April 11, 2024 • 48 mins
We think of estrogen and testosterone as the female and male sex hormones and they may seem kind of gross (is that just Josh?), but that simple understanding is way off. A magical biochemical dance between the two creates everything from bones to moods.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to stuff you should know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's
Chuck and Jerry's here too, back again on the trip
of a lifetime and it's the Three Amigos, the Three Musketeers,
the Trace Caballeros. Stuff.
Speaker 1 (00:24):
That's right, talking about e n t Oi oi oi.
Speaker 2 (00:30):
Hey, that was pretty good, Chuck. I was not expecting that.
Sometimes sometimes there's like a little pause in between you
talking and me responding, and it's because I'm just astounded.
And that was a good example of that. You did great.
Speaker 1 (00:48):
Yeah, and t Baby, let's do it.
Speaker 2 (00:49):
Okay. So we're talking today about testosterone estrogen. What people
commonly think of are the two hormones, the female hormone
the male hormone, and that those are what divides us.
The sexes are binary, they're bisexual, there's male, there's female.
Gender is a totally different topic, as we'll talk about
(01:13):
a little bit. But if you have a lot of estrogen,
you're female, a lot of testosterone, you're a male, and
it turns out that we can trace that that's all
like generally incorrect. It's such a such a broad stroke
explanation of estrogen and testosterone that it actually has tripped
us up all this time. And just from researching this, Chuck,
(01:36):
I learned like, wow, this is if we had just
never considered estrogen female in testosterone male, I think our
general understanding of those two hormones would be so much deeper.
Speaker 3 (01:47):
Yeah, and it's one of those things where we can
trace back to a time where that sort of whole
notion came from. And of course, you know, it's early science.
They were trying to figure stuff out. But starting about
the mid nineteenth century is when scientists started kind of
going wild with animals and organs and doing things like, hey, rat,
(02:12):
let me remove your testicles and let me put some
ovaries in you and see what happens.
Speaker 1 (02:18):
And there was a lot of this going on.
Speaker 3 (02:19):
There was a British physiologist named Ernest Starling who actually
coined the word hormone from the Greek word to excite
in nineteen oh five. And this is sort of right
around that time in the early nineteen hundreds, when there
were other scientists and physiologists doing all kinds of wacky
experiments to see what happened.
Speaker 2 (02:37):
Yeah, and we should say hormones are simply chemical messengers
that basically relay messages and trigger responses or keep responses
from happening in the body, and that estrogen and testosterone
are two kinds of hormones, specifically steroid hormones, meaning they're
made from cholesterol, which for some reason I find really.
Speaker 3 (02:57):
Gross, so well, you might find this gross too. Then
there's an Austrian named Eugene Steinach who was doing these
kinds of experiments that I was just talking about, and
he was saying, like, came here, frog, let me poke
around your testicles and get some liquid out of there.
Let me, like I said earlier, let me take this rat,
(03:20):
let me castrate it, let me transplant some ovaries onto
this rat, and then observe what happens. And Steinach was
one of those early scientists who kind of led to
this sort of binary idea that you know, if you
do this, you're going to feminize a rat, or you're
going to masculinize a rat if you do that.
Speaker 1 (03:40):
Sort of the vice versa operation.
Speaker 3 (03:42):
Yeah, but very very quickly there were people even back
then scientists that were like, oh, wait a minute, this
is it's not quite as binary as you're making it
out to be. And there's plenty of examples and reasons why.
Speaker 2 (03:54):
Yeah, you could almost lay the entire problem at the
feet of Eugene Steinach. That he was the one who
basically said that humans are bisexual as how we put it,
binary sexes male female, and it depends on whether you
have testosterone or estrogen. And like you said, he got pushedback.
There was one guy in particular, an embryologist named Carl Moore,
who was like, hey, Steinick, stop and think about what
(04:16):
you're saying here, Like, even without your you know, mad
scientist experiments, female rats do all sorts of like quote
male behaviors and vice versa. And even with your flip
flop you know, overreason gonad rats, they're still doing behaviors
that are are not easily assigned to one sex or
(04:40):
the other. So I'm not one hundred percent sure that
it's quite as cut and dry as you you have
have explained it. And Eugene Steinach had Carl Moore murdered silence.
Speaker 1 (04:52):
Forever not true at least I don't think it is.
Speaker 2 (04:58):
I hope, okay, I just.
Speaker 3 (04:59):
Tho you might have just leaned in with a pillow
and gave him the forever Hugin.
Speaker 2 (05:03):
That's right.
Speaker 3 (05:04):
So flashing forward a little bit too, about the turn
of the twentieth century is when research got a little
more serious about it, and they found that extracts from
your ovaries could have beneficial treatments for things like hot
flashes during menopause, and it could stimulate what's called estros,
which is where the word estrogen comes from. But estris
(05:26):
is like when an animal is in heat. If you've
ever seen a cat or something or a dog in heat,
it's pretty clear that something different is going on, right,
And that word estrogen in nineteen oh six comes from
that word estrus, which is from the Greek word oystros,
which means mad desire.
Speaker 2 (05:47):
It also sounds like a brand of.
Speaker 1 (05:49):
Yogurt oysters, Yeah, oystros. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (05:53):
So once these guys like this is the beginning of
the twentieth century, very late nineteenth but mostly the first
couple decades of the twentieth century, scientists are starting to
isolate hormones, and in particular sex hormones, and they're like, well,
what happens if you give them to humans? Now forget
the frogs and rats and all that stuff. And what
they figured out very quickly is like you said, they
(06:14):
like menopause have been around for a while, and they're like, well,
women have menopause and estrogen seems to be the woman's
sex hormone. Let's give them estrogen and see what happens.
And it actually had a pretty beneficial effect. It's been
long known that estrogen given as like a drug can
treat symptoms of menopause, like hot flashes and stuff. And
(06:37):
the first estrogen, I guess prescription drug. It's called premarin,
which says like a perfectly legitimate, big pharma sound to it, right, Premarin.
That's a great name for a drug. But it's even
better if you know what it stands for.
Speaker 3 (06:57):
Yeah, and this is well should we say when it
stands say what it is and then what it stands for.
Speaker 2 (07:03):
I think you can do both simultaneously.
Speaker 1 (07:05):
Actually, well, it's not a synthetic estrogen.
Speaker 3 (07:09):
It was actually a natural isolated estrogen derived from the
urine of a pregnant horse. So premarin stood for pre
pregnant mayor mayor and the end from urine, so pre
maren pregnant horse urine.
Speaker 1 (07:27):
Yeah, and it was I believe this is nineteen thirty nine.
Speaker 3 (07:30):
It was made of like ten different estrogens and was
available commercially in the US just a few years later,
and by nineteen ninety two was the highest selling drug
in the United States.
Speaker 2 (07:41):
Yeah, if you want to have a good idea of
just how crazy the pharmaceutical market has become in the US,
Premarin was the I think you said, the most prescribed
drug in the US.
Speaker 3 (07:56):
Well, the best selling I guess sho would match. Yeah,
the hit single exactly.
Speaker 2 (08:01):
So this hit single, Premarin in nineteen ninety seven had
revenues of one billion dollars. Pretty not shabby. It'd be
about two billion dollars today. Humera, the second best selling
drug in twenty twenty two, had revenues of twenty one
billion dollars. In that nuts like, that's that's just night
(08:21):
and day compared to how far we've I guess how
far we've come. It's one way to put it. But
the upsot is premar in was it was a lifesaver.
Men were like, hey, I'd like you to be sexually available.
Why don't you take this horse, you're in estrogen, And
when we were like, it solves my hot flash problems
sold so it actually, it really was very popular for
(08:43):
a while, and it wasn't until I think two thousand
and two that it just dropped off precipitously.
Speaker 3 (08:48):
Right, Yeah, And we should mention too that this was
you know, it was obviously for things like hot flashes,
but they were also marketing it as a way to
maintain femininity as you age, none other than William Masters
of Masters in Johnson's Fame Sex Crime. They said that
women should use the drug to avoid falling into the
(09:09):
third sex or the neutral gender, which is very off base,
to say the least. But yeah, in two thousand and two,
things change because there was the Women's Tell Initiative released
a study about attitudes that that really like changed everything
when it comes to how women or people in general
(09:30):
think of hormone therapy when they said that it can
cause breast cancer, heart disease, blood clots, and stroke if
you take what was called by this time prim pro
which was Primaran and pro Vera as a you know,
sort of a cocktail. And they they minute so much
they said, we're even stopping this study. But it turns
(09:52):
out there was just a lot of bad reporting about that, right.
Speaker 2 (09:54):
Yeah. There's a New York Times magazine article about menopause
by a writer named Susan Dominus, who basically reported that
the media just jumped all over it. There's like, there's
a twenty six percent increased risk in developing breast cancer
if you take Prempro or generally have hormone replacement therapy,
(10:15):
and that's whopping. That's a big, a big number, a
big percentage. But in absolute numbers, it's actually not that big.
So the average woman had a two point three to
three percent chance of developing breast cancer. If you took Prempro,
you had a two point nine to nine percent chance,
So like that was your twenty six percent increase, And
(10:35):
in real terms, it sorted out to, based on the
population at the time, an additional eight women developing breast
cancer out of every ten thousand who were taking replacement hormones.
Nothing to sneeze at those eight women. I'm sure would
much rather prefer not to have breast cancer. But the
point was the risks of it were grossly overstated, and
(10:55):
that it got but it got such a bad rap
because of the reporting that for a couple of decades,
just trust and hormone replacement therapy dropped off and a
lot of women suffered unnecessarily as a result.
Speaker 3 (11:06):
Yeah, and I think they didn't even find that the
transdermal variety was in fact much safer than the other
way of taking it.
Speaker 2 (11:15):
Yeah, absolutely so, Like if you take it orally, which
is what it was always before, pretty much it has
to go through your liver to be processed, and while
it's there it can do all sorts of nasty stuff
side effects that you don't really want, like causing thrombosis
and blood clots, it can lead to heart disease, whereas
if you do it transdermally, it just enters the bloodstream
and it does its thing with minimal side effects. So
(11:37):
we've reached the point today where your average kind of
coologists is probably going to say the benefits if you're
healthy outweigh the risk of taking it, especially if you
are under age sixty, and especially if you're under age
seventy and you start apparently there's a if you have
a gap between menopause and then start hormone replacement therapy
(12:01):
of a decade or two, then it can become pretty risky.
And by the way, I don't have my lab code
on right now, I would advise you not to take
gecological health advice from me. Instead, ask your doctor. But
this is what I've seen from research.
Speaker 3 (12:15):
Yeah, and that, I mean you say that virtually every
time you meet someone in person. I've heard you say
those same words.
Speaker 2 (12:21):
I'm big on that for sure.
Speaker 3 (12:23):
Say Hi, Josh, nice to meet you. I dude, stuff
you should know. Please don't take onecological advice for me. Yeah,
no matter what comes out of my mouth at this
dinner part.
