Hormones, Gut, & Inflammation

In this episode, we delve into the impact of inflammation on health, focusing on its connections to hormone imbalance, weight gain, and longevity. We discuss how chronic inflammation—triggered by diet, stress, and environmental factors—can lead to various chronic diseases and accelerate aging. The episode highlights the role of gut health in inflammation, particularly how imbalances in gut bacteria can lead to "leaky gut" and systemic inflammation. We also explore how inflammation disrupts key hormones, contributing to mood disorders and metabolic issues. Finally, we offer strategies for reducing inflammation through an anti-inflammatory diet and lifestyle to enhance hormone balance, body composition, and overall vitality.

Transcript

(00:09):

Hi everyone. Welcome back to the Jolie Life podcast. Today we are going to talk about inflammation, and this podcast is going to have more than one part On Fridays, we are beginning our Friday chat with Julia, which will be focused on aspects of weight loss, whether it's what's happening in terms of the secret life of fat, one of my favorite books in terms of exercise, in terms of body care, in terms of diet. So Friday Jolie podcast will be our Friday chat, and this is also the space where I will answer questions, share stories of my own life, do all those things. So if you have questions, please send them in. You can send them into me at Julia, at the Julie Life. You can also leave comments. We love comments. So let's dive in because this is going to cover a few sessions. There's a lot of information here.
(01:09)
Inflammation is such a critical factor, and if you are overweight, particularly if you have a belly, I can almost guarantee you that you have systemic inflammation. Inflammation is not a buzzword. It is something that as we dive into the roots of disease from a scientific perspective, we see inflammation as being an actor in so much chronic disease, chronic disease, hormone imbalance, weight gain, and even longevity is all influenced by inflammation. And being Jolie, we will focus on how nutrition can fuel inflammation. So there may be some things that you're eating that exacerbate that cause inflammation and how an anti-inflammatory diet and lifestyle can be used to reduce inflammation. And by doing so, not only do you improve your body composition, your weight, you improve your hormones, and you also improve your vital longevity, as I call it, vital longevity. We just don't want to live long.
(02:32)
We want to live in vitality. So let's first dive into the role of inflammation because sometimes the question is, well, what is inflammation? And we all know you sprain your ankle, you twist your wrist in the wrong way, you break a bone, it becomes swollen. That is inflammation, that's inflammation that we're very familiar with, and that is acute inflammation. It's a immune repair response that the body mounts for a specific injury or infection. And this is totally natural. This is good. This is what allows us to heal, to get bumps and bruises, to get broken bones and heal back better than new. Again, this is what helps us recover from procedures, from surgeries. However, chronic inflammation is different because it is inflammation and immune response. Inflammation is an immune response triggered by diet, stress or environmental factors. This inflammation damages tissues throughout the body. It disrupts your metabolic processes, and when it runs rampant in your body over time, it leads to diseases like accelerated aging, diabetes, cardiovascular issues, high blood pressure, autoimmune disorders.
(04:09)
My wish for you is that you never get to that stage. And if you are at that stage that we reel that back in together and that you are empowered to know how to make choices that will reduce the inflammation in your body and therefore lessen the severity of these chronic diseases. Let's talk about hormone imbalance because hormones affect every part of your body. Inflammation triggers hormone disruptions, and the main way that this happens is during inflammation, cortisol levels are elevated because the body is like in high gear and insulin sensitivity is blunted, so your body becomes less sensitive to insulin. And when this happens, it influences estrogen, testosterone, our sex hormones and our thyroid hormone. So when we see something that takes one hormone out of balance, we can almost always be sure that it will take multiple hormones out of balance because they're very interconnected.
(05:25)
Inflammation leads to weight gain and that comes through insulin resistance. And it also makes it harder for our body to burn fat because inflammation is one of the leading causes of visceral fat accumulation and our belly fat is very metabolically active in a negative sense and actually increases our inflammation, therefore creating a very non-virtuous circle shall we say. We talked about how inflammation influences longevity by accelerating cellular aging. When you are inflamed, your cells are being damaged, and also the immune system gets first dibs on all nutrients. And in cases of chronic inflammation, many nutrients that your cells need for their repair cycles are being used by the immune system and therefore our cells don't have everything that they need to manage proper DNA replication and to help the cell function well. And for that reason, our cells accelerate in their aging. And honestly, the age of our cells is what determines whether or not we have a longevity that is dynamic or we're moving around and we're of silent mind and we feel good, or rather we have aging that is really riddled with problems.
