Exercise Reduces Estrogen In the Blood and Strengthens Insulin In the Blood!

From the first moment my wife discovered she had breast cancer, there was a deafening silence from the men I know. Even ones whose wives, mothers or girlfriends had breast cancer seemed to have received a gag order from some Central Cancer Command and did little more than mumble about the experience. Not one to shut up for any known reason, I started this blog…

Doctors harp on exercise.

Despite the harping – or in my case, perversely because of it – I avoid exercise like the plague.


Even so, as I read more and more sites promoting the “exercise makes you better if you have breast cancer” meme, I found that almost none of them give any kind of evidence as to WHY exercise fights cancer and promotes healing.


So I dug into the sites and finally found some evidence supporting this wild, “Do this one weird thing…” (http://www.fatburningfurnace.com/index.php?hop=zthfitaff&pid=1974) kind of meme.


1) Exercise may prevent tumor development by lowering hormone levels, (particularly in premenopausal women), as well as lowering levels of insulin and insulin-like growth factor



“Tumor development” – tumors are the things that create the ghastly dark shadows on the mammogram. Characterized by being a lump, the tumor is “abnormal breast tissue cells, growing in an uncontrolled way.”


Hormone levels in a human body mean lots of things. When we thing of hormones, we think of estrogen and testosterone, what most people call “sex hormones”. Essentially, hormones are chemicals made by cells and organs that send messages to other parts of the body. Chemicals we are familiar with but don’t usually call hormones are things like calcitonin, glucagon, human chorionic gonadotropin, serotonin, prostaglandin and of course, insulin. Early pregnancy detection kits are made to show the level of human chorionic gonadotropin. If it’s there, there is a 99% chance you are pregnant. It doesn’t EXIST in a woman’s bloodstream unless she is pregnant.


What hormone levels does exercise reduce? Primarily estrogen. Estrogen does things besides produce secondary sexual characteristics and feed breast cancer tumors. It also increases fat stores in the body (important for energy), increases bone formation, increases triglycerides in blood, promotes fluid balances and decreases fat deposition. Exercising to a point of fat loss causes a decrease in the number of cells in women that make estrogen in fat cells (this begins in menopause) , therefore the amount of estrogen in the blood goes down and the cancer cells grow more slowly.


Insulin and insulin-like growth factor from the pancreas and the liver respectively, regulate the uptake of glucose and fats in the body as well as regulating cell growth. With exercise, insulin absorption and effectiveness increases which shows up as less insulin in the bloodstream and doing its job in the body – which is to cause cells in the liver, muscle, and fat tissue to take up glucose from the blood and store it as glycogen rather than allowing it to float around the bloodstream – which is toxic.


To make a long story short: exercise lowers estrogen and makes insulin more effective.


OK – now I’m starting to see it!


References: http://breastcancer.about.com/od/risk/a/lump_overview.htm, http://www.aphroditewomenshealth.com/news/20030123215938_health_news.shtml, http://www.diabeteshealth.com/read/1996/05/01/611/how-does-exercise-affect-insulin-levels/, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_human_hormones


Image: http://www.fernlifecenter.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/estrogen1.jpg