Speaker 2 (12:31):
I mean, it's just a smart thing to say.
Speaker 1 (12:33):
It is.
Speaker 3 (12:34):
So this is all going on on the ester's in side,
on the testosterone side, and we're gonna, you know, kind
of bop back and forth between.
Speaker 1 (12:43):
The two of these.
Speaker 3 (12:45):
That was isolated, I believe in nineteen thirty five. In fact,
that's when the name testosterone got its name, which is
sort of the big daddy mail hormone.
Speaker 1 (12:54):
And we'll talk about all the versions of these in
a second.
Speaker 3 (12:57):
And on its own, testosterone, you know, wasn't doing very much.
But when they added estrone, which is a quote unquote
female hormone, it became very powerful. And in nineteen thirty nine,
there were a couple of guys dude, name I guess
one guy, sorry, Leopold Ruska. Oh no, no, there were
(13:17):
two guys and Adolph Butenant of Germany. They won the
Nobel Prize for chemistry by working on largely testosterone, but
you know sex hormones as a whole. And none other
than mister Adolf Hitler was one of the early adopters
when it came to a testosterone treatment.
Speaker 1 (13:38):
Yeah, he had low tit.
Speaker 2 (13:40):
I meant to send you this, and I'm sorry I didn't,
but I turned up something that there was in British
World War two military files. There were like a bunch
of ideas of how to like basically take neutralized Hitler,
and one of them was to start slipping estrogen into
his food and that over time it would basically turn
(14:02):
him from a maniac, murderous killer psycho to maybe a
little calmer, maybe a little more feminized. And the whole
idea was that if you put poison in his food,
he had tasters, and the tasters would die from the
poison and he would know that he was being poisoned.
That would not happen with estrogen. It would take place
(14:22):
over such a long time they wouldn't be able to
taste it that that apparently it was never even attempted,
or certainly not carried out, but that was someone's idea
to take care of Hitler. It would have been hilarious, dude,
to see that transition, like had they done that, and
then just to be able to look back all these
years later and watch the progression.
Speaker 3 (14:43):
There's a Benny Hill sketch in there somewhere, for sure,
I think so.
Speaker 2 (14:47):
So.
Speaker 3 (14:47):
Initially, medically speaking, the first use of testosterone was to
try and cure homosexuality in males, which was a needless
to say, it spectacularly back fired because all it did was,
you know, it didn't alter any orientation. It just created
I guess super tops and power bottoms and ramped up
(15:10):
to sex drive. And then of course trans people. This
was you know, very early in the days of hormone
therapy for trans people. It was actually going on, and
in fact, we did a whole episode in April twenty
nineteen called Michael Dillon Trans Pioneer about the Englishman who
was I mean, I think probably the first person at
(15:33):
least from the female to male transition to use that
hormone in nineteen forty.
Speaker 2 (15:37):
Yeah, yeah, it definitely was from what we could tell.
Speaker 3 (15:40):
And by the way, if you go back and listen
to that episode, if you're like, oh my goodness.
Speaker 1 (15:44):
We heard from listeners.
Speaker 3 (15:45):
We goofed up the pronouns on that one because we thought,
and this is five years ago, we know better now,
but we thought it would be a good idea to
sort of let the pronouns follow the journey of Michael
Dillon's life. And you know, we know better now, So
just take that with a grain of salt.
Speaker 2 (16:03):
Yeah, kid, co. And while we're on that, we should
probably say we're using male and female and man and
woman just generally a shorthand, a biological shorthand. With the
advent of trans people, there there's a much more specific
way of talking about that. Specifically, we would we should
(16:23):
be saying typically developing assigned male at birth or assigned
female at birth, people who haven't altered their hormones. Right,
that's tough to say over and over again, rather than
man or woman. So please forgive us for that. We're
not we're not being disrespectful in that way, and we're
certainly not excluding trans people from this, because this very
much has a lot to do with trans.
Speaker 1 (16:46):
Yeah, and well you know that'll come in part too, obviously.
Speaker 2 (16:48):
For sure. I say we take a break and come
back and we'll start talking about estrogen.
Speaker 1 (16:53):
Let's do it.
Speaker 3 (17:14):
All right, So we're back with estrogen. Welcome to the studio, estrogen.
How have you been doing so? That is, usually you
think of estrogen as one of the two female sex
hormones with progesterone, and it is actually a family of
three hormones, the first one being estrone, and that is
(17:35):
the that's not the money estrogen, that's the weakest one menopause.
You know, it keeps getting produced through menopause. It's made
in the adrenal glands, it's made in the ovaries, it's
made in fatty tissue, and it can actually serve as
a sort of a warehouse keeping place for estrogen.
Speaker 2 (17:55):
Right, yeah, for sure. So here's where we get to
the idea that it's just misguided. Think estrogen is a
woman's sex hormone and that's it. There's so much more
to it. The whole reason you would continue producing estrogen
as a woman in some form or fashion after menopause.
I mean, if you're not having sex, if you can't
reproduce any longer, why would you produce estrogen? You would
(18:16):
produce a weaker version because it's still doing other things
like it's really important for bone growth and muscle development
and to keep yourself active. There's a lot of stuff
that estrogen does just beyond forming the reproductive system or
for sexing females.
Speaker 3 (18:36):
Yeah, and we also did mention and this is probably
if someone wants more quote unquote proof. Estrogen is found
in plants like rice.
Speaker 2 (18:44):
Yeah, I mean, we could just end the podcast right here.
Speaker 1 (18:49):
Testosterone is not found in plants, only in the animal world.
Speaker 3 (18:51):
But we'll get to that, all right. The next one
we come to that was E one. By the way,
E two is estra diol, which is this is the estrogen.
This is the potent one. This is made in the
ovaries of women and made in the testes of men.
Once again, men and women both have each in different levels.
(19:12):
And this is the one that really like kicks in
during puberty and then takes a break during menopause. Not
a break but more like a retirement.
Speaker 2 (19:21):
Yeah, it goes to Florida.
Speaker 1 (19:24):
Yeah exactly.
Speaker 2 (19:25):
Maybe yeah Flora for once. I'm just gonna stick with
my original one. Good Astriol is another one. This one
is mostly produced during pregnancy to help the uterus grow,
and it also helps with breastfeedings. It leads to most
of the body changes during pregnancy. You can thank estriol
(19:47):
for that. And there are other types of estrogen, but
typically it's those three. Those are the big ones. And
it's obviously everyone knows estrogen is the reason that you
have breasts and that your hips fill out, and that
it has a lot to do with a woman's monthly cycle, right,
And that's absolutely true. That has a lot to do
with everything, like that's what estrogen does. But it is
(20:09):
again it's important for metabolizing muscles, for preventing your muscles
from injury. It also contributes to endurance, which if you
read about ultra marathons, women tend to dominate those I
was reading about, Like short runs, men can outrun women
very easily. Marathons typically men win. But then as you
(20:32):
get further and further and further, and actually there's a
moment I think it's like like one hundred and fifty
miles or some mind boggling amount of distance, women start
to slowly overtake men. And then the longer you go,
the further ahead, women finish before men in tests of
endurance like that, and they think it's because they have
(20:54):
higher stores of estrogen, which is helping their muscles work better.
Speaker 3 (20:59):
So you talked about good for like you know, muscle
growth and muscle formation. Sure, Also estrogen can help facilitate
brain activity, skin elasticity, which you know, is that why
like wrinkles happen as you age? Is that because of
drop and among other things in estrogen?
Speaker 2 (21:20):
I would think so. I think it's also just they've
been around the block so many times, like skin, I mean.
Speaker 1 (21:27):
Yeah, yeah, So if you're a doctor, doctor Clark.
Speaker 2 (21:31):
Well, no, okay, why am I?
Speaker 3 (21:34):
Why am I going wrinkley around the eyes here? What's
going on with physiologically with my body? You know, it's
been around the block?
Speaker 1 (21:41):
What more? What more can I say? And also, don't
take any gynecological advice from me.
Speaker 2 (21:46):
Right, I'd be like, I thought you're a dermantologist. Oh
I'm neither.
Speaker 1 (21:49):
Oh boy.
Speaker 3 (21:50):
So estrogen is something that can affect mood, but you
know it's it fluctuates. I think pre menopausal women have
a range of about thirty to forty pikeograms per mili liter,
But it varies from person to person. And then like
we said, it rises and falls during the menstrual cycle.
(22:11):
It's not like a set number. I think Postman Apostle
that drops all the way down from literally zero to thirty.
Speaker 1 (22:20):
And then for.
Speaker 3 (22:21):
Men, for guys like you and me, yeah, we have
a range of about ten to fifty. I'm probably more
like fifty five or sixty would be my guess.
Speaker 2 (22:30):
So I'm right there with you, buddy. So again, the
reason why men would have it at all is because
it's not just the woman's sex a female sex hormone.
It does other stuff. Just I can't say this enough
because it was such a sure you can like it,
It was such an epiphany for me. I'm just like, Oh,
I had no idea that it was this, that things
(22:52):
overlap this much. Yeah, I mean I didn't think it
was just like cut and dry, but I knew there
was some crossover, but I didn't realize just how much
Steinbach screwed us up with that whole binary thing.
Speaker 1 (23:05):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (23:05):
I was trying to make a joke about a pop
act that crossed over, but I couldn't come up with it.
Speaker 1 (23:11):
Just, uh, someone send in a good joke there.
Speaker 2 (23:13):
How about Bay Bay Beyonce in the country.
Speaker 1 (23:17):
I heard about that, did you hear it? Is it good? Yeah?
Speaker 2 (23:20):
It's fine. I'm not huge in the country.
Speaker 1 (23:23):
So it's real country then, huh.
Speaker 2 (23:25):
No, it's like dance floor line dancing hunt. Yeah, sure
it is real country. Yes, but it's not like it's
not like Hank or anything like that. But it's like
a it's more like Garth. It's like a Garth Brooks song.
Speaker 1 (23:38):
Oh geez, I need to hear it.
Speaker 3 (23:39):
I thought it was more just like Hi and Beyonce
and I put on a cowboy hat.
Speaker 2 (23:43):
So now, no, she's from Texas. You know she knows
what she's talking about.
Speaker 1 (23:46):
Yeah, that's true. Can we talk about the Big.
Speaker 2 (23:49):
Don't please don't quote me on that. I'm not in
the bay Hive.
Speaker 1 (23:53):
Okay, I went to that concert. Was great.
Speaker 2 (23:56):
Yeah, I'll bet. Can we talk about the Big t
Oh we're here? Huh yeah.
Speaker 3 (24:02):
I mean we're going to go back and forth. But
T needs to he needs this tea is ready to speak.
Speaker 2 (24:06):
I think before we do, I want to say one
other thing about estrogen. It apparently encourages physical movement, and
you're like, so like with low estrogen, your will to
get up and move or walk across the room or
go take a walk is depleted because your estrogen is lower.
It's as simple as that Isn't that nuts? Yeah, that's cool.
