Are you troubled by physical, emotional, or even psychological issues preventing you from developing optimal heart health?

Each year 1,000,000 Americans are stricken with serious heart related illnesses.  Heart attacks, congestive heart failure, and chest discomfort have soared to epidemic levels. Just the fear of heart disease paralyzes some people.

You don’t have to become a medical statistic. Your heart can be healed, and creating Optimal Heart Health doesn’t have to be painful.  Just by learning 3 Simple Steps (Sign up for my special report above) you can begin improving your body’s heart health.

Yet not all ailments of the heart afflict just the body.  The National Institutes of Health has reported that 20 million Americans suffer from anxiety, and another 30 million are crippled by depression-psychological conditions that have been linked to heart disease.
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Recession Proof Your Heart

Are you experiencing the effects of the recession? If you haven't noticed its been in the news everywhere. A recession is brewing! The real estate market is in shambles. Many people have been laid off of their jobs... Read More...

Health Tips

Stress & Hormones Can Affect Your Libido

One of the questions I receive most often concerns a very delicate subject: libido, or sexual drive. Human libido is a very important marker for both physical and emotional health. Disturbance in sexual drive is connected with almost all serious disorders. We need to discuss this topic and learn what we can about how we function and what a disturbance in sexual function may mean - at any age. Nearly half of women and nearly one-third of men experience sexual dysfunction, according to a survey published in an issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association. So, if you have any kind of sexual difficulty, you are not alone!

Hormones: special messengers
You may recall from our discussion of menopause that hormones are messengers. They convey instructions to target tissues to respond in a specific way. When that response is met, the target tissue will often send another hormone out to say, "Mission accomplished."

There are thousands of different hormones. We know the names of some of the more familiar ones: estrogen, progesterone, testosterone, etc. These are special hormones for reproduction, but they also serve many other functions. This is a very important point.

Consider the hormone progesterone. Progesterone is produced in men, women and children. More progesterone is produced in women during childbearing years as part of the cycle of ovulation. However, progesterone is an important hormone for sexual development and libido throughout life. Interestingly, higher levels of progesterone are associated with stress resistance.

Stress: anti-progesterone, anti-libido
With higher levels of progesterone come higher levels of testosterone and DHEA, the "anti-stress" hormone. When stress increases, DHEA, progesterone and testosterone all decrease. This makes sense because stress, the so-called "fight or flight" response, is designed to save our life during a crisis. Progesterone is designed to help men and women procreate. These are not activities that usually occur at the same time. So, your body steals energy from sexual drive and donates it to the "fight or flight" response.

Stress levels go up; progesterone, testosterone and DHEA levels go down; cholesterol also goes up - all because of the hormones associated with fight or flight. Women can develop Polycystic Ovary Syndrome (PCOS) and have very difficult symptoms with menopause. Men can develop an enlarged prostate gland and serious symptoms of andropause (male menopause). Both sexual drive and function will be impaired.

What to do
Hormones have a life cycle of three stages: we make them, we use them, and we detoxify them. For "making" good hormones we need to remember that good hormones are made from good cholesterol which is made from good fats. OmegaPrime contains balanced Omega fats for making healthy hormones. I suggest two per meal for several months to help rebalance the hormones, improve sexual function and reclaim sexual drive. This suggestion is for both women and men. Other sources of good fats include salmon, trout, herring, walnuts and flaxseed.

From the John Hopkins Health Report:
www.JohnHopkinsHealthAlerts.com