Derek (More Plates More Dates)

From there, you can start doing some of the minute changes, like putting a chlorine filter on your shower head, do this, change your water source, whatever.

Do you notice an incremental uptick in your gonadotropin output or your response to it at that point?

If yes, like, okay, maybe it was a meaningful change.

But until you do that, you're kind of just taking shots in the dark, assuming...

All of these things are, you know, occupying your mental bandwidth and concerning you that may not be worth your concern to that degree.

For example, if you ingest cholesterol, it doesn't necessarily mean you're going to have a dose-dependent elevation in your serum cholesterol, as I'm sure everyone knows here.

But there are certain baseline requirements to serve as the substrate for producing cholesterol-derived

steroids in the body and these are all ultimately derived from cholesterol and then get cleaved and manipulated through enzymatic processes to make all the hormones in your body including but not limited to testosterone estradiol etc so in general it does seem like having a sufficient amount of fat

Is worthwhile and does seem to impact how much hormones you can actually produce and the carbs for actually mediating.

And this is going to depend on, you know, activity levels, how demanding of exercise you do, if you burn through them versus not, if you're sedentary versus not.

But in general, the insulogenic signaling is somewhat necessary to facilitate a balance of free androgens, including free other hormones in the body that often go overlooked, to actually do what they're supposed to do.

Because a lot of people won't even measure the free levels of the IGF-1, the T3.

Some of this stuff gets hyper-nuanced when you get into what hormones are actually bound up that you don't realize.

Estrogens, DHT, et cetera.

So having a balanced diet and then the protein, like you mentioned, from like a mechanistic perspective, like I think in general, these things all serve as building blocks is the simplest way I can put it.

And having a deficiency entirely of one or the other, it's just like it's kind of the expected outcome.

Like it's often not going to be ideal to be missing something entirely that your body utilizes for critical, you know, structural things.

And it's not to say that it will absolutely happen.

I'm sure there are a lot of people that thrive on long-term ketogenic diets or may even clinically require them.

So I certainly don't want to come out here and suggest,