A lot of men are walking around with high estrogen and low testosterone. The worst part? They don’t even know about it.  In this episode, I walk you through my husband's lab findings and how we are addressing his chronic low testosterone and estrogen imbalance.  Healthy hormones are critical for healthy sperm.  Tune in to learn more.

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Key Takeways

2:02 Impact of estrogen dominance on fertility

5:35 Case study: Host's husband's hormone issues

10:42 Environmental and genetic factors affecting hormones

13:15 Analyzing hormone test results

19:51 Initial results of hormone balancing protocol

22:23 Understanding root causes of hormone imbalances

Memorable Quotes

"If the male you are carrying an extra 10, 20, 30, 50, 100 pounds of weight, that is absolutely going to impact your sperm quality."

"Instead of keeping the testosterone around, when we have this aromatase enzyme upregulated, the testosterone doesn't get to hang around and it gets converted into estrogen."

"Never underestimate what happened to you as a teenager, as a baby, as a kid, the environment that you grew up in and what your parents passed on."

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That's one of the reasons why he has to work so hard. Now we have this piece of information, and I am looking at his Dutch test, and I see that his DHEA is on the low side. His testosterone, we've tested it many times. When we first met, he was probably in the three hundreds. And now the last time we tested, he was like seven hundred, which is the highest we've had it, which is fantastic. Of course, that fluctuates quite a bit. If you've had a really stressful period, it can go back down to three hundred and then it can climb back up. So the testosterone levels on the Dutch test, in terms of his metabolism are on the low side. They're not low, but they're not optimal for his age.

Pregnancy is a natural process, so if it's not happening or if it's not sticking, something is missing. After having a family member go through infertility and experiencing a miscarriage myself, I realized how little support and education women have around infertility. I want to change that.

I'm Dr. Jane Levesque. I'm a naturopathic doctor and a natural fertility expert. Tune in every Tuesday at nineam for insightful case studies, expert interviews, and practical tips on how you can optimize fertility naturally. If you've been struggling with infertility, pregnancy loss, women's health issues, or you just want to be proactive and prepare yourself for the next big chapter in your life, this show is for you.

Hey, ladies. Today I want to talk to you about estrogen dominance in males. And so what I'm going to need you to do is probably forward this podcast to your male partner and see if it resonates for him, because my husband has been struggling with estrogen dominance. And I'm cautious to say estrogen dominance because I think a lot of it is in relation to what's happening with testosterone for the males. But this is something that my husband has been struggling with, and I'm seeing a lot more men struggling with estrogen dominance.

So I have my kombucha, I grabbed my drink, and today I'm going to try not to go on too many tangents, but I want to break down what estrogen dominance looks like in males. I am coming back from vacation in Hawaii with my family, and of course, I got to see a lot of men without their shirts on. And I think it is astounding how many men have estrogen dominance or estrogen displacement without really realizing it. And as soon as I say it, I think men get offended.

Nobody wants to have. As a male, you do not want to have high estrogen levels because, you know, that's associated with muffin tops and man boobs. And everybody wants to have healthy levels of testosterone. And this is not just important for when you're going out and able to take your shirt off and feeling confident in being able to take your shirt off and not worry about what you look like. But of course, as a natural fertility expert, when we're seeing the imbalance in men in their estrogen in comparison to testosterone and what else is going on, it is impacting the quality, the quantity, and everything about the sperm.

And everything that the male does will impact his sperm quality. So if the male you are carrying an extra ten, twenty, thirty, fifty, one hundred pounds of weight, that is absolutely going to impact your sperm quality. And one of my biggest pet peeves is when males do their sperm analysis and they are told that everything is normal, but you look at the man and you look at what he looks like, how he feels, let alone his blood markers, and, you know, there's so much room for improvement. And so that sperm analysis might be fine, but it is far from optimal. And so, of course, we want to.

I'm always going to have that lens. I want my men to be healthy, and I want them to be making really good sperm. This is really, really important if you are older, so over the age of thirty five for a female. If you're over thirty five, you're a female and you're trying to get pregnant, it is more important that the male sperm is. Is really good because the egg has started to age. And so it does not have that same capacity to essentially fix any issues within the sperm. And so this is when we're seeing the increased rate of miscarriage rates and implantation issues and even issues and complications throughout the pregnancy can absolutely be tied to sperm health.

