Food Sensitivity
We help you to find the foods that are causing issues in your body. With our quality-assured food sensitivity and food intolerance tests, analyzed in our own laboratory and supported by qualified nutritional therapists, we provide expert dietary advice for the whole family.
Our Food Sensitivity & Allergy Test measures both your IgG and IgE reactivity and provides you with clear, color-coded results that show your reaction to each ingredient/allergen.
What Is Food Sensitivity?
Food sensitivities and intolerances are unwanted reactions to certain foods. Consuming these foods can cause various symptoms including upset stomach, bloating, and other gastrointestinal problems.
Food sensitivities and intolerances are not the same as food allergies. The central difference is that true allergies are caused by an overreaction of the immune system.
With food sensitivities and intolerances, reactions are normally predictable and increase based on how much of the food is consumed. In contrast, allergic reactions can have unpredictable severity and often occur with minuscule levels of exposure or even just contact with the skin.
Some hormones are relevant to cardiovascular syndromes, including coronary artery disease. These hormones include:
- B-type natriuretic peptide (BNP): Elevated levels of BNP in the blood can indicate heart failure. BNP also works on the kidneys to excrete more salt and water, and reduces the production of hormones that can narrow blood vessels, increase heart rate, or affect fluid retention.
- Atrial natriuretic peptide (ANP): Elevated levels of ANP are found in patients with heart failure.
- N-terminal fragments of their prohormones (N-ANP and N-BNP): Elevated levels of these fragments are found in patients with heart failure.
Hormones Affect Everything that Happens in Your Body
Estrogen vs. Testosterone
Testosterone’s Role in Cardiovascular Health
Estrogen Can Be Heart-Protective
The human body, for both sexes, produces a few different kinds of estrogen. The type produced by the ovaries is called 17 beta-estradiol. This is the hormone best known for regulating the female reproductive system. Your body converts some testosterone into estradiol through an enzyme called aromatase, so it’s present in male bodies as well, just at lower levels (the testicles also produce small amounts of estradiol).
Estradiol performs numerous functions that have seemingly nothing to do with reproduction. In fact, we have estrogen receptors in systems throughout our entire bodies: in our brains, digestive systems, in skin and bones, and even in our hearts.
Estrogen Can Be Heart-Protective
Testosterone’s Role in Cardiovascular Health
Estrogen Can Be Heart-Protective
Estrogen’s role in cardiovascular health is one piece in a very complex system of factors that researchers are still just beginning to understand. What we know so far suggests that the estradiol produced by the ovaries appears to be heart-protective in a number of ways.
- It helps tissues throughout the body stay supple and flexible, and that includes blood vessels. This helps to increase blood flow.
- It helps keep blood pressure low.
- It helps keep blood triglycerides low, increases HDL cholesterol (the helpful kind), and lowers LDL cholesterol levels.
- It promotes blood clotting.
- It absorbs free radicals, particles that cause damage.
Testosterone’s Role in Cardiovascular Health
Testosterone’s Role in Cardiovascular Health
How Does Progesterone Affect Cardiovascular Health?
If estrogen (specifically estradiol) is heart-protective in a number of ways, at least until menopause, and we know that males suffer cardiovascular disease sooner and in greater numbers than females, does testosterone play a role? The verdict is still out.
We know that cardiac cells have receptors that bind to androgenic hormones like testosterone. But based on the research so far, there is not a direct link between normal levels of testosterone in males and heart disease.
On the other hand, extremes either in low testosterone levels or high doses of testosterone supplementation do seem to be linked with CVD, though more research is needed to confirm why.
How Does Progesterone Affect Cardiovascular Health?
How Does Progesterone Affect Cardiovascular Health?
We know even less about progesterone’s effect on the heart. This is mainly because there isn’t enough research on progesterone-only therapy independent of estrogen, and the studies that have been conducted are mostly on animals.
There is evidence that natural progesterone is more heart-healthy than synthetic progesterone, she adds. Synthetic tends to bind to receptors other than progesterone receptors, which makes it detrimental to health.
How Does Menopause Affect Your Risk of CVD and Heart Attack?
Women seem to have a lower risk for CVD, and are less likely to die from it, up until menopause. From that point on, the risk for CVD and heart attack rises dramatically.
Studies additionally showed that as women transition through menopause, they become higher risk for metabolic syndrome, where women experience changes in important cardiovascular risk factors including obesity, blood pressure, and diabetes, as well as cholesterol and that women experienced changes in the distribution of body fat as they transition.
Why Estrogen is Not the Only Cause of Increased CVD After Menopause
Of course, it is at menopause that the ovaries also stop producing progesterone and estradiol. (This can be a gradual process over the span of years or a shorter, more abrupt change.) Other tissues throughout the body still produce other kinds of estrogen (as they do in male bodies), and we continue converting testosterone into estradiol, though never at the same levels that the ovaries were producing.
And other types of estrogen don’t serve the exact same functions that estradiol does. So it’s not just the amount of estrogen that matters, but the type of estrogen as well.