Can THIS Supplement Build Bone & Fix Your Hormones?

have you heard of some supplements that claim to be able to improve bone health but also fix women's hormones I use that last part in quotes because those are not my words those are theirs but I've heard these claims too and there might be some truth behind them but I want to take a deep look into the details of some of these products because one of the biggest errors I see when people are building their own bone health program is that they put too much faith into these products that are maybe unlikely to help them as much as they claim they are one of the challenges I see here is that if you're using dexa as your primary tool to measure Improvement then it can take one or two years to show a difference so if you're only verifying your plan is working every two years then it's really important to make good decisions around the tools that you're using there is a big difference between some tools that are reported to improve bone health but only slow down bone loss versus tools that are actually going to show through research that they can build bone not only compared to Placebo because we know that's bone loss but compared to Baseline so it's really important that we look deep at the literature really look at the results to show are we actually building bone from Baseline are we building bone compared to Placebo or are we actually just preserving bone compared to Placebo because those are three very different things so before we get into this I'm curious what do you think is the strongest tool in your toolbox for your bone if you're on YouTube please leave that in the comments because I would love to hear what you think the best tool is that you're using right now so a few weeks ago I did a video on the potential benefit benefits of these things called phytoestrogens now phytoestrogens are these hormonik products that are in soy and other foods and you can see that video I believe over here one of the takeaways from that video was that while soy and other foods do have these things called phytoestrogens in them and that they can benefit bone health and Hormone Health because of the potential negatives of soy particularly for some individuals getting all that active ingredient of soy in a supplement might actually be better than getting it from soy it's self but the big question is this how effective is it so I'm going to show you exactly how we use one of these products with patients but first let me give you a little background so soy and other similar foods like flax seeds have these again phytoestrogens now phytoestrogens are compounds that again have similar structure to estradiol which is the dominant estrogen in both women and men and these phytoestrogens can activate estrad receptors in the body resulting in potentially some of the benefits which is pretty cool some of that active ingredients in these compounds are called isoflavones and this is where like things get challenging but again we're going to talk about these isoflavones in my last video we talked about the most potent isoflavone in soy which is called genestin supplement manufacturers have capitalized on this a little bit I think there's still room for growth here actually in the industry but they've capitalized on this a little bit in this particular isoflavone so now there are products that are marketed specifically for bone health also for hot flashes and other symptoms of menopause but they are specific specifically with this compound and then combined again with a couple of other things and we'll talk about that in some of the supplements at the end and some of the things that we have found and are potentially recommending but whenever We're translating this uh idea of taking a compound from a whole food source and putting it in a supplement we do need to take that next step and find out actually does it work so if we take this one thing out of food and we use it in an isolated supplement is it the same or is it less or is it better more effective than using it from the food itself because some times there's synergistic compounds and whole foods that are going to help something to work better rather than that compound itself so fortunately there is some research that we can look at specifically on genesin as a supplement and we can also get a sense of dosing and then we can translate that into what kind of products are available on the market all right so let's look at this first study so this is a 2013 review paper which is always a good place to start because you're going to basically learn what other researchers have learned about these things by reading a whole bunch of studies so basically this one is on genes and one other isoflavone but very specifically genesin they talk about it having dual functions on bone cells it's basically able to both inhibit bone resorption of of osteoclast and then also stimulate osteogenic or bone building cells differentiation and maturation so it's cool you're working on both sides of the equation of bone metabolism which we is what we want to do uh in most natural products too so they go on to describe genesin and its selectivity for estrogen receptors as a little bit balanced so it has a greater affinity for estrogen receptor beta rather than Alpha and there's some potential negatives there because now we're going to be imbalanced in stimulating these estrogen receptors if you look at natural hormones like estrad it actually stimulates them equally um so this is going to be a little bit different and there's some potential negatives with that but also some potential positives and then the second study I pulled actually looks at genes in a very specific dose so this is a 54 milligram dose and that'll become important later when we start looking at products but a 54 milligram dose and then they talk about the impact again on both bone building and on bone breakdown so again natural products working on both sides of the equation and that's pretty cool so we do also have some randomized control trials to go through and so that RCT data I'm going to show you but before I do if you're having a hard time putting together all of the potential uh tools and information that there's available on bone health you may want to consider coming to our free master class that Master Class we run every 1 to two weeks I run it myself we spend about 45 minutes going through how we build a program then we have about 15 minutes for questions so if you haven't done that yet strongly encourage you to do it totally free look for the link in the description on YouTube or if you're listening to this on a podcast go to Optimal human health.com and you can access the link there okay so this randomized control trial that I want to show you is a pretty good trial this is back from 2009 and it has 183 women again using