(07:04)
So we want vital longevity. Inflammation begins. 80% of inflammation, I should say, begins in the gut, which is a huge clue to us that chronic inflammation is a biological response that occurs when the body's immune system is continually activated. And most often this is due to factors around stress and diet, both of which highly influence your gut, your gut microbiome, and the way food is released into the bloodstream. Environmental triggers also cause chronic inflammation and you find them as it relates to things that you put on your skin. So I'm one that's really for clean beauty and you find them in non-organic foods or food additives that disrupt the gut microbiome and therefore lead to more inflammation. So this is not a gut podcast today, but to briefly just touch on this because if 80% of your inflammation has its source in the gut, then we can't ignore the gut and that Jolie, we'd literally never ignore the gut because it's so important.
(08:27)
So your gut microbiome is a balance of what we call beneficial and non-beneficial bacteria. They are imperfect balance and they keep each other in check. Think of this as kind of like we don't really like mosquitoes, but they exist and there are bats and other animals that help other insects that eat mosquitoes, that helps keep them in check. For some reason, we have mosquitoes. We may not understand the ecological reason why we have them, but we have them. However, we have natural predators that keep them in check. Our gut microbiome is the same way. So our dietary choices can lead to an imbalance in our microbiota because when we eat certain foods, it favors the non-beneficial microbes. When we eat lots of sugar or when we eat lots of processed foods, when we eat lots of foods that are fiberless less, we don't give our beneficial bacteria the food that they need and therefore the balance is off kilter.
(09:42)
And this disrupts our microbiome. This disruption in the microbes leads to increased intestinal permeability, which is often referred to as leaky gut. This means that what we call endotoxins, so indigenous toxins, toxins inside of our body, whether it comes through food or through metabolic processes, can enter the bloodstream because the gut lining is literally one cell thick in terms of permeable versus impermeable. Can I go through, can I not go through one cell? There's spaces between the cells. The amount of space between the cells determines what gets through. There's a mucosal lining that keeps the cells tight, so only what it's supposed to get through gets through. But when we have leaky gut, that lining becomes begins to degrade and spaces form between those cells. And what that means is that things that should be staying in your intestines actually make it into your bloodstream and the body knowing that it's not supposed to be there, those things are not supposed to be in the bloodstream.
(11:05)
It triggers systemic inflammation because you have basically garbage in your bloodstream floating all over your body and your immune system is like, Hey, this is not supposed to be here. Let's go get it. Let's make sure it doesn't do any damage. Unfortunately, in the process, because this response is triggered over and over and over again, a lot of damage is done to the body through the process itself, and that's called immune activation. So when the immune system is constantly, constantly being activated, it ends up damaging the body instead of helping the body when our immune system dysregulate. So when it becomes hyperactive, we start producing more immune cells that are inactivity for longer than necessary. This prolonged activation of the immune cells leads to tissue damage and it also leads to the release a pro-inflammatory cytokines. These are the bad guys during covid that cause chronic inflammation that led to people being hospitalized and some people dying.
(12:28)
Cytokines are part of our immune system, but they are pro-inflammatory, and the more our immune system is activated, the more of these pro-inflammatory cytokines we release. Also, when we have immune response, we get more reactive oxygen species. So this is the result of the metabolic activity that happens when the immune system is activated. And so we get unstable oxygen molecules in our body and those are the, when we talk about antioxidants and you need to eat your antioxidants, we put antioxidants on our skin. Antioxidants are molecules that have an extra electron that can donate to an unstable oxygen and make it not reactive, can make it stable. That is how antioxidants help our skin to glow, but that's also how antioxidants help our body and inflammation. We have a lot of this. So what ends up happening without proper nutrition is we don't have the antioxidants on board to neutralize these oxygens, these unstable molecules.
(13:49)
Another pathway where inflammation is very, very damaging. So now we know what inflammation is. It is an immune response that causes tissue damage and proinflammatory molecules to be released. We also know that our gut is important in keeping it healthy. So allergens never even enter our body and we do not need to have a prolonged immune response. So we know those two things and we know that inflammation influences many of our body systems. So let's dive into hormones because hormones, they influence your mood, they influence your weight, they influence your sex drive, they influence your youngness or lack of youngness. So let's dive into that because chronic inflammation leads to a significant hormonal disruption. So let's talk about cortisol first.
(14:56)
With inflammation, we have elevated cortisol levels. What does that do? Cortisol is our stress hormone. Cortisol is the hormone that signals to our body energy needs to be ready because we are in a panic right now. So that means that cells don't really want to take up the extra sugar floating in your blood. So when insulin comes knocking and says, Hey, take this extra sugar with high cortisol levels, your cells are like, no, thank you. I know you need it because of the cortisol. So no thank you. And it ends up staying sugar ends up staying circulating in our blood instead of being stored in our fat cells because our fat cells think that the rest of the cells in the body need this energy, this glucose because of a high cortisol levels, when in reality it's not true, hence insulin resistance. The other effect when we think cortisol means we need energy is anxiety is and anxiety is one side of the depression coin.
