How Can Toxins Contribute to Cancers and Weight Gain?

Summer is here; ladies get ready to color their toes to show off in their beautiful sandals in this hot season. Have you ever thought about what these colorful nail polishes can do to your health? Many women pump an abundant supply of toxic chemicals into their bodies from cosmetics, hair products, deodorants, and perfumes these days. The nose is the direct line from the environment to the brain, which means pollutants, viruses, and bacteria can travel through the nasal passage to set the wheels of disease in motion.

Today, many women are suffering from estrogen dominance syndrome and hormone imbalance, such as mood swings, food cravings and sugar cravings, and weight gain. We may wonder how this vicious cycle started. Estrogen dominance is a condition in which the body has a higher level of estrogen than progesterone. There are many possible causes of estrogen dominance, and one of them is exposure to xenohormones found in petroleum-based products such as plastics (including disposable water bottles), cosmetics, skin products, shampoo, paint, and fingernail polish, soaps, cleaning products, deodorants, and perfumes. According to a study in 2012, 99% of analyzed breast cancer samples contained parabens, a common carcinogen found in deodorants. You can see how these beauty products are damaging our health significantly.

These foreign chemicals not only put your liver and digestive system under stress but also cause hormone imbalance. This is why estrogen dominance contributes to weight gain because estrogen regulates the homeostasis of mitochondria, which means how efficiently your body produces energy (ATP), in another word, your metabolism. Estrogen also affects how glucose is used in the body by working on insulin receptors, which can affect your blood sugar levels. Estrogen also affects the hormone leptin sensitivity in the body, which regulates your appetite. Fat has neuroendocrine receptors and has the ability to cross-communicate with the other organs in the body. When estrogen tells the body to store more fat, it does it by activating the peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor, which is a mechanism that tells the body to specifically store glucose into fat. Estrogen, directly and indirectly, affects the thyroid gland and the production of growth hormones. Your circadian clock, the 24-hour clock cycle, is controlled by the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN) located in the brain. It has both estrogen and testosterone receptors. In another word, estrogen can affect your sleep cycle as well. Estrogen can also affect your mood because the estrogen in the brain can also act like a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), which has the ability to inhibit the reuptake of serotonin. Depression is associated with low serotonin levels in the body. As you can see that estrogen plays many important roles in the body. With estrogen dominance, the foreign estrogen is taking over the natural estrogen in the body, which interferes and interrupts many important biochemical pathways in the body, and affects your thyroid function, and your gut health since some of the estrogen receptors are in your gut lining, this, in turn, affects your metabolism and contributes to your weight gain.

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