Skip to content 
How Hormones Affect Gut Health For Women! – with Dr. Daved Rosensweet
Today on the Gut Health Reset Podcast, we are discussing women’s hormones with special guest Dr. Daved Rosensweet! Maintaining gut health is essential for overall wellness, and this is especially true for women. Hormonal changes and estrogen levels can have a major impact on gut health, and an imbalance can lead to digestive problems like bloating, constipation, and diarrhea. In addition, estrogen plays a role in gut motility, so an imbalance can also affect how quickly food moves through the digestive system. Estrogen also affects gut bacteria, and an imbalance can lead to an overgrowth of bad bacteria. All of these factors can contribute to gut inflammation, which can be uncomfortable and even dangerous. Maintaining hormone balance is therefore essential for your health!
We will answer these questions:
– How are hormones linked to your gut health?
– How can a hormonal imbalance affect your overall health?
– Can hormones cause cancer?
– What diet should you consider for better hormonal balance?
– And more!
Still want to learn more? Schedule with Dr. Barter today!
Recommended Products From Today’s Show
About Dr. Daved Rosensweet:
Dr. Rosensweet graduated from the University of Michigan Medical School in 1968. He has been in private medical practice since 1971, and has had offices in New Mexico, California, and Colorado and is currently in practice in Southwest Florida. Dr. Rosensweet was the clinical physician involved in the very first Nurse Practitioner training program in the U.S.A. and in charge of health promotion for the State of New Mexico. He teaches health professionals about the treatment of women in menopause with bio-identical hormones.
–
Subscribe for more gut health content and share this podcast with a friend! Take a screenshot of this episode and tag Dr. Ann-Marie Barter:
http://instagram.com/drannmariebarter
–
Dr. Ann-Marie Barter is a Functional Medicine and Chiropractic Doctor at Alternative Family Medicine & Chiropractic. She is the clinic founder of Alternative Family Medicine & Chiropractic that has two offices: one in Longmont and one in Denver. They treat an array of health conditions overlooked or under-treated by conventional medicine, called the “grey zone”. https://altfammed.com/
*As always, this podcast is not designed to diagnose, treat, prevent or cure any condition and is for information purposes only. Please consult with your healthcare professional before making any changes to your current lifestyle.*
Transcription:
Today on the Gut Health Reset Podcast, we are talking about female hormones, a lot of estrogen and progesterone, but specifically estrogen and how that links back to the gut and the absorption of the nutrients are so. Important. Thank you so much for joining us here today on the Gut Health Reset Podcast.
I’m your host, Dr. Ann-Marie Barter, and today I have Dr. Rosensweet who graduated from the University of Michigan Medical School in 1968. Since 1971, he has been in private medical practice with the offices in Florida, New Mexico. California and Colorado. Early in his career, Dr. Rosen suite trained the first nurse practitioners in the United States and was in charge of health promotion for the state of New Mexico.
He’s nationally known, lecture and presenter at the American Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine, the American College for Advancement in Medicine, the age manage. Medicine group and more. In 2019, he was called to Washington to speak in front of the National Academies of Science and Engineering and Medicine on the safety and efficacy of bioidentical hormones.
He is the founder of the Menopause Method and the Institute of Bioidentical Medicine where he has been training medical professionals to master C B H R T using the most advanced and modern tools. His protocols have been used to treat more than 12,000 women, Dr. Rosensweet. It is such a pleasure to have you on the podcast today, and I am very excited.
Talking about hormones in the gut and, and how they are so interlinked to your overall
health. And so good to meet you too as well. A fun, a fun thing to do in, in my world, ,
yeah. Kind of gets you out and you get, you get to explain to a much wider audience, I think. So I guess without further ado how are our hormones linked to our gut?
