Welcome to the Dr. Berg's Healthy Keto and Interminate Fasting Podcast, where Dr. Berg takes you on the journey for the truth about getting healthy and losing healthy weight.

You know, zinc is a fascinating trace mineral. It's involved in so many different biochemical

reactions. But today we're going to talk about the relationship between zinc and your hormones.

Now, zinc is involved in so many different biochemical pathways, but it's majorly involved in quite a few of your

hormones. In fact, it's involved in all of your major hormones. Let's go through this. First of all,

there's two pituitary hormones called follicle stimulating hormone and a lutenizing hormone,

and they send signals down to the gonads, both the ovaries and the testicle.

So in men, lutenizing hormone, LH, increases testosterone. So zinc increases testosterone. If you're

zinc deficient, your gonads actually shrink. You get what's called hypogonadism. So zinc will

increase your testosterone. Now, there's also another situation where you have testosterone

turning into a very powerful form of testosterone called dh-ht. There are a very specific enzyme called five alpha reductase.

So if there's too much of this enzyme, you get too much dht and one of the problems you get

is you get hair loss. Another problem is prostate enlargement. So zinc helps act as an inhibitor

of five alpha reductase, limiting the amount of dhht you get.

Now, when a female follicle-stimiting hormone and leutonizing hormone control estrogen and

progesterone, zinc will help increase progesterone as well as estrogen unless you have

estrogen dominance, which I'm going to get to

in a second. But so many women during menopause end up having a major deficiency in progesterone.

And if they took a little zinc, they would actually have more progesterone. They would have

better ratios of progesterone to estrogen. Now, if a woman is menopausal, she typically has a lot less estrogen,

and so zinc can help bring that up to a correct level. But you also have another enzyme that

converts testosterone into estrogen. It's called aromatase. And if there's too much of this

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