Is Gluten Causing Your Hormonal Imbalance?

What Do Fatigue, Overweight, PMS, etc All Have in Common?

Fatigue is the most common symptom plaguing most patients. Trouble sleeping, weight issues, PMS, headaches, fertility or libido issues, and achy joints are also very common and can all be affected by hormonal imbalance that continues after gluten has been removed from the diet in the gluten intolerant individual.  The trouble with trying to resolve such symptoms is that the root cause can vary. If every patient with fatigue had a thyroid problem, it would be easy to correct because we would know exactly where to look.

If you’re gluten intolerant you may have suffered from some of the complaints listed above prior to discovering your celiac disease or gluten sensitivity. But perhaps now, despite your gluten-free diet, some of these same symptoms continue to plague you.  If so, read on.

Do You Have Any of These Symptoms?

• Fatigue
• Trouble sleeping
• Weight trouble
• PMS
• Migraines
• Infertility or miscarriage
• Achy joints or muscles
• Allergies
• Light headedness
• Frequent illness, weak immune system
• Asthma

While the list is long, believe it or not, there is a common cause to all of them.  I’m not saying it’s the only cause, but I want to discusswhy someone can be found gluten intolerant, successfully institute a gluten-free diet, and yet continue to suffer from many of the above symptoms.

The Problem May Be Your Stress Gland

There is a gland in your body, of which you have two, called the adrenal glands. They sit atop each of your kidneys and they are the master of multi-tasking! If I asked you if one part of your body was responsible for:

• Providing you with strong energy
• Maintaining a healthy weight, 
• Keeping your immune system strong,
• Decreasing inflammation
• Maintaining stable mood, 
• Anti-aging, 
• Controlling sleep quality, 
• Balancing hormones, 
• Handling allergies, and more… 

 What would you say?

You might think to yourself that if there was one body part responsible for all those things then you better start treating it well! You’d be very right in your analysis.

As you’ve probably guessed the aforementioned adrenal glands are responsible for handling that very long job list and, unfortunately, those very same adrenal glands tend to be quite stressed in the gluten intolerant individual.

Gluten Intolerance Can Damage Your Stress Glands

Why? Because adrenal glands are sensitive to, and get very stressed with, unstable blood sugar. Stable blood sugar comes from eating healthy food that your body finds nourishing. As you well know if you’re gluten intolerant, gluten, for you, is a poison. Therefore years of eating gluten created unstable blood sugar and thereby put a tremendous strain on your adrenal glands.

Due to the many, many jobs that the adrenal glands are responsible for, simply removing gluten as a stressor is typically insufficient to restore them to normal function. They need to be ‘re-set’ with a nutritional and dietary program, to restore their good health. This explains why many who are gluten intolerant continue to suffer with the symptoms mentioned above.

Therefore, even if your gluten intolerance has been diagnosed and you’ve instituted a strict gluten-free diet, if you haven’t also found a clinician who understands and specializes in restoring health and function to the adrenal glands, you may very well continue to suffer with the symptoms associated with adrenal stress.

Treatment is Easy and Drug-Free

The good news is that the treatment to normalize adrenal function is not at all difficult.Here at the Clinical Nutrition department of HealthNOW we utilize a natural program that involves no dangerous drugs or surgery. There are lab tests to determine the level of adrenal malfunction occurring, and these are called functional specialized lab tests. They differ from traditional adrenal lab tests that only look for disease, not malfunction. I mention this because I want to ensure that there is no confusion created when I mention adrenal function lab testing. We are measuring 'function' and therefore are looking for signs of malfunction rather than only looking for disease, which in the case of adrenal glands is quite rare, although dangerous.

If you ask your traditional medical doctor to test for adrenal malfunction he or she will test for adrenal disease – once again a rare occurrence – and will likely pronounce your adrenal glands ‘fine’ because they are not diseased. While adrenal gland disease is rare, adrenal gland malfunction is extremely common. It is this latter condition that we are speaking of here.

This is an important distinction because I want to make sure that if you are suffering from adrenal fatigue that you aren’t given a ‘clean bill of health’ incorrectly. Unfortunately this happens often. If it took you a while to receive a diagnosis of gluten intolerance then you understand this phenomenon. Sadly this area of health is fraught with misunderstanding and it is the patient who ultimately suffers, unnecessarily.

We Can Help!

If you need any help finding a clinician to help you, feel free to contact me. Normalizing adrenal function is one of our areas of expertise and patients visit us from across the country as well as internationally at our destination clinic to receive this treatment. If we cannot find a clinician close to you that specializes in this then we are more than happy to see you here. The good news is that the treatment is natural and inexpensive.

Visit us at www.RootCauseMedicalClinic.com. If you have questions or need any help, I’m here for you! Call 408-733-0400.

I look forward to hearing from you.

To your good health,

Dr Vikki Petersen, DC, CCN, CFMP


IFM Certified Practitioner

Founder of Root Cause Medical Clinic
Co-author of “The Gluten Effect”

Author of the eBook: “Gluten Intolerance – What You Don’t Know May Be Killing You!”

