i had some questions about a confusion relating to high cortisol and low cortisol how do you truly
know if you have one problem versus another this is a lot of confusion even if you get
a 24 hour saliva cortisol test and it does show a problem your symptoms might not match a classical
high cortisol situation or even a low cortisol situation because sometimes the symptoms are
mixed between both of these so if we take a look at the civil collection of medical
illustrations volume 4 endocrine system by frank netter md we get the section on
high cortisol the classic syndrome being Cushing's syndrome where you have this
huge waste thin leg muscles round face you have insomnia sometimes blood sugar issues
atrophy in your glutumas maximus that's your butt muscle acne allergy low vitamin d
excessive thinking etc eventual osteoporosis now if we compare these symptoms over here with
this condition which is low cortisol it's called addison's disease very very different
in this condition you pretty much have no more cortisol and you're very thin you're
tan you have a vitiligo you have a very poor immune system you are craving salt
all day long because you're losing tons of salt and you're completely burned out so
it's very confusing because some people have symptoms of high cortisol and some people have
symptoms of low so i wanted to clarify what's going on if we take a look at cushing's syndrome
it's actually very very rare three out of a million people get this condition every single
year if we take a look at addison's disease that's also very rare one out of 10,000 people
actually get addison's disease each year so what is going on here just doesn't make sense
well the next thing i'm going to tell you will help you understand what's really going on there's
a subclinical problem with cortisol which means it may not show up on a blood test it may not show up
on a saliva test until it's very very advanced because you don't just go from here to a disease
overnight it gradually happens over a period of time so it's my belief that a lot of people are
stuck in this subclinical area over here it's very very hard to detect on certain testing
and here's what's happening the receptor for cortisol becomes downgraded in other words you
develop something called cortisol resistance now the concept is very similar to insulin resistance
in which you have this high level of a certain hormone which causes the receptor on the other
side to start to become downgraded or blocked to the point where this receptor does not receive
that hormone as well as it did in the past now there is quite a bit of research on this i'm
going to put some links down below now you're probably not going to find a lot of data if you
do research on cortisol resistance but you will find it under glucocorticoid resistance because
this is just another name for cortisol so what happens when you have this glucocoracoid
resistance you have a situation where your adrenals are pumping out a lot of cortisol
that cortisol is ineffective it's not working so you have both symptoms of high cortisol
and low cortisol i mean think about it cortisol is supposed to suppress
the immune system and reduce inflammation but why then do so many people with high cortisol
have all these inflammatory conditions so what happens over time is you get this massive
confusion in the endocrine system uh this is the hypothalamus right here in the pituitary
that's supposed to be sending signals down to the adrenal so if this cortisol being pumped out
of the adrenals for whatever reason becomes inhibited or blocked as in this right here
then the communication doesn't get back to the pituitary or the hypothalamus
so if there's no turn off switch then you just get an on switch that's permanently on causing the
adrenals to pump out a lot of cortisol now what is the best thing to do for the situation well
what you need to do is you need to do whatever you can to inhibit the trigger to cortisol
dropping stress you need to isolate where the stress is coming from and do whatever you can to
minimize the stress i have a lot of data on this i'm going to put some links down below there's
things that you can do from an exercise standpoint change your eating nutrients and even a manual
type massage technique that you can do to help reduce stress now from a nutritional standpoint
if we take a look at what we're dealing with we're dealing with the glucocorticoid
receptor problem now i want to bring up a new word for you that potentially could be misunderstood
it's called agonist okay an agonist is the opposite of an antagonist
so an agonist is something that stimulates something it increases something now there are
certain drugs that they're researching right now that are glucocorticoid receptor agonists and the
reason why they're coming up with these is they're trying to find a treatment for this problem
that doesn't have too many complications because if you think about it if you have a glucocorticoid
resistance okay so in other words that that hormone is not working then logically it would
make sense to give the person more of this hormone since it's blocked right but the problem with that
is it makes things a lot worse so if you were to give someone like prednisone with this condition
they might feel a little bit better temporarily but they're going to gain a lot of weight they're
going to have blood sugar issues and so there's certain drugs they're trying to come up with that
acts like prednisone which is a synthetic type of cortisol without the side effects
however if you know anything about me i'm going to go more on the natural route i'm going to look for
plant or herbal or vitamin type versions of this right here and one research paper describing a
natural corticoid receptor and agonist is Panax ginseng so i put a link down below and this may
help in this condition however honestly i don't think this is going to do much unless the actual
root cause of your stress is greatly reduced so in summary if you're confused whether you have high
cortisol or low cortisol the most important thing you need to be focusing on is getting to the root
of your stress and reducing stress as much as possible before you go if you have a question
about a product or you're new to keto and you want to know how to begin keto or you're on keto and
you need a debug because it's not going as smooth i have a keto consultant standing by to help you
this is just for the people in the us hopefully in the future we'll be able to answer everyone's call
but i put the number down below so you can call and get some help