(24:29):
So yes, now we're on to tea.
Speaker 1 (24:31):
That's right, the male hormone in.
Speaker 2 (24:35):
Part, Yes, and that's no joke. Like, for sure, estrogen
helps form females, Testosterone helps form males, and apparently in
the uterus they're both exposed to copious amounts of testosterone.
It's just what differentiates females from males or keeps females
(24:56):
from developing into males. Because I didn't know this either, Chuck.
We all start out as females. Did you know that.
Speaker 1 (25:04):
I think we talked about that in our puberty episode.
Speaker 2 (25:06):
Okay, so just bear with me for a second. We
all start out as females, and then we're all we're
all kind of inundated with testosterone. But females typically have
something called aromatase, which is an enzyme that converts testosterone
into estrogen much more prevalent in the feed in the
placenta with the fetus, and so it's basically like batting
(25:29):
away all the testosterone. So the baby comes out assigned
female at birth. Pretty interesting, huh. Like without the injection
of testosterone, we would all be females or without the
presence of aromatase, we would all be males.
Speaker 1 (25:44):
That's right.
Speaker 3 (25:45):
And then once things are you know, I guess what
that's around the seventh week or.
Speaker 2 (25:49):
So, yeah, something like that.
Speaker 1 (25:51):
That's when the testicles start to produce testosterone. That's when the.
Speaker 3 (25:54):
Factory opens up. And I don't think we mentioned, but
testosterone is a member of a family of androgen hormones. Uh,
boy to should we even try and say these or
just say the shorthand? I want to say them, knock
yourself out?
Speaker 2 (26:10):
Uh andros stenny dione then I practiced and st andres
steno dione.
Speaker 1 (26:18):
Yeah, I think that's right.
Speaker 2 (26:19):
D hydro epi andros sterone also known as dh A sure,
d hydro epi androsterone sulfate d h A, yes, and
then dihydro testosterone d h T.
Speaker 1 (26:31):
Yeah. Nice work.
Speaker 3 (26:33):
Thanks, you get to move on in our medical competition.
Speaker 2 (26:37):
You could be a doctor, but but I'm not. So
don't that's forgotten logical.
Speaker 1 (26:42):
Advice, never never or any medical advice.
Speaker 3 (26:45):
Uh So, Like I said, the test testosterone factory is
open at about seven weeks. And the reason we went
back and kind of named the others is because some
of that testosterone at that age is converted into the dhea. Right, yeah,
I'm not gonna say it. And that is the sort
(27:07):
of the money hormone for making the penis form and
grow in the prostate. And about seven months in is
when the trigger is kicked off by testosterone for testicular descent.
Even though that can happen after you're born.
Speaker 2 (27:23):
It makes it hilarious. Beew sound.
Speaker 1 (27:26):
Oh man, where's your slide whistle?
Speaker 2 (27:28):
I don't have it on me. Maybe gerial'll work it in.
Speaker 3 (27:32):
Yeah, I think you actually isolated some slide whistle cuts,
so don't.
Speaker 2 (27:36):
Tell everybody I know. Here's one of the facts of
the podcast. To me. I had no idea about this.
But so male babies are flooded with testosterone. They don't
have a bunch of aromatase to convert all of it
into estrogen, so they become male and all the stuff
that you just mentioned happens. But they do have some aromatase,
(28:00):
and some of that testosterone is converted into estra diol,
and that estra dial actually is what forms the male brain.
So estrogen forms the male brain starts out as testosterone
converted into estratiol. It causes the changes in the brain
that create.
Speaker 1 (28:18):
The male brain whatever, snowflake.
Speaker 2 (28:21):
I just think that's awesome. Like it also just goes
to show you, like just how so, I mean, just
imagine what an intricate chemical dance this is and how Yeah,
you just adjust this a little bit and adjust that
a little bit and all sorts of different outcomes can happen.
It's just fascinating, Oh for sure.
Speaker 3 (28:40):
I mean, when you're a little kid, there's not a
lot of difference between your testosterone levels. If you're a
little girl a little boy, I think usually under ten
nanograms per desolators at puberty where things just go hog wild, right,
and little boy's testosterone just shoots through the roof. It
(29:00):
rises in girls as well, but nothing like it does
in boys. Once you become a big man, a full
grown man like us, you're gonna have tea levels between
three hundred and a thousand, if you know, if you
have normal quote unquote normal tea. Women have much lower
levels between fifteen and seventy. And this is you know,
(29:21):
in little boys, what's gonna trigger your voice to change,
your bone and muscle mass to grow. You're you know,
all of a sudden, you're gonna have body hair and
facial hair and stuff like that. And also, and I
think we've talked about this at some point, but it
is related to male pattern baldness. But I don't think
they're still at the level where they can say like, hey,
(29:43):
if you have high tee, then you're more likely to
be bald.
Speaker 2 (29:47):
Yes. And that's really really important to point out, dude,
is that we are not at a place in microbiology
or human chemistry or we're like, this is what this
hormone does, and this is what that hormone and dones.
And one of the reasons why is because the same
hormone can have wildly different effects depending on at what
stage in a reaction it comes in, or in what
(30:10):
tissues or what regions of the brain or the body
it's interacting with other things. So when you add all
these different not just other kinds of hormones, but also
like neurotransmitters or neuromodulators and all this stuff, it just
becomes exponentially more complicated and complex. So we're still kind
of at the place where it's like, yeah, testosterones for
(30:30):
boys and estrogens for girls, and we're making tons of headway,
but generally speaking, we're still at a very basic level
and understanding what hormones are capable of. And then also
on the flip side, looking at behavior and saying like, oh, well,
clearly aggression is related to high levels of testosterone.
Speaker 3 (30:51):
Yeah, and we'll get to that coming up in a
sect for short with there been lots of studies, Well,
we need to talk about testosterone dropping over the years,
because men don't experience like a drop off in testosterone
like women do with menopause and estrogen. But it does
decline in both men and women testosterone by about a
(31:11):
percentage a year starting in your thirties, sort of early
to mid thirties generally, although that can vary as well,
and it can vary just from time to time too.
A man's level of testosterone can go up or down
fairly dramatically for different reasons over short periods of time.
Speaker 2 (31:30):
Yeah, And just like with estrogen, testosterone is also responsible
for bone growth and development in remodeling, apparently, the testosterone
is useful for the hard outer layers of the bone
and estrogen is for the spongy interior layers. It's cool
and also something else that stood out to me is
men's estrogen levels are roughly similar to women's testosterone levels
(31:55):
under normal circumstances. Yeah, I guess so, right, Yeah, I
think it's pretty interest.
Speaker 1 (32:00):
I think I'm looking at the numbers.
Speaker 2 (32:01):
Did they add up?
Speaker 3 (32:03):
Well, you were talking about aggression. I mean, should we
take a break and talk about that or should we wait?
Speaker 2 (32:09):
I say we take a break. Now, we've already the
monkey's already flown the.
Speaker 3 (32:13):
Coup, right, all right, the monkey's out of the bag,
the cat is out of the cage.
Speaker 1 (32:18):
We'll be right back.
Speaker 2 (32:40):
Okay, Chuck, So we're back. We found the cat, put
them in the cradle with the silver spoon, so everything's
back to normal.
Speaker 1 (32:46):
Sad a song?
Speaker 2 (32:48):
Oh it is? It is pretty said, especially if you
like your dad.
Speaker 1 (32:52):
Especially if you had problems with your dad.
Speaker 2 (32:54):
Oh yeah, I guess so, I guess so.
Speaker 1 (32:56):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (32:57):
Yeah. Is there any circumstance where that wouldn't be a sad?
Speaker 1 (33:00):
I don't know.
Speaker 3 (33:01):
Maybe the perfect amount of care and love from your
father and with no accompanying.
Speaker 2 (33:09):
Abuse, gotcha, perfect?
Speaker 1 (33:11):
I don't know.
Speaker 2 (33:12):
I'm sure that's very prevalent. Yeah. So, yeah, we're talking
about testosterone, we're talking about sex, we're talking about aggression.
All of those things seem to be very much intertwined
in the public consciousness about testosterone. Right, the more testosterone
you have, the more stillone esque you are, the more
likely you are to wear like a floor length mink
(33:34):
coat with no shirt underneath, which I have to say,
if I could wear that, I definitely would, if I
could rock that look. It's a good look.
Speaker 3 (33:41):
And Josh, I think if you remember, I wore that
exact coat in the movie, in my film Nighthawks, is
that what happens from I think you are mink coat
in Nighthawks?
Speaker 1 (33:50):
Okay, although he was a cop in Nighthawks. You can
afford a mink coat.
Speaker 2 (33:53):
No way, not on a cop salary, not an honest cop,
an underrated movie. So is it?
Speaker 3 (34:00):
Yeah, I don't know if it holds up great, but
I thought it had a pretty good ending. We won't spoil.
Speaker 2 (34:05):
No, no, it's and it's definitely spoilable for sure.
Speaker 3 (34:08):
But and that was my st alone. By the way,
people are just like, what are you even talking about?
Why did Chuck slur there?
Speaker 2 (34:14):
For a little while, I thought it came through loud
and clear. Okay, But the idea is that, like the
whole reason the Rambo films were made, particularly two and three,
is because Sylvester still own experienced a massive spike in testosterone.
It had to get it out in some productive way, right.
Speaker 1 (34:29):
Oh, I thought it was because Rambo was no expendable.
Speaker 2 (34:33):
I haven't seen those movies.
Speaker 1 (34:35):
Huh No, no, no, it was a joke from Rainbow two.
Speaker 2 (34:38):
Oh well, he was also in the Expendables.
Speaker 1 (34:40):
Yeah, I know. I wonder if that had anything to
do with that line.
Speaker 2 (34:43):
Probably not, It could be at I'm sure there's some
people who are like, shut up and talk about aggression
in testosterone, you're making me aggressive.
Speaker 1 (34:54):
Well, what if you knew to a male dog. That's
a good sort of first example.
Speaker 2 (34:57):
That's a great entree, Chuck. Most people would say that
if you neuter, if you remove the testicles of a
male dog, it's going to become much more submissive, much chiller,
probably a lot more fun at parties, will come pick
you up if your car breaks down, that kind of thing.
And there is some data that shows that that's the case,
(35:19):
that some dogs are calmer once they're neutered, But the
other studies have shown like the exact opposite is true,
that dogs can become actually more aggressive when they're neutered,
which is a head scratcher of a puzzler if you
ask me.
Speaker 3 (35:34):
Yeah, I mean I just went through this with Gibson,
and he's not more aggressive because that's an aggressive is
a weird word, because aggressive isn't the same thing as like,
you know, heaper now just like an excitable puppy, Like
that's not aggression necessarily. Yeah, but it definitely did not
(35:55):
chill him out at all.