Gluten Intolerance Can Cause PMS

Your Stress Gland Balances Your Hormones

The part of the body responsible for helping you deal with stress, also creates energy, maintains an ideal weight and balances mood and hormones. It’s called your adrenal gland(s) – you have two of them and they sit on top of each kidney.

Adrenal fatigue is one of the secondary effects that gluten intolerance creates, which is why it can relate to PMS. In our stressful world, it is not surprising to learn that adrenal fatigue is all but epidemic. Normalizing adrenal function is an integral part of the job of clinical nutritionists.

 

Adrenal Stress Causes Many Hormonal Problems

When the adrenal glands become exhausted from chronic stress, they cannot keep up with all the demands made upon them. This can then lead to such symptoms as fatigue, depression, loss of libido and hormonal imbalance symptoms such as PMS, migraines, heavy bleeding and infertility, to name a few.

Gluten Intolerance Adds to the Problem

Gluten intolerance, be it from celiac disease or gluten sensitivity is responsible for putting stress on the adrenal glands in two ways:

1.  Inflammation is created in a gluten sensitive individual’s digestive tract. If the inflammatory reaction happened only occasionally it wouldn’t be an issue. But in patients with gluten sensitivity this inflammation occurs chronically, every time they eat any gluten.                                                                                                                                               This continued inflammation acts as a chronic strain on the adrenals glands, thwarting their ability to perform all their functions. One of those is to make the precursor hormones that in turn make the sex hormones, both male and femaile.These hormones need to be maintained in proper balance to prevent such conditions as PMS, anxiety and infertility.
2.  Nutrient deficiencies can occur due to the damage created from inflammation, as mentioned above, as well as from the tissue destruction that occurs in the small intestine from celiac disease. Important nutrients such as B vitamins, calcium and iron, to name but a few, can become deficient. The lack of these nutrients has been mentioned in scientific literature as a cause of hormonal imbalance in women and mean alike, all as a result of gluten intolerance.

What is important to realize is that when your body has been under chronic stress it is forced to make a decision: It can get you through the day, putting one foot in front of the other, or it can make adequate amounts of sex hormones. It is designed to perform both activities, but it can’t because it’s too overwhelmed by stress. 

Is Your Body Low in Progesterone?

When put in this situation, your body decides that the most pro-survival thing to do is to get you through the day, to the detriment of making sex hormones. The insufficient production of hormones does not occur evenly across the board however and progesterone tends to fall more dramatically than does estrogen resulting in a net estrogen dominance.

The symptoms of estrogen dominance are such things as cramping, heavy bleeding, menstrual irregularity, endometriosis, polycystic ovaries, fibrocystic breasts, migraines and PMS.

A major symptom of progesterone deficiency is infertility and miscarriage, along with depression and anxiety.

There is an Easy Solution!

The existence of gluten intolerance and its resultant stress upon the adrenal glands is common, but rarely diagnosed. Millions of women therefore suffer with symptoms that are correctable with often something as simple as diet, nutrition and lifestyle changes. The exciting aspect of treating both gluten sensitivity and adrenal exhaustion is that neither one requires drugs or surgery. The treatment is completely natural.

There are lab tests available that identify gluten intolerance as well as adrenal fatigue. If you would like assistance in this area I am happy to offer you a free health analysis - call 408-733-0400. We are here to help!  

Visit us at www.RootCauseMedicalClinic.com. If you have questions or need any help, I’m here for you! Call 408-733-0400.

I look forward to hearing from you.

To your good health,

Dr Vikki Petersen, DC, CCN, CFMP


IFM Certified Practitioner

Founder of Root Cause Medical Clinic
Co-author of “The Gluten Effect”

Author of the eBook: “Gluten Intolerance – What You Don’t Know May Be Killing You!”

Permission is granted to re-post this article in its entirety with credit to Dr Vikki Petersen & HealthNOW Medical Center and a clickable link back to this page. Dr Vikki Petersen, DC, CCN is founder of HealthNOW Medical Center and the author of “The Gluten Effect” and eBook: “Gluten Intolerance – What you don’t know may be killing you”.  She has been featured in national magazines, international medical journals and is a frequent headlined speaker.

Is Gluten Sensitivity the Cause of PMS?

A reader wrote the following comment to an earlier blog post entitled, “Gluten and PMS, What is the Association?” It was so compelling that I have decided to write a post about it.

Here is her question:

I've been getting terrible PMS for about 7 years. Sometimes it would last 2 weeks. Recently it changed to 3 weeks and I've developed a massive fibroid even though I am slim. I read about the gluten connection to estrogen dominance and cut-out all gluten a month ago, however my PMS has not improved, in fact I think it's worse. Any suggestions would be appreciated. Kitty

First of all I’d like to say that PMS is never normal.  Common it may be, but “normal”, no.  And it is absolutely ridiculous that Kitty has had to put up with PMS for 2 and 3 weeks per month!  That is between 50 and 75% of her life – truly unnecessary considering it’s able to be fixed, naturally. I underscore “naturally” because too often such women are put on the birth control pill to “control” their symptoms.  I am opposed to this as it doesn’t get to the root cause of the problem but merely masks the issue while in fact the real problem worsens.  Other doctors may recommend inducing a short term “menopause” with drugs to give the fibroid a chance to shrink.  I don’t recommend this approach either.