But, like speaking to my male listeners, if you are out there and I know that it's your wife's and your partners are sending you these podcasts, you do not want to have extra estrogen. I've seen my husband struggle with it, and you could see the imbalance in his system and how hard he has to work to keep the weight off and to keep it off in the right areas. And because I'm a naturopath and like, let's face it, it's so fun to be married to a nitro, a naturopath, and I'm psychotic and I test all the things on him because it pains me to see him Put a lot of effort into something and then still feel like I have to put this effort all the time, otherwise my body doesn't respond.

So I know he loves it when I talk about him. He's probably never going to listen to this podcast, so it's great. Unless it goes viral, and then for what reason? Then he will just be happy for me. I want to give you a little bit of a background for my husband. I have some screens open because we just ran the Dutch test, so the dried urine test for comprehensive hormones. I ran this test on him when we first met in, like, two thousand seventeen or maybe when we first got married. And I just remember because we were feeling stuck, we've done a bunch of detoxing, and this is just in the last six months. And I'm like, I think something's going on with his estrogen metabolism.

And, like, let me look back at this test and two thousand seventeen, and sure enough, I don't remember this in two thousand seventeen.I just graduated. And so, of course, the things that I would notice on a test are not the same as what I'm noticing now in my ability to interpret them. So essentially, I noticed in that two thousand seventeen test that he does have some issues with metabolizing estrogen. And even though it's not out of range in comparison to his testosterone, his estrogen levels are much higher. And he's metabolizing it into the bad pathway, the pathway that is associated with cancer and, like, DNA damage and oxidative stress.

And yes, men can get breast cancer, believe it or not, from this poor metabolism of estrogen. So as soon as I saw that in two thousand seventeen, I'm like, man, you're going to have to redo this test. Like, I'm sorry, pulling you all supplements for four days in preparation for this test. You know, there's no caffeine for this amount of time. Like, you're going to have to pee on these strips. You're going to do some saliva. And let's get some more information, because we've done some really good detoxing and we've done a lot of replenishing and methylation and all of this stuff, but there's still something that's missing.

So the reason that my husband has been struggling with it for so long, because we've been married now for ten years, and he has been doing all the things that I tell him to do for the last ten years, and obviously the way that he has aged has changed dramatically, but there is this missing piece. And I'm like, why does he have to work so hard. And then I went down the rabbit hole of understanding estrogen balance and aromatase.

So aromatase is an enzyme that gets upregulated when we have high levels of inflammation and then when we have high levels of adipose tissue. So this could be just visceral fat versus fat anywhere around. And for some people, this aromatase enzyme is upregulated really easily. So you don't have to have a lot of extra weight. You might have an extra ten pounds, which is the case for my husband. And that aromatase enzyme will be upregulated.

What does this aromatase enzyme do? Well, instead of keeping the testosterone around, so we make testosterone from cholesterol and then goes into pregnet alone and then dhea and it feeds down, you know, the stereogenesis pathway. When we have this aromatase enzyme upregulated, the testosterone doesn't get to hang around and it gets converted into estrogen. And so then of course that creates more chaos, especially for the males where it creates more inflammation, it creates the digestion and microbiome imbalance is also going to be connected in there. And then it upregulates their aromatase more because now you have more inflammation, you're gaining more weight, and then the testosterone that your body is trying to make is continuing to convert into estrogen.

You see how this is a vicious cycle. And so the cycle will continue to happen until obviously we put an end to it. So the reason that this has been an issue for my husband, and this is why I take such thorough history with all of my patients, is because my husband was at his heaviest when he was a teenager. So when he was fourteen, fifteen, sixteen years old, he was two hundred and twenty five pounds. He's about five, ten, five, eleven. And now he's hanging around about one seventy five, one seventy five. Now he probably still has an extra ten pounds to lose, but, but one seventy five to two hundred and twenty five, that's a fifty pound difference.

