ESTROGEN AND BREAST CANCER
~ What’s cause and what’s effect ~
by Harry Chrissakis Herbalist, M.H., M.T. Natural Healing
It seems odd that the role of a hormone so intimate to a woman’s body could also be a primary factor in creating a life threatening disease.
Implicated as one of the driving forces behind breast cancer, estrogen acts as both an initiator and promoter of cancer.
Please watch a short video to introduce you to the topic:
Initiation is when something causes damage to the DNA resulting in cellular mutation.
Promotion is the process that pushes a mutation through enough cycles to become a cancer cell and pushes cancer cells to divide and multiply forming tumors.
What is confusing is that estrogen is also foundational to a women’s health and longevity. So why and how have things gone so wrong!
1 Does having children make a difference?
2 Are women’s bodies making too much estrogen and or not eliminating it properly?
3 Do the herbicides and pesticides used on our food and the growth hormones used in the mass production of meat and dairy have any effect?
4 What roles do birth control pills and hormone replacement therapy have in breast cancer?
An important fact to remember about cancer is that it is our normal cells gone renegade. Cells that break away from their colonies, multiply excessively, refuse to die, hijack normal systems to feed themselves, spread to other areas and eventually overcome what was once a healthy person.
Somewhere in all of this chaos estrogen is playing its part.
Lets examine the idea of lifetime exposure to the estrogen that a women’s body normally produces.
The theory goes like this
Women used to have children much earlier and often had many.
During pregnancy and breast feeding estrogen production is way down. So having say 10 children would reduce your lifetime exposure to estrogen dramatically.
Sounds logical, but what if a women’s system was designed to have cycles up till menopause, children or not.
Dying from too many cycles says there is a flaw in the design!
If this were so, any women not in a state of almost constant pregnancy or lactation is at high risk.
The idea of estrogen exposure still holds up if it is applied in a different way.
What if it was an imbalance in menstrual cycles over decades that led to the complications favoring the development of breast cancer.
What has been considered normal in a woman’s cycle; heavy periods, passing large amounts of clotted blood, bad cramping, P.M.S., bloating, excessively tender and swollen breasts are the bodies way of saying something is wrong.
The balance between estrogen and the other sex steroids (progesterone, testosterone, D.H.E.A., etc) has been thrown off by stress, poor diet, deficiencies, and lack of exercise.
Under this condition estrogen dominates the entire cycle, pushing the body in a direction that will undermine its health.
Estrogen has a proliferate effect. It builds tissue and increases blood supply by increasing cell division and multiplication.
Without the proper checks and balances of a harmonious cycle, estrogen can over stimulate breast tissue.
This can act as a pro-cancer event in a women’s body.
Part of prevention is treating these imbalances early. Often this profile responds well to herbs, supplements and diet.
The use of synthetic hormones in the meat and diary industry and the herbicides and pesticides on fruits and vegetables are influential in modern day cancers.
Estrogen like hormones given to animals bring them up to market weight faster.
Those same hormones store themselves in the meat and through consumption end up in us.
Dairy cattle are given hormones to increase milk production. Consequently it ends up in our dairy products.
Herbicides and pesticide use in the U.S. stands at about 1 billion pounds per year.
This amounts to 5 pounds per person per year.
Both herbicides and pesticides have been shown to act like very strong forms of estrogen once inside our bodies. Stronger and more proliferative than the natural estrogens produced in a women’s body.
These foreign chemicals are difficult for our liver to break down and eliminate and are often stored in our fat tissues.
A women’s breast is 1/3 fat premenapausially and up to 2/3 fat postmenapausally.
Fat tissue in a women’s breast can store large amounts of these synthetic hormones putting the tissue under a toxic load.
Breast tissue is very sensitive and vulnerable. The only tissue more sensitive is fetal tissue.
Concentrations at this level are dangerous due to hyper- estrogenism and its harmful effect.
Adding to this load is the use of birth control pills and hormone replacement. Although the use of natural hormones can be part of an intelligent strategy to help women, birth control pills and standard hormone replacement are questionable.
Both are too strong and both contain synthetics.
In postmenopausally women adipose (fat) tissue produces estrogen from the conversion of testosterone and D.H.E.A.. by an enzyme known as aromatase.
If a womam is excessively over weight the estrogen production can be high, furthering estrogen excess.
Standard medical practice uses aromatase inhibitors. Natural medicine uses an extract of passion flowers known as Chrysin, which is very effective and without side effect.
Due to stress, poor diet, multiple deficiency, and multiple toxicities, a women’s body can develop problems breaking down and eliminating her own estrogens as well as the synthetics taken in through diet or medication.
The liver is the main player here.
Unfortunately this organ is often over taxed and under-nourished resulting in compromised
function. Estrogens that should be eliminated are instead recirculated back into the bloodstream in a reactive and damaging configuration.
Another area that estrogens can get back into the body is through the bowel.
Poor diet and poor elimination help estrogens to get reabsorbed through the walls of the large intestine, adding to estrogen overload. Both of these areas respond well to Natural medicine.
The areas covered are some of the reasons for the development and proliferation of our present breast cancer epidemic.
I hope this knowledge will be of help to you and please feel free to post comments or questions.