Well, the primary action of hormones is not directly related to the gut, but there is definitely an interaction and there’s a place. If the gut is not healthy you can have some hormonal imbalances because of it. And the actual technical way that that happens is your a woman’s ovaries produces four ovarian hormones.
and one of the most one of the many is estrogens. And the estrogens are circulated throughout the body. They go into the cells, they do their thing, they leave the cells, and they’re biochemically processed. And they’re sent to the liver and they’re degraded as actual potent hormones. And then they’re actually linked up with something that makes them soluble and they pass through the bile into the gut and in the gut.
They’re actually conjugated as a glucuronide principally. . Pretty technical. I’m getting there though. I’m getting to the punchline. , and then they’re excreted through the stool and that’s the natural process. And ovaries produce new hormones. They go do their thing, they go to the liver. They’re conjugated to the glucuronide.
They pass out the gut in the stool. They also pass out the. . Now we depend, and I’m sure you’ve emphasized this so many times on a very healthy bacterial flora in our gut. And we need ’em. We love ’em. They’re just critical. Three and a half pounds of ’em, plus or minus, and you can correct me if I got the poundage wrong.
And however, if there. Resident bacteria that aren’t our wonderful, familiar, genetically designed to co-create together and be in synergy with gut flora, but rather some different bacteria, that shouldn’t really be in the gut. They shouldn’t be there. They, they’re fine that they’re alive on the planet earth, but they don’t need to be in human intestinal tracts.
And these particular bacteria excrete an enzyme called beta glucuronidase. I hope this isn’t too deep in the weeds. And what that beta glucuronidase does is it breaks the cleavage of the estrogen metabolite with the glucuronide. And that makes it possible to reabsorb that estrogen into the body. As a glucuronide, it’s, it can’t be reabsorbed.
The gut is a barrier to it, but if you split up that way that it’s being conveyed out. It can be reabsorbed in the gut, so you get these estrogen imbalances going on. I hope that wasn’t too technical for our audience, but the bottom line is have a healthy gut for that and a zillion other reasons.
And some women can get into some hormonal challenges because of excessive estrogen, because of that particular function. And
so what does that put you at risk for? If beta glucuronidase is elevated, for example, so they’re reabsorbing the estrogen in the body, would you mind going into that a little bit?
Well, you’re gonna have extra estrogen, and that imbalance is not pleasant and it’s not. It’s not tremendously serious. I think the question that might be in the listener’s mind is, well, am I at risk for cancer? Yes. Because of that, and the answer is no. You’re going to have a hormonal imbalance. It’s not pleasant.
You can get ps, you can have mood changes, you can have all kinds of things go on from the hormonal imbalance. But cancer is a serious diagnosis and it takes serious health challenges to create it. And those health challenges take place over the course of our lifetime causes come down to issues of nutrition, toxicity.
Too much or too little exercise and an inappropriate, dysfunctional response to the stress of life. The stress is fine, but if you don’t, if you’re not skilled at dealing with the stress, you’re going to recruit the biology of the stress response to the fight or flee from sabertooth tigers that distorts the immune system that gives you all claims of problems, so hormones don’t cause cancer.
Even though there is incorrect information about that now worst case, an estrogen imbalance where there’s too much estrogen compared to the other hormones can increase breast density. That’s not a healthy breast. You didn’t get fibrocystic breast disease, even that’s not healthy, and that’s a vulnerable breast.
But in order to get cancer, you gotta have a lot of adversities taking place over the course of your lifetime on every level, including levels. We don’t usually talk about .
Yeah. I do wanna just touch back on something that you quickly said that hormones do not. Cancer. And when you say hormones do not create cancer, are you saying are regular hormones, bioidentical hormones, or hormone replacement therapy?
Would you mind just breaking that down a little bit? Because there’s a lot of confusion, I think, even among healthcare practitioner.
Yeah. Zero, zero and zero to all three of those possibilities. And excuse me, there’s that belief out there that’s false, that hormones can cause cancer because of a crazy, misogynistic event that I can hardly understand took place in in our medical world in 2002.
There was a big study done on women and women’s hormones, and they stopped the study and the press got a hold of a, of, of a mis misunderstood line in that study that said that with one of the products that was being tested, there was reduced risk. Premarin horse urine derived estrogen. They catheterized horses.
