Welcome to the libido lounge where we focus on all things love, lust, and libido. We believe that fabulous sex is important to health as exercise and good food. Hey, everybody. Welcome back to the lounge. Today, we are circling back to a topic that I introed a while ago, several months ago now. This topic is on hormones and are hormones safe. And several months ago on this channel, on this podcast, I wound up talking about myths.
I talked about the top myths that are commonly seen when it comes to sexuality, when it comes to understanding your libido. And I gave you nine out of 10 and I said, stay tuned, number 10 is coming. And that was the teaser to this moment in time. So the myth is that hormone therapy is unsafe. And this is a myth and this is based upon some research that was done in the nineteen nineties. And I wanna explain that research so you understand what that research told us and what it did not.
My hope is that when you are hearing this, when you hear this, you will become more empowered to talk to your doctors or clinicians about hormone replacement therapy if it's a good idea for you and to talk in a way where you understand the research and you're not coming at this conversation from fear, which is happening a lot. And of course, if you ever need any help from my team and I, you can always join our master class or our online programs which are you can find in the show notes.
Now, let's get into the juiciness of this research. So, essentially back in the fifties and sixties, this was when hormone replacement therapy got really popularized because what was being noticed was when women went on hormone replacement therapy especially around menopausal ages, they were finding that symptoms were going away, that women were feeling so much better. But there wasn't a ton of research that had done been done on hormones and long term effects.
So in the nineteen nineties, the Women's Health Initiative was basically, like, launched this particular study and the the goal with the study was largely to have a a way of saying, okay, well, what are the long term effects, especially mortality? That was the main point of this study, was to look at death rates and to say, are we putting women at risk? So that was a very very noble cause and an important cause of that, right? So, so far so good.
Now, how this study worked was it put women on progesterone or estrogen and it or a combination, right? So, essentially we had a placebo group and then if women had a uterus, they were given estrogen and progesterone together if they were the non placebo. If women did not have a uterus, if they had had a hysterectomy, they had they were given estrogen only and that was compared against the placebo.
So, the way that this study was really promoted when the results came out was that basically what was said is that if you have a uterus, basically you have a twenty five percent increased rate of death with the use of hormones. But the study did not go into these details that are really important. So essentially, what the study found was that about four out of a thousand people had that that were in the placebo group basically died early. Right? So they were they were four out of a thousand.
And so these four out of a thousand essentially died early in the placebo group. In the group that essentially had estrogen and progesterone, five out of thousand died. And so if you look at four out of out of a thousand versus five out of a thousand, that increase you could say is a twenty five percent increase and it sounds really bad and that's relative to how many died in the placebo.
But if you're actually looking at the actual number and how many people out of that hundred or that out of that thousand group died and and compared to the placebo, we're talking actually point o one percent. Right? We're talking about one extra person out of a thousand. And another problem with this study is that it did not take into account women that had things like obesity or diabetes or other health risk. Also, the women that were using the study didn't have any hormone related symptoms.
They didn't wanna test women at menopause because women at menopause are in their fifties and essentially in our fifties. We're not gonna die for a long time hopefully, and they were studying death. So they used older women because then they could track death rates. So there's a lot of problems that this study really created and one is that we don't have a good we don't have good research really showing, like, was this increase truly due to estrogen to progesterone? Right?
We don't have that because there was all of these other risk factors, obesity, diabetes, and more that really could have been major problems and probably were, and people were not evaluated for that. It also was not taking into account did women need these hormones or not. They were very, you know, much later in their age.
So it really wasn't looking at things like, okay, well, what are the health benefits and what are the cardiovascular benefits, for example, that we see from things like estrogen now. So there's a lot that we now know that is different than we did when that study came out. And again, when we're really looking at what the data says is really looking at, okay, four out of a thousand with placebo died, five out of a thousand with the estrogen progesterone.
So it's a very, very, very small difference and it might be a difference to consider but you need to consider the whole picture and you need to also consider the benefits that could be coming from hormone replacement therapy. The other thing this particular study did is it used non bioidenticals. So it used synthetic versions of hormones that used equine estrogen, so estrogen from horses. It used synthetic progesterone.
So it wasn't using bioidentical hormones that are actually more closely related to what we create as women. So here is another unknown as far as hormones, as far as how they interact. So it's really important to understand this because a lot of the medical community is now basing their decisions, like from this study. And we've seen this happen in other studies, right?
We saw this happen in the nineteen eighties with the fat movement, with the saturated fat is bad for you and this is when everything became low fat and it was low fat cheese and it was margarine and all these different things. And now since then, we've realized that saturated fat is actually pretty good for you and that the brain needs fat and we make hormones out of our fat. There's so many different benefits of having fat in the diet.
We wanna be careful, of course, like any macronutrient not to overdo it, but the fact that, hey, this is not as clear as saturated fat is bad for you. And also in that study, that was a long correlative study. And in that study, they did not do a good job of eliminating for other risk factors like obesity, like what people are eating, these kind of scenarios.
So one of the problems we have when we do these types of studies and they get published and they get so promoted is it really does not allow us to understand the inner workings of how these studies actually operate. And it's so easy to hang on to a, you know, a headline or just one sentence, one thing that somebody read that then gets promoted.
