the multiple pound bag or we have tons of access to dairy fat, right? Whereas before when we milked our own cow or how had to source or own dairy we had to really be picky and choosey what we use the dairy fat for, right? We could use it for butter, for cream, for ice cream, but we couldn't use it for everything because there's only so much cream that comes on a gallon of milk. But now we can buy full fat everything. And we can put, you know globs of butter and globs of dairy fat. And I'm not saying that these things are bad, but the amount that we eat them in are a little bit different than we did before because of our access. We have all these kinds of individual factors working together to create this really, the society that's extremely overloaded in estrogen. And we see it, right? Women are struggling more than ever before with painful fibrotic breasts, they have skin problems every cycle, liver and gallbladder issues, endometriosis, PCOS, fibroids, ovarian cysts, breast cancers, uterine cancers, ovarian cancers, we are seeing the impacts of estrogen. And yet, we haven't even talked about the big elephant in the room - the exposure to estrogen that we as women choose, which is birth control, hormonal birth control.
The History of Estrogen
So when we look at the history of estrogen, it really has a packed history. In the past 100 years, we've really come to think of it as the female hormone. And there's some very real marketing reasons why we believe that about estrogen. The marketing of synthetic estrogen for women has always been tied to industry in some way. And the birth control industry today is a $17 billion industry. And so our thoughts on estrogen are really now kind of shaped by that industry. But estrogen has been a part of some different industries throughout the years. And you see this a lot, right? Marketing to women to play on our fantasies and our emotions has always been the case, like, “you're this miserable piece of shit, you don't like where you're at, let me give you something better at the expense of yourself.” And at the cost of yourself, right? You don't want that. Let me tell you what you actually want. And man, because of our proneness to fantasy, marketing really gets us doesn't it? It really gets us to get into our emotions, have misplaced compassion, misplaced perceptions of ourselves. And then we trade one type of imprisonment for another, we do it all the time.
With hormonal birth control, we've been marketed to so successfully that we really see hormonal birth control as synonymous with freedom and liberation. We kind of see it as a synonym for being able to take control of our own fertility, because we've been sold that. And it's actually kind of hard to talk about in some circles. There always seems to be pushback about this. But I'm just trying to present the facts and you can make whatever conclusions that you want. I think it's pretty hard to deny at this point that when you talk about birth control, it's almost always synonymous with women's empowerment. It's so tied into our freedom. And we get so caught up in our emotions about it, that we sometimes don't even want to hear both sides of the story. Not only is it marketed that way to us and has been throughout really the past century, but we also see it being marketed so well as a lifestyle drug really, you know, this idea of, of regulating your periods and having no more periods and fixing our skin and fixing our PMS, that some of us feel the need to almost defend it in a way.
But a true empowered woman is informed and she makes consent, she makes a choice based on information and knowing what's best about her own body. And so we cannot be empowered or informed if we do not know the facts, if we don't know the information. That's what I'm trying to do here today. Some of the stuff I didn't even know. I's really powerful stuff. Some of the stuff that I use to research what I'm talking about today is in the show notes. Actually, all of the links that I've used, all of the papers that I've used, I also watched the documentary, “The Business of Birth Control,” which I highly recommend as well. There's some very interesting things in there. But before we look at birth control, it's important to look at just the estrogen industry in and of itself.
You know, estrogen became isolated, it was hard to find an exact date but it seemed to be around the 1920s. There were various uses of estrogen so they were able to see that it was a part of the estrous cycle in rodents and then they started to kind of realize that maybe this has something to do with women's cycles. And then they started to create this bovine ovarian supplement. There's this one scientist that started supplementing women with the dried glands of, I think it was cows and pigs, and they started to improve. Their menopausal symptoms start to improve, their hormonal symptoms start to improve. And so he's like, “Okay, I’m onto something.” And so you start to see that's kind of the first discovery of estrogen. Then the hormone Emmenin comes on the market, which was made from pregnant woman's urine. It was really expensive to produce. So then they later came out with the, I think it was called Premarin. And it was made from horse urine. So those were kind of like the earlier iterations and uses of estrogen.