Speaker 2 (35:57):
Yeah. Yeah, I don't know that it's supposed to, but yeah,
I think some people think it does. But the idea
that it would make a dog more aggressive, so it
had like no impact on him as far as like
his energy level is what you're saying. Yeah, so imagine
if he was generally like that before and then you
neuted him and then he started like biting people. Yeah,
(36:18):
that's that's what happens with some dogs. And they're like, well,
that doesn't make any sense whatsoever. One of the explanations
is is that we think testosterone is tied up with
confidence more than aggression, and that a dog that has
this chemical confidence removed through neutering can actually become more
more nervous, and nervous dogs frequently will bite or bark
(36:41):
more than they did when they had confidence via testosterone.
Speaker 3 (36:46):
Yeah, and that ties in perfectly to the fact that
and this to me is one of the facts of
the show. But they have done studies and male athletes,
like you know, superior male athletes, actors, it or not,
blue collar workers and confidence artists, con men, they all
have above average levels of testosterone.
Speaker 2 (37:08):
Yeah, so there you have it, so too, all right,
case closed, So too though, And this is the state
of study right now with studying the stuff where we're
relating human behavior to hormones like testosterone or estrogen, Like,
there's results like that out there, but that we arrive
at the question, well, wait a minute, do people who
(37:31):
have higher levels of testosterone naturally gravitate to those professions
or does being in a profession like acting or being
a con man raise your testosterone life? Right, They're like, well,
hold on, okay, I got this. We're going to go
study prisoners, specifically violent criminal offenders and see what their
testosterone levels are.
Speaker 1 (37:51):
Like.
Speaker 2 (37:51):
Sure enough, they found that their testosterone levels were above average,
But that still raises the question do higher levels of
testosterone make you more prone to any social violent behavior?
Or does being in prison raise your levels of testosterone.
We still don't know at this point.
Speaker 1 (38:10):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (38:11):
Yeah, it's pretty interesting because I think a lot of people,
like the generals, just the old way of thinking was like,
of course.
Speaker 2 (38:16):
It does, right, And you know what they're finding, they
think is that it's more that testosterone is released when
you need it.
Speaker 1 (38:27):
Yeah, it meets the occasion.
Speaker 2 (38:29):
Right, It's not the thing that's driving the behavior. It's like, oh,
this guy says it's go time, we better release some
testosterone to keep it going.
Speaker 3 (38:36):
Yeah, this next thing is super interesting to me. You know,
moment to moment throughout your day, you're gonna your testosterone
is going to rise and fall some. And they have
found that if you lose, like a running race or
a one on or a basketball game, or an arm
wrestling match, or even a chess match, you will lose testosterone.
(39:03):
So it's not even necessarily it can be something as
cerebral as a chess match, but losing reduces your testosterone.
Winning increases and boosts your testosterone. And they even found
this is crazy to me, that they sampled male voters
for like an election and just your candidate losing causes
(39:25):
a drop in testosterone.
Speaker 2 (39:28):
Yeah, isn't that nuts? That was among McCain voters because
it was the two thousand and eight election. Yeah, it's crazy.
Speaker 3 (39:36):
Yeah, it's like it's unbelievable, like winning and losing even
if you're not participating other than voting yes.
Speaker 2 (39:43):
So they also found that they think that social expectations
can kind of modulate behavior, right, and this kind of
ties into that idea that testosterone kind of helps foster
a response rather than triggering a response, right. So essentially
(40:04):
what they found is that with testosterone levels, we can
correlate it as far as if you are having if
you're faced with a fight or flight situation and you
choose to fight, you probably are experiencing an up tick
in testosterone levels. Again that you didn't have testosterone and
now you're choosing to fight. They think the exact opposite
(40:25):
is true, that you've chosen to fight and your testosterone
levels go up. On the other hand, they found that
if you choose to flee or say not be aggressive,
your cortisol levels, your stress hormone levels increase. So our
response seems to be based on what we think society
will either reward or punish, and then based on our
(40:46):
decision from that our hormones kick in to help kind
of carry out whichever response we decide to go with.
So one other thing that I found was that that
surprised me is that testosterone isn't just made in like
the t testies or the ovaries depending on your sex
assigned a birth, but that it's actually made locally in
(41:06):
the brain, and that testosterone can also be transformed into
different types of estrogen in the brain too, And they
think that locally produced is what it's called testosterone in
like our neural pathways, has much more of an effect
on behavior, mood, that kind of stuff than the stuff
that's made in the testes or the ovaries, and that
(41:27):
actually accounts for some of the baffling results we've gotten
where you know, if you take a blood sample of
somebody and find that they were just being aggressive, but
their blood doesn't show any kind of spike and testosterone, well,
that would account for that because it's not the stuff
that's floating around in their blood that's making them do that.
It's the locally produced testosterone in their brain that's you know,
(41:49):
connecting with their amygdala or something like that it's making
that's helping them their aggressiveness, I guess alone.
Speaker 3 (41:56):
And now I know everyone wants to get to the
part about sex and what testosterone does there. And testosterone does,
you know, sort of directly ramp up the sex drive
in men and women. And they have done trials where
they have shown that it increases the libido. But just
(42:16):
because your tea falls doesn't necessarily mean it's going to
decrease your libido. It can, but it doesn't mean it
has to.
Speaker 2 (42:25):
Right. Yeah, Again, that's just there's baffling results we get
sometimes from just studies of what we presume has to
do with testosterone or estrogen, and it just doesn't quite job.
Speaker 3 (42:40):
All right, So I guess now we can sort of
finish up with some talk of intersex people and where
we stand now with hormone therapy, right.
Speaker 2 (42:48):
Yeah, because one group there's a lot of different people
besides postmenopausal or perimenopausal women who take hormone replacement therapy,
intersex people, people who are born with ambiguous genditalia. Because
like we'd mentioned that whole amazingly intricate dance of chemicals
and hormones during development. Fetal development can just take one
(43:11):
step to the left or one step to the right,
and all of a sudden, there's just a different outcome
that happens to some people. And some people take hormone
replacement therapy to either become more like the gender they
presume that they would have been assigned at birth, or
the gender that they feel like they were assigned at
birth but their genitalia doesn't quite match. There's a lot
of different outcomes that are basically considered conditions that you
(43:35):
can kind of help alleviate with hormone replacement.
Speaker 1 (43:37):
Yeah, for sure. Another one.
Speaker 3 (43:39):
And I'm pretty sure we talked about this in our
female puberty episode. Was starting the nineteen forties, and maybe
even before that, estrogen therapy and hormone treatment could help.
Basically what they would say, like, you know, you don't
want your daughter to grow too tall, so they would
use a hormone block. You don't see that as much today.
(44:02):
It was called precocious puberty, which is still.
Speaker 1 (44:04):
A thing that can happen.
Speaker 3 (44:05):
I think if you enter puberty, I think it's like
a year or two two or what's considered too early,
or you know, just with outside of the normal range.
You can also use these hormone blocking drugs. I mean
they still use in today, but that it's not like
say you don't grow too tall. It's basically just to
save off puberty and to halt precocious puberty in its tracks. Also,
(44:28):
if you are a trans kid, you can use a
hormone blocker to just sort of hit the pause button
to give you a little time to decide what kind
of puberty to go through.
Speaker 2 (44:38):
Yeah, because once you go through puberty, particularly if you
think it was the wrong puberty for the gender you
identify with, there are going to be changes that are
essentially irreversible aside from surgery. Like if you go through
female puberty but you're a trans male, you're still going
(44:58):
to have breasts that half to be removed. Or if
you're a trans woman and you went through male puberty,
your vocal cords are gonna think you're gonna have a
deeper voice, and maybe an atom's apple surgery will have
to remove that. That's how powerful the hormones that get
released and the amounts that they get released in during puberty.
So if you're not quite sure which gender you belong
to yet, using hormone blockers can actually help kind of,
(45:22):
like you said, buy you some time until you figure
out which way you want to go.
Speaker 3 (45:26):
Yeah, and as far as testosterone therapy goes, if you
have a deficiency and testosterone because of hypogonatism or maybe
from HIV or something like that, it's obviously gonna help
with that. Also problems like and here's where it gets
a little tricky, depression, low muscle mass, low energy. There's
(45:48):
some evidence that can prove sexual function, but not as
much that it can increase your low energy if you're
just sort of losing testosterone at that normal rate of
like one what was it, I can't remember.
Speaker 2 (46:00):
The one percent a year? I think is it?
Speaker 3 (46:03):
Yeah, one percent a year. But if you have an
actual deficiency, they've shown that it can improve sexual function
and just don't have as much proof with energy level.
Speaker 2 (46:14):
So does that mean that the ad that has Frank
Thomas and Doug Flutie in it talking about how they're
like crushing their workouts that actually doesn't work. Well.
Speaker 3 (46:22):
I don't know if they're just saying if they're claiming
they're just having natural decline in age, or if they
had a deficiency to begin with, because that's that seems
to be the differentiating factor.
Speaker 2 (46:32):
Yeah, for sure, Yeah, who knows.
Speaker 1 (46:34):
I mean, let's call up Doug Flutie in.
Speaker 2 (46:36):
Let's get him on the horn exactly. Uh, you got
anything else?
Speaker 1 (46:41):
Uh no, I got nothing else.
Speaker 2 (46:43):
I got nothing else either. This is a very enlightening
podcast episode. I should say a lot of stuff I
didn't know about, and now I know more, and you
still shouldn't take my advice medically speaking. Never since Chuck
said never after a nice hearty chuckle, it means it's
time for listener may.
Speaker 3 (47:03):
Hey, guys, I was turned on your show about six
months ago and have been rapidly consuming multiple episodes each
day going back and forth to work. I heard the
school bus yellow episode this morning and thought you might
not have found this little nugget you pointed out mister
Sear Sire was credited with the standardization. I believe you
also noted some other districts had already turned to bright
(47:25):
paint jobs on school buses. But on March twenty third,
nineteen thirty one, the Pleasant Hill tragedy near town Or,
Colorado was because I had a blizzard that came in
that morning. School shut down sent the kids home, and
one of the school buses ran off the road, stuck
in the snow for thirty plus hours. Resulting in the
death of five of the twenty students and the bus driver.
Speaker 2 (47:44):
Oh my god.
Speaker 3 (47:45):
The aftermath theorized that a brightly painted school bus would
have been much easier to spot in the white out
and might not have sat waiting so long to be found.
So buses in Colorado adopted the yellow standard by nineteen
thirty nine, and the proposal for Mister Sire became a
national standard. Unfortunately, it was a reactive, not proactive solution,
(48:06):
brought on by a spring blizzard on the plains of
eastern Colorado. That is from John Colts, and I was
just curious John didn't say I guess that.
Speaker 1 (48:15):
School bus might have been white.
Speaker 2 (48:17):
I would think so.
Speaker 1 (48:19):
Yeah, not a great color.
Speaker 2 (48:20):
No, No, for sure. Thanks a lot, John, That was
a really amazing email. I never heard of that one.
