When Dr. Martin sees a trend in health care, he can’t help but ask why it’s happening. Why are we seeing so much more depression lately? And why specifically are women more susceptible to getting depression?
When it comes to hormones and mental health, Dr. Martin says you need to connect the dots. Women are more prone to depression because of hormonal imbalances, when estrogen dominates and progesterone is lacking.
Join Dr. Martin as he takes a deep dive on “horror-mones” and mental health in today’s episode!
TRANSCRIPT OF TODAY'S EPISODE
Announcer: You're listening to The Doctor Is In Podcast, brought to you by MartinClinic.com. During the episode, the doctors share a lot of information. As awesome as the info may be, it is not intended to diagnose, cure, treat, or prevent any disease. It's strictly for informational purposes.
Dr. Martin: Well, good morning everyone. Once again, welcome to another live this morning and hope you're having a great start to your day. Have you had your vitamin C yet? Guys, look, one of the things that I like to do in the way I operate, the way I think, and that's what I appreciate with our friend to this program and a friend to Martin Clinic, Dr. Mackewn, is we like connecting the dots. So when we see something like for example, depression and mental health in general, but depression, let's just talk about depression for a minute. What in the heck is going on? Why is it today we see so much more depression? Not that depression. You can read about depression in the Bible if you want. I mean it, David, King David, when you read his Psalms, I mean he went through some pretty dark times.
So depression has been around as long as we've been around. But why is it it's like on steroids today? It's gone up so much and there's social factors to that for sure. Okay? The world today is different, and I think we all, especially someone if you're in around my age with the advancements in technology and social media, who would've ever thought, but there's a price to be paid for the complexity. Our society, there's a huge price to be paid. But when I talk about connecting the dots, I'm a guy that looks at, okay, what's happened? And of course when it comes to our mental health, what has happened? Why? And then mostly the way I think is how does your body operate? Why is it that that has changed?
Now, let's connect the dots a little bit this morning when we talk about mental health. Let's connect some dots. Okay? Now, just being a woman, and I know there's blurry lines today. Things are blurry, okay? Just because I never thought in my lifetime I would ever have to discuss gender. For the sake of this program, there's only two, okay? The barnyard gets it right, but we confuse things. And anyway, I don't want to upset anybody, but all I got to say is if you are a woman, okay? If you are a woman, this is a fact. Just being a woman doubles the risk of depression. Just being a woman. And why? Why would that be?
I think women are much healthier than men overall. They are. They take care of themselves. Men are dense. Men, they don't get it. They're hardheaded. And that won't surprise you because if you've been following this program for any length of time, I'm very hard on men because we're stubborn. We don't listen. I know we call ones that don't listen, Linda, but we should give it a male name because ones that don't listen the most, men, they're stubborn. Women listen, they're much more reasonable. And I'm making a general statement, so don't get too upset with me, okay? I know there's exceptions. There's a lot of men that follow this program. I know that. Okay? And we appreciate you. But if you know me, I've been pretty consistent about that.
But why would women, just by being a woman, why were they twice as likely to get depression? I'm going to tell you why. Primarily it's called horrormones. Women are complicated. Women need balance when it comes to hormones. And so often and more often than ever in this day and age, women are out of balance, hormonally. And it starts young. Today, we live in a world dominated by estrogen, dominated by estrogen, the womanly hormone, and it's unbalanced because of its lack of progesterone. It was like an epidemic in my office. I'm not kidding you guys, young girls coming in to my office as early as eight years old with estrogen coming out. Both their ears. Shouldn't be. Way too much estrogen.
And that messes you up, hormonally, big time, ladies, big time. And it has a severe effect or a can on mental health. Estrogen dominance, a lack of progesterone. Let me give you an example to show you that I'm right, okay? I'm going to go a little bit older here, but a woman and only a woman can have a baby, okay? Women have a baby, and often they leave all their progesterone in the placenta. What keeps the placenta healthy? The baby in that sack and prevents miscarriages. The strength of the placenta depends on progesterone. So woman has baby, no more progesterone. All of it is in that placenta. Well, that's all right, because your ovaries start producing progesterone and you get your progesterone back in a short period of time, or supposed to be a short period of time, and mommy's good. Except when that progesterone doesn't come back the way it should.