And it's interesting, because when you look, throughout history, it's always marketed in one way, and yet, the marketing around it is a little bit spotty, like they haven't been able to actually prove most of what they're marketing it as, and then later on, they're held accountable. And they're like, “Oh, actually, we shouldn't have said that, we're not gonna say that anymore." You see this happen again, and again, and again, with every iteration of estrogen, or most of the different types that come come on the market. So we have, you know, the pregnant women urine, estrogen in the early I think the 1930s, around there, and then the horse urine, estrogen, and then they start to actually synthesize estrogen or make synthetic estrogen. So you have the ethanol estradiol, which is actually still used today in certain birth control pills and certain types of birth control. And that kind of comes out in the late 1930s. This was, again, around the same time, women are getting lobotomies - this is a dark time for women. And they're also rolling out what's called Diethylstilbestrol. They were using it for anything and everything under the sun. They're like, this is a female hormone, this is a hormone, we were able to isolate in a cycle, like it must be good for them. And so they're using it for things like pregnancy, menopausal symptoms, miscarriages, which they consider to be estrogen deficiency, and then they start to roll out the use of Diethylstilbestrol in cattle in the later 1940s.
So they start to really understand the growth effects of this and how it causes growth in the fatty tissues of these cows. And so these cattle are growing faster, they're getting fatter, thicker, and they're starting to experiment, they're starting to implant this Diethylstilbestrol subcutaneously. So under the skin. They give these cattle oral administration of this synthetic estrogen. And then it finally gets approved for food use in the mid 1950s. It only runs for a few years, when they start to realize it's causing way too many symptoms on the cows, and they're starting to get really, really sick. And so they really tried to tailor it over and over and over again, to try to define the optimal dose. I believe that they were doing both, I think it got approved for oral use in like 1954. And then they were putting it in cows subcutaneously like I think in 1957. And that ran for, I believe until the 1970s Don't quote me on that. I can't remember the exact date but they were giving cattle DS or as a growth hormone or an anabolic for quite a while. So there's there's kind of this mass estrogen experiment on mammals.
Then it was also rolled out into humans. You know, humans were using DS. Now DS is known to be an endocrine disruptor. It is deemed unsafe. But from 1938 to 1971, they believed that miscarriages, premature deliveries, and menopause were all caused by low levels of estrogen in the woman's body. And so they would administer DS. And then and they use it to “correct the problem.” Then it was given to millions of women in the US. Now it's known to cause cancer, it causes birth defects. Because it was given to millions of women, there are many children that suffered the effects, the birth defects and genetic defects that came from giving Diethylstilbestrol to women, and there's actually something called Diethylstilbestrol withdrawal syndrome.
It took them 30 years to say, like, “Oh, it doesn't work for that. Oh, this is not the best option.” They've classified it as an endocrine disruptor. So now that the estrogen industry is off to a great start, they just keep going. Right? So this really leads us into hormonal birth control.
The Development of Hormonal Birth Control
If you don't know the story of hormonal birth control, it's deeply tied into a really dark history of eugenics and racism. You cannot separate eugenics, racism, and the birth control pill. Because you see, at this time, you know, in the 1960s, early 1960s, late 1950s, you know, the government is primarily run by men, male politicians, and then we have predominantly male doctors as well. There's still this idea - it takes a long time to move ideas out of society - there's still this idea that women are hysterical and that we don't really understand what's going on with our own bodies. We're emotional, we're kind of crazy. And we probably shouldn't be in charge of a lot of things, especially our own bodies. We don't really know what's best for ourselves.
Then you see Margaret Sanger, which if you don't know who she is, was a person who believed in eugenics. If you don't know what eugenics is, it's the belief that certain types of people based on their race or based on their ethnicity, are more worthy and deserving of life and happiness than others. It's straight racism. But Margaret Sanger is supposedly the first person to initiate the research and development of the birth control pills. She supposedly got the scientists together and had them start trying to synthesize something that would be able to control ovulation or stop a pregnancy. And this is where she started to set up the first birth control clinics. So if you don't know, Margaret Sanger is also the one that established Planned Parenthood. But the beginning was just this birth control clinic. And specifically because of her beliefs, she purposefully set these clinics up in poor black communities. Which is disgusting and makes my blood absolutely boil.