They collect their urine, they dry up that urine, and there’s a lot of hormones in there. 50% of which actually are equivalent to a human female. 50% are not, but women treated with Premarin had a reduced risk for breast cancer, for example. But there was this molecule called Prempro that was part of the study as well, that contained this artificial progestin, which is a problematic molecule to begin with.
And what was in the study was there was a 1.26 increased relative risk for breast cancer, and that was followed by the statement. And this is statistically insignificant and in medicine, as you so well know, the word statistical insignificance means don’t draw any conclusions. Folks, this is not clear, but the press got a hold of the, the increased risk state.
Blasted it out. And all over the world, women and healthcare providers got frightened. And even though in 2002 there was 18 million American women on horse urine derived estrogen and, and prem and prempro, 40% of all American women in menopause. And they, it was to great advantage that they. Well in my community, of those who really are paying attention to it, we went, why in the world would they report that?
And the consequence of women stopping their hormones and the numbers went down to the low, millions, maybe one or 2 million women, the rest of them got off those hormones. Healthcare providers got frightened to provide, to write the prescriptions, and I said, why in the world would this happen? Those women who are coming off those hormones, they’re gonna have some serious health consequences because hormones are so important for women and men, and they’re doing it for false reasons.
There’s no evidence. Well, the same study committee that actually did the original study and published it in the Journal of the American Medical Association, retracted that study in 2016, and they said after 18 or 2017, after 18 years of follow up, there is no increased risk in breast cancer, heart attack and stroke.
Mm-hmm. , and they showed the reduced risk. Now this has been elaborated upon by a breast cancer specialist, an oncologist. His name is AVM Blooming. The book is called Estrogen Matter Source. So for those of you who want to dive into the science, and I’m gonna give you a soundbite of that science in just a moment, Dr.
Bing’s book, estrogen Matters, and then in chapter three of Happy Healthy Hormones, our book on menopause. Dr. Annamaria is going to offer that as a, a free P d f copy if you want it. In chapter three, I explain this in, in a condensed fashion. Here’s the science. Women who take, who are treated with hormones in menopause are at less risk for developing.
Breast cancer, heart attack and stroke than women who go untreated.
Women who are treated with hormones, , and basically they’re talking about permanent prempro. And myself, I’m not a great fan of horse sharing drive stuff there. Women who are treated with hormones are at less risk for breast cancer, heart attack, and stroke than women who are unt. Now we’re all at risk for a thousand diagnoses.
We’re all as a, we’re all at risk for hundreds of cancers. And as a male, I have an increased relative risk for prostate cancer and there’s reasons for that. And they, they really boil down to special reasons and, and women have increased risk for breast cancer in uterine cancer. And there’s reasons for that increased relative risk.
But the science is this, women who are treated with hormones are at less risk for developing breast cancer than women who go untreated. Men who are treated with testosterone are at less risk for getting prostate cancer than men who are not receiving testosterone. Replenishing the natural hormones don’t cause.
There the prescribed hormones that midlife don’t cause ’em, doesn’t cause cancer. That’s the science. What,
Would you say about some of the studies that say if you have active cancer, progesterone feeds the cancer, et cetera, what would you say to those studies?
There’s holes in the studies. , and again, Dr.
Blooming addresses this directly. And there’s also that claim for estrogen treatment. Mm-hmm. , like for example, these days for actually for decades and decades, when a cancer is analyzed in a patho by a pathologist, they’re even able to tell whether the cancer has estrogen receptor sites that are active or not, and progesterone receptor sites.
And it’s. Well, the main thing is, is that in a breast cancer, there’s all kinds of cells in there, and the cells within the cancer that you’re concerned about are the ones that are primitive. They’re undifferentiated, they don’t respond to anything. They just grow and go wild. They, there’s no control over them, but in any different, any different any cancer, there’s also cells that are well differentiate.
They still have estrogen re receptor CTEs in there because normal breast tissue has estrogen receptor sites in there. They respond to estrogen throughout the menstrual cycle. Now to look at it from a, and so the ones the cells in a breast cancer that were concerned about are the undifferentiated ones.
