One of the biggest enemies for men is high estrogen levels. Estrogen is for a male body in terms of functions and benefits, the complete opposite of testosterone. And when we‘re talking about having a laser focus at work, in life, having the motivation to stay in the gym, having the motivation to cook right in the kitchen, we definitely want to have our testosterone levels significantly higher than estrogen.
In this article, I am going to share with you three foods that are killing your testosterone levels, and raising your estrogen levels, and at the very end of the article, I am going to share with you one simple food that you can eat that’s gonna abolish the extra estrogen out of your body.
When men have high levels of estrogen within the body, it means that we have a high amount of aromatase-activity happening. And what aromatase activity is, it’s a high level of what’s called the aromatase enzyme, and that enzyme is what converts androsterone and testosterone into E2 or estrogen.
So when we have that conversion happening a lot, it raises the amount of belly fat that we have, it increases fatigue, it makes our brain foggy, and worst of all, it raises our cortisol levels which makes us flighty and causes us to make rash decisions that we don’t always want to make. It also pushes us into “survival mode” which ends up making us store even more fat and burning our precious muscle that’s encouraging our metabolism to fire efficiently.
So let’s dive right into what there three foods are.
The first food I want you to eliminate is a pretty straightforward one, and that’s excess processed carbohydrates and refined sugars. And there’s a reason behind it. We hear all the time that sugars are bad, but the reason that sugars are bad as they correlate directly to testosterone levels and your estrogen levels is the hormone insulin.
When you eat processed carbohydrates you increase your insulin levels, it lowers the effect of something called the Sex Hormone Binding Globulin SHBG. And what that hormone does, it binds testosterone with estrogen. Now when that binding hormone isn’t there, it allows levels of free testosterone and free estrogen to be floating around. When you have an excess amount of free estrogen floating around, that means more estrogen that your body can utilize in a negative way (gynecomastia – male breast enlargement). Remember that we, as men, don’t want to have high levels of estrogen. We want that bond to happen. So when we don’t have SHBG, then we have all this estrogen floating around, wrecking havoc on the body.
The first way you can eliminate that issue is by reducing the amount of refined sugars that you eat. Replace them with some healthy fats (coconut oil). When you would ordinarily have carbohydrates, and here I mean complex carbohydrates, mix them up with some fat, cuz you want to have those healthy fats so your body can naturally spike the production of testosterone, rather than have sugars that are gonna free up more estrogen.
The next food that I want you to practice avoiding is non-organic dairy products. You’ve probably seen from my other posts that I condone the use of anything made from a mass-produced type of milk, greek yogurt included, and I have dairy in a lot of my client’s diets. But unfortunately, conventional dairy has so much in a way of medication, has so much in a way of estrogen, it wrecks havoc on our bodies as well.
Now, I need to be blunt, but have you ever noticed that 12 and 13-year-old girls are going through a puberty a lot sooner than what we may have noticed ten, fifteen or twenty years ago. Well, a lot of that has to do with the increase of hormones in the milk that people consume. There’s a lot more estrogen in milk now (read the study: exposure to estrogen from commercial milk https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19496976) – Study of the Interdisciplinary Graduate School of Medicine and Engineering in Japan found that conventional milk products not only contain copious amounts of estrogen, but also components that suppress gonadotropin in a male body. And gonadotropin suppression ultimately leads to a suppression of testosterone. So not only do we have an increase in estrogen from conventional milk, but we have a suppression of the main male hormones.
So what’s the solution here? If you don’t want to ditch the dairy completely (that I would strongly advise you do), the solution when it comes to choosing your dairy products is to opt for the things like organic raw milk whenever possible. Not only do you get a source of higher quality protein, but also you don’t have the estrogenic side effects. Another one that you can try if you can get accustomed to the taste is goat milk. Goat milk has an extremely bioavailable form of protein that body utilizes very well, and also since goat milk isn’t as popular, it isn’t mass produced, it doesn’t have medications in it, it doesn’t have hormones added to it. So if you get the chance, go raw, go organic, and if you can’t do that since goat milk isn’t so readily available, go for powdered goat milk by Mt. Capra.
And the last food I want you to avoid is one that you’ve probably heard a lot about, and that’s soy. And there’s a lot of myths floating around there. There’s a lot of different conflicting evidence, and so many people talking about soy. But I want to get down to the important core.
The regular soy people massively consume nowadays contains isoflavones, which is a type of plant estrogens, known as phytoestrogens. Phytoestrogens are not real estrogen. They’re not the real hormone. What they do is mimic estrogen within the body. And when you mimic or emulate the estrogen within the body, it sort of forces the body to kind of go into this artificial spiral that may produce more estrogen, sometimes it shuts it down, and then it skyrockets later on. It throws your entire body out of whack because you really have an artificial form of estrogen. And as stated above, higher amounts of estrogen within the mail body have a negative impact on testosterone levels, which this study on dietary soy’s impact on testosterone levels clearly showed – subjects were fed phytoestrogen-rich dietary soy for 5 weeks, that significantly reduced their plasma androgen hormone levels, both that of testosterone and androstenedione.
Now a lot of other health issues we face with soy are simply because it’s so heavily genetically modified and most of the nutrients and natural estrogens have really been stripped from it. In fact, it’s very very seldom that you come across a soy that you can have that isn’t genetically modified. Over 98% of the soy that we consume is considered GMO. A lot of times even if you do find organically produced soy, it’s not as pure as you may think. One of the only sources of soy that man can eat comes from something called NATTO, which is a pure form of fermented soy out of Japan, and it’s not something readily available and that you can find in the regular health food store, although you can find a few natto products, like dried Hoshi Natto or Fresh Fermented Natto, available on Amazon.
I have a lot of clients that are vegetarians and they still want to supplement their protein, and for the most part they have been using soy protein. And since most of the soy proteins that we do have out there are going to be full of those phytoestrogens, how do we fight that? Well, I recommend going for something like pea proteins. They are still going to get you that complete protein without the estrogenic side effects of soy. Naked Pea protein by Naked Nutrition, with 27g of protein per serving, is what I recommend.
Now, I promised you at the start of this article that I’m going to share with you one simple food to help eliminate estrogen from the body. One simple food – cruciferous vegetables. Now that can be broccoli, collard greens, cauliflower, any of those foods that the general population doesn’t find particularly fun to eat. Now the reason that they are so successful at riding the body of estrogen is because they have something in them called Indole-3-Carbinol or I3C, that you can also find in a supplement form from Jazzee Naturals. It helps the body fight the extra estrogen in the bloodstream, but in addition to fighting off estrogen, it is also a sulfur, and sulfur is known for helping detoxify the body, so not only are you ridding the body of the excess estrogen, but you’re assisting in detoxifying and purifying and getting rid of that excess estrogen out of the body entirely. Now you might be wondering when the best time of day is to eat the cruciferous vegetables is in order to rid your body of estrogen, and the answer to that is going to be night time. See, testosterone levels peak during the morning hours, up until 2 p.m., with the highest concentration being around 10-11 a.m. Estrogen levels, however, peak at the complete opposite time. They peak in the evening. So the best way to fight it is to eat those cruciferous veggies before you go to bed, allowing your natural testosterone levels to have that perfect peak when you wake up, ready to take on your day.