What was going on around this time was absolutely sick, right, we have this going on. And then we also have, you know, black women, indigenous women, immigrants, who are getting sterilized without their consent. So they're often being given incentives like food, housing, medical treatments, in exchange for sterilization. There's already mass experimentation on women's bodies. This is the same time that these lobotomies are going on, you also have women going for medical help going in for surgery or some type of medical issue and coming out sterilized or being told that if they want their needs taken care of their their housing needs and their food needs, they're going to need to be to be sterilized. And all of this is being kind of deemed as what's needed for gynecological research.
This is really the foundation of gynecology and where this part of the medical system really began. This is the foundation of modern gynecology, the mass sterilization. It was often gruesome, brutal, without anesthesia type experimentation, that was “needed” to further this area of study.
So around the same time, you see that women are starting to want to get hormonal birth control approved in the US. And to do that you have to go through the FDA. So they have to do some type of study, to weigh what's called benefits to risk. They're not going to let this study be done in the US, and so they go to Puerto Rico. And in Puerto Rico at the time, there was a lot of poverty there, they were having overpopulation issues. And they knew that women would be desperate for some type of intervention, and they would be willing to take part in this study. So they put 132 women in this trial of the hormonal birth control pill. I believe it ran for 12 months - don't quote me on that, I can't remember exactly the exact amount of time. But five women died. One was a suicide and they then they brought it to the US. And this is really when you see the push for approval start to really, really happen within the US.
Around the same time there's women starting to take hormonal birth control, these kind of first generation estrogens and there's a lot of issues going on with lots of strokes and blood clots and cardiovascular events, things of that nature. And so what happens is, there's a series of events that happen. Barbara Seaman, she's a doctor, that writes a book called “The Doctor's Case Against the Pill.” At the time, you know, that first generation birth control, which I think was called Enovid, was being proven to cause pulmonary embolism which really, what that is, is a blockage in the lung, a clot in the lung that prevents oxygen from getting to the rest of the body. So there's quite a few people, including the Female Health Initiative, which was this group that was all about really understanding female physiology and fighting for women's rights within medicine and, and the health space. And, there's quite a few doctors that are not sure about the safety of the pill. They come together, they get the Senate involved, and they get a man named Gaylord Nelson to put a hearing together. These are sometimes referred to as the “Nelson Pill Hearings.” Mind you, this is a panel of all men, and the women are in the crowd. And they're sharing their stories, there are people speaking on what's going on, what women are feeling, what women are experiencing, and the real true dangers that they're seeing. They wanted answers.
What you see here is, this is really the first time that they shift the drug market to kind of change the benefit to risk. They really allowed the industry to dictate what was safe. And they did end up deeming that it was effective and safe, and that they could continue to sell it. This is really where no matter how many women spoke up and said, This is really hurting us. This is really causing some severe problems. This comes with severe risks, we need women to know this before they take it. It was kind of being sold as this just magical empowerment pill that you could take and you won't get pregnant. And this was during the 60s and 70s, you know, the time of free love, where it was, again, women kind of having that fantasy of like, “I want to be free, I don't want to have to worry about my true nature, my true essence, I just want to live my life and do whatever I want.”
Then there's women over here kind of advocating, like, “hey, this comes at a cost, I want you to know the cost, just make sure that you're informed.” This was actually the time where, although there was this fight to get the drug off the market and never got off the market, but they were able to get the pharmaceutical inserts. That was the time when pharmaceutical inserts became a thing. Before there wasn't a lot of labeling or a lot of informing of the risk of certain drugs. And then we saw that with the push of the Women's Health Initiative. And that movement, they were able to push to say we at least want to get some type of labeling or some insert to warn women of the risks before they take this.
Then at the time, you also see in the late 1960s a book come out by a guy named Robert A Wilson. He was a doctor, and it was called Feminine Forever. And this is really the first time, or I don't want to say the first time, but it seems like this was really when the idea of menopause being fixed by estrogen first came up. He really started to define what menopause was, what the symptoms are, and then promoted the use of estrogen as a way to stay young and feminine forever. In his words, it was inevitable, inevitable to become - get this - “living decay” without estrogen. Yeah, but again, playing on emotions, I don't want to become living decay. So I'm going to do XYZ thing.
With all this going on, within the span of really a decade a little bit more than in the 1970s you really see that the feminist or feminine movement was really about understanding female physiology and protecting women and truly empowering women and figuring out the best way to do that. But then as Roe versus Wade comes out, you start to see a shift and it goes from really understanding the feminine and understanding female physiology to then it goes from their power and empowerment over their own body to then the power within society and you really see a marketing shift after that point.