So it doesn’t matter if a tumor has estrogen receptor positive in there or not, or another way to look at it is Dr. Bloom. A breast cancer specialist, once again, he’s, and he’s run the only study that I’ve ever seen of actual what happens when you treat women who have had breast cancer with hormones.
Mm-hmm. . And he said that for, I mean, as he was doing his study, He started that study in the eighties. There was no knowledge of the estrogen receptor sites. There was no knowledge about progesterone receptor sites that didn’t come till the late nineties, and he said that the conclusions he drew was that women who were treated with hormones, who had prior breast cancer and had that breast cancer prior I was treated, had less incidence of.
So long before there was estrogen receptor sites. When you, and here’s this situation. You have a woman who’s had breast cancer. She’s had the breast cancer properly treated. She’s had an increased risk of recurrence of that cancer. Then a young woman is at getting breast cancer who’ve never had it, right.
The relative risk is, However, that woman who’s had breast cancer and had the breast cancer properly treated is at less lessened risk for recurrence if she’s treated with hormones than if she received no treatment at all. And the hormones that have been best studied is Premarin and Prempro. Less risk of recurrence.
Hey, this is Dr. Annemarie barter. Have you ever spent hours searching for the right supplements to heal your body and when you finally found them, maybe you weren’t sure, was a brand that you could trust? Or if the products were safe. After hearing about these issues time and time again, I decided to put together a complete store of supplements for healing and supporting your gut at dr anne marie barter.com there are supplements for constipation, thyroid health, gut health.
and so much more. There are bundles created for sleep support, pain support, histamine support, and the list just goes on and on. These supplements I use personally or I’ve handpicked because they’ve worked time and time again on countless cases. In the office and on the website, you can see what ingredients we use to put your mind at ease.
If you visit Dr anne-marie barter.com and use the promo co podcast to get 10% off your next order. So what are you waiting for? Go visit Dr. Anne-Marie barter and get 10% off your supplement bundle. Ciao. And now back to our episode. In, in your experience, do you feel like. Any particular estrogen is better because we have E one, E two n e three.
Is it having a mix of all of those? What, what has the science showed us on that?
Well, I do, I, I do have opinions about that, and I must say that in midlife, women lose their ovarian hormones and. , almost any hormone if done decently by someone who’s somewhat knowledgeable is gonna benefit her greatly.
Mm-hmm. . Now I’m a strong advocate for using the same molecule bioidentical hormones. Mm-hmm. , me too. And because they’re available and they’ve been available since the late seventies . You can a a compounding pharmacist can purchase the same molecule that comes out of a woman’s ovary or out of a man’s testicle.
And you were talking about estrogens. You’re, you’re saying what is so is that there’s not one estrogen. Estrogens is a family. There’s actually three estrogens. And what, as my colleague who originated suggesting that we treat with bioidenticals, Dr. Jonathan w. In the he did this in the early 1980s. He said, why do we wanna use horse urine?
Some of those estrogens are not in human females, and some of ’em are provocative. Why don’t we use the same molecule that’s in human females? Well, he suggested that we copy nature. That’s very radical.
I like it though. I just like
it, you know? But that was not the thing before , right? Why don’t we just copy nature and here’s what nature has going on.
Young women have the three estrogens, and one of ’em is the most potent one. It’s called Estradiol, and there’s a second one called Estro. It’s about 80% as potent as estradiol, and there’s a third one that’s called Esri. Or E three, and it’s about one eighth is potent as estradiol. However, there is more estriol than the sum of the other two estrogens.
Mm-hmm. . And on an average, there’s 1.3 times as much estriol is, there’s the sum of estron and estradiol. That’s how nature’s got original young women originally. , possibly. There’s a reason for that. and Dr. Wright, long before we had the details, said, let’s just copy nature. Let’s not invent this new thing.