Now he's a grown man now. He has good muscle mass, good bone density. He's been working out for a really long time. We met at CrossFit. Whereas as a teenager, at fifteen years old, he didn't have the muscle structure that he has now and he didn't even have his skeleton properly developed at fifteen yen. Right. Men don't stop growing, like physically don't stop growing at twenty one and some up until twenty five. So if you think about that extra fifty pounds of weight that he was carrying as a teenager, what that would do not only to his metabolism, but genetically turn on all of these genes and the activity of the aromatase would be so much higher. And so even though he's lost a bunch of that weight, what happens is the body remembers. It's not that you lose the number of fat cells, it's the fat cells shrink. And so his fat cells still remember, for better or for worse, that when I get testosterone, I am going to make it into estrogen. And in order for us to stop that cycle, we have to be very specific in terms of what we're going to do to block the aromatase while helping him build up his testosterone.

So the most. I hope you guys are with me. Maybe you need a sip of water at this point or pause it, totally do that. But I just see this whole picture and I know my husband so well and he's dealt with mold issues because he's grown up in Seattle. He grew up on the standard American diet. And when I look at his parents profiles, they also both had mold yeast fungus issues just based on the symptoms that they're presenting now and for sure, things that they carried when the mom gave birth to him and he's third born.

So standard American diet, living in moldy environments and already having crappy genetics passed on from the sense of how to metabolize, cannabalize mold, it's not that their genes are crappy, but if you're struggling with mold, there is a genetic predisposition to and you don't deal with it and then you get pregnant. You're essentially passing on that blueprint to your child. This is why I'm such a proponent of you have to figure out your shit first before you think about bringing a baby into this world.

Because you literally are just passing on whatever you haven't figured out. Now, you don't have to completely heal and restore everything, but you need to have more good cells than bad cells, if you will. You need to have more energy in the body than not in order to do it well. And again, this is why I'm so passionate about it. Because I've just seen kids and then now I have my husband where, oh my God. If his mom or his dad did X, Y and Z, he would be in a very different place, just genetically right? And how much more it takes to shift him and to shift and to help his body process everything, basically.

So that's one of the reasons why he has to work so hard. Now we have this piece of information and I am looking at his Dutch test and I See that his DHEA is on the low side. His testosterone, we've tested it many times. When we first met, he was probably in the three hundreds. And now the last time we tested, he was like seven hundred, which is the highest we've had it, which is fantastic. Of course, that fluctuates quite a bit.

If you had a really stressful period, it can go back down to three hundred and then it can climb back up. So the testosterone levels on the Dutch test, in terms of his metabolism, are on the low side. They're not low, but they're not optimal for his age. And the same with dhea, they're not low, but they're not optimal. And this is where I'm getting very needy and greedy and picky because I know my husband well and I set a very high standard for us and our health where I'm not going to wait for that dial to go low to start doing something about it.

And then I took down the test and I see where is he getting stuck and what's going on? He had some hair loss that we were dealing with as well. And I was like, Maybe it's the five alpha reductase pathway. So his androgens are being shuttled in a different way and that's what's causing the male pattern baldness, which we actually got ahead of, by the way. And I haven't recorded on it, but, like, his hair has grown in really beautifully over the last six months. His five alpha reductase is really low, so he would not benefit from five alpha reductase blockers. Right.

And this is why I test instead of giving him something, hoping that it's going to work. So his five alpha reductase was not the problem. And then when I look at this estrogen pathway, all of his estrogens, estrone and estradiol, not estriol, I like. So estriol is very uncommon for men to be high anyways, I mean, sometimes. But his estrone and estradiol are elevated, which are both very much related to the aromatase enzyme.

So that aromatase is pushing the androsten dion and the testosterone that he's making into estrogen. And so instead of the testosterone hanging around, it's going into estrogen. So it's not that he's not making testosterone, and if I try to feed him more cholesterol or DHEA without addressing the aromatase, it's just going to feed into the estrogen pathway. I want you guys to hear this. If I would just give him dhea, which I've done before and that's why it didn't work. If I just give him DHEA but do not address the issue with the aromatase, he will continue to feed that testosterone that he makes from the fresh DHEA that I give him into estrogen.

