SOME OF THE DIFFERENCES BETWEEN NATURAL AND SYNTHETIC HORMONES
Excerpted From
WHAT YOUR DOCTOR MAY NOT TELL YOU ABOUT PREMENOPAUSE:
Balance Your Hormones and Your Life from Thirty to Fifty,
by John R. Lee, M.D., Jesse Hanley, M.D. and Virginia Hopkins
Not too long ago Dr. Lee was confronted at a conference by the owner of a
large herbal products company who claimed that Dr. Lee was incorrect in
referring to the progesterone used in the creams as "natural" because it
was manufactured or synthesized in a laboratory, and that made it
synthetic. This is a confusion in semantics that we hear frequently. In
fact progesterone is far more natural to your body than any plant is
because your body actually manufactures the identical substance. The
progesterone manufactured in the laboratory has the identical molecular
configuration of the progesterone that your body makes. It does not matter
if the body makes the hormone, or a chemist makes it from a plant extract
or from anything else. If it is the identical molecule, it is the identical
hormone. The source of the progesterone is unimportant in this context.
We usually think of the word synthetic as meaning something that is
produced artificially, and is not found in nature, such as plastics and
pharmaceutical drugs. For example, the "hormone" Provera is made from the
same substances that natural progesterone is made from, but the molecular
configuration of it is changed in the laboratory so that it is not
identical to anything found in nature. But natural progesterone made in the
laboratory is identical to that made in the human body. In other words,
what makes a substance "synthetic" or "natural" in this context is whether
or not it can be found in nature.
The same distinctions apply to estrogens. The two types of estrogen in
Premarin taken separately are natural (found in nature) and not synthetic,
but not all of the estrogen in Premarin is natural to humans. About half of
it is human estrogen, and about half is horse estrogen -- a molecule not
found in the human body. It's ironic that the manufacturer of Premarin has
tried to advertise it as a natural product. Since about half of the
estrogen in Premarin is estrone (which is natural to humans) and the other
half consists of a different estrogen that is natural only to horses and is
extracted from pregnant horse urine, it is natural, strictly speaking, only
if you are half horse and half human! It's unfortunate that so much of
estrogen research has been done with Premarin, so we don't have a truly
accurate knowledge base of the effects of human estrogen versus horse
estrogen.
Natural estrogens extracted from wild yams or soybeans that are identical
to those made by the human body are easily available by prescription in the
form of creams, tablets and patches. These are estrone, estradiol and
estriol, so there is no reason to take horse estrogen.
Plants do not make human hormones, but some plants make compounds that have
some hormonal effect. These, in their natural form, are called
phytohormones ("plant-based" hormones). Although they are not the same as
our hormones they may have some hormonal activity.
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