And then you get postpartum blues. You know how many times I saw that? Do you know how frequent that is? Postpartum depression. Why? Horrormones. Too much estrogen, not enough progesterone. Like I tell ladies, and some men, you're too much of a woman and some men. We know that men after the age of 50 got more estrogen than their wives so often. And a man with too much estrogen don't have much testosterone. Let me tell you that. Well, when it comes to mental health, there is a classic example postpartum, okay? Classic. Horrormones, connecting the dots. And today, because we live in an estrogen dominated world, we live in a world that's dominated by estrogen today compared to progesterone, pro babies. Okay?
Okay, so let's connect the dots. One horrormones. Well, I haven't given you the whole story because there's another hormone called cortisol, and cortisol is the stress hormone, okay? It's your friend, ladies. The stress hormone cortisol is your friend until it becomes your enemy, because it's not meant to be secreted for a long period of time. And cortisol, one of the things that it does, it robs progesterone. See the problem as we connect the dots, cortisol robs progesterone. Cortisol decreases the conversion of T4 to T3 of your thyroid. Ladies, the thyroid has a big, big job to do when it comes to mental health. If your metabolism is slowing to a crawl, hormones, horrormones.
Remember, I used to test these things. I used to see it like it was no tomorrow in my office, and my practice changed 20, 25 years. Huge change. A huge paradigm shift in my practice. Two hormones, cortisol, you almost couldn't get over it. It was something that, not that I didn't know about. Of course I did. I wrote a book on chronic fatigue syndrome, and I talked about cortisol. I talked about the adrenal glands. So it wasn't because I wasn't aware of it, but now it was coming at me, left, right, and center. Women, they were dropping like flies because of cortisol messing them up. Messing up their progesterone, messing up their thyroid. And I developed a system which I called the metabolic storm. And I used to tell my lady patients, you're in a metabolic storm. And sometimes that storm was a category five, and they were so unwell and they were depressed.
Well, gee, let me tell you something just about me. I'm a big baby. Well, I'm spoiled. My wife said to me, how can you come from a family of 11 kids and be so spoiled? I guess I was spoiled, but thank God, I feel good. Okay? 99% of the time, I feel very good. I got lots of energy. I feel good by the grace of God. Look, there's no guarantees in life, but I feel good. But I was very sympathetic for someone that didn't, very sympathetic, and that's why I wrote the book on chronic fatigue syndrome. Women, they were so messed up hormonally, and nobody just about could ever tell 'em why. Ah, you're depressed. Take some pills. Okay, doc, why am I depressed? And why do these pills? They sedate me, but they don't do much else. They're not fixing the problem. But you got to look at the body holistically. You got to connect the dots.
And mental health, sure, there's relationships, there's family dynamics. Usually in depression, it's a perfect storm. But if you look at the physiology of it, if you look at the etiology, why is someone that's got some real emotional and family dynamics or whatever, and they're not depressed, and then you get severe anxiety and depression in others? Well, usually it's because there's an underlying condition, and this becomes a perfect storm. Too much estrogen, not enough progesterone. Cortisol is through the roof. That slows the thyroid to a crawl. Leaky gut, leaky brain have underlying conditions. I used to test for that. I used to see it all the time and almost invariably, I rarely ever saw an exception to this either. Insulin resistance, of course, they don't feel good.
And then they choose the wrong fuel. It gives them a little spark. Doesn't last long, but they choose crappy carbs, and they're carboholics, and they don't feel well, and they choose the wrong fuel, and their brain needs another fuel, but they're choosing the wrong one. And then they got the can't help its. And of course, they've been lied to about nutrition right from the get-go. Well your brain needs carbohydrates, if you don't have sugar, you're not going to do well, honey. We have a whole generation or two or three that bought the lie of fat makes you fat so they don't eat fat, and your body needs fat to operate properly, and it needs to be saturated. So when we connect the dots, we see that insulin is involved, and therefore food is a big, big, big factor.