That's terrible. If you want to bring us down terribly
like John did, you can send us an email, wrap
it up, spank it on the bottom, and send it
off to Stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. Stuff you
Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (48:42):
For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,
Welcome to stuff you should know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's
Chuck and Jerry's here too, back again on the trip
of a lifetime and it's the Three Amigos, the Three Musketeers,
the Trace Caballeros. Stuff.
Speaker 1 (00:24):
That's right, talking about e n t Oi oi oi.
Speaker 2 (00:30):
Hey, that was pretty good, Chuck. I was not expecting that.
Sometimes sometimes there's like a little pause in between you
talking and me responding, and it's because I'm just astounded.
And that was a good example of that. You did great.
Speaker 1 (00:48):
Yeah, and t Baby, let's do it.
Speaker 2 (00:49):
Okay. So we're talking today about testosterone estrogen. What people
commonly think of are the two hormones, the female hormone
the male hormone, and that those are what divides us.
The sexes are binary, they're bisexual, there's male, there's female.
Gender is a totally different topic, as we'll talk about
(01:13):
a little bit. But if you have a lot of estrogen,
you're female, a lot of testosterone, you're a male, and
it turns out that we can trace that that's all
like generally incorrect. It's such a such a broad stroke
explanation of estrogen and testosterone that it actually has tripped
us up all this time. And just from researching this, Chuck,
(01:36):
I learned like, wow, this is if we had just
never considered estrogen female in testosterone male, I think our
general understanding of those two hormones would be so much deeper.
Speaker 3 (01:47):
Yeah, and it's one of those things where we can
trace back to a time where that sort of whole
notion came from. And of course, you know, it's early science.
They were trying to figure stuff out. But starting about
the mid nineteenth century is when scientists started kind of
going wild with animals and organs and doing things like, hey, rat,
(02:12):
let me remove your testicles and let me put some
ovaries in you and see what happens.
Speaker 1 (02:18):
And there was a lot of this going on.
Speaker 3 (02:19):
There was a British physiologist named Ernest Starling who actually
coined the word hormone from the Greek word to excite
in nineteen oh five. And this is sort of right
around that time in the early nineteen hundreds, when there
were other scientists and physiologists doing all kinds of wacky
experiments to see what happened.
Speaker 2 (02:37):
Yeah, and we should say hormones are simply chemical messengers
that basically relay messages and trigger responses or keep responses
from happening in the body, and that estrogen and testosterone
are two kinds of hormones, specifically steroid hormones, meaning they're
made from cholesterol, which for some reason I find really.
Speaker 3 (02:57):
Gross, so well, you might find this gross too. Then
there's an Austrian named Eugene Steinach who was doing these
kinds of experiments that I was just talking about, and
he was saying, like, came here, frog, let me poke
around your testicles and get some liquid out of there.
Let me, like I said earlier, let me take this rat,
(03:20):
let me castrate it, let me transplant some ovaries onto
this rat, and then observe what happens. And Steinach was
one of those early scientists who kind of led to
this sort of binary idea that you know, if you
do this, you're going to feminize a rat, or you're
going to masculinize a rat if you do that.
Speaker 1 (03:40):
Sort of the vice versa operation.
Speaker 3 (03:42):
Yeah, but very very quickly there were people even back
then scientists that were like, oh, wait a minute, this
is it's not quite as binary as you're making it
out to be. And there's plenty of examples and reasons why.
Speaker 2 (03:54):
Yeah, you could almost lay the entire problem at the
feet of Eugene Steinach. That he was the one who
basically said that humans are bisexual as how we put it,
binary sexes male female, and it depends on whether you
have testosterone or estrogen. And like you said, he got pushedback.
There was one guy in particular, an embryologist named Carl Moore,
who was like, hey, Steinick, stop and think about what
(04:16):
you're saying here, Like, even without your you know, mad
scientist experiments, female rats do all sorts of like quote
male behaviors and vice versa. And even with your flip
flop you know, overreason gonad rats, they're still doing behaviors
that are are not easily assigned to one sex or
(04:40):
the other. So I'm not one hundred percent sure that
it's quite as cut and dry as you you have
have explained it. And Eugene Steinach had Carl Moore murdered silence.
Speaker 1 (04:52):
Forever not true at least I don't think it is.
Speaker 2 (04:58):
I hope, okay, I just.
Speaker 3 (04:59):
Tho you might have just leaned in with a pillow
and gave him the forever Hugin.
Speaker 2 (05:03):
That's right.
Speaker 3 (05:04):
So flashing forward a little bit too, about the turn
of the twentieth century is when research got a little
more serious about it, and they found that extracts from
your ovaries could have beneficial treatments for things like hot
flashes during menopause, and it could stimulate what's called estros,
which is where the word estrogen comes from. But estris
(05:26):
is like when an animal is in heat. If you've
ever seen a cat or something or a dog in heat,
it's pretty clear that something different is going on, right,
And that word estrogen in nineteen oh six comes from
that word estrus, which is from the Greek word oystros,
which means mad desire.
Speaker 2 (05:47):
It also sounds like a brand of.
Speaker 1 (05:49):
Yogurt oysters, Yeah, oystros. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (05:53):
So once these guys like this is the beginning of
the twentieth century, very late nineteenth but mostly the first
couple decades of the twentieth century, scientists are starting to
isolate hormones, and in particular sex hormones, and they're like, well,
what happens if you give them to humans? Now forget
the frogs and rats and all that stuff. And what
they figured out very quickly is like you said, they
(06:14):
like menopause have been around for a while, and they're like, well,
women have menopause and estrogen seems to be the woman's
sex hormone. Let's give them estrogen and see what happens.
And it actually had a pretty beneficial effect. It's been
long known that estrogen given as like a drug can
treat symptoms of menopause, like hot flashes and stuff. And
(06:37):
the first estrogen, I guess prescription drug. It's called premarin,
which says like a perfectly legitimate, big pharma sound to it, right, Premarin.
That's a great name for a drug. But it's even
better if you know what it stands for.
Speaker 3 (06:57):
Yeah, and this is well should we say when it
stands say what it is and then what it stands for.
Speaker 2 (07:03):
I think you can do both simultaneously.
Speaker 1 (07:05):
Actually, well, it's not a synthetic estrogen.
Speaker 3 (07:09):
It was actually a natural isolated estrogen derived from the
urine of a pregnant horse. So premarin stood for pre
pregnant mayor mayor and the end from urine, so pre
maren pregnant horse urine.
Speaker 1 (07:27):
Yeah, and it was I believe this is nineteen thirty nine.
Speaker 3 (07:30):
It was made of like ten different estrogens and was
available commercially in the US just a few years later,
and by nineteen ninety two was the highest selling drug
in the United States.
Speaker 2 (07:41):
Yeah, if you want to have a good idea of
just how crazy the pharmaceutical market has become in the US,
Premarin was the I think you said, the most prescribed
drug in the US.
Speaker 3 (07:56):
Well, the best selling I guess sho would match. Yeah,
the hit single exactly.
Speaker 2 (08:01):
So this hit single, Premarin in nineteen ninety seven had
revenues of one billion dollars. Pretty not shabby. It'd be
about two billion dollars today. Humera, the second best selling
drug in twenty twenty two, had revenues of twenty one
billion dollars. In that nuts like, that's that's just night
(08:21):
and day compared to how far we've I guess how
far we've come. It's one way to put it. But
the upsot is premar in was it was a lifesaver.
Men were like, hey, I'd like you to be sexually available.
Why don't you take this horse, you're in estrogen, And
when we were like, it solves my hot flash problems
sold so it actually, it really was very popular for
(08:43):
a while, and it wasn't until I think two thousand
and two that it just dropped off precipitously.
Speaker 3 (08:48):
Right, Yeah, And we should mention too that this was
you know, it was obviously for things like hot flashes,
but they were also marketing it as a way to
maintain femininity as you age, none other than William Masters
of Masters in Johnson's Fame Sex Crime. They said that
women should use the drug to avoid falling into the
(09:09):
third sex or the neutral gender, which is very off base,
to say the least. But yeah, in two thousand and two,
things change because there was the Women's Tell Initiative released
a study about attitudes that that really like changed everything
when it comes to how women or people in general
(09:30):
think of hormone therapy when they said that it can
cause breast cancer, heart disease, blood clots, and stroke if
you take what was called by this time prim pro
which was Primaran and pro Vera as a you know,
sort of a cocktail. And they they minute so much
they said, we're even stopping this study. But it turns
(09:52):
out there was just a lot of bad reporting about that, right.
Speaker 2 (09:54):
Yeah. There's a New York Times magazine article about menopause
by a writer named Susan Dominus, who basically reported that
the media just jumped all over it. There's like, there's
a twenty six percent increased risk in developing breast cancer
if you take Prempro or generally have hormone replacement therapy,
(10:15):
and that's whopping. That's a big, a big number, a
big percentage. But in absolute numbers, it's actually not that big.
So the average woman had a two point three to
three percent chance of developing breast cancer. If you took Prempro,
you had a two point nine to nine percent chance,
So like that was your twenty six percent increase, And
(10:35):
in real terms, it sorted out to, based on the
population at the time, an additional eight women developing breast
cancer out of every ten thousand who were taking replacement hormones.
Nothing to sneeze at those eight women. I'm sure would
much rather prefer not to have breast cancer. But the
point was the risks of it were grossly overstated, and
(10:55):
that it got but it got such a bad rap
because of the reporting that for a couple of decades,
just trust and hormone replacement therapy dropped off and a
lot of women suffered unnecessarily as a result.
Speaker 3 (11:06):
Yeah, and I think they didn't even find that the
transdermal variety was in fact much safer than the other
way of taking it.
Speaker 2 (11:15):
Yeah, absolutely so, Like if you take it orally, which
is what it was always before, pretty much it has
to go through your liver to be processed, and while
it's there it can do all sorts of nasty stuff
side effects that you don't really want, like causing thrombosis
and blood clots, it can lead to heart disease, whereas
if you do it transdermally, it just enters the bloodstream
and it does its thing with minimal side effects. So
(11:37):
we've reached the point today where your average kind of
coologists is probably going to say the benefits if you're
healthy outweigh the risk of taking it, especially if you
are under age sixty, and especially if you're under age
seventy and you start apparently there's a if you have
a gap between menopause and then start hormone replacement therapy
(12:01):
of a decade or two, then it can become pretty risky.
And by the way, I don't have my lab code
on right now, I would advise you not to take
gecological health advice from me. Instead, ask your doctor. But
this is what I've seen from research.
Speaker 3 (12:15):
Yeah, and that, I mean you say that virtually every
time you meet someone in person. I've heard you say
those same words.
Speaker 2 (12:21):
I'm big on that for sure.
Speaker 3 (12:23):
Say Hi, Josh, nice to meet you. I dude, stuff
you should know. Please don't take onecological advice for me. Yeah,
no matter what comes out of my mouth at this
dinner part.
Speaker 2 (12:31):
I mean, it's just a smart thing to say.
Speaker 1 (12:33):
It is.
