Food and Hormonal Balance

I never realized food, water and skincare products have a major impact on hormones. The first clue I got was from reading Gillian Michael's book Master Your Metabolism. She outlines all sorts of foods that affect different hormones and in particular emphasizes the destructive effects of chemically laden processed foods. There's also a bit about skincare products and plastics in the book.

She mentioned this awesome site - Skin Deep - this is a free site that rates the contents of various bodycare and cosmetics products. Every ingredient is listed along w/a safety rating - really eye opening as most beauty care products you see on the shelves rate pretty poorly. I started getting rid of a lot of off the shelve products after reading this. I mean who really needs it anyway? I mean a lot of the stuff we buy is just stuff we are conditioned to think we need. Skincare products are full of questionable chemicals and this stuff is being absorbed right into your skin. I found out that natural stuff like sesame oil or coconut oil works great as a moisturizer. Also stuff like Tom's of Maine deodorant which doesn't have aluminum and other harmful chemicals.

Kevin Gianni of Renegade Health has a nice article by Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo on balancing hormones naturally...one thing she mentioned was plastics. Apparently plastics can contain an estrogen-like material that can mess w/your hormones:

Avoid plastic drinking and food containers. These contain what’s known as
xenoestrogens, which are estrogen look alikes that bind to estrogen receptors.
Xenoestrogens can cause endometriosis, ovarian cysts, breast cancer and fetal
abnormalities. Other sources of xenoestrogens are detergents, some skin lotions
and soaps, commercially raised meat and dairy, spermicides, and herbicides. The
xenoestrogens leach from the plastic food containers into the food or water.
Heat increases the amount of xenoestrogen that gets into the food or water. Use
ceramic or glass as much as possible, NEVER heat anything in a plastic
container,and use only pure, chemical free body and home care products.

BTW, if you still think soy is a superfood, think again. Apparently soy contains estrogen like substances as well. They are putting soy in almost everything these days, much of which is genetically modified. From what I have read, Asians use mostly small amounts of fermented soy like Miso, tempeh, etc. because the fermentation. Here's a site w/a short video that goes into some of this information.