And so instead, what we're doing this time, and it's only been a month, so I'm excited to see what the next couple of months. Remember hormones, you're going to take at least three months to see the difference. Like a profound change, if you will. This time, what we're doing is I'm still giving him some DHEA because he does need it and it will help to feed into the energy pathway and into the production of testosterone. But this time I'm being very aggressive with aromatase inhibiting things and I'm going to talk to you about what I'm doing there.

And then I'm being very aggressive in helping his body clear excess estrogen. We need to help the body clear the excess estrogen so then. And block the production of it from testosterone so then he has a boost in testosterone, which for men feel like motivation, energy, muscle mass, focus, libido. When they have that, it's a lot easier to then keep going versus I'm tired, I feel like foggy. I am. There's low motivation, there's low libido. I'm craving chips or I'm craving sugar because I'm tired.

And you see how it spirals. And so if I can get him to spiral upwards, it generally then tends. Everything tends to work out. So for estrogen, because I have a lot of testing on him, this is what I feel comfortable doing with him. And I am going to retest in four months. Obviously, we're also just going to take a look at his symptoms and see what's going on. For his estrogen, I am giving him some calcium D glucarate. We have done stool analysis and his calcium deglucorate was never elevated, but it's just a little bit high for a male. And so again, it's just a little bit high.

But now I feel comfortable giving him the prescription that I'm giving him because I've seen this test as well. This is a. Like, if you missed that, it's Dutch precision analytical dried urine test for comprehensive hormones. So I am giving him some calcium deglucorate to essentially help break down of estrogen and making sure that he's not recycling it. And I am actually feeding him some dim because based on the way that he is metabolizing. He could use some help in the phase one of detox of estrogen. Now, you never just support phase one. You have to start from phase three, which is how we're getting rid of it. And then phase two, which is liver, the glucuronidation. That's where the calcium deglucorate comes in. And then the dim does the phase one. So I'm giving him a little bit of dim. I'm giving him a lot more of calcium D glucarate.

And then we've already been doing a lot of drainage support, energy support, mitochondrial support, methylation support. All of that stuff has already been kicking in. We're just kind of putting finishing touches on his protocol. I did add some Molybden as well, which is actually really important for sulfur and clearing sulfur pathways. Pathways, which is the way that the body detoxes estrogen and that. And then he's doing some flax seeds. We are always doing cruciferous veggies, you know, magnesium, electrolytes, all that kind of stuff to just help metabolize and break down estrogen.

What I'm doing for the aromatase inhibiting, and I just chose to do two things. We've already done a fairly good dose of zinc, but I actually just bumped up his dose of zinc. And I know this because I've tested his methylation and I work with, you know, my mentor, Dr. Leah Hechman, where she's kind of opened up my eyes where you can have somebody on thirty milligrams of zinc, but if their genetics and the way that their methylation works and the way that they're breaking down or maybe they're stressed that they're under. They actually need ninety milligrams of zinc or one hundred and twenty milligrams of zinc a day.

And so it just opened up my eyes to like, oh, my God, I'm giving the right thing. I'm just not giving enough of it. And I've been doing this over the last year where he was probably in about sixty milligrams. And I just bumped him up to one hundred milligrams a day to help with the aromatase inhibition. So that's really. Zinc is really important. And then green tea extract. So ECGC, we're doing it in the morning and in mid afternoon. I did get him a decaffeinated one. He's not sensitive to caffeine, but that's the one that I like. And they have it. And that is a really Powerful blocker of aromatase as well, and it will give energy. It's also an antioxidant and it also does help with some micro.

My microbiome balances like, helps to feed Akkermansia, which is a really important bug for inflammation and mucosal lining and just a healthy gut microbiome. And like I said, I have him on a bunch of stuff to support methylation. So I don't want you to think that this is the only thing that I'm doing. He is taking amino acids at nighttime to help him sleep, and he's doing some tauri and other amino acids, carnitine to help with energy production and B vitamins and, you know, beautiful drainage support, curcumin, all of this stuff. Like I said, I know him probably the most just because I've done so much testing and I literally live with him and I know how his system and body responds to things. But this is what we're doing. I will keep you updated.

