From: Sex, Lies and Menopause:
Picture life as a Slinky lying on its side: circles connected in a spiral. Now picture the one-way arrow of time traveling the circles of loops that seem to go on forever. If we follow the arrow of time as it carries information and energy through the organism (us)—in the form of food and light—coming in from the outside, traveling through us and out again on the other end, it becomes obvious that all organisms are dissipative structures—that is structures that lose energy just living.
We use up resources over time and literally wear ourselves out doing it. The Second Law of Classical Thermodynamics describes the process of the dissipation of energy as the movement of energy away from the point of equilibrium, which in humans is about the age of twenty-six years, when human growth hormone and estrogen start to decline.76 In our individual lives, the circles or loops carrying information begin to narrow as we age and run out of hormones. We literally start to run down like an old record player unwinding, in terms of physical function. This dissipation of energy is called entropy.
Entropy is essentially an organism moving away from order to disorder.77 Any closed system, like the human body or a cell, will spontaneously move in the direction of ever-increasing entropy or disregulation as the arrow of time moves away from equilibrium. With fewer hormones in place to regu¬late and mandate order, ever-increasing disorder ensues.
The loops in the spiral of eternity get smaller and smaller as we age. Just as a dying heart slows its beat in old age, your menstrual periods get shorter and shorter and farther apart as you approach menopause because our ovaries are running out of eggs.
That's why we run out of estrogen and are no longer fertile. The eggs were the source. Without an estrogen peak in a woman's blood every month, her brain stops sending the monthly signal to ovulate, or release the egg the next month. The absence of a released or "popped" egg leaves her with¬out the progesterone that would be secreted by the egg "shell," or degrading egg sac.
It is progesterone's major job to regulate the genes that cause all of a woman's cells all over her brain and body to grow, to differentiate, or to die.94-" Progesterone is one of the premier regulatory hormones. Without it rising cyclically, the woman becomes, literally and figuratively, on the cellu¬lar level, out of control. This is the beginning of aging and, ultimately, the onset of the death of the organism that is you.
Sex hormones register directly to genes95 that flip on and off according to hormonal directives, elicited by environmental cues. Sex hormones deter¬mine which genes are expressed (turned on) or silenced (turned off) in the nucleus of every cell in the body. Estrogen, progesterone, cortisol, testos¬terone, insulin, prolactin, and melatonin reach all the way down into the nucleus of every cell in every organ in your body to hit "promoter regions" and "response elements" on genes that literally control the stuff of life.
Hormones not only cause you to think, behave, and react in ways that enhance your chances for survival, but they also cause you to go forth and multiply.96-99 Without regular ovulation, which must be stimulated by high enough levels of estrogen, and without the progesterone that follows ovulation, the regulatory genes involved in cancer, heart disease, diabetes, Alzheimer's, and autoimmunity are left "deranged," or uncontrolled.'00-107 Your particular experience of this disregulation will take whatever form your inherited genetics dictate. In other words, when your sex hormones fall off and you start to die, the disease that gets you will depend on your family's personal threshold of entropy.
Will your heart or breast or blood sugar go first?
In most of us now, our biological age doesn't really match our chronological age anymore. When we lived outside most of the time and slept when it got dark and ate what the season offered us, we were as old, in years, as the number of trips we'd taken around the sun or how many "moons" or months we had lived. But now, at thirty-five, many of us are years older inside.
Now we live in a world where it seems as if the sun never sets and we never run out of fruit (sugar). Although we have evolved to experience one mating season a year, which is one summer, our lives in the modern world are all sex all the time. When the light is long—that is, in summer—we are programmed to feel sexy because the sunlight and plentiful carbohydrates of summer increase our insulin, which provides us with extra circulating estrogen and testosterone to let us appreciate it hormonally. That's why the beach seems so sexy—it's the light, not just the bikinis.
Conversely, when the days are short and dark outside, even though we may be sitting in front of a blinking computer screen under fluorescent lights, rising melatonin lowers our body temperature a few tenths of a degree,'" which is enough to cause a shiver and yawn. Your body is trying to remind you that it's winter outside and should be winter inside—of you, too. In nature, before now, we went dormant (more sleep, no sugar, very little sex) when the temperature dropped in winter, just like the other animals and plants. That's all different now Now we turn up the heat and get a cup of coffee.
By creating endless summer, we have changed the rules of life. Since the light is long all the time in our world, it has put us—our bodies—out of rhythm with the earth, on which we evolved to survive. Everything in this life is all about timing, and we've altered what had to be a rhythm, to be a constant. There is no tempo without variation. That's why it is as much of a physical and mental problem when your menstrual periods stop as it is when your heart starts skipping beats.
It's a physical impossibility to be part of life and not be able to keep time.
This fundamental change in our environmental cues for mating and aging began in the mid-1860s. Then, in the mid-1960s, after about ten de¬cades of altered light and food in exaggerated rhythms, birth control pills were invented and took us even farther away from the beat of nature and our own bodies.