Let’s not just give estradiol. That’s not what a young woman’s body does. He was also resting strongly on, or some research that are done by a university in Nebraska, oncologist, Dr. Henry Lemon. Is this too much detail? No,
it’s, I, I it’s great actually. . Okay. ,
In the late 1960s Dr. Lemon was looking at the urine of women who had breast cancer and women who didn’t have breast cancer because he wondered was there something unusual about the hormones?
And the hormones show up in the urine plus the metabolite. So it’s a great way to measure. And what he found is young women who had, who were healthy had 1.3 times as much on the average of estradiol as they had the sum of estro and estradiol. Mm-hmm. . And women with breast cancer did not have near as much ESOL as they had the sum of ESTRO and esol.
They had a lot less esol. Mm-hmm. . Now I don’t wanna overemphasize this. Cancer has got very specific causes to take place over the course of a lifetime. Once again, dietary problems, eating pesticides and herbicides that mess up, do a lot of stuff. And other toxicities and emotional and mental and life issues that aren’t handled elegantly with wisdom and skill and exercise too much.
These cancer has a multitude of causes, but this observation was made and Dr. Wright said, let’s just copy nature. This is, this is in the late sixties, early seventies. That study was, In about 10 years ago, a laboratory commissioned me in to do a new study to see was this still happening? And what I learned about young women is they had 1.1 times as much ESOL as they had the son of Terone and estradiol using the latest technology.
Now here’s the, you know, going on just a little bit further. If it’s okay, and you can interrupt. Please interrupt me and stop me at any time. A woman, every single menstrual cycle does this astounding, almost impossible to grasp because it’s so miraculous process in which she prepares for pregnancy once a.
and if she, if she, if she gets pregnant, she goes on to be pregnant and, and prepare for breastfeeding. And if she does not get pregnant, everything, all those preparations disappear once a month. She forms this endometrial lining. And if she has a fertilized egg she keeps that endometrial lining throughout the pregnancy.
If she does not get pregnant, she sheds that mans endometrial lining and that’s menstruation. But as astoundingly, every single cycle, a young woman prepares for possible breastfeeding right there in the beginning of each menstrual cycle, she actually gets increased number of breast glandular cells. Via process called cell division or mitosis.
A lot of young women can really feel that their breasts get fuller as the cycle is progressing. If they do not get pregnant, the breasts get less full, and actually what’s going on is those cells, those new cells disappear by a process, funnily enough, called apoptosis. That whole process is, is inspired by the hormones during the first part where there’s proliferation, there’s new cells, there’s endometrial cells, there’s angular cells proliferating.
That’s under the inspiration of an estrogen receptor site called ER alpha, estrogen receptor site alpha, the proliferative. If there is no implantation, a whole deep proliferation occurs, and that’s inspired through the action of estrogen with the estrogen receptor site beta. The principle inspirer of estrogen receptor site alpha is estradiol.
The principle inspirer every single menstrual cycle of estrogen receptor beta. Thus depro proliferation is estriol the most prevalent of all the estrogens. This was not known when Dr. Lemon. And Dr. Wright was, and Dr. Wright proposed by identical hormones. So I say copy, nature in favor, esol. And do we have a lot of estriol there because we don’t want per proliferation of cells in a midlife woman, we don’t need it.
We can get all the benefits that are so crucial for taking hormones in. But we don’t need breast gland or cell proliferation. We don’t need cell division. Our immune systems, for example, midlife aren’t quite as vigorous and amazing as they were when we were younger, . So why have cell division that you don’t need anyway?
That’s why. That’s why there’s three estrogens. That’s how they behave and that’s why we think it’s very important to copy nature because we want that deep proliferation. Emphasis. That
was so interesting. Let me, so in, when we’re building the hormones, you know, because we need certain nutrients to build those hormones from the gut.
So we need to have a healthy gut absorbing that to basically have the co-factors to make that there. Any, any nutrients in particular that you think are important for hormone product?
Well, it’s, there’s the direct and there’s the indirect. And in order to produce hormones in ovarian hormones, statistical hormones, or luxuries, they’re not gonna be given the same priority of production.