In terms of the progress so far within the first two weeks, the biggest thing that he noticed is for sure, more energy, more libido. Like, right off the bat, it was like, DHEA does wonders for him. I did put him just on twenty five milligrams of DHEA because I feel comfortable doing that because I'm blocking the aromatase and because I'm helping clear the estrogen. But, like, his libido noticeably went up and then. And it's funny because it's one of those things where you don't feel like the libido is an issue until it's more. And then you're like, oh, this is where your libido should be. So libido went up, energy went up, and he actually finally started to lose weight.

So every time he tries to lose weight, if it's just ten pounds, he has to do a lot. I mean, a lot. Like, he can't. He can't slip anywhere. As soon as he slips, the body just gains weight. And that's where I'm like, that's not right. That's not the way that it should. Like, you should be able to bounce, you know, a weekend or whatever, a meal out and not have to worry about every little thing. So the energy is going up and then the libido is up and then the weight. So he noticed. We came back from Hawaii and obviously we, like, had ice cream every night.

But, like, we had good meals and we didn't really overeat, but we didn't really watch what we ate. Meaning, like, we don't have ice cream every night when we're at home. I came back five pounds heavier. He came back the same weight, and then that as he left, which is, I think, says a lot for going on vacation. And then, like, the adjustment period, for sure, there's some more inflammation that you're holding into. But, like, five days later, he's like, oh, this is the lowest I've hit in the last two months, despite the fact that two months before, I was trying to lose weight and I couldn't hit this one seventy five mark or whatever.

So I can already see that the body is losing inflammation and there's more energy in the system. This is only two weeks on supplements, okay? So I want to make sure you guys understand that this isn't after three months. After three months, I will tell you what happens. But two weeks, this is really great progress. And so we are just going to keep doing it and watching and seeing how his body responds. But I'm excited to unveil this kind of new piece of the puzzle. And what I will say is, never underestimate what happened to you. And as a teenager, as a baby, as a kid, the environment that you grew up in and what your parents passed on. I don't say this from a place of blaming. Like, there's a lot of stuff that my parents passed on, but, like, I never hold anything against them because it's like, I didn't even know this until a year ago. How are they supposed to know this, you know? Or until five years ago, whatever. So please, please, please don't look at this as a place where you're blaming your parents more from a understanding.

I'm like, why is he struggling so much? And then when I put these pieces together, I was like, oh, my God, you were two hundred and twenty five at fifteen , which is basically as if he was, like, five now. That's crazy. Of course you would have high levels of inflammation and this aromatase enzyme be inhibited. And then I know that you have some mold strains that are estrogenic, which means they create hormone chaos for him. And so, yes, we're working on getting rid of the mold, and we've absolutely gotten rid of a bunch. But we also have to help his body process this extra estrogen and block it. So we're, like, reteaching the body of how to manage testosterone and what it's like to be with testosterone instead of reverting it back, you know, instead of converting it into estrogen.

So I hope you guys find it helpful, please send it to your male partners. I think they'll find it fascinating, especially if your dude is data driven, where my guy, like, I do not give him anything until I show him results. Because if I show him this and I'm like, look, obviously he doesn't have any issues taking things now, but if I show him and I go, you have high estrogen. Like, we need to deal with this. It's like, yep, what do I need to do? Tell me. I'll take all this. Because my protocols for him are not exactly simple, where it's like, you're going to take these five things in the morning and then these two things throughout the day and then this in the evening.

And I know it's a lot, but if I can truly play and see how fast I can make it go, I'm gonna give him everything. And then like, almost watch it and remind him. And I have random stuff on his desk so then he can. And I put little labels on it. One cap. Take one cap right before you go to the gym. And so then he's like, okay, take a cap before I go to the gym. I do really try to set him up for success.And like I said, if your dude is is data driven, nothing makes him more motivated than seeing higher estrogen levels and lower testosterone levels. I will just leave it at that.

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