Tidbit Tuesday - Testosterone
Hello,
Welcome to another Tidbit Tuesday where we aim to teach you something new about health, nutrition, lifestyle, training, and so much more, every week!
Today we are talking about TESTOSTERONE and the importance of its role, for both men and women. This is not written by me, this is an article written for The Ready State by Keenan Eriksson. I have simply taken the important parts of the article to deliver it to you. However, if you want to read the whole article, which is far more detailed, I have attached the link at the bottom.
In the past decades, testosterone levels have declined drastically. The reason?
It feels like everything...
How bad is this? Testosterone can be thought of as the lifeblood of male health and performance.
Low Testosterone can look like depression, diabetes and insulin resistance, metabolic dysfunction, infertility, weight gain, chronic inflammation, poor exercise recovery.
This article includes some lifestyle changes that can improve your Testosterone.
Even if you already have good levels, these habits and tactics will help improve and protect your hormones as you age. Basically, you don’t need to know for certain in order to use this guide, but it’s still good to get testing in case you need actual hormone therapy.
Testosterone therapy is something I support, but only after addressing your lifestyle and health. If you are under 50, and you have low T, it’s not aging. It’s the world you live in.
From work schedules to activity to estrogenic compounds and even the lights in our buildings, there are tons of factors that lead to the declining testosterone of our population. Address that first.
Certain nutrients offer a different story. Zinc, magnesium, Vitamin D, and creatine have all been shown to reliably influence testosterone levels. Let’s not forget about high-quality saturated fats either. If you still think cholesterol is bad for you, I’d ask you if you realize cholesterol is the literal building block for your hormones. Our bodies are literally made of fats. Lipid biology is the fact of life down to the cellular level.
Now, where can we find most of these nutrients in our diet? High-quality meat. It’s no secret that I think red meat is a superfood. Red meat is a source of all the essential nutrients for testosterone in their most bioavailable forms.
Fat is an organ and one of its roles is to store toxins. While conventionally raised meat may have similar nutrient profiles to grass-fed, the fat is different. Conventionally raised animals are exposed to many more toxins that end up in their fat. If you are trying to stick to a budget, you can definitely get your lean meat from conventional sources. But source fat from grass-fed and finished. Always.
Thankfully, these are also some of the cheapest products and if you know a good butcher, can often be sourced free. Just ask for the trimmings.
Eat Organ Meat!
Now, any conversation about nutrients and meat should absolutely consider organs. Organ meats are one of the single greatest things you can eat to support your body, but they have fallen out of popular dining over the last century.
This is incredibly unfortunate. Organ meats have some of the best nutrient profiles available in all food. The liver is literally the most nutrient-dense food known to man. On top of this, all the nutrients are in their most bioavailable forms, and there are no anti-nutrients to block absorption.
If there were one animal product I could convince vegans to eat, it would be liver. That’s how powerful it is.
One of the best foods you can eat to support your own T levels is beef oysters.
OR Try Desiccated Organ Supplements
The number one supplements I promote are desiccated organ supplements. These are freeze-dried organ meats that have been capsuled in a pill form. Though cooking liver is definitely cheaper, it’s much harder to find other organ meats like spleen, pancreas, etc.
For the purpose of optimizing testosterone, there is no better supplement than the Paleo Valley Grass Fed Organ Complex. This desiccated organ supplement contains heart, liver, and kidney. It’s like a tailored nutrient package designed for testosterone optimization.
For Vegetarians & Vegans
As I’ve stated already, I think meat is a superfood. I think the stigmas about meat are based on exaggeration and poor research. The fact is that nutrients in meat are far more bioavailable than those from plants.
If you include organ meats and eat nose-to-tail, you can get every nutrient a human can need without ever eating plants. I also believe that the true culprits behind diet-related disease are the chemicals and the oxidized vegetable oils that have been added to our diets in the last 100 years. Vegan, omnivore, or carnivore, your best nutrition move is still just to avoid ultra-processed food.
However, if you are trying to optimize testosterone but you are vegetarian or vegan, I must say I truly believe your diet is very lacking in this endeavor. You consume a diet that has shortcomings with nearly every nutrient that supports testosterone.
Vitamin D requires Vitamin K2 which humans cannot create on their own. The main dietary source of Vit K2 is animals. Plants only contain Vitamin K1 which we cannot convert.
Furthermore, creatine, zinc, and vitamin D are all abundant in animal foods but exceedingly rare or nonexistent in plant foods. So, I’m not here to convince you to stop being vegan or vegetarian.
But if you have symptoms of low T. Supplement with Creatine. Supplement with Zinc. Supplement with Vitamin K2. And really learn all the nutrients that are suboptimal on a vegan diet and make sure you are supplementing.
Lift Heavy, Sprint, & Don’t Skip Leg Day
While diet and the outdoors can help provide the building blocks for testosterone, they work best when combined with an active lifestyle. In fact, studies on zinc and magnesium show these nutrients only significantly improve testosterone in active individuals.
Testosterone levels benefit from a small handful of specific exercise types: High-intensity interval training, lifting heavy things, and leg day.
So, for a minimum effective dose training protocol, I advise two workouts a week, both focused on legs. One of these workouts will be in the form of sprints, the other in the form of barbell squats.
F*** Plastic Bottles
Next, prioritize good quality drinking water that is not in plastic bottles. Plastics drinking bottles may be one of the most significant exposures to endocrine disruptors we have. So many products are bottled in thin plastic that degrades into the very liquid it contains.
I personally prioritize glass bottles or cans. I’m a big fan of San Pellegrino and liquid death mountain water. Buying canned or glass bottled water can be expensive if it’s your exclusive source of H2O, but you can also use large glass or hard plastic (not ideal but way better than thin bottles) to store gallons of water inexpensively.
Address Your Cheap Dopamine Addictions: Porn, Social Media, Video Games, Etc.
Testosterone is highly involved with your dopamine neurotransmitter. This neurochemical creates a sense of achievement and is referred to as the reward chemical. Naturally, it secretes in larger amounts when you do something that feels good, such as winning a game or having sex.
I believe that cheap and too-easily accessible dopamine triggers have a harmful effect on testosterone. If you are constantly getting a low-grade dopamine hit, you are likely burning through your body’s resources to create the neurochemical, not to mention becoming less interested in bigger achievements.
For this and many other reasons, I recommend a serious examination of every habit you have for alleviating boredom and getting that dopamine hit.
This can be monitoring the likes on your social media page, playing video games, watching tv, etc. Anything that gives you that good feeling. In small amounts, these things could be beneficial.
But often we use these to alleviate a sense of boredom that I believe is actually necessary for our health and our mind.
My recommendation? Go as distraction-free as possible. Actively monitor for activities you use for procrastination. Usually, the cheapest and most useless things will rise to the top: excessive comment scrolling, reading clickbait news stories.
What we want instead is to actually feel bored and let that boredom fuel proactive or “real” pursuits. In my life, I recently sold both my gaming console and television. Why? Because even though I love games, I often play to alleviate boredom and burnout rather than for the love of the game.
Eat food high in essential building blocks for Testosterone. Activate those building blocks by working out with sprints, heavy lifting, and a focus on legs, and then avoid habits and environmental compounds that lower your testosterone production.
Treat Testosterone with the awareness and respect it’s due, and you will have a much better life.
Happy training!
Your friend in Health & Fitness,
Coach Sean
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