<<Disclaimer: Verify this information before applying it to your situation.>>

I guess this is a women - only post...but you guys can read it too.

Lately I've been thinking about this bloating.  Knowing about the PST
enzyme, I've started taking about 3/4 teas. of epsom salts in about 16 oz
of water, & that seems to help.  Diluted to that porportion, and drunk
over a day's time, bitterness is not a problem.  I would expect that
eating veggies that like sulfur might help augment available magnesium
sulfate, (sweet bell peppers), but I have yet to check that out.

But the timing of the bloating is what I got real curious about, having
experienced an awful case of it right before "that time".  Does this sound
familiar to you ladies?  In fact, I have memories of myself as a skinny
little kid who all of a sudden bloated out at about age 9 or 10...& I see
this happening to my 10 year old daughter....just recently has bloating
become an issue.

I was wondering if there was a hormonal connection.  So I started looking
up estrogen & progesterone on the web.

The first two weeks of a woman's cycle she's secreting estrogen, the
second two weeks, progesterone.  When progesterone levels drop, menses
begins.  That time when progesterone levels decrease correspond to the
window of time that PMS occurs, right before the menses.

Now, according to what I'm reading, some women don't make enough
progesterone...and when their levels drop at the end of the 2 2-week
cycles, they are still secreting estrogen.

This condition is known as estrogen dominance, and it's associated with
PMS.

Another article I came across referred to calcium stores and these two
hormones.  Estrogen's role is to put the calcim into bones, progesterone's
role is to keep it there.  If I'm reading this right, calcium stores
deplete after menopause because there isn't enough progesterone to keep
the calcium "locked up", so the estrogen dominant woman is more prone to
osteoporsis because of those low levels of progesterone.

And besides the PMS & the osteo, what about inappropriate levels of
estrogen in the post-menopausal woman and breast cancer?

(oh, and incidentally, another page I pulled down is about estrogen and
it's effect on neural development of the fetal brain during pregnancy...
how would this affect our children?)

The BEST part of this list is that everyone is at different levels of
knowledge...those of you who have been to an endocrinologist, can you help
me out here?  Has anyone been told they were estrogen dominant?  Is it
something that is fairly common on among us female CD'ers?  Once we
identify it, is it an aspect of our unigue physiology that we can exploit
to make our lives better?  (For example to favor more output of
progesterone, I read somewhere to take extra beta carotene and vitamin C).

You input is greatly appreciated.  Thanks

Bec
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