hi everyone dr samina mitha here naturopathic doctor and today i'm talking about botanical
herbs that can help to reduce testosterone that we've seen in the research so the first
herb i really want to talk about is licorice licorice was actually found in a 200 2004 study
um to significantly reduce testosterone levels in healthy women after one month of treatment
the study actually showed that licorice may exert anti-androgenic which basically means testosterone
actions through blocking a specific enzyme called 17 hydroxy steroid dehydrogenase which basically
converts androstenedione to testosterone it also helps to um exert anti-androgenic benefits
to another enzyme that converts 17 hydroxy progesterone to androsyndion so basically
what it's doing is it it's helping to block some of these enzymes that convert the precursors
that we know that end up becoming testosterone so ultimately it helps to reduce testosterone levels
there's a specific component in licorice called glycerizin and this actually helps
to be that anti-androgenic property of licorice which is really interesting it has been shown to
reduce androgenic or high testosterone like symptoms in women with pcos so when we're
talking about high testosterone like symptoms we're talking about hair loss excessive hair
growth hersheytusm and acne so that's licorice that's number one number two is reishi mushroom
there was actually a study um with larishi mushroom that actually found that it reduced
levels of five alpha reductase this is an enzyme that converts testosterone to our most potent
testosterone called dht or dihydrotestosterone and we know that higher levels of dht can
get into you know the skin or the sebum in the hair and cause inflammation and cause
things like acne hair loss and excessive hair growth so really important is reishi mushroom
the third one is white peony and actually we know that i'm putting it into a tincture form
so this is a liquid form of the herb with white or so sorry with licorice so white peony with
licorice at a one one-to-one ratio has been shown to help reduce testosterone as well
in this specific study it was it was an older study it was in 1991 a chinese medicine
journal actually described the component of white peony this compound that
actually inhibited the production of testosterone and promoted aromatase activity this compound is
piono fluorine and aromatase is actually an enzyme that converts testosterone to estrogen
so it actually helps us to reduce the production of testosterone and increase the production of
estrogen which we commonly see is the biggest issue when it comes to pcos where we have too much
testosterone and not enough production of estrogen in the hormone pathway what's so interesting
is testosterone actually gets converted into estrogen so that's the downstream effect of where
testosterone will end up or it'll get converted into dht that dihydrotestosterone so what's
happening in pcos is that that conversion is being blocked so we're not getting enough estrogen
or and mostly because it's probably getting created into more dht dihydrotestosterone
the third botanical or compound is actually green tea so green tea has also been shown to
have important anti-anti-androgen effects because it contains something called
egcg which actually inhibits the same enzyme as we just spoke about five alpha reductase
um that reishi mushroom actually inhibited um so it's really important um to kind of look and see
which herbs are actually um what their action is to actually help reduce that dihydrotestosterone
so converting testosterone to dht we use five alpha reductase so we're finding herbs in the
research that actually help to inhibit this enzyme specifically all right and last but not least
is saw palmetto so salpa metal was a very popular i would say herb in pcos lots of talk about it
and basically it does the exact same thing it's a five alpha reductase
inhibitor and so it's going to help decrease that production of dht
the one thing i want to keep it make sure that you keep in mind is oftentimes on lab work we may not
see higher levels of testosterone but if you have clinical signs and symptoms of high testosterone
such as acne or cystic acne hersheitism so excessive hair growth especially on the face
um the chin the jawline the chest the abdomen arms legs um that's a sign of hersheytism and then also
hair loss and typically hair loss can be like overall thinning it can kind of be in this frontal
area as well and so it's really important to get assessed for clinical signs and symptoms of high
testosterone but then also testing testosterone in your blood so we went over a few herbs today
based on the research in terms of their ability to reduce testosterone i'm just going to review
them for you so licorice white peony reishi mushroom green tea and saupa meadow if you
have any questions at all please drop them in the comments below and i'll see you in the next one