How diabetes, high blood glucose and insulin-resistance lowers testosterone in men

"I am tired, I don't have the energy I did when I was younger. My sex drive is lower. I have a hard time getting an erection and sustaining it. I have been more irritable and short with the people I care about in my life." These are all symptoms that many men complain of. Often our medical establishment just chalks this up to getting old. That is a bad justification.

Testosterone levels have more recently become a target of looking to address these symptoms.  A simple blood test can tell us where your levels are at. It would seem strait forward that if these levels were low, replacing the low levels with testosterone hormone would fix the problem. This where things start to get short sighted. 

The body is not a singular system where A+B=C. When a guy has low testosterone, there are multiple reasons why this is occurring. While it is a convienent and attractive option to just give T, it is a disservice and really a liability to use testosterone hormone replacement to artificially bring back up the serum values without addressing the causes of why it is low. I am going to discuss one of the most influential reasons why testosterone goes low and also the problems that can happen without addressing this cause and just injecting T. 

Your metabolism is the process by which your body converts food into energy. There are different types of macromolecules that we consume (fat, protein and carbohydrate) to run our metabolism. Protein and fat are the best due to their energy per gram of substance. This means that you get more bang for your buck by consuming these two macromolecules. This does not mean that carbohydrate do not have a place in our diet but it should be consumed primarily through foods such as fruits and root vegetables likes sweet potatoes. We have culturally gone way over board with our refined and processed carbohydrate consumption leading us into diseased states such as diabetes, hyperglycemia and insulin- resistance. Once these diseased states start to occur and we lose efficiency in our metabolism, then we start to use our hormones to sustain our energy output. For us guys, this means we begin to use testosterone in greater amounts. In the short term, this is in our benefit because we can still continue to do our activities of daily living at the level that we desire. But as time wears on and our metabolism begins to slow down, we begin to get more depleted of testosterone, then bigger problems start to occur. 

Fatigue, weight gain, erectile dysfunction, low libido, irritability, joint pain, difficultly with concentration and decreased muscle strength are all the symptoms that show up. So what is to be done when this is occurs? Well most guys and their doctors will have no problem just juicing up with T while looking at the short term symptom relief as the major victory. The problem with this approach is that they have not addressed the underlying metabolic issue and they are going to have much bigger problems down the road.

Taking time to evaluate your diet and lifestyle along with your toxicity load while committing to an action plan so you can see results is the path to health recovery. The best dietary choices for addressing metabolic problems and low testosterone in guys is to get more protein and fat into the meal plan. Our human design is to only eat 3 types of Whole Foods- meat, fruit and vegetables. Here a list of choices to consider-

• steak and eggs in the morning
• sausage and bacon with avocado slices over top, add fresh fruit with it
• sautéed chicken and veggies 
• BBQ meat and veggies
• sautéed ground beef and veggies
• eat more grass-fed butter, put over sweet potatoes or steamed veggies.

 Increased risk of heart disease it what happens when you decide to use injectable testosterone without addressing the metabolism of the individual.  In my clinical experience, men's risk of heart attack, stroke and cardiovascular events rises from this type of prescribing. One of the primary contributors to this is testosterone's influence on thickening the blood. As the numbers of blood cells increase through a process called polycythemia, these cells have a higher tendency of clotting together. This clot formation is what will lead to stroke and heart attack. Now, if time and effort are being provided to address the metabolic imbalance and subsequent inflammation processes that are occurring in the body's of men supplementing with T, then these risk factors start to lower. There still will be risk associated with this type of treatment but statistically less heart disease will occur. 

Take away- before you go and inject a medication with risk into your body based on having all these unwanted symptoms, find a doctor who will help you recover the health of your metabolism. This by itself is typically enough to restore you to a optimal state in body, mind and strength. 

Yours in health,

Dr.Buttler 

https://joe.bioscientifica.com/view/journals/joe/220/3/R37.xml#bib94

https://www.drugdangers.com/testosterone/strokes-and-blood-clots/