And I can tell you that this is, you know, this is a very important conversation to have with your doctor to have with your prescriber, but I see so many women get so much better, so much symptom reduction being on hormones. And then we also look now and we see things, for example, like estrogen has cardiovascular effects. We actually see that estrogen, testosterone, progesterone all can contribute to healthy bones.
And although progesterone maybe not as much as the others, I have seen a study that is showing that progesterone can actually have a contributory factor on bone health as well. So there's really so many reasons to be on hormones. We see that, you know, menopause is a lot easier. We see that mood's a lot better. We see it's a lot easier to maintain weight because muscle maintenance is so much better being on these hormones. I could really go on and on and on. There's also a hormone called DHEA.
DHEA is a precursor hormone. So we make estrogen out of DHEA. We make testosterone out of DHEA. And DHEA not only can help with libido, it not only can help with muscle, it not only can help with energy, it also has been associated with antiaging. So it's another thing is, like, hormone hormones help us, like, stay strong, can help us age more gracefully. Now Now there's gonna be exceptions to every rule. Right?
There's of course times like we do not want to give these hormones if somebody has an active cancer. Right? So if somebody has an active cancer, then we wanna be very careful about avoiding hormone replacement therapy while that cancer is active. But a lot of people are now I should say some people are now moving more and more and more to these these places where when people are post cancer, right?
When it's totally in remission, when everything is negative, when you really are say, you know, out of that scenario of utilizing hormones at that point in time because we're now seeing that there this causative effect from these hormones doesn't seem to be causative in the way that we used to think that there's a lot more of this correlative type of scenario which just doesn't add up.
So again, it's like, this is a personal thing, this is a conversation for your doctor, this is a conversation to think about And, you know, in looking at the risk from that women's health initiative study, sure, there is an increased risk in women with the uterus. There's actually that study also showed that for women without a uterus that were just doing placebo versus estrogen only therapy, that estrogen only therapy actually helped them to live longer.
So basically, what that study also showed is without a uterus, that for sure hormones helped with mortality and those sorts of things. So we wanna consider that as part of this as well. This is again, this is just, like, really, really messed up communication that has happened out of studies like that. And, I mean, I saw a study once, like, a a study headline once, and it was this. It was, pizza helps fight cancer, literally.
And it I think the reason for that and, like, if I remember the article, this this was many years ago. This was probably close to two decades ago or so I read this article. And I think it was the lycopene in the pizza, the lycopene in the tomato sauce that maybe had been found to have a anticancer effects. Right? So I don't remember the details of the study because it was so long ago.
But what really stuck with me from that study was how easy it is to pull out this one thing, make it a headline, and all of a sudden, it's like pizza is a health food. You know? Every every diet needs needs pizza. And and then and don't get me wrong, everybody, like, you know, who doesn't love a good slice of pizza? But, that should be a treat and something that we do on occasion and not a health food.
And because things are taken out of context like that, it can be so misunderstood by the community what is really needed to help and support the individual. So take home points, you know, the number one thing, my personal and professional feeling is that most women, especially once they get to menopausal age or perimenopausal age, do really well on bioidentical hormones. I love them. I think they really help people. I think symptoms go away.
I think I'm in that age range, and I'm taking hormones, and I completely love them. And I would, you know, definitely recommend that for most women. Everybody, there's always exceptions. But for most women, they really give this a huge consideration because it cannot only help with symptoms, it can help with long term benefits such as cardiovascular health and, emotional health and so many more things, bone health, on and on and on and on.
So I would definitely consider that DHEA has been shown to be very, very safe for most people. So a lot of women, a lot of men do really, really well on DHEA as a supplement. And then always remember to come back to diet, to lifestyle. Of course, all of those factors matter. But, again, on our Libido Lounge channel, right, the idea of this channel is to help you understand all these contributory factors to libido, and hormones are huge one. They're not the only one.
There's so many different contributory factors that we talk about here. Anything from physical things, you know, what's going on in the gut, what's going on in inflammatory scenarios in the body, what's going on in the thyroid, the adrenals, on and on and on. And, of course, there's all these physio you know, physio psychological things, I mean, like, what's going on in the mind? Are you present? Are you communicating with your partner? Are you safe?
Are you having sex that's, like, enjoyable to you? Do you even like those positions? Do you even like what's happening? Like, there's so many different things that play into this. And I really find that sometimes in in teaching and in supporting people in my clinical community, one of the things that often happens is people are looking for that one thing, you know. And so there's there's usually not one thing. So we wanna always remember that too.
Like hormones are important but oftentimes hormones when we're talking about libido, hormones are one spoke on the wheel to a healthy libido. And if you fix the hormones, that spoke is fixed. And sometimes maybe that spoke is the most broken spoke, sometimes it's the least broken spoke, and we still need to come in and say, okay. Well, what are the other spokes on the wheel, The wheel of libido and the wheel of our sex drive.
What are the other spokes on the libido that really needs to be fixed in order to help somebody really gain that type of true health they are looking for? So thanks again for another great episode and always remember to stay classy, be sexy, and stay a little badassy. See you on the next one. Thank you for listening to the libido lounge. Please don't keep me a secret. Please share this with your friends. You can find me on YouTube, on Instagram, as well as how to work with me at mylibidodoc.com.