As women become more powerful they entered the workforce, then, obviously, the microwave comes into the picture and frozen meals and more convenience options come into play. Boom, boom, boom, hop, skip, jump, and here we are. When you wade through all this stuff, you know, I tried to present the facts as unbiased as possible, because I want you to be able to really think for yourself and decide what you feel about it. But the pattern that I see over and over again, is just really shady, really shady marketing. You really see that, you know, modern gynecology and advertising to women is intertwined. And it's funny that we think that gynecology, all of a sudden, just somewhere along the way, started caring about women, not only were they sterilizing women against their will, and experimenting with estrogen, finding that pulmonary embolism is an acceptable risk.
But you also see throughout each decade there kind of is this rise and fall where every time something comes out about hormonal birth control, you know, they're marketing it as XYZ thing they're trying to figure out, like, how can we package this and do research to make it look like it's good for for the body. So they'll do like a study and try to prove it's better for cardiovascular health. And then oops, the group that takes the hormonal birth control actually has a worse cardiovascular outcome. So we can't say that, and so that will come out. And then women will kind of get scared off and stop taking it as much.
So you see this kind of trend of a rise and fall, something new will come out about estrogen. And so women will kind of drop off and stop taking it. But then, in the 80s, and 90s, you really see a skyrocket of women taking hormonal birth control and being prescribed it for things other than just contraception. This is really when doctors start to believe that this is the only way to regulate the cycle. There's this kind of push that these synthetic hormones will regulate the cycle. But that doesn't mean that throughout these decades, crazy stuff has come out. And then you'll see a shift in the marketing, you know, over and over again, the hormonal birth control is shown to cause strokes or put us at risk for more strokes, diabetes, blood clots, cardiovascular disease. And so instead of changing the formula, they just changed the advertising in the marketing.
And towards the end, I believe that this happened in like the 90s, where they started to do studies where, if they combined it with a synthetic progesterone, aka progestins, they're called, which usually are the first generation progestins were really androgenic. But now the next generation of progestins are way less androgenic. They've made them into more androgen blockers, a lot of the newer ones are, that was their way of starting to maybe mask some of the effects of the pill. So when they started to put the synthetic estrogens with the synthetic progestins, they started to see that, okay, maybe that will change the outcome a little bit more. And it didn't necessarily mitigate the risk, it just kind of changed the outcome of some of these studies, and then you saw the, you know, the whole but you see the occasional initiative where they were having, you know, Women's Health Initiatives, where they again, came together and discussed some of these hormonal birth control options that were causing really severe problems, even death, you know, women were being put at risk for strokes and women were dying of, of young women that previously had no health problems, were having heart attacks and strokes.
And so they came together again, right, they come they came together. They tried to get a lot of people came together, especially parents of the women that had passed away, came together to try to get the some of these hormonal contraceptives off the market because of their risk. And again, it was deemed an acceptable risk for women, they deemed that as long as they put the warnings in the inserts, that there was no problem there. I'm just summarizing some of the facts. This is way deeper. I mean, I could talk about this for hours. And I'm not going to, but if you're interested in more of the history, I highly recommend diving into some of the resources that I've linked in the show notes. This is really like a very quickly summarized history of birth control.
We’re now in the kind of the third generation of these synthetic hormones, but a lot of them that were on the market at the beginning are still on the market. I think a lot of women think that they have to completely change interest. And some of them have shifted, they've come out with second generation and third generation different renditions of these hormones, because they're synthesizing them. And so they're trying to constantly make them “work better.” But that doesn't necessarily mean that they're safer. What we see even now, I mean, even when so many women are empowered about how their body functions and works, we still see so many women that don't understand how hormonal birth control works, they don't understand the impact that it has on the body.
Shocking Statistics
So I'm going to throw some stats at you because I was really curious about how many women are actually on the birth control pill or some type of hormonal birth control, and it said, in 2015, to 2017 64.9% of the 72.2 million women aged between 15 and 49. In the US, we're currently using contraception, the most common contraceptive methods currently used were female sterilization, 18.6%, and then oral contraceptive pill. And then it goes on to say that contraceptive use increases with age from 37%, among women aged 15-19 to 73.7%, among women aged from 40-49. And then they say the percentage of non-Hispanic white women currently using contraception is at 67%. And then they say is higher compared with non Hispanic black women at 59.9%. But not different from the percentage for Hispanic women at 64%. So those are kind of the statistics that I was able to find.