Then let’s say breathing is going to be given, or energy production is gonna be, You need the whole panoply of everything really to do a good job, because there’s a lot of moving parts. When you look at hormone biochemistry and you mentioned it already, there’s a lot of nutrients that are required because they are, they ma the hormones are made out of them, and there’s a lot of co-factors, vitamins and minerals that make that production possible and.
Nutrient insufficiencies are, are epidemic in the standard American diet. If you’re not going a hundred percent organic, you can count on not having the nutrients, but that’s not the whole story and you know it better than anyone . You can put the most wonderful food in fully of all nutrients that you need.
Into your mouth, but that does not guarantee that you’re gonna digest it. You gotta have real digestive power in that from here, right on down the whole intestinal track to be able to digest it. And I’m, I’m really saying things that is your home territory. So, pardon me. I don’t mean to say it, but you asked me the question, so that’s why I’m doing it.
of course. Yep. That’s why you’re here. That’s why you’re here. .
You have to have a healthy intestinal track lining and you have to have a healthy resident population of bacteria E, everything’s gotta be in place to. When you start getting imbalances and you get, you can get in into an unhealthy gut lining that’s doing things that are not, okay, I’ll keep it simple like that and leave it to you to, to really hunker down on it.
So are there specific nutrients? I like to keep it sort of simple in a way. You gotta eat organic food these days. Throughout human history, up till about 75 years ago, all food was organic so you didn’t have to think about it, and you gotta have enough calories and you wanna spread it out. And then everyone’s dietary specific needs are individuals.
So I don’t wanna dive into that. There’s those who thrive better on a less animal products. There’s those who won’t live unless they get adequate animal products and these kind of things you can find out about your own individual way, but just eat, eat enough, and eat a variety of foods like your grandmother told you to do , and you’re gonna do fine.
You’re gonna get enough nutrients. And these days you probably have to supplement. I do. Because the food supply’s hurting. If you don’t have a garden in your backyard with good soil, you gotta have good soil, no less. I’m garden. I’m a gardener, and I’ve gotten to witness firsthand the man, the health of the soil is gonna really translate into health of the food.
So, sorry to get too detailed there, but yeah, that health of that gut, without it, you’re not gonna produce a lot of things.
Agreed. Agreed. So I, I’ve, this has been so interesting and you’ve just provided so much information but I wanna make sure that the listeners get a chance to, you’ve got a special offer for the listeners today and I’d love to know where people can find you if they wanna get in touch with you and in all your details, which will also link.
Well, thank you. You’re going to offer a link to our book, happy Healthy Hormones for Women, and they can download a free P D F copy. And then the greatest breakthrough I’ve seen in treating women in menopause has occurred because of my team. They, because we have so many providers we’ve ch trained my team, Andre and Joshua principally negotiated with the national pharmacy for two years.
And we’re about to be able to offer all four ovarian hormones for $99 a month total. And that’s remarkable because women are paying in the United States on an average of two 50. That means some are paying 400 and, and very few are paying a hundred, 160. So this is gonna increase the access. So $99 a month, and I think my team is set up with your team on how to.
do that on your website and then you can go to our website of women and go to www.menopausemethod.com
and yeah. That’s, that’s an entry, that’s a gate gateway. There’s a new website we have called Happy Healthy Hormones. It’s gonna be for males and females and it’s happy, healthy hormones.live. I don’t know if it’s quite activated yet, but the menopause method will get you there. Menopause method. Do menopause method.com?
Yeah. Okay.
Yeah, we’ll put that link below so that people can can have access to your offer and to the book and to the website. But thank you so much for being here today. This was very informative and I think a lot of people are going to get a lot of great information out of this. So thank you so much.
Thank you.
Thank you for listening to the Gut Health Reset podcast. Please make sure you subscribe, leave a rating and a review so more people can hear about the podcast. And hey, take a screenshot of this episode and tag Dr. Annmarie on Instagram or Facebook at Dr.
Annmarie barter. And for more resources, just visit dr ann-marie barter.com.