Speaker 3 (12:34):
So this is all going on on the ester's in side,
on the testosterone side, and we're gonna, you know, kind
of bop back and forth between.
Speaker 1 (12:43):
The two of these.
Speaker 3 (12:45):
That was isolated, I believe in nineteen thirty five. In fact,
that's when the name testosterone got its name, which is
sort of the big daddy mail hormone.
Speaker 1 (12:54):
And we'll talk about all the versions of these in
a second.
Speaker 3 (12:57):
And on its own, testosterone, you know, wasn't doing very much.
But when they added estrone, which is a quote unquote
female hormone, it became very powerful. And in nineteen thirty nine,
there were a couple of guys dude, name I guess
one guy, sorry, Leopold Ruska. Oh no, no, there were
(13:17):
two guys and Adolph Butenant of Germany. They won the
Nobel Prize for chemistry by working on largely testosterone, but
you know sex hormones as a whole. And none other
than mister Adolf Hitler was one of the early adopters
when it came to a testosterone treatment.
Speaker 1 (13:38):
Yeah, he had low tit.
Speaker 2 (13:40):
I meant to send you this, and I'm sorry I didn't,
but I turned up something that there was in British
World War two military files. There were like a bunch
of ideas of how to like basically take neutralized Hitler,
and one of them was to start slipping estrogen into
his food and that over time it would basically turn
(14:02):
him from a maniac, murderous killer psycho to maybe a
little calmer, maybe a little more feminized. And the whole
idea was that if you put poison in his food,
he had tasters, and the tasters would die from the
poison and he would know that he was being poisoned.
That would not happen with estrogen. It would take place
(14:22):
over such a long time they wouldn't be able to
taste it that that apparently it was never even attempted,
or certainly not carried out, but that was someone's idea
to take care of Hitler. It would have been hilarious, dude,
to see that transition, like had they done that, and
then just to be able to look back all these
years later and watch the progression.
Speaker 3 (14:43):
There's a Benny Hill sketch in there somewhere, for sure,
I think so.
Speaker 2 (14:47):
So.
Speaker 3 (14:47):
Initially, medically speaking, the first use of testosterone was to
try and cure homosexuality in males, which was a needless
to say, it spectacularly back fired because all it did was,
you know, it didn't alter any orientation. It just created
I guess super tops and power bottoms and ramped up
(15:10):
to sex drive. And then of course trans people. This
was you know, very early in the days of hormone
therapy for trans people. It was actually going on, and
in fact, we did a whole episode in April twenty
nineteen called Michael Dillon Trans Pioneer about the Englishman who
was I mean, I think probably the first person at
(15:33):
least from the female to male transition to use that
hormone in nineteen forty.
Speaker 2 (15:37):
Yeah, yeah, it definitely was from what we could tell.
Speaker 3 (15:40):
And by the way, if you go back and listen
to that episode, if you're like, oh my goodness.
Speaker 1 (15:44):
We heard from listeners.
Speaker 3 (15:45):
We goofed up the pronouns on that one because we thought,
and this is five years ago, we know better now,
but we thought it would be a good idea to
sort of let the pronouns follow the journey of Michael
Dillon's life. And you know, we know better now, So
just take that with a grain of salt.
Speaker 2 (16:03):
Yeah, kid, co. And while we're on that, we should
probably say we're using male and female and man and
woman just generally a shorthand, a biological shorthand. With the
advent of trans people, there there's a much more specific
way of talking about that. Specifically, we would we should
(16:23):
be saying typically developing assigned male at birth or assigned
female at birth, people who haven't altered their hormones. Right,
that's tough to say over and over again, rather than
man or woman. So please forgive us for that. We're
not we're not being disrespectful in that way, and we're
certainly not excluding trans people from this, because this very
much has a lot to do with trans.
Speaker 1 (16:46):
Yeah, and well you know that'll come in part too, obviously.
Speaker 2 (16:48):
For sure. I say we take a break and come
back and we'll start talking about estrogen.
Speaker 1 (16:53):
Let's do it.
Speaker 3 (17:14):
All right, So we're back with estrogen. Welcome to the studio, estrogen.
How have you been doing so? That is, usually you
think of estrogen as one of the two female sex
hormones with progesterone, and it is actually a family of
three hormones, the first one being estrone, and that is
(17:35):
the that's not the money estrogen, that's the weakest one menopause.
You know, it keeps getting produced through menopause. It's made
in the adrenal glands, it's made in the ovaries, it's
made in fatty tissue, and it can actually serve as
a sort of a warehouse keeping place for estrogen.
Speaker 2 (17:55):
Right, yeah, for sure. So here's where we get to
the idea that it's just misguided. Think estrogen is a
woman's sex hormone and that's it. There's so much more
to it. The whole reason you would continue producing estrogen
as a woman in some form or fashion after menopause.
I mean, if you're not having sex, if you can't
reproduce any longer, why would you produce estrogen? You would
(18:16):
produce a weaker version because it's still doing other things
like it's really important for bone growth and muscle development
and to keep yourself active. There's a lot of stuff
that estrogen does just beyond forming the reproductive system or
for sexing females.
Speaker 3 (18:36):
Yeah, and we also did mention and this is probably
if someone wants more quote unquote proof. Estrogen is found
in plants like rice.
Speaker 2 (18:44):
Yeah, I mean, we could just end the podcast right here.
Speaker 1 (18:49):
Testosterone is not found in plants, only in the animal world.
Speaker 3 (18:51):
But we'll get to that, all right. The next one
we come to that was E one. By the way,
E two is estra diol, which is this is the estrogen.
This is the potent one. This is made in the
ovaries of women and made in the testes of men.
Once again, men and women both have each in different levels.
(19:12):
And this is the one that really like kicks in
during puberty and then takes a break during menopause. Not
a break but more like a retirement.
Speaker 2 (19:21):
Yeah, it goes to Florida.
Speaker 1 (19:24):
Yeah exactly.
Speaker 2 (19:25):
Maybe yeah Flora for once. I'm just gonna stick with
my original one. Good Astriol is another one. This one
is mostly produced during pregnancy to help the uterus grow,
and it also helps with breastfeedings. It leads to most
of the body changes during pregnancy. You can thank estriol
(19:47):
for that. And there are other types of estrogen, but
typically it's those three. Those are the big ones. And
it's obviously everyone knows estrogen is the reason that you
have breasts and that your hips fill out, and that
it has a lot to do with a woman's monthly cycle, right,
And that's absolutely true. That has a lot to do
with everything, like that's what estrogen does. But it is
(20:09):
again it's important for metabolizing muscles, for preventing your muscles
from injury. It also contributes to endurance, which if you
read about ultra marathons, women tend to dominate those I
was reading about, Like short runs, men can outrun women
very easily. Marathons typically men win. But then as you
(20:32):
get further and further and further, and actually there's a
moment I think it's like like one hundred and fifty
miles or some mind boggling amount of distance, women start
to slowly overtake men. And then the longer you go,
the further ahead, women finish before men in tests of
endurance like that, and they think it's because they have
(20:54):
higher stores of estrogen, which is helping their muscles work better.
Speaker 3 (20:59):
So you talked about good for like you know, muscle
growth and muscle formation. Sure, Also estrogen can help facilitate
brain activity, skin elasticity, which you know, is that why
like wrinkles happen as you age? Is that because of
drop and among other things in estrogen?
Speaker 2 (21:20):
I would think so. I think it's also just they've
been around the block so many times, like skin, I mean.
Speaker 1 (21:27):
Yeah, yeah, So if you're a doctor, doctor Clark.
Speaker 2 (21:31):
Well, no, okay, why am I?
Speaker 3 (21:34):
Why am I going wrinkley around the eyes here? What's
going on with physiologically with my body? You know, it's
been around the block?
Speaker 1 (21:41):
What more? What more can I say? And also, don't
take any gynecological advice from me.
Speaker 2 (21:46):
Right, I'd be like, I thought you're a dermantologist. Oh
I'm neither.
Speaker 1 (21:49):
Oh boy.
Speaker 3 (21:50):
So estrogen is something that can affect mood, but you
know it's it fluctuates. I think pre menopausal women have
a range of about thirty to forty pikeograms per mili liter,
But it varies from person to person. And then like
we said, it rises and falls during the menstrual cycle.
(22:11):
It's not like a set number. I think Postman Apostle
that drops all the way down from literally zero to thirty.
Speaker 1 (22:20):
And then for.
Speaker 3 (22:21):
Men, for guys like you and me, yeah, we have
a range of about ten to fifty. I'm probably more
like fifty five or sixty would be my guess.
Speaker 2 (22:30):
So I'm right there with you, buddy. So again, the
reason why men would have it at all is because
it's not just the woman's sex a female sex hormone.
It does other stuff. Just I can't say this enough
because it was such a sure you can like it,
It was such an epiphany for me. I'm just like, Oh,
I had no idea that it was this, that things
(22:52):
overlap this much. Yeah, I mean I didn't think it
was just like cut and dry, but I knew there
was some crossover, but I didn't realize just how much
Steinbach screwed us up with that whole binary thing.
Speaker 1 (23:05):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (23:05):
I was trying to make a joke about a pop
act that crossed over, but I couldn't come up with it.
Speaker 1 (23:11):
Just, uh, someone send in a good joke there.
Speaker 2 (23:13):
How about Bay Bay Beyonce in the country.
Speaker 1 (23:17):
I heard about that, did you hear it? Is it good? Yeah?
Speaker 2 (23:20):
It's fine. I'm not huge in the country.
Speaker 1 (23:23):
So it's real country then, huh.
Speaker 2 (23:25):
No, it's like dance floor line dancing hunt. Yeah, sure
it is real country. Yes, but it's not like it's
not like Hank or anything like that. But it's like
a it's more like Garth. It's like a Garth Brooks song.
Speaker 1 (23:38):
Oh geez, I need to hear it.
Speaker 3 (23:39):
I thought it was more just like Hi and Beyonce
and I put on a cowboy hat.
Speaker 2 (23:43):
So now, no, she's from Texas. You know she knows
what she's talking about.
Speaker 1 (23:46):
Yeah, that's true. Can we talk about the Big.
Speaker 2 (23:49):
Don't please don't quote me on that. I'm not in
the bay Hive.
Speaker 1 (23:53):
Okay, I went to that concert. Was great.
Speaker 2 (23:56):
Yeah, I'll bet. Can we talk about the Big t
Oh we're here? Huh yeah.
Speaker 3 (24:02):
I mean we're going to go back and forth. But
T needs to he needs this tea is ready to speak.
Speaker 2 (24:06):
I think before we do, I want to say one
other thing about estrogen. It apparently encourages physical movement, and
you're like, so like with low estrogen, your will to
get up and move or walk across the room or
go take a walk is depleted because your estrogen is lower.
It's as simple as that Isn't that nuts? Yeah, that's cool.
(24:29):
So yes, now we're on to tea.
Speaker 1 (24:31):
That's right, the male hormone in.
