Imagine a world where the young don’t get acne, infertility is unheard of and the only sign of menopause is that our periods cease. This is the world we evolved from. Stepping bravely into cities, we modernised, industrialised, denatured our food and lost something along the way that our bodies crave. Of course every wise woman knows that the problem is the modern processed diet, the ruthless chemical environment and the stress we are all under. Now we are discovering another element to those ancient times that we have forgotten and must find a way to renew in ourselves and that is plant hormones.
We only discovered plant hormones in the 1920’s and at first we didn’t like them.
We gave them harsh names like xenoestrogens and endrocrine disrupters. We thought they were something extraneous, bombarding our bodies with more oestrogen than we could cope with. We didn’t understand the mechanism of how they worked. Slowly science is realising that plant hormones are ancient, some 450 million years old, they evolved before and will be around after us. Plant hormones help us balance, if we have too much oestrogen they can calm us down, if we have too little, they can top us up. An incredible feat that science can only wonder at. The plant hormones tune into us, they work with us, they know us. This is nature’s miracle, a way our bodies can balance our hormones. If there is any doubt that we need them, very recently we found out that we have receptors in our cells too, that are just looking for plant hormones. Deeper than that is that we now understand that it’s not the plants themselves that give us the hormones, but rather it is our own gut bacteria that turns compounds from the plants into the perfect hormones that we need (and beware the antibiotics that destroy this function). Our bodies are working with nature, perhaps because we evolved side by side with plant hormones, they were always there, and we miss them when they’re not.
It shouldn’t be difficult to get plant oestrogen, it’s in abundance in beans, peas, seeds and pulses. But we didn’t realise that we need plant hormones until the 1980s when the rise in menopause symptoms in the west wasn’t matched by those in Asian countries such as Japan. We thought perhaps we needed to eat soya and diligently trouped to the health food shop to buy a westernised form of it, that wasn’t that healthy. Instead we could have looked at what else Japanese women were eating. The sprouted mung beans, the sprouted alfalfa and daikon cress. Or we could have looked at our own culture. Old fashioned dishes such as lentils and hock, pottage, pease pudding, ham and peas gave us a bounty of them. Side dishes such as horseradish sauce and sprouted cress added depth and more hormones. When we moved to eating pasta and pizza we lost so much more than just our culinary heritage. In the past we had other things in common with the Japanese too, we both use red clover in our herbal medicine for menopause and menstrual problems and science is now revealing to us that it has a rich mix of all the plant hormones. We can sprout that too.
Sprouting is another ancient tradition that we nearly lost. 10,000 years ago we made the first beer from sprouted barley, we knew how to make things edible. You simply water your beans or seed, keep them on your windowsill for just a few days, no soil is needed. It’s a little miracle the sprouting sloughs off anything in their husks that might be bad for us whilst increasing the vitamins and minerals and just when it is at its peak of nutrition, we eat it. There are so many things that love to sprout. Mung beans, lentils and chickpeas, alfalfa, radish broccoli and all of them are full of plant hormones.
The world is catching on that we need these plant hormones, the chemists shelves are heaving with plant hormone supplements. But supplements are not real food, the body might not recognise those hormones in condensed form separated and processed and mixed with preservatives, The research into supplements doesn’t hold up the way the studies of populations, their real food in real diets does.
It’s not just menopausal women either. Younger women need plant hormones too. Too many are struggling with fertility issues. Studies in Denmark, land of the Vikings, discovered a third of women were not ovulating. Not ovulating throws us out of balance, if we don’t ovulate, our ovaries don’t produce enough progesterone, which we need to clear out excess oestrogen and protect us from its exuberance. Oestrogen tells our cells to reproduce, it tells our breast to grow and our womb lining to build up. But we need to tell it when to stop, and without progesterone nothing does, so we feel heavy, we have long cycles, heavy periods. If this happens month after month it can lead to fibroids, polycystic ovaries and of course infertility.
But why are modern women not ovulating, not bringing forth their egg, not carrying on the hormonal dance that has gone on for millions of years, what is happening to us? Of course it’s modern life again, the stress, the alcohol, the processed diet. But something deeper is going on. We are inundated with unnatural hormones in the environment, in our toiletries, in detergents, in the water. These too will attach to our hormone receptors, they block them, they send out the wrong messages, they attack our ovaries, our follicles and our egg production. We must protect ourselves as much as possible from these chemicals, use natural cleansers, organic makeup. Of course we can’t avoid them all and luckily plants can help us, brassicas can wash toxins through the body and plant hormones, gentle natural hormones, will take up arms against them. Our hormone receptors will not go unprotected these gentle compounds with battle to get on them.
We have only known about plant oestrogen since 1921 but yet it has existed for millions of years. And what of other plant hormones? Plant progesterone, plant androgens that include testosterone, have recently been discovered. Of course herbalist have known about them for centuries and point to sage and oregano and other witchy herbs but were dismissed, now science is showing us they exist, again they are in compounds that our gut bacteria coverts into the hormones we need. This is important for older women who don’t make progesterone in our ovaries anymore. For many species this is not a problem, they die once they can no longer procreate, nature has no need for them, they are pointless now they no longer reproduce. But not so the human female, she lives on, past her reproductive years. Scientists tell us that for 30,000 years the human female has been living into a dotage, and without offspring to care for she created art and culture and became grandmothers. And where did she get progesterone, from the food that she foraged. From dark leafed cruciferous vegetables, from sprouting little seeds to make them edible, from putting nuts in the river in baskets to slough off toxins. There are no plant hormones in meat, she was gathering her own plant hormones without ever knowing it.
She was sharing it all with her sons, husbands, fathers and brothers because they need plant hormones too, studies showed that Japanese women with their diets rich in seaweeds, sprouted foods, beans and vegetables have fewer cancers, osteoporosis, dementia and heart attacks. Horrifyingly they call these diseases “Western illness”, and have pinpointed our diets as the problem. What the newspapers didn’t report was that Japanese men have less of these illnesses too because they eat the same diet. So we can share this food with everyone, including our children.
And the young with their terrible acne, their early puberty, no tribal societies have it, no healthy eaters. Some are starting to look at hormones for that too.
Let us sprout plant hormones, eat them and share them. It’s doing what we always did, getting back to ancient ways
BUY Grow Your Own HRT Here