the same dose of 54 milligrams per day so this is sort of the kind of standard dose that we see in the human studies and now what's interesting about this study is they used a quantitative ultrasound so if you've heard me talk about Rams this is kind of kind of like a Rams idea but not the same device and then they did also fortunately look at bone mineral density of the spine and the hip and they tested bone both at one and two years of treatment so we have two years of data which is pretty awesome U then they also looked at ultrasound parameters of improvement and so what they found is that the uh the ultrasound did show improvements uh from you know these different variables of of bone uh and what it looks like under ultrasound which is a little bit hard for me to interpret but most importantly the bone mineral density did improve compared to Placebo now the statistics are a little bit confusing but when you look at this at one year in the femoral neck which is the hip the intervention group was up 2.32% which is pretty cool the spine was up at 2.68% compared to- 1.63% in the hip and - 2.12% in the spine so those are pretty dramatic differences and then continue to follow that at the 2-year Mark you have in the intervention 4.54% versus - 3.92% so now we're talking about a 7% swing between Placebo and intervention and that swing is even bigger in the spine so you have uh positive 5.25% in spine versus negative 3.74% so those are really big changes now it's a little unclear from a statistics perspective how they actually got those numbers and I think they're comparing um I think they're comparing comparing the Improvement to Placebo and vice versa so I think it's going to cause them to look bigger than they really are but still that's pretty good and you know this is a relatively natural product so pretty low risk so something certainly worth considering So speaking of that risk you might be asking well I'm a little concerned about this the estrogen receptor thing so what if you know is this the same thing as estrogen like does it does it have the same risks as estrogen so I'm not going to talk about all the potential risks and benefits of estrogen here um I have other videos on that but the challenge here is that yes it they do interact with estrogen receptors so anybody that is at risk of having a complication of estrogen may want to talk to their doctor before uh starting this in fact of course anybody should talk to their medical team before starting anything I talk about on YouTube um but for example somebody who either has breast cancer who's being treated for breast cancer has a history of breast cancer and has been told that they need to stay away from estrogen they need to essentially block all estrogen that's something to consider any estrogen um sensitive cancer would be relative in this space to be something to be concerned about there may also be some concerns around premenopausal women param menopausal women if you're still making estrogen this could actually drive your levels up and if you're imbalanced this could cause some hormone imbalance so I'm talking about this most specifically in my my postmenopausal uh Patient Group because we don't have to worry because they're not making any estrogen or at least very very little so we're not going to have any issues with estrogen overload with a product like a phytoestrogen so plenty of women are taking this in the premenopausal status um and they find benefit from it but you might also see some negative impact on potentially fertility also cycle dysfunction you say may see some dysfunction of of menstrual cycles actually potentially worsening of symptoms around your cycle so again this is something to be used with caution um in that age group there's also some concern around some interaction with hormonal birth control which I strongly advise against anyone way uh but another reason not to take hormonal birth control there are some other medications this might interact with so again because it's working through hormone receptors and hormones are very powerful there's a lot of things to consider here so you may want to check or at least you definitely should check if you're on medications with your doctor about potential interactions other things that people have noticed when they take these specific types of supplements is that there might be some gii discomfort you remember to that this is a specific compound that we're getting out of a natural product right so we're taking a a isoflavone out of soy we're condensing it we're putting it in a capsule and then we're putting it in your body so while it is natural it is in an unnatural form because you're not going to get that much genestin out of soy unless you eat a whole lot of soy not actually that much but still more than certainly taking a capsule there's also some concern of an increased risk of cancer because of the imbalance of estrogen receptor beta over Alpha I don't know that I believe that um there's no clear evidence on that so take that for what it is men should also be careful here because if we are overstimulating estrogen receptors in men and we don't have enough Androgen or testosterone stimulation to balance it then you might also uh run into some issues potentially you know the estrogen sensitive things like actually breast inness swelling potentially changes in mood Etc so where do you get this kind of product so I looked at a few different options here and the one that really stood out to me was actually a designs for health product called femguard now this is probably not going to be exciting for my male audience but uh there's a product called femguard which is combined with a couple other things and they all check out as far as something that is reasonable to take for a postmenopausal woman who's not on estrogen so I think that's probably the sweet spot for this group um but again there are all these potential considerations so this is the one that we're looking at as a product for our patient population now most of our patients are going to be on estrogen so we're not going to end up recommending this product um and I have no Financial relationship with designs for health um however our HSN members do get a discount from our full script dispensary so if that's something that you're looking for it's something that you could consider so that's it for this product if you would like to look at other supplement uh videos that we have out right now that are recent we have this video called raw milk in a capsule and so this is all about lacto Farin which is a really cool supplement to talk about and then we also have our best supplement for osteoporosis in 2024 in that video is here as well so remember that osteoporosis as a diagnosis is not the end but deciding to reverse it is a beginning I'll see you in the next video