In summer, the weightless, invisible energy of the sun saturates plants and fruit, they ripen, and we eat them. Any sugar is a carbohydrate and any car¬bohydrate is just sugar. When the plants and fruits as "solid sunlight" enter the body, over time the sun's energy becomes very visible as insulating weight around our middles and backsides. In the natural world, which still has sea¬sons, we would reburn this weight, this solar "charcoal," in winter, when sum¬mer's carbohydrates were gone. But when winter never comes because we have indoor heating and electric lighting, we continue to crave the carbohy¬drates of summer and become exhausted, and sexually a little crazy.
We go to the grocery store and buy fruits we would never have seen in winter before, plus thousands of recently invented forms of sugar that would never have been available to us seventy-five years ago.
Unfortunately for us, all that nature allows is one period of high insulin a year—the three months or so of summer. Since we evolved and adapted to this rhythm, when we are exposed to heat, sugar, and light for all twelve months of the year, we naturally experience accelerated biological time. Every year for us in the modern world has four summers, because just one of our modern years is twelve months of light and heat and sugar. That's why one year today is like four years to our Stone Age bodies, because our sensors for aging register "four trips around the sun" instead of just one.
We collaterally experience accelerated aging.
The hallmarks of being old, increasing blood sugar, arthritis, macular degeneration, and so forth, are also, not coincidentally, the hallmarks of Type II diabetes. This adult onset form of diabetes is on the increase in ado¬lescents as of this writing. Human timing mechanisms read the endless summer cues literally and respond automatically.
If this behavior goes on year after year, well, you do the math.
The fact that we enjoy all this light and heat doesn't mean our biology won't respond to it in the only ancient way it can. The false cues of endless summer affect not only our appetite for food but also our appetite for sex. In our brave new world, it's always mating season. We are experiencing a forty-year mating frenzy. It's not only apparent in our cultural obsessions, but in our ovaries, "party" has become a verb, and there are only so many eggs to go around.
This sleep/sugar/survival equation is the control mechanism on how fast we age, and how fast we age determines how fast we deplete the eggs in our ovaries. As children we matured faster and began ovulating sooner than our grandmothers did. The average age of menarche at the turn of the century was seventeen, for us it was twelve, for our daughters, it's down to ten years old.
Higher insulin levels not only mean faster maturation sexually, they mean that the reproductive machinery is on overdrive. We weren't meant to ovulate twelve months a year, every year, year in and year out, from a very young age. If we should have our first period at about seventeen years old and then, in the natural world, we would be pregnant soon afterward, and then breast-feeding, we'd save a lot of eggs and be exposed to high levels of estrogen and progesterone as a bonus. Birth control pills didn't save our eggs by stopping ovulation; instead, the androgens (testosteronelike hor¬mone drugs) actually caused egg cell death, as the eggs aged at an increased rate.17-'28 Picture a carton of chicken eggs left out in the heat for a couple of months. That's where we are.
It's about not enough death of one kind of cell or another.
Life and death is a three-act play consisting of genesis, florescence, and decay—the endless cycle of birth, life, and death. Cells are born, they live, but they must die so new cells can come again. When cells don't die cyclically, we start to.
While we are young, the ups and downs of estrogen and progesterone month after month strike the beat that keeps us rocking and rolling with the stresses of life that could negatively affect our health. When the cycling rhythm of "on and off" ceases, we can no longer handle germs, fatigue, and hot or cold weather; maintain our body temperature; or control our appetites under stress. We are beginning to die. Sometimes death can happen in as little as three years, or it can take as long as an agonizing twenty or thirty.
When our hormones stop humming the tune of the Sun and the moon and start keeping the beat of an artificial environment, our internal systems— which have evolved over millennia to adapt for survival—are being driven by artificial signals. When this happens, what was the dance of life becomes a malignant pas de deux. Those of us more genetically predisposed to be light- and food-
responsive suffer first and most from the altered rhythms. But in the end, losing the beat gets us all.
Menopause, or "egglessness," causes the breakdown of the estrogen and progesterone feedback system that controls all the cell cycles in your body. Remember the narrowing Slinky? That's the real problem. As we said ear¬lier, estrogen leads to progesterone by way of released eggs, and progesterone regulates the genes that cause cells to grow, differentiate, or die. Cancer is not really about too much growth of one kind of cell or another.
It's about not enough death of one kind of cell or another.
Early menstruation, one of the other risk factors, isn't even about estro¬gen. Early menstruation, "precocious puberty,"160-161 in its scientific guise, is a function of a high-carbohydrate diet (causing high insulin, an enormous growth factor in cancer) fostering accelerated aging, hence the term precocious. In this case, they've vilified the wrong hormone again.
The biggest clue is found in the statistics showing that in our grand¬mothers' generation, breast cancer struck one woman in twenty-eight and in our mothers' generation, one in sixteen. In ours, it's one in eight or nine. In our daughters it's expected to be one in five.1634" The escalating numbers reflect the pandemic proportions of this killer of women.