Speaker 2 (24:35):
Part, Yes, and that's no joke. Like, for sure, estrogen
helps form females, Testosterone helps form males, and apparently in
the uterus they're both exposed to copious amounts of testosterone.
It's just what differentiates females from males or keeps females
(24:56):
from developing into males. Because I didn't know this either, Chuck.
We all start out as females. Did you know that.
Speaker 1 (25:04):
I think we talked about that in our puberty episode.
Speaker 2 (25:06):
Okay, so just bear with me for a second. We
all start out as females, and then we're all we're
all kind of inundated with testosterone. But females typically have
something called aromatase, which is an enzyme that converts testosterone
into estrogen much more prevalent in the feed in the
placenta with the fetus, and so it's basically like batting
(25:29):
away all the testosterone. So the baby comes out assigned
female at birth. Pretty interesting, huh. Like without the injection
of testosterone, we would all be females or without the
presence of aromatase, we would all be males.
Speaker 1 (25:44):
That's right.
Speaker 3 (25:45):
And then once things are you know, I guess what
that's around the seventh week or.
Speaker 2 (25:49):
So, yeah, something like that.
Speaker 1 (25:51):
That's when the testicles start to produce testosterone. That's when the.
Speaker 3 (25:54):
Factory opens up. And I don't think we mentioned, but
testosterone is a member of a family of androgen hormones. Uh,
boy to should we even try and say these or
just say the shorthand? I want to say them, knock
yourself out?
Speaker 2 (26:10):
Uh andros stenny dione then I practiced and st andres
steno dione.
Speaker 1 (26:18):
Yeah, I think that's right.
Speaker 2 (26:19):
D hydro epi andros sterone also known as dh A sure,
d hydro epi androsterone sulfate d h A, yes, and
then dihydro testosterone d h T.
Speaker 1 (26:31):
Yeah. Nice work.
Speaker 3 (26:33):
Thanks, you get to move on in our medical competition.
Speaker 2 (26:37):
You could be a doctor, but but I'm not. So
don't that's forgotten logical.
Speaker 1 (26:42):
Advice, never never or any medical advice.
Speaker 3 (26:45):
Uh So, Like I said, the test testosterone factory is
open at about seven weeks. And the reason we went
back and kind of named the others is because some
of that testosterone at that age is converted into the dhea. Right, yeah,
I'm not gonna say it. And that is the sort
(27:07):
of the money hormone for making the penis form and
grow in the prostate. And about seven months in is
when the trigger is kicked off by testosterone for testicular descent.
Even though that can happen after you're born.
Speaker 2 (27:23):
It makes it hilarious. Beew sound.
Speaker 1 (27:26):
Oh man, where's your slide whistle?
Speaker 2 (27:28):
I don't have it on me. Maybe gerial'll work it in.
Speaker 3 (27:32):
Yeah, I think you actually isolated some slide whistle cuts,
so don't.
Speaker 2 (27:36):
Tell everybody I know. Here's one of the facts of
the podcast. To me. I had no idea about this.
But so male babies are flooded with testosterone. They don't
have a bunch of aromatase to convert all of it
into estrogen, so they become male and all the stuff
that you just mentioned happens. But they do have some aromatase,
(28:00):
and some of that testosterone is converted into estra diol,
and that estra dial actually is what forms the male brain.
So estrogen forms the male brain starts out as testosterone
converted into estratiol. It causes the changes in the brain
that create.
Speaker 1 (28:18):
The male brain whatever, snowflake.
Speaker 2 (28:21):
I just think that's awesome. Like it also just goes
to show you, like just how so, I mean, just
imagine what an intricate chemical dance this is and how Yeah,
you just adjust this a little bit and adjust that
a little bit and all sorts of different outcomes can happen.
It's just fascinating, Oh for sure.
Speaker 3 (28:40):
I mean, when you're a little kid, there's not a
lot of difference between your testosterone levels. If you're a
little girl a little boy, I think usually under ten
nanograms per desolators at puberty where things just go hog wild, right,
and little boy's testosterone just shoots through the roof. It
(29:00):
rises in girls as well, but nothing like it does
in boys. Once you become a big man, a full
grown man like us, you're gonna have tea levels between
three hundred and a thousand, if you know, if you
have normal quote unquote normal tea. Women have much lower
levels between fifteen and seventy. And this is you know,
(29:21):
in little boys, what's gonna trigger your voice to change,
your bone and muscle mass to grow. You're you know,
all of a sudden, you're gonna have body hair and
facial hair and stuff like that. And also, and I
think we've talked about this at some point, but it
is related to male pattern baldness. But I don't think
they're still at the level where they can say like, hey,
(29:43):
if you have high tee, then you're more likely to
be bald.
Speaker 2 (29:47):
Yes. And that's really really important to point out, dude,
is that we are not at a place in microbiology
or human chemistry or we're like, this is what this
hormone does, and this is what that hormone and dones.
And one of the reasons why is because the same
hormone can have wildly different effects depending on at what
stage in a reaction it comes in, or in what
(30:10):
tissues or what regions of the brain or the body
it's interacting with other things. So when you add all
these different not just other kinds of hormones, but also
like neurotransmitters or neuromodulators and all this stuff, it just
becomes exponentially more complicated and complex. So we're still kind
of at the place where it's like, yeah, testosterones for
(30:30):
boys and estrogens for girls, and we're making tons of headway,
but generally speaking, we're still at a very basic level
and understanding what hormones are capable of. And then also
on the flip side, looking at behavior and saying like, oh, well,
clearly aggression is related to high levels of testosterone.
Speaker 3 (30:51):
Yeah, and we'll get to that coming up in a
sect for short with there been lots of studies, Well,
we need to talk about testosterone dropping over the years,
because men don't experience like a drop off in testosterone
like women do with menopause and estrogen. But it does
decline in both men and women testosterone by about a
(31:11):
percentage a year starting in your thirties, sort of early
to mid thirties generally, although that can vary as well,
and it can vary just from time to time too.
A man's level of testosterone can go up or down
fairly dramatically for different reasons over short periods of time.
Speaker 2 (31:30):
Yeah, And just like with estrogen, testosterone is also responsible
for bone growth and development in remodeling, apparently, the testosterone
is useful for the hard outer layers of the bone
and estrogen is for the spongy interior layers. It's cool
and also something else that stood out to me is
men's estrogen levels are roughly similar to women's testosterone levels
(31:55):
under normal circumstances. Yeah, I guess so, right, Yeah, I
think it's pretty interest.
Speaker 1 (32:00):
I think I'm looking at the numbers.
Speaker 2 (32:01):
Did they add up?
Speaker 3 (32:03):
Well, you were talking about aggression. I mean, should we
take a break and talk about that or should we wait?
Speaker 2 (32:09):
I say we take a break. Now, we've already the
monkey's already flown the.
Speaker 3 (32:13):
Coup, right, all right, the monkey's out of the bag,
the cat is out of the cage.
Speaker 1 (32:18):
We'll be right back.
Speaker 2 (32:40):
Okay, Chuck, So we're back. We found the cat, put
them in the cradle with the silver spoon, so everything's
back to normal.
Speaker 1 (32:46):
Sad a song?
Speaker 2 (32:48):
Oh it is? It is pretty said, especially if you
like your dad.
Speaker 1 (32:52):
Especially if you had problems with your dad.
Speaker 2 (32:54):
Oh yeah, I guess so, I guess so.
Speaker 1 (32:56):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (32:57):
Yeah. Is there any circumstance where that wouldn't be a sad?
Speaker 1 (33:00):
I don't know.
Speaker 3 (33:01):
Maybe the perfect amount of care and love from your
father and with no accompanying.
Speaker 2 (33:09):
Abuse, gotcha, perfect?
Speaker 1 (33:11):
I don't know.
Speaker 2 (33:12):
I'm sure that's very prevalent. Yeah. So, yeah, we're talking
about testosterone, we're talking about sex, we're talking about aggression.
All of those things seem to be very much intertwined
in the public consciousness about testosterone. Right, the more testosterone
you have, the more stillone esque you are, the more
likely you are to wear like a floor length mink
(33:34):
coat with no shirt underneath, which I have to say,
if I could wear that, I definitely would, if I
could rock that look. It's a good look.
Speaker 3 (33:41):
And Josh, I think if you remember, I wore that
exact coat in the movie, in my film Nighthawks, is
that what happens from I think you are mink coat
in Nighthawks?
Speaker 1 (33:50):
Okay, although he was a cop in Nighthawks. You can
afford a mink coat.
Speaker 2 (33:53):
No way, not on a cop salary, not an honest cop,
an underrated movie. So is it?
Speaker 3 (34:00):
Yeah, I don't know if it holds up great, but
I thought it had a pretty good ending. We won't spoil.
Speaker 2 (34:05):
No, no, it's and it's definitely spoilable for sure.
Speaker 3 (34:08):
But and that was my st alone. By the way,
people are just like, what are you even talking about?
Why did Chuck slur there?
Speaker 2 (34:14):
For a little while, I thought it came through loud
and clear. Okay, But the idea is that, like the
whole reason the Rambo films were made, particularly two and three,
is because Sylvester still own experienced a massive spike in testosterone.
It had to get it out in some productive way, right.
Speaker 1 (34:29):
Oh, I thought it was because Rambo was no expendable.
Speaker 2 (34:33):
I haven't seen those movies.
Speaker 1 (34:35):
Huh No, no, no, it was a joke from Rainbow two.
Speaker 2 (34:38):
Oh well, he was also in the Expendables.
Speaker 1 (34:40):
Yeah, I know. I wonder if that had anything to
do with that line.
Speaker 2 (34:43):
Probably not, It could be at I'm sure there's some
people who are like, shut up and talk about aggression
in testosterone, you're making me aggressive.
Speaker 1 (34:54):
Well, what if you knew to a male dog. That's
a good sort of first example.
Speaker 2 (34:57):
That's a great entree, Chuck. Most people would say that
if you neuter, if you remove the testicles of a
male dog, it's going to become much more submissive, much chiller,
probably a lot more fun at parties, will come pick
you up if your car breaks down, that kind of thing.
And there is some data that shows that that's the case,
(35:19):
that some dogs are calmer once they're neutered, But the
other studies have shown like the exact opposite is true,
that dogs can become actually more aggressive when they're neutered,
which is a head scratcher of a puzzler if you
ask me.
Speaker 3 (35:34):
Yeah, I mean I just went through this with Gibson,
and he's not more aggressive because that's an aggressive is
a weird word, because aggressive isn't the same thing as like,
you know, heaper now just like an excitable puppy, Like
that's not aggression necessarily. Yeah, but it definitely did not
(35:55):
chill him out at all.