One of the official reports I found on the internet, I think that was within like 2014 to 2016. But you're seeing a high amount of usage of contraceptives for purposes other than contraception as well. Out of the 11.5 million women that are on the pill, 35% of them are using them for non contraceptive use. And most women are not being informed of the very real risks, specifically the blood clots and stroke, the cardiovascular implications, they're not having any type of informed consent, it's being prescribed to them as a regulator of cycles. I think even about the statistic that I learned from the documentary, The Business of Birth Control, how 90% of black women struggle with fibroids by the age of 50. That is an absolutely asinine statistic that should not be happening, yet it is.
So many women, including myself who, I was prescribed birth control at a very young age, and on it for a couple of years, I was never informed of the real risks to my metabolism or my libido or my bone density. I think of taking it while it was still developing and what type of impacts it had on my development, shutting down my progesterone production. Because what it does is it shuts down or mutes the communication between our reproductive organs and our brain. And it replaces our own hormones that we create with synthetic versions of them. And synthetic hormones are not identical to our own hormones because identical hormones cannot be patented. So you're seeing estrogens like estradiol and then now with the increase in progestin based birth controls, or birth control pills or hormonal contraceptive contraceptives that include progestins. And then you're seeing things like medroxyprogesterone acetate, like the one used in the Depo Provera shot or at an OG shell. I don't want to say that don't say that. Don't say any of those names. I don't want to say any of those names, scratch that - we're seeing the synthetic progestins that come on the market as well. Because a lot of the newer birth controls on the market are a blend of both these synthetic estrogens and progestins.
The Impacts of Birth Control
I remember the first time that somebody educated me that when I bled on the pill, I was having a withdrawal bleed, and it was my body withdrawing from the hormones. And it wasn't actually a period in the same way that I was having when I had my natural cycle. And that just blew my mind. So I think, you know, I, in a way, I'm a victim of not having informed consent, not really understanding the impact of birth control on my body. I remember getting one test and the doctor said, “Oh, this is gonna fix you right up.” And that was it. I just take it every day, there was no information on what it was doing. There was definitely no informing me of the possible risks. I don't think I ever read my birth control insert. And I doubt a lot of women do. And even when you do unfold it, it's like microscopic, I need a magnifying glass to read it. I don't know what any of it means, you know, I have to pull out trusty Google.
Now that I really understand the energy behind behind hormones, I just really think about how it impacts our energy and our co creative energy when our brain and our womb can no longer speak. It cuts that co creative energy off and how many women do we hear like, how many acquaintances have I had, and how many friends that I've had that have been on some type of hormonal birth control and have said, they don't feel right or something's wrong, or they feel crazy, or they're even suicidal? And even Dr. Leiterguard who did the study, I think it was at the University of Copenhagen where he was trying to test to see depression rates amongst women who are on the pill. And he concluded that women on the pill have an 80% increase in depression, women that are ages between 15 and 19. That there's very real psychological side effects to hormonal birth control.
And if you look at depression rates, even they tell you a lot, you know, I was like, I'm curious about how many women in the US consider themselves depressed and depression rates among women are extremely high - 18% compared to our male counterparts at 8%. Eighteen percent of women are on antidepressants for depression. Compared to 8% of men. Suicide rates right now amongst women between the ages of 15 and 19 are at an all time high. There's something seriously wrong going on. There’s some women who are seriously cut off, we are seriously numbed down, we are seriously not okay.
I also think about Dr. Sarah Hill's research, you know, where she wrote that book, Your Brian on Birth Control. And she was able to show that it dampens our stress response, that it affects our learning and memory and can give women the feeling of being foggy. And also, more importantly, it can change our desires, what we want for our life, but also our desire for a partner. It changes who we're attracted to and it changes the types of pheromones that we're attracted to. And we end up choosing a mate that instead of having a compatible immune system to us, and having kind of a really powerful genetic potential, we choose mates that are more brother, like, in a sense. She tells so many stories about how women who are attracted to someone on birth control, and then they get off, and they're no longer attracted to that person at all. In fact, they disgust them.