A woman actually has a triad of glands—hypothalamus, pituitary, and adrenal glands (called the HPA axis)—that act in concert to read the cues in her environment. The HPA axis has marked off the years she's lived by adding up all of the summer days of her life, when she had high levels of cortisol and insulin, and coming to the conclusion that she is old enough to begin the next phase of her life.22-25
When a girl has passed enough summers, her adrenal glands, which sit on top of the kidneys, take the cue from her brain's calculations of her age in relationship to time passed and pump more testosterone faster. In our world, adrenarchy often begins as early as age seven or eight, instead of ten to twelve,26 because artificial light and food have sped up our internal clocking mechanisms, hence the surge of precocious puberty in our time. The problem is that in today's world your chronological age may not necessarily be your biological age. The first sign of adrenarche is what medical textbooks call secondary sexual characteristics—armpit and pubic hair, for example. Eventually, leg hairs get coarser, and even head hair changes.
When testosterone reaches a certain threshold, or crescendo, it con¬verts, or becomes something else. An enzyme made in your fat base, called aromatase, controls the conversion of testosterone into estrogen. That's why "baby fat" is important to normal development and why young women ath¬letes often don't menstruate when they're too thin. With no fat, they have less estrogen to build a uterine lining to start that first period.
The conversion of testosterone to estrogen is the beginning of puberty.27 At first, the system begins to turn over slowly, like an obstinate starter in a car. It takes a while for it to rev up to speed. These low-level fluctuating sex hormones make it hard for you to sleep, and you begin to stay up later and later. This behavior is your brain and body's attempt to gain weight. Just like in summer, the longer you are exposed to light in a day, the more corti¬sol you make. Circulating cortisol levels mobilize blood sugar stored in your liver and muscles.
All of the extra blood sugar raises insulin production enough, over the course of just a few days, to make you insulin-resistant enough to gain, weight for winter and to make the enzyme aromatase appear to increase estrogen.'" As we said above, aromatase from your fat base is needed to try convert more testosterone to estrogen. Your body, by gaining weight, ing to optimize that mechanism."' Staying up late enhances weight gain, and by being awake later and later, you shorten your time to produce melatonin." Melatonin is made while you sleep and blocks estrogen receptors. There would be more melatonin, naturally, in the winter, since the
days are shorter. Short, colder days mean almost no carbohydrates, so fertility would be down, too, thanks to less estrogen reception and less insulin.
Not sleeping enough means less melatonin and puts you into summer or mating mode, with estrogen receptors listening and insulin high." On the way to menopause we run through this very same scenario of increased appetite for carbohydrates and decreased ability to sleep late because this is the only template nature knows for raising estrogen levels. But without eggs in place, it doesn't work.
When enough testosterone finally converts to estrogen," the pituitary gland responds with follicle (egg) stimulating hormone (FSH). The point of increasing FSH is to ripen eggs (actually, the follicles holding the egg) The ripening eggs throw off even more estrogen. At this point in puberty, a girl will go through a few anovulatory periods, but each time estrogen will peak higher and higher, until it actually peaks high enough to make the pituitary send luteinizing hormone (LH) down to her ovary to release her first viable egg."
The key to understanding life and death rests in being mindful of nature, and we're not mindful anymore. In the world we live in, weve blurred the distinction between summer and winter and day and night.' We can barely tell what season it is, let alone when the full moon is coming or going.
But your body still reads nature very clearly.
Otherwise, the artificial triggers wouldn't play such havoc with our systems.
The light of the moon in its various phases has always controlled and "phased" the hormonal interplay of our menstrual cycles." That's why most women cycle between twenty-eight and thirty days. In our brave new world, where we are no longer governed by natural light, including the natural tim¬ing of moonlight, our fertility is not as reliable. One hundred years is not quite enough to effect extinction through infertility.
But two hundred is. We're getting close to the point of no return.
We've only really been exposed in any great way to artificial light after dark since the turn of the twentieth century. Although we've had candles and then gaslights longer, the expense and mess of those forms of light made them less ubiquitous to the masses than cheap, easy electricity.
Moonlight is really the reflected light of our sun—still shining, out of our view—on the other side of the planet at night. The moonlight at night inhibits melatonin release just like sunlight in the daytime, the lightbulb in your refrigerator, or the light from your computer screen does.38 Any light at night changes natural rhythms. It is melatonin, in turn, that controls the amount of estrogen you receive by destabilizing the estrogen receptor.39-44 When the moon is bright and melatonin is low, you can feel your estrogen, and, conversely, when the moon light is dim and melatonin is high, you can't. The reason, psychologically, that moonlight is so universally romantic is because we have evolved to feel sexy in the extra light of the moon and act on those feelings.
The program for reproduction is run by the light and food supply. Just as the summer sun makes food and hormones more available for mating, your menstrual cycle of twenty-eight days has a "fruiting" period, too, guided by the amount of moonlight your skin and closed eyelids absorb.
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