When scientists were first mapping out the human steroid system, two steroids were referred to as “sex hormones”. The observations were that women’s bodies generally have more estrogen than men’s, while men’s bodies have more testosterone than women’s.
The mistake in calling one the “female” hormone and the other the “male” hormone is that these substances are both present in both genders, just in varying amounts. Women’s hearts concentrate testosterone just like men’s do. Men’s testosterone promotes aggression by being converted to estrogen in their brains.
Recent research has found that higher testosterone levels seem to prevent sudden cardiac arrest in men, while higher estrogen levels are associated with more sudden cardiac arrest events in both genders: Study Links Sex Hormone Levels in the Blood to Risk of Sudden Cardiac Arrest. (The high levels of Progesterone produced during the luteal phase of a non-medicated menstrual cycle protects younger women against their higher estrogen levels.)
Overweight people of both genders get to experience the deleterious effects of excessive estrogen levels because fat cells have lots of aromatase, the enzyme which turns androgens into estrogens.
Real Scientists have long known about the ‘Estrogen Problem’
This quote is from The Pill and I: 40 Years On, the Relationship Remains Wary (NY Times, June 25th 2000) (emphasis added):
Twenty years earlier, animal researchers established that hormones could prevent ovulation in rabbits and other species. However, scientists (outside Nazi Germany) deemed it unethical to try such experiments on humans, since the physiology of female reproduction depends on a delicate, imperfectly understood feedback system. Within this system any hormonal interference may change the patient’s entire metabolism.
At first, Pincus was understandably wary of estrogen, as it was already understood to increase cancer risks. His dream was to create a progestin-only contraceptive, and that is what he intended to test in his historic 1956 Puerto Rican clinical trials, in which hundreds of mostly impoverished Puerto Rican women were given the newly developed pill experimentally.
But there is a problem with progestin-only contraceptives: they produce irregular and unpredictable spotting, or conversely, a complete absence of menstruation. Cycles range from a few days to many months, a condition aptly called menstrual chaos. Pincus, after wavering, eventually put estrogen back into the pill that was being tested.
Instead of recognizing that Estrogen is ‘the cancer hormone’ or ‘the heart attack hormone’, Big Drug has spent decades cashing in on the myth that “estrogen is super-duper-important for women’s health”. In the 1950’s, before Big Pharma was allowed to advertise directly to patients, the industry maximized profits from the xeno-estrogenic drug Diethylstilbestrol (DES) by heavily marketing this drug to physicians. It was decades before doctors realized DES actually causes miscarriages, and was giving their patients’ daughters vaginal cancer. DES-sons got their own set of birth defects. Whoops.
Another of Big Drug’s ‘Estrogen Crimes’ stems from the observation that pregnant horses pee out a lot of estrogen. Women’s estrogen levels go down a little bit at menopause. The drug Premarin (made from PREgnant MARe’s urIN) is still sold to women to supplement their horse-estrogen levels.
This is yet another example of Wall Street using lies to market defective products. How is ‘prescription horse piss’ NOT a lie of omission? HOW MANY PREMARIN-PRESCRIBED PATIENTS KNOW WHERE THEIR DRUG COMES FROM? More and more doctors are using “bioidentical hormones” instead of horse piss, but prescription horse urine is still a huge business for Big Drug.
In theory, horse estrogen gets converted to human estrogen. But because excess estrogen always causes problems – like cancer and sudden cardiac arrest – there is actually no long-term benefit to using this product of horse-cruelty.
(In 2005, Harvard Law student Carla Rothenberg wrote The Rise and Fall of Estrogen Therapy: The History of HRT, a legal brief for her ‘Food and Drug Law’ course. This paper outlines the drug industry’s decades-long conspiracy to maximize sales of DES, Premarin, and the fake-progesterone Provera.)