You know, so many women are not aware of the thousands of lawsuits going on right now. And how some of these companies have paid out hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars in damages to women and their families who no longer have the women in their life due to these effects. And the thing that we forget to think about sometimes is this impacts all of us because it's in our environment. What what a lot of people don't realize is when women take birth control, they pee it out. Or when we have some type of hormonal birth control, we urinate about 70% of those hormones out into the sewage. Well, what happens to sewage? It gets reclaimed, right, it gets filtered. And then what do they do? They release it into oceans, they release it into waterways. And unfortunately, these hormones, there's differing opinions about it online. There's a lot of articles I will say it doesn't affect our waterways at all. All of it is filtered out, but I was able to track down some different articles and some different people that are saying it's impossible to completely filter this stuff out. It is absolutely getting into our environment and impacting all of us.
Protecting Our Progesterone
So as women, you know, going back to the estrogen to progesterone ratio, it's really important for us to protect our progesterone and to believe in its prosperous power. It is a part of that feminine power that we have. Not only not only is it so important for thyroid function and protection against estrogen, and our metabolism, and our libido, and our brain health, and our lung health, and our eye health, and protecting our reproductive system and and determining fat distribution and obviously fertility itself. But it plays a huge role in expanding humanity, in creating awareness. And it really impacts a woman's connection to her God or her source or creation. Through that co creative energy because part of that energy flow is how the brain takes our environment and takes the energetic environment and then communicates to the glands including the ovaries, including the uterus. And by taking a woman's progesterone away or not really protecting our progesterone or prioritizing our progesterone, it really takes away our ability to relax and surrender into life and really practice that trust and to experience life to its fullest.
Not having progesterone can really rob us of our health, our metabolism, our desire, our hunger, our vigor for life. We need it. There are real true consequences to shutting our ability to make progesterone down. It has forever impacts on our physiology. But what I do believe is that there's a lot of fear mongering going on. And instead of fear mongering, it's really important to empower women with information so that they can take it in and make the best choices for themselves, we have to move away from fear and move into empowerment. Understanding our body, being able to make informed decisions and consent, actually make an informed choice is everything. And understanding our body, having “body literacy,” as I love that it's called that within the fertility awareness movement is so incredibly important. This idea that oh, you can get pregnant at any time of your cycle all the time, is ridiculous. And it's just not scientifically true. It's not physiologically true. We need to do better for our daughters, right, we need to start really guiding them and having them understand, understand their own physiology so there's no fear there, there's no intimidation there, they can fully embody and step into who they are.
I think of the ridiculous sex education I got when I grew up. And you know, the Mean Girls scene comes to mind where he's like, “do not have sex, or you're gonna get pregnant and die.” And that pretty much sums up what most of us learned about our bodies. And it has had devastating effects for generations. I do not want that for our daughters, I want our daughters to flourish, I want them to be better than we could ever be, don't you? I think understanding what has gone on in the past 100 years can really maybe light a fire under some of us to really understand what we want for the future. And for our future.
I don't know about you, but I don't want to go back to any of that. It is time to move forward with confidence, to stop falling for a fantasy that will never be a reality, and to create a vision together of what we want to move forward towards. And then stop suppressing the most powerful parts of ourselves and let them rise. Understanding our physiology, practicing body literacy, even learning about the fertility awareness method, if you don't know you know, reading the book, Taking Charge of Your Fertility by Toni Wechsler is a great place to start. But there are so many amazing fertility awareness method educators out there now, I feel like making a small investment to really learn body literacy is a generational investment because not only is it something that we can pass down to our daughters or the women in our life, but they will pass down and they will pass down. It's a momentum type effect, a ripple effect when we invest in learning our own physiology. It also empowers the women around us.
It's really time we wake up and figure out how impactful our choices are right now. In changing everything, humanity itself is moving into the future. I hope you really enjoyed today's episode as we talked about estrogen and progesterone and women's history and how we cannot and back, we can only move forward. The only way out is through. If you're looking to explore more about our power of vision and imagination, make sure to join me in next week's episode, which is all about harnessing our perspective using our physiology.
Episode Links
In this episode, I mentioned:
History of diethylstilbestrol (DES) in cattle
Estrogen & Lack of Progesterone Makes Us Fat:
Chamberlain-Kahn Act/The American Plan:
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