Speaker 2 (35:57):
Yeah. Yeah, I don't know that it's supposed to, but yeah,
I think some people think it does. But the idea
that it would make a dog more aggressive, so it
had like no impact on him as far as like
his energy level is what you're saying. Yeah, so imagine
if he was generally like that before and then you
neuted him and then he started like biting people. Yeah,
(36:18):
that's that's what happens with some dogs. And they're like, well,
that doesn't make any sense whatsoever. One of the explanations
is is that we think testosterone is tied up with
confidence more than aggression, and that a dog that has
this chemical confidence removed through neutering can actually become more
more nervous, and nervous dogs frequently will bite or bark
(36:41):
more than they did when they had confidence via testosterone.
Speaker 3 (36:46):
Yeah, and that ties in perfectly to the fact that
and this to me is one of the facts of
the show. But they have done studies and male athletes,
like you know, superior male athletes, actors, it or not,
blue collar workers and confidence artists, con men, they all
have above average levels of testosterone.
Speaker 2 (37:08):
Yeah, so there you have it, so too, all right,
case closed, So too though, And this is the state
of study right now with studying the stuff where we're
relating human behavior to hormones like testosterone or estrogen, Like,
there's results like that out there, but that we arrive
at the question, well, wait a minute, do people who
(37:31):
have higher levels of testosterone naturally gravitate to those professions
or does being in a profession like acting or being
a con man raise your testosterone life? Right, They're like, well,
hold on, okay, I got this. We're going to go
study prisoners, specifically violent criminal offenders and see what their
testosterone levels are.
Speaker 1 (37:51):
Like.
Speaker 2 (37:51):
Sure enough, they found that their testosterone levels were above average,
But that still raises the question do higher levels of
testosterone make you more prone to any social violent behavior?
Or does being in prison raise your levels of testosterone.
We still don't know at this point.
Speaker 1 (38:10):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (38:11):
Yeah, it's pretty interesting because I think a lot of people,
like the generals, just the old way of thinking was like,
of course.
Speaker 2 (38:16):
It does, right, And you know what they're finding, they
think is that it's more that testosterone is released when
you need it.
Speaker 1 (38:27):
Yeah, it meets the occasion.
Speaker 2 (38:29):
Right, It's not the thing that's driving the behavior. It's like, oh,
this guy says it's go time, we better release some
testosterone to keep it going.
Speaker 3 (38:36):
Yeah, this next thing is super interesting to me. You know,
moment to moment throughout your day, you're gonna your testosterone
is going to rise and fall some. And they have
found that if you lose, like a running race or
a one on or a basketball game, or an arm
wrestling match, or even a chess match, you will lose testosterone.
(39:03):
So it's not even necessarily it can be something as
cerebral as a chess match, but losing reduces your testosterone.
Winning increases and boosts your testosterone. And they even found
this is crazy to me, that they sampled male voters
for like an election and just your candidate losing causes
(39:25):
a drop in testosterone.
Speaker 2 (39:28):
Yeah, isn't that nuts? That was among McCain voters because
it was the two thousand and eight election. Yeah, it's crazy.
Speaker 3 (39:36):
Yeah, it's like it's unbelievable, like winning and losing even
if you're not participating other than voting yes.
Speaker 2 (39:43):
So they also found that they think that social expectations
can kind of modulate behavior, right, and this kind of
ties into that idea that testosterone kind of helps foster
a response rather than triggering a response, right. So essentially
(40:04):
what they found is that with testosterone levels, we can
correlate it as far as if you are having if
you're faced with a fight or flight situation and you
choose to fight, you probably are experiencing an up tick
in testosterone levels. Again that you didn't have testosterone and
now you're choosing to fight. They think the exact opposite
(40:25):
is true, that you've chosen to fight and your testosterone
levels go up. On the other hand, they found that
if you choose to flee or say not be aggressive,
your cortisol levels, your stress hormone levels increase. So our
response seems to be based on what we think society
will either reward or punish, and then based on our
(40:46):
decision from that our hormones kick in to help kind
of carry out whichever response we decide to go with.
So one other thing that I found was that that
surprised me is that testosterone isn't just made in like
the t testies or the ovaries depending on your sex
assigned a birth, but that it's actually made locally in
(41:06):
the brain, and that testosterone can also be transformed into
different types of estrogen in the brain too, And they
think that locally produced is what it's called testosterone in
like our neural pathways, has much more of an effect
on behavior, mood, that kind of stuff than the stuff
that's made in the testes or the ovaries, and that
(41:27):
actually accounts for some of the baffling results we've gotten
where you know, if you take a blood sample of
somebody and find that they were just being aggressive, but
their blood doesn't show any kind of spike and testosterone, well,
that would account for that because it's not the stuff
that's floating around in their blood that's making them do that.
It's the locally produced testosterone in their brain that's you know,
(41:49):
connecting with their amygdala or something like that it's making
that's helping them their aggressiveness, I guess alone.
Speaker 3 (41:56):
And now I know everyone wants to get to the
part about sex and what testosterone does there. And testosterone does,
you know, sort of directly ramp up the sex drive
in men and women. And they have done trials where
they have shown that it increases the libido. But just
(42:16):
because your tea falls doesn't necessarily mean it's going to
decrease your libido. It can, but it doesn't mean it
has to.
Speaker 2 (42:25):
Right. Yeah, Again, that's just there's baffling results we get
sometimes from just studies of what we presume has to
do with testosterone or estrogen, and it just doesn't quite job.
Speaker 3 (42:40):
All right, So I guess now we can sort of
finish up with some talk of intersex people and where
we stand now with hormone therapy, right.
Speaker 2 (42:48):
Yeah, because one group there's a lot of different people
besides postmenopausal or perimenopausal women who take hormone replacement therapy,
intersex people, people who are born with ambiguous genditalia. Because
like we'd mentioned that whole amazingly intricate dance of chemicals
and hormones during development. Fetal development can just take one
(43:11):
step to the left or one step to the right,
and all of a sudden, there's just a different outcome
that happens to some people. And some people take hormone
replacement therapy to either become more like the gender they
presume that they would have been assigned at birth, or
the gender that they feel like they were assigned at
birth but their genitalia doesn't quite match. There's a lot
of different outcomes that are basically considered conditions that you
(43:35):
can kind of help alleviate with hormone replacement.
Speaker 1 (43:37):
Yeah, for sure. Another one.
Speaker 3 (43:39):
And I'm pretty sure we talked about this in our
female puberty episode. Was starting the nineteen forties, and maybe
even before that, estrogen therapy and hormone treatment could help.
Basically what they would say, like, you know, you don't
want your daughter to grow too tall, so they would
use a hormone block. You don't see that as much today.
(44:02):
It was called precocious puberty, which is still.
Speaker 1 (44:04):
A thing that can happen.
Speaker 3 (44:05):
I think if you enter puberty, I think it's like
a year or two two or what's considered too early,
or you know, just with outside of the normal range.
You can also use these hormone blocking drugs. I mean
they still use in today, but that it's not like
say you don't grow too tall. It's basically just to
save off puberty and to halt precocious puberty in its tracks. Also,
(44:28):
if you are a trans kid, you can use a
hormone blocker to just sort of hit the pause button
to give you a little time to decide what kind
of puberty to go through.
Speaker 2 (44:38):
Yeah, because once you go through puberty, particularly if you
think it was the wrong puberty for the gender you
identify with, there are going to be changes that are
essentially irreversible aside from surgery. Like if you go through
female puberty but you're a trans male, you're still going
(44:58):
to have breasts that half to be removed. Or if
you're a trans woman and you went through male puberty,
your vocal cords are gonna think you're gonna have a
deeper voice, and maybe an atom's apple surgery will have
to remove that. That's how powerful the hormones that get
released and the amounts that they get released in during puberty.
So if you're not quite sure which gender you belong
to yet, using hormone blockers can actually help kind of,
(45:22):
like you said, buy you some time until you figure
out which way you want to go.
Speaker 3 (45:26):
Yeah, and as far as testosterone therapy goes, if you
have a deficiency and testosterone because of hypogonatism or maybe
from HIV or something like that, it's obviously gonna help
with that. Also problems like and here's where it gets
a little tricky, depression, low muscle mass, low energy. There's
(45:48):
some evidence that can prove sexual function, but not as
much that it can increase your low energy if you're
just sort of losing testosterone at that normal rate of
like one what was it, I can't remember.
Speaker 2 (46:00):
The one percent a year? I think is it?
Speaker 3 (46:03):
Yeah, one percent a year. But if you have an
actual deficiency, they've shown that it can improve sexual function
and just don't have as much proof with energy level.
Speaker 2 (46:14):
So does that mean that the ad that has Frank
Thomas and Doug Flutie in it talking about how they're
like crushing their workouts that actually doesn't work. Well.
Speaker 3 (46:22):
I don't know if they're just saying if they're claiming
they're just having natural decline in age, or if they
had a deficiency to begin with, because that's that seems
to be the differentiating factor.
Speaker 2 (46:32):
Yeah, for sure, Yeah, who knows.
Speaker 1 (46:34):
I mean, let's call up Doug Flutie in.
Speaker 2 (46:36):
Let's get him on the horn exactly. Uh, you got
anything else?
Speaker 1 (46:41):
Uh no, I got nothing else.
Speaker 2 (46:43):
I got nothing else either. This is a very enlightening
podcast episode. I should say a lot of stuff I
didn't know about, and now I know more, and you
still shouldn't take my advice medically speaking. Never since Chuck
said never after a nice hearty chuckle, it means it's
time for listener may.
Speaker 3 (47:03):
Hey, guys, I was turned on your show about six
months ago and have been rapidly consuming multiple episodes each
day going back and forth to work. I heard the
school bus yellow episode this morning and thought you might
not have found this little nugget you pointed out mister
Sear Sire was credited with the standardization. I believe you
also noted some other districts had already turned to bright
(47:25):
paint jobs on school buses. But on March twenty third,
nineteen thirty one, the Pleasant Hill tragedy near town Or,
Colorado was because I had a blizzard that came in
that morning. School shut down sent the kids home, and
one of the school buses ran off the road, stuck
in the snow for thirty plus hours. Resulting in the
death of five of the twenty students and the bus driver.
Speaker 2 (47:44):
Oh my god.
Speaker 3 (47:45):
The aftermath theorized that a brightly painted school bus would
have been much easier to spot in the white out
and might not have sat waiting so long to be found.
So buses in Colorado adopted the yellow standard by nineteen
thirty nine, and the proposal for Mister Sire became a
national standard. Unfortunately, it was a reactive, not proactive solution,
(48:06):
brought on by a spring blizzard on the plains of
eastern Colorado. That is from John Colts, and I was
just curious John didn't say I guess that.
Speaker 1 (48:15):
School bus might have been white.
Speaker 2 (48:17):
I would think so.
Speaker 1 (48:19):
Yeah, not a great color.
Speaker 2 (48:20):
No, No, for sure. Thanks a lot, John, That was
a really amazing email. I never heard of that one.
That's terrible. If you want to bring us down terribly
like John did, you can send us an email, wrap
it up, spank it on the bottom, and send it
off to Stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. Stuff you
Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (48:42):
For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,
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Chuck Bryant
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