What Every Woman Should Know About Hormones, part 2 of 4
You already know fresh fruits and veggies can help protect your health. Thousands of studies say so. Part of that is vitamins and mineral and fiber, of course. But part is that they protect against estrogen dominance! There are seven classes of “phytoestrogens” that you would be wise to seek out, in your diet:
Isoflavones and coumestans are the strongest classes of these nutrients, ten times stronger than the others. Legumes have the highest concentration of both isoflavones and coumestans. In countries where women suffer the least from PMS and menopause—Asia, South and Central America–legumes are staples. In the U.S., we eat meat instead of legumes. And meat is heavy to digest: acidic, highly estrogenic, free of fiber, and low in micronutrients.
Flavones, coflavonones, flavanols, lignans, and chalcones are the other five compounds. They might sound like Greek to you, but exposure to those words will help you recognize references in the future to these little friends that heal and protect us from risk everywhere in our environment. One reason I promote a 60-80 percent raw diet is that raw foods are phenomenally healing, but if we take up an extreme position of 100 percent, we’ve eliminated legumes. They add bulk, they’re easy to eat, and they’re highly nutritious as evidenced by research on the many millions of people on the planet who eat a lot of them. (Yes, you can sprout raw legumes, and feel free to do that, but they’re starchy and hard to eat that way in any kind of quantity.)
You can’t always control the smog you’re exposed to—but you can certainly control what you put in your mouth. Some disease factors are fully in your control, and the flip side, when you follow the rules, is that you have stable mood, youthfulness, and pretty skin, hair and nails.
Because when you lose your female hormones, it’s your body’s signal to begin dying. Who wants THAT? Not me.
Here’s the good news. You don’t have to chase berries up the Himalayan mountains to get a variety of these compounds in your diet. These are found in virtually every vegetable, fruit, seed, legume, and grain.
Shocker! It’s the diet I teach. All paths lead to Rome on this blog, don’t they? It’s not an agenda of mine—it’s science. It’s like shootin’ fish in a barrel, to prove to you why you should EAT MORE PLANTS. The reasons are so many, to shift to this kind of diet, I can hardly enumerate them!
A simple progression in a year of transition, and you, too, could be eating the most disease-preventative diet possible. While living in the “real world,” traveling, going to parties, and having a normal social life. It’s possible. I do it.
Tomorrow we talk a little about specifics of estrogen and progesterone.
Posted in: Health Concerns, Whole Food