I was just reading some statistics here. Let me read you a couple of them. I might've brought them to you before. You know that we talked about schizophrenia and parasites, okay? But let me give you another one on schizophrenia. If you're schizophrenic, you know someone that is, there are three times more likely to become a diabetic. There's a connection there. If you have a major depression, you are 50 to almost a hundred percent more likely to have a risk of heart attack. What's the connection with that? Bipolar. 53% more likely to have premature heart disease. Depression early in life doubles the risk of Alzheimer's. Why? Insulin. Insulin resistance. It's major factor in mental health, the brain, the energy hog.
So guys, this is me. If you look at young people today. Of course, we live in a world that's different and we're so inactive compared to the way we used to be. And I'm big on vitamin E, you guys know that and exercise. And today, kids, they're set up for depression because they don't move like they used to. And we see these children with obesity and fatty liver. Imagine kids a scourge in our society. But what happens in the liver doesn't stay in the liver. It's not Vegas. It has an effect. It has an effect on the brain. It has an effect on your mood. You got to connect the dots here. I was big on testing, probably more than anything else was insulin resistance. And today, if you send me your blood work and you've got an A1C that's above 5.4, you're in doo doo. Your brain's in deep doo doo, but nobody talks about it. They separate mental health from physical.
What did they do with mental health? Big pharma comes in and they developed SSRIs. Remember I was around when they'd come out in the seventies and the F D A and Health Canada let them bring these things to the market with a severe warning on them. I remember it like it was yesterday. These are temporary. These are meant to be taken to get you through a crisis, not beyond. I'm telling you guys, I was there when they brought these out. I was in practice, and even back then, I go, well, that's a bandaid. I know they're going after neurotransmitters and their serotonin uptake. I understand that. I understood what those medications were, but it was a bandaid. I'm not saying that they couldn't get you through a crisis, but they never fixed the problem and they were never meant even today, I know people that have been on those for 30 years. They're very addictive.
Research has shown. Summer of '22 or summer of 21. 2022, I think, right around this time in 2022, was it a year ago, two years ago, I can't remember now that these huge studies, when they finally had a look at bipolar depression and Alzheimer's. They did studies to look at the studies. Remember that? I mean, we had more podcasts come out on mental health. Was it a year ago? They were looking for love in all the wrong places where the conclusions of the studies that SSRIs were not the answer. We have more depression than ever, and Alzheimer's. All the research and all the medications that came out to treat Alzheimer's. The premise was wrong according to these studies. Studies looking at the studies.
The premise was wrong in Alzheimer's. The protein thesis really plaques in Alzheimer's and then bipolar. They said, well, it's a blood sugar problem. It's an insulin problem. It was shocking. But that's been buried. Practitioners like myself, well, holy moly, they're finally getting it. They're getting it, and that ought to have turned psychiatry on its head. It hasn't. And it's hard to change things, isn't it in society. In medicine, it's very hard to change things, okay? So that's why I aim guys at you. I want you to connect the dots. I didn't even talk about deficiencies. I would see deficiencies too when I tested them, almost invariably in mental health, low B 12, low vitamin D, and often low oil. They needed an oil change. They were very low on good oil, the long chain fatty acids of oil. Remember, when someone calls you fathead, take it as a compliment, okay? I like some of you are saying, I'm meathead. I am fathead.
Okay, guys, you know what tomorrow is, it's question and answer Friday. So get your questions in. It's not too late. Now we'll try and answer all of those tomorrow, Lord willing. Okay. Have you got your book? Sun, Steak and Steel? Thank you for making it number one. We appreciate it and thank you for your continued support. We appreciate that big time. Appreciate our audience. I'm just reading on Facebook here, 86,600 and something I believe. Facebook followers. That's incredible, guys. Getting close to a million and a half downloads of The Doctor Is In podcasts. That's you guys that do that. We appreciate that, okay? And we love you coming on live too. Okay? We know a lot of people can't, but we love having you on live. I love my live audience too. You guys are wonderful. Okay? We appreciate you very much. Okay, love you and talk to you soon.
Announcer: You've reached the end of another Doctor Is In Podcast, with your hosts, Doctor Martin Junior and Senior. Be sure to catch our next episode and thanks for listening!