Hormone Balance is Key To Healthy Aging

Interviewer: Let's switch gears a little bit, let's talk about anti-aging medicine. I know that's one of the things that you, a service you provide here. How important is hormone balancing when it comes to anti-aging?

Dr. Joel Baumgartner: It's very important, especially for the population that is dealing with the problems with aging, whether it's with fatigue, with chronic joint pain, not at the ideal body weight. We're finding that when hormones become imbalanced, it's like you can have a very talented orchestra, you've got the best trumpet players, the best saxophone players, the percussion, everybody is amazing at what they do. But the saxophone is a little bit off balance and it's just out of tune. And then your violin guys are a little bit off key. So everybody is working, but they're just not working together. So then you go and you fine-balance the percussion, you get everything tuned, and then all of the sudden the orchestra is working amazing. It's the same thing inside our body. Our body has hundreds of hormones that are working together. They're overlapping, they're helping each other out, and they're supporting each other. If those guys aren't finely-tuned, if one is too low, one is too high, it's going to create a lot of havoc in the body which directly relates to aging, creates inflammation in the body, degenerates the joints. Or it also makes it such that if I do injure my knee, if my hormones are out of balance and I don't have enough growth hormone, testosterone, or other things, I'm not going to heal that thing appropriately because I don't have all of those anabolic hormones to help my body heal. Anabolic just means heal, repair, and grow. And so, it does effect it a lot.

Interviewer: When you talk about balancing and you've mentioned "baseline" before too, how do you know what is low, what is normal, what is high? Are we all different when it comes to levels?

Dr. Joel Baumgartner: Yeah, everybody is a little bit different and there's going to be definitely a range of "normal." There's also a range of what is "optimal." So for example, say I went in to get my vitamin D level checked and my vitamin D came back at 32. So one doctor might say "Oh congratulations, your test is normal. You're in the normal range, you're at 32." If somebody came to me with a 32 vitamin D I'd say "Wow, your vitamin D is not optimal. We need to get you on vitamin D because the optimal level for vitamin D is about 80. At 32, vitamin D really can't do anything healthy for you. It can maybe help a little with bone density, but if you get your vitamin D levels to 80 by supplementing with some vitamin D - because you can't make enough vitamin D through the sun - if you supplement with some vitamin D I can get your bone density to get better, I can get you more energy. Studies show you can increase your strength by 20%. For guys it decreases the risk of prostate and colon cancer, for women breast cancer and colon cancer. Mood and all of those other positive things, those only happen once your D is optimized." So, just because I'm in that normal range of 30 to 100 doesn't mean I'm optimal. So it's real important to optimize things, not just to normalize them.