(16:16)
So we have a coin on one side is depression and one side is anxiety. So this elevated state of being like vigilant, which is what we'd want if we had a true emergency, if there's no emergency, it leads to chronic anxiety. And chronic anxiety also mirrors itself in depression because you constantly feel something is wrong and there's nothing you can do about it. So that's one reason why conquering inflammation is beneficial to you because it will improve your mood, it will improve the way that your body functions. So let's dive to the next hormone, which is insulin. And we talked about how cortisol affects insulin and insulin resistance. So what happens downstream when we become more insulin resistant? That leads us to higher blood glucose levels, which leads us to prediabetes and diabetes if we are not careful, it leads to obesity and a collection of visceral fat that's the fat inside the abdominal wall.
(17:31)
That's the fat that is very plu and inflammatory and very damaging to your cardiovascular system. It is not what you want. Inflammation. Let's move on to our sex hormones, causes elevated estrogen levels by affecting the balance between estrogen and its breakdown or clearance in the liver. So the inflammatory cytokines that we talked about earlier can impair liver function and that slows the metabolism and excretion of estrogen. One of the jobs of your liver is to metabolize or to convert old estrogen to repackage it so it can be excreted or it can exit the body. When the liver is not able to do this, it leads to a buildup of estrogen in the body because the liver isn't clearing our old estrogen out. So pro-inflammatory cytokines impair liver detoxification enzymes that are responsible for metabolizing the estrogen into an inactive form. When it's inactive, our body knows to get rid of it.
(18:48)
If these enzymes are disrupted, then estrogen stays active in our body longer than it should, and therefore we instate, which is commonly called estrogen dominance, where estrogen levels are high relative to progesterone. And this contributes to symptoms such as irregular periods having menstrual bleeding, weight gain, and the risk of conditions like endometriosis and breast cancer. This is where inflammation crosses over into polycystic ovarian syndrome, Picos. It's very, very, very inflammation as a woman and even as a man because men have all these sex hormones as we'll see, when we talk about testosterone and how it impacts them, it's very, very important for our overall health that we keep inflammation down. Also, inflammation stimulates the enzyme aromatase, which converts testosterone into estrogen. And this too can lead to excess estrogen production, particularly in our fat tissue where aromatase is more active because there is more inflammation in our fat tissue.
(20:05)
So we see high inflammation levels leads and contributes to estrogen dominance by its effect on the liver and by its effect on testosterone's conversion to estrogen. So progesterone inflammation negatively affects progesterone levels, particularly in women because it disrupts the normal function of our ovaries, which reduces progesterone production. And this contributes to us being deficient, which exacerbates all the symptoms of estrogen dominance. Estrogen dominance, see mood swings, anxiety and fertility. Our cycles are off whack. When our progesterone levels are low, those symptoms become more exaggerated. And the other thing is we get a cortisone steel. So we talked about how inflammation increases cortisol levels through the stress response. It also causes because our body is producing more cortisol, the body to divert the precursors that would normally be used to make progesterone. Instead, those precursor molecules are shunted off to cortisol production, and so we get less progesterone because our body literally doesn't have the building box. They're already being used to build something else.
(21:45)
With inflammation, progesterone, we get a shorter luteal phase. That's the second part of our menstrual cycle, and this is where progesterone should be the dominant hormone. Since our progesterone levels are low, that phase of our cycle can be shortened, which can lead to difficulty in conceiving, but also difficulty in maintaining our pregnancy. And I definitely had that problem with my first child, so I had to have progesterone supplementation, but I didn't know the source of it with inflammation until much later. Testosterone is the last of the sex hormones that we're going to cover, and we both have testosterone. When I say we, I mean men and women have testosterone. Chronic inflammation tends to reduce testosterone levels, which for men means it reduces sexual function. And we all know that that's not a good thing. And it also does other things to the body. For women, it influences our estrogen levels, which isn't good. And by increasing the conversion of testosterone to estrogen symptoms of our low testosterone levels, that can happen with inflammation, our low energy reduction in our muscle mass because testosterone is responsible for us being able to really build muscle, which is something a different podcast, but we need to do that our whole entire lives. Low testosterone leads to erectile dysfunction and to increase estrogen, which we talked about how that is weight gain and mood swings.
(23:45)
So we see here why it's so important for our hormone balance that we lower inflammation levels. In the next section of this podcast, we are going to talk about other hormones that are affected by inflammation that are related to your weight and your sleep, and we're going to talk about what you can do about it. I hope you have enjoyed this podcast on inflammation. I would love it if you would leave feedback, if you would leave questions, if you would share this, if you would subscribe, if you would like, you can reach us@thejolielife.com. You can come to the at 12 Village Road and just meet your Health Dream team, our chefs, our program designers, everything, and we would love for you to share this, and we would love to know what your health concerns are, what your wellness concerns are, and how we can help you. At Jolie, we try to blend beauty and science and doability to help you optimize your health and to support you in the best way possible. That's holistic and really propels all of you to help. That's it. Love you.