Today I’d like to talk about my thoughts on high dose lignans from linseed to balance estrogen levels. Linseed or flaxseed is a food. When we’re using linseeds therapeutically, it’s using food as medicine. I love using food as medicine.

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Food As Medicine

Food as medicine is a fantastic way to restore balance to the body in a cost-effective manner.   It’s also therapeutic so it’s a great strategy. Wherever possible, I would choose to use food as medicine before using supplements, either nutritional supplements or herbal medicine. So, for that reason, linseeds are great.

How Do Lignans Balance Hormones?

The way that linseeds work in the body to balance estrogen levels is through the process of estrogen modulation. Linseeds or flaxseeds contain a phytoestrogen called lignan.  Lignans lock on to your body’s estrogen receptor sites and trick your body into either increasing or decreasing its production of estrogen, depending on what’s going on in your system at that point in time. So, for this reason it’s a really safe food to use.

It doesn’t really matter where your oestrogen levels are at, the linseed is going to help to balance them out so that they’re in the correct ratio for your body at that stage of your life or at that point in time. You don’t even need to have hormone testing done before you use the linseeds therapeutically, because it doesn’t matter if your estrogen levels are too high or too low, the linseeds will still help.

How to Prepare Linseeds For Maximum Absorption of Lignans

You need to know that in order to absorb lignan from linseeds you need to use the whole linseed and it must be freshly ground. Flaxseed oil is a great source of essential fatty acids and fat-soluble nutrients, but it doesn’t contain the lignan. In order to get the lignan into your diet, you need to eat the flaxseed meal. If you eat whole flaxseeds (that is you eat the seed without grinding it), it’ll give you an increase in fibre for your gut function but again, you won’t absorb the lignan.

In order to get all the therapeutic benefits from linseed or flaxseed (it’s the same thing linseed and flaxseed, it just goes by different names). In order to enjoy all the therapeutic benefits of the food, you’re much better having it ground.

The essential fatty acids in flaxseed are quite volatile.  The essential fatty acids will oxidise pretty quickly so, you don’t want to have linseed meal that was ground 2 years ago and it’s been sitting on the supermarket shelf waiting for you to buy it. You’re much better off buying whole linseeds and grinding them up in a coffee grinder or a food processor, to last you for about a week. Store that ground flaxseed meal in the fridge in a glass food storage container for that length of time.

Consume it every day and at the end of the week grind another batch for the following week.

Linseed Meal Can Help Manage Constipation

I love the fact that ground flaxseed meal also helps to manage constipation. It’s a great source of soluble fibre. So, we know that increasing your intake of soluble fibre helps to improve the motility of stools through the gut and reduce constipation. And we know this can be really beneficial for balancing estrogen levels for women whose estrogen levels are too high.

If you have a slow motility of stools through the bowel it can actually cause re-absorption of estrogen metabolised from the bowel back into the blood stream which will disrupt your estrogen cycle. It’s like a vicious cycle. So, the fact that the flaxseed meal is helping to reduce constipation is very beneficial.

Listen To Your Body

One thing to keep in the back of your mind though is that if you consume a lot of a specific food every day, it can cause you to develop an intolerance to the food. So, we want to minimise the chances of this occurring. Always listen to your body. Start with maybe one tablespoon of ground flaxseed meal a day and gradually increase to two tablespoons per day.  But you might, a couple of days a week want to give it a rest, just so that your system has a chance to function without the flaxseed meal as well. So, you know, 5 days on per week, 2 days off. Or you might want to do 3 days of flaxseed meal have a day off, do 4 days of flaxseed meal, have a day off, once you get to the point where you’re having 2 tablespoons per day.

Linseed Meal, Lignans and Hot Flushes

There’s lots of research about the influence of flaxseed meal on hot flushes as well. So, if you’re a woman who is either peri-menopausal or menopausal and you’re experiencing hot flushes, flaxseed meal is a great food to include in your diet.

There’s some concern regarding the use of phytoestrogens and the adverse impact it might have, particularly with the phytoestrogens from soy containing foods. If you are trying to increase your intake of phytoestrogens, using the phytoestrogen lignan from linseed meal is definitely my preference as opposed to soy products. We know that soy can inhibit thyroid function.  We certainly don’t want to fix one problem and cause another by using a lot of soy foods in your diet for your phytoestrogen source.  This can disrupt thyroid hormone regulation and can trigger a  thyroid hormone condition.

So, I give high dose lignans from linseed meal the thumbs up for balancing estrogen levels naturally.

I hope this information’s been helpful for you and keep watching out for my next blog.

Yours in Health,

 

 

Book a Consultation with Naturopath Emma Stimpson