When making a dietary or lifestyle change that you hope will result in a favorable change in your hormones, you must be patient. It takes at least 3 months to alter hormonal balance.  There are some lucky individuals who notice changes sooner but typically you need to give it 3 months.

Kitty also tells us that she has a “massive fibroid”.  We don’t know her age but regardless, a large fibroid speaks strongly of hormonal imbalance. Typically symptoms such as PMS, anxiety, depression, heavy periods, migraines, fibroids and fibrocystic breasts all can be interpreted as a likely deficiency of progesterone in relationship to estrogen. Changing PMS with the profile of a concomitant large fibroid is definitely not something that will occur in a month.

Progesterone is a common deficiency seen in women in this country of all ages.  Progesterone, when normalized, can almost “magically” handle the above mentioned symptoms. An added bonus is that progesterone is a glucose tolerance factor.  When its levels are normalized, sugar cravings abate and unstable blood sugar is no longer an issue. This can be a huge relief to someone being “ruled” by sugar cravings and who is unable even to eat fruit or any complex grains without getting the cravings started.

The good news is that the solution to these symptoms is not difficult. We work with women frequently in this area with excellent success.  The “fix” is often a multi-pronged one, meaning that it entails more than one step.  Let’s look at the possible steps below:

1. First is always food and Kitty has made a great start eliminating gluten.  Gluten is known to offset hormonal balance, whether it's from celiac disease or gluten sensitivity. Kitty doesn’t mention if after 30 days she has noticed any improvement in her general health from removing gluten, which is something I would very much like to know. Dairy products are also a big no-no when a woman is expressing estrogen dominant symptoms. Unfortunately our cows are fed a lot of hormones (as is our beef) and that can definitely contribute to estrogen dominance.  So in addition to diagnosing any food intolerances, all sources of exogenous [coming from the outside] hormones must be removed.
2.  Adrenal gland balance.  We don’t know much about Kitty’s health history but it would be important to know about her stress load, both past and present, sleep habits, caffeine consumption, any drugs she takes, etc.  The adrenal gland is the stress gland and when it is overstressed it will make more stress hormones and less progesterone.  This is a major cause of hormonal imbalance in this country. A poor diet and food sensitivities will also stress the adrenal glands which is why step #1 is always done first. Fortunately normalizing adrenal function is not difficult nor does it involve any drugs or surgery.
3. Natural, bio-identical hormones. Once again there are many questions about Kitty’s health that are unknown to us, but it would be important, considering her large fibroid, to have some blood tests for hormonal levels.  A woman who typically has a 28 day cycle would get a blood test on day 21 of her cycle.  Her progesterone, total estrogen, DHEA and testosterone would all be measured. With Kitty’s large fibroid and horrific PMS, would could likely make the assumption of a low progesterone level, but that doesn’t tell us the rest of the values, which are equally important to know.  Depending on the woman’s age, some bio-identical hormones could be prescribed.  There’s also a substance made from broccoli that has a strong estrogen lowering effect in women whose estrogen is excessive.  But without a lab test this is impossible to determine.
4. Liver and digestive function. The top 3 points listed above are the major ones.  But it is important to ensure that the liver and digestive organs are functioning normally to ensure that hormones are being excreted effectively.  As an example, if you did all the points mentioned but the woman had constipation, you wouldn’t get the desired results.  The slow moving colon is allowing hormones that should be excreted to re conjugate and create disruption.

Personally I used to suffer from extreme PMS and migraines related to hormonal imbalance.  I also suffered from terrible menstrual cramps with my period.  When I added all those days together is was about 1/3 of my life.  Fortunately I handled the problem while still in my 20s and have had no issues since. So when I hear of such stories as Kitty’s my heart goes out to her.  But more importantly I know how to solve such problems so I am, of course, delighted to help anyone I can.

Please do know that such symptoms are never normal and truly do not need to be put up with.

I hope you find this helpful and let me know how I can be of any assistance.Our destination clinic treats patients from across the country and internationally. You don't need to live local to us to receive help. And if you would like to improve your health, consider calling us for a free health analysis - call 408-733-0400.

Visit us at www.RootCauseMedicalClinic.com. If you have questions or need any help, I’m here for you! Call 408-733-0400.

I look forward to hearing from you.

To your good health,

Dr Vikki Petersen, DC, CCN, CFMP


IFM Certified Practitioner

Founder of Root Cause Medical Clinic
Co-author of “The Gluten Effect”

Author of the eBook: “Gluten Intolerance – What You Don’t Know May Be Killing You!”