The answer is that, yes, you absolutely can raise testosterone levels in the body through natural supplementation. For years in the United States there has been an emphasis on what’s called scientific medicine, as if plant medicines and other natural remedies are horrible throwbacks to an unscientific, primitive past. There was a lot of excitement about pharmaceuticals when antibiotics came about, but as people started to use pharmaceuticals more, they started to experience serious side effects. A lot of pharmaceutical testosterones caused people to get cancer or have other problems with their bodies. This prompted those in search of higher testosterone to seek natural solutions. In a way, you might say herbal medicines are equivalent to organic food. People have been using herbal medicines for a long time, such as in China and India for millennia. There’s a lot of evidence that shows that plant medicines and natural supplementation can really increase your testosterone to a significant degree. You know that through diet and lifestyle you can make gains in combating low testosterone. But when is it right to start considering supplements to balance your hormones?
What’s In Our Water?
Many people don’t realize that one of the major problems of the technological world is that our water supplies are contaminated. They’re polluted with a lot of things, but a major pollutant in the water we drink is pharmaceuticals. People take these drugs and then excrete them. The excreted drugs find their way back into the water supply, coming back again and again over time. Hormone replacement for women is one of the largest categories of pharmaceuticals. We’re drinking low levels of that all the time . Epidemiologists have been finding hormone level s in male animals all around the world, irrespective of species, are being adversely affected. There are two areas of our lives in which supplements are important. One is for men in midlife who are going through andropause, because they’re going through a natural kind of shifting of their androgen levels and their androgen to estrogen ratio . Supplements can help even out that process. Secondly and perhaps more importantly, a lot of men — even young men who wouldn’t normally need androgen supplementation — are experiencing a lot of negative effects on their reproductive health, such as low libido, erectile dysfunction, and things like that. For those two groups, natural supplementation nicely dovetails with the lifestyle changes we make as part of this program to boost your body’s production of testosterone. It’s an integrated or “holistic” plan, combining supplementation with better lifestyle choices, while eliminating some causes of low testosterone as you give your body that little boost.
This can attack your low – testosterone symptoms on many different fronts, capitalizing on the positive benefits of everything available to you. The bodybuilding world is another area where people look to this type of supplementation, in the belief that this can help them get “really big.” These are guys who don’t necessarily have a testosterone problem, but who want to become a superhero version of themselves and stack on massive amounts of muscle. We’ve been conditioned for this because we know that some professional bodybuilders are skyrocketing their testosterone levels by using anabolic steroids. This is really counterproductive, because it over – stimulates the system and there are side – effects produced by that. By contrast, a good way to support bodybuilding i s through natural tonics that help the adrenal glands function more effectively. This helps the testes function stronger and more efficiently, supporting some of the gains bodybuilders seek. Testosterone and Your Body Testosterone is created through a number of steps within the body and is not an end product by itself. It can turn into estrogens rather than remaining an androgen. So, to take something that keeps the testosterone that is already in your body in the chemical pathway rather than letting it go over to estrogen, well, that’s a great thing. There are a lot of different foods and supplements that can help with this. Some natural supplements permit you to add testosterone directly to your body. This can be done by taking of pine pollen, which can directly raise testosterone because there’s so much testosterone in the pine pollen itself. The only negative effects I’ve ever heard of from someone using pine pollen as a bodybuilder are from those taking up to an ounce a day of the tincture.
That’s overdoing it, achieving effects similar to what people get from taking pharmaceutical testosterone. This can produce shrinkage in the testes and can cause the body to stop producing its own testosterone. This happens because the body has too MUCH testosterone, and thinks it doesn’t need to make any more. It simply is not healthy to take a lot of direct testosterone, even natural testosterone (as opposed to pharmaceutical testosterone) in a young male body, unless there is some compelling medical areas on to do so. As a society, we’ve become conditioned to think that we can solve everything magically by popping a pill. Yet even young guys who are training for muscle, who want to increase testosterone because they associate it with muscle growth, still may have some lifestyle changes they can make, things that are possibly reducing some link their testosterone boosting chain. It could be adrenal fatigue, staying up and partying all night long, excessive alcohol, estrogenic foods or environmental toxins, or any number of other things that are robbing them of their maximum testosterone levels. They don’t necessarily need a supplement to boost those levels back up; they just need to change these factors that are making their testosterone lower. Take a loo k at lifestyle and environmental issues that could be holding back your testosterone recovery, and the natural testosterone boosting your body can do without supplementation, before you consider taking supplements. Remember that a testosterone imbalance can trigger an estrogenic response, which makes everything worse. It’s probably not likely that you’ll do this through taking supplements, but it is at least possible. Natural testosterone supplements, because they are natural, have fewer side effects than pharmaceutical testosterone supplements. While they do have SOME side – effects, these are nonexistent compared to the pharmaceuticals.
The body knows how to recognize natural substances. When you’re looking at pine pollen, for example, the testosterone in pine pollen is absolutely identical to the testosterone in our bodies. It was here long before human beings every showed up. There’s no stress of a foreign substance in the body when this is taken. Apart from that, though, we need to consider the estrogenic pathway, which is the conversion of testosterone into estradiol. What this means is that you can take supplements to boost testosterone, or you can take supplements that prevent the conversion of testosterone into estradiol. Adaptogenics Many people who take natural testosterone supplements also take some kind of ginseng. The amazing thing about the ginseng family is that they belong to a category of plant medicines called adaptogenics . That means they help the body adapt to both internal and external stressors. Taking something like this really helps reduce the tendency toward the estrogenic pathway when working with these supplements. The Chinese have been using adaptogens for three or four thousand years; there is a huge body of evidence that supports its use. It pretty much balances us out, so we don’t get into that heavy movement to the estrogenic line, unless there’s some real strange physical condition involved.
