hi guys welcome back to the channel i'm here again today with dr kitchen richard who is
our in-house functional medicine specialist and i'm sure that many of you recognize him
from tons of our previous videos and today we are going to be doing a series of seven videos
looking at well hormonal treatments and the first one that we're going to be doing as it is
suggested in the title obviously is testosterone for men all right kish let's get into the meat
of it what is testosterone it is a sex steroid hormone its backbone is cholesterol molecule
um is vital for men for vitality for well-being for general health and for preventing all sorts
of age-related health problems it's also very important for women but we're going
to come back to that later aren't we we are i've often thought actually that if you just told men
it's good for your penis they'll buy it is that your opinion uh so i would never say that
because i think we get some funny looks and a lot of funny comments but um let's put it this way
it's it's vital for well-being in general and there's no doubt that it's got a huge role in
genital health because as men get older and the skin of the obviously we're doing loads of skin
treatments for the head and neck but the skin of the penis becomes more atrophied it becomes
paler it becomes more wrinkly like the rest of us so testosterone is actually our secret weapon
against wrinkling in general and obviously degeneration and atrophy of the genitals can you
put that on the scrotum you can well you know what they say sex cells so other than your meat and
tea veg what are the benefits of testosterone um okay so okay apart from the obvious testosterone's
got huge far-reaching benefits across the whole body the whole the whole physiology of the body
actually from well-being mentally and cognitive function so how your brain works really um to
your heart health so it prevents heart disease it optimizes blood flow it optimizes the creation of
blood cells and it's very very important for body composition in terms of packing on lean muscle and
minimizing or optimizing body fat percentage as well and it's also vital for bones because
the other thing about testosterone is it's really three hormones in one it is testosterone it's also
dihydrotestosterone and it's also estrogen as well and all of these hormones have a very big big role
in general health estrogen as well is important for bone health so why is it three hormones in
one okay so testosterone is a dynamic hormone in the sense that it converts via different enzymes
into different hormones so for example via an enzyme called aromatase it converts into
estrogen which i know it's the female hormone but it's also very important for whip for men as well
and it also converts into dihydrotestosterone dht which is very important important
for masculinizing a man and obviously all the secondary sexual characteristics and sexual
function as well okay imagine i'm a dude what are my symptoms of low testosterone
okay so just in the same way that we know it's got loads of benefits across the you know all the body
um you might come in with different complaints so for example one of the most common ones is that
men just don't feel like how they used to in their 30s 40s 50s they don't feel youthful anymore
they have foggy thinking and just sort of like cloudy sort of fuzzy thinking almost they often
talk to me about losing their sense of ambition their drive obviously their sex drive can be
impacted and erectile function can be impacted as well another common common issue is this sort
of feeling of fatigue laziness and just a little bit of i don't know feeling a bit you know like
not having the drive to get up and go a lot of men will talk about working out in the gym
running taking exercise as they used to but they're not having the same gains that they
used to have so for example they might still be carrying around excess uh body fat particularly in
the midsection despite being in the gym you know like for an hour you know hour four times a week
it's quite interesting because i think a lot of people would say that they were just symptoms
of getting older that's right and this is this is now where we're on a bit of a paradigm shift you
know because if you look at medicine in general or health care health care in general it's been
very much a sort of a let's catch you when you've got a disease well let's catch you when you've
actually got a problem and it's almost like a disease care model rather than a healthcare model
this way of doing medicine i think is a little bit more proactive we try and prevent things
from happening at the very first sign of a suggestion of a problem so up until now we've
had that sort of slightly fire fighting way of doing things in medicine whereas this is much more
proactive aging and are there any physical signs that other people might be able to
see on somebody with low testosterone okay so on the beach you might see men that have got
loss of hair on their calves sometimes lots of hair on the chest as well sometimes the beard
could be patchy um interestingly testosterone has a role in hair growth as well so
although testosterone we're going to talk about its conversion to dht and how it can impact
on the health of the scalp testosterone has got a very interesting role in keeping healthy hair
male pattern hair loss is something that we see as well in the clinic other signs include
sort of excess fat build up around the midsection that's pretty common as we get older and as we see
a functional testosterone deficiency so maybe we would see someone who looks like this guy
so you're saying that the testosterone level is correlated to aging okay so just imagine
most of the things that we think about when we think about people getting older wrinkling sagging
uh skin tissue becoming sort of drier as well all these things that we're used to treating in clinic
okay apply that to the whole body and also then add on all the other things that we think about
you know heart disease um strokes general decline our bones becoming thinner putting on fat in areas
that we don't want it hairs growing on the body where we don't want it so all of those
things that we think as traditional aging a lot of it is rooted in a low testosterone deficiency
state so what's actually happening as we're getting older 95 of testosterone is made in
a young man from his testicles and a little bit is made from the adrenal glands now as we get
older the testicles there's the cells that produce testosterone start to decline and therefore that
sort of background production of testosterone starts to go down i've seen it happen a lot
you know a lot earlier than you would expect there have been cases of men even in their 20s
who have a testosterone deficiency but that's not so common normally i'll be seeing men in their 30s
and 40s and that's that age-related decline in testosterone that is one very well recognized
mechanism the other mechanisms are a bit more complicated first of all we are now living in
a really different time to our to our parents and our grandparents and we're constantly exposed to
environmental endocrine disruptors so these are all things that we might not even recognize
as being harmful to us so this is plastics this is insecticides pesticides um even till
receipts they've all got this plastic resin on the back of them which has an impact on
our hormonal health so what it actually does is it mimics estrogen in our bodies
and it binds very tightly to hormone receptors and that sets up another chain reaction of
creating a surge in something called sex hormone binding globulin this is a really important
protein it's like a bus it ferries school children from one school to the next where they'll play
football if we've got too many of those buses you've got no children to run around and play
football and with that analogy if we've got too much sex hormone binding globulin being created
we don't have enough testosterone or enough free testosterone available to do its job so will you
touch a tiller seat uh never again will you drink a bottled water do you know what i be honest with
you i have started to change make these small changes and i think you can't avoid these things
you know pesticides things like glyphosate um plastics they're everywhere right however
however good a job the um food industry is trying to do it's still everywhere so we've
just got to do our best i understand that you've got some terrifying stats in terms of fertility
there was a really important study in 2007 and it looked at testosterone levels of of
different aged men um across that sort of time period and what they found was that in 2002
uh the average testosterone level of a 65 year old man was 17 less than a 65 year old
man in 1987. so that's quite huge and similarly there's been similar studies to show average drop
in sperm quality um and sperm count as well so what you're saying is that there's a 17 drop in
testosterone in men who were 65 years of age from 1987 to 2004. yeah 17 different 17 think about it
that's quite a lot yeah and i think it's because we're living in a completely different world now
student loans tick tock plastics okay guys so that's it for this week we hope
that you enjoyed the video next week we're going to be talking all about how to boost
your own natural testosterone levels let us know in the comments section below if you
enjoyed the video if you have any questions don't forget to like and subscribe and do
all those things that you might want to do afterwards alright we'll see you later bye