DIM

I have many remedies for balancing hormones up my sleeve, one of them being DIM. DIM, short for diindolylmethane, is a compound extracted from cruciferous vegetables in which helps the body to metabolize excess estrogen. DIM naturally occurs in veggies such as kale and broccoli, but to balance your hormone levels, you have to aim for a therapeutic dose, higher than what just eating those vegetables provides. You’d have to eat alot of broccoli to get the same effect as taking DIM, as it’s concentrated and much more potent.

We produce different types of estrogen in the body, the three main ones being estradiol, estrone and estriol. Estradiol are the strongest and delivers signals to most estrogen receptors, but the second one, estrone, is quite strong too. The last one are called estriol and is the gentlest ones of the three. Estradiol and estrone floats around in your bloodstream, before getting filtered through the liver. There they get converted into estriol, which is the weaker, but more protective form of estrogen, which is said to have ‘anti-cancer’ properties. Ideally, your liver takes the first two, breaks them apart, so that you end up with estriol. Unfortunately, this is not always the case as our livers are overworked with toxins etc. We need estrogen, but we don’t want it to be too low, and especially not too high. Today, we bathe in a sea of estrogens, because not only are we dealing with our very own estrogen, but we also have all these external estrogens, the xenoestrogens (found in plastic, beauty products++) that disrupt our own hormonal balance. In a perfect world, without toxins, your liver would still be busy all the time! The liver got all its normal duties, and now, by living the lifestyles we do, it’s getting all these extra things added on from the outside world. So if your liver is not functioning optimally and gets the excess estrogens out, this may trigger breast or cervical cancer, or prostate cancer in men (estrogen causes cells to grow) or other hormonal imbalances as the estrogens will just continue to circulate and cause harm. DIM helps your liver more efficiently process those estrogens as it supports the conversion and breakdown of estrogens.