Encouraging The Perfect Diet Plan: 6 Essential Food Types To Eat For Hormone Balance

You may not think about hormones in your body as you think about your everyday needs. However, they are highly important as they deliver messages to organs in the body, telling them what to do. To break it down, the hormones help with metabolism, fertility, and mood.

When your hormones are unbalanced, you may experience fatigue, joint pain, headache, high blood pressure, weight fluctuation, and more. More than you think, your hormones are integral, and you should ensure they’re at the right levels.

Thankfully, some food types help with hormone balance, and you can combine them into your diet.

Organic Fruit and Vegetables

Organic fruit and vegetables are more beneficial to your hormones than non-organic ones. The non-organic ones contain pesticides like glyphosate, which can disrupt your hormones and affect fertility. It can also affect testosterone level, which is needed for increased muscle mass. Beyond doing a testosterone test for muscle building, consuming organic fruit and vegetables will help improve the levels.

Furthermore, you should avoid eating fruit and vegetables packaged in plastic as bisphenols in hard plastics and phthalates in soft and flexible ones are endocrine disruptors and affect the system’s normal function. Instead, you should store your fruit in paper, glass, or other naturally-made materials.

While eating fruit is important for healthy living, it may not count much if you eat non-organic ones. Minimize your food’s exposure to glyphosate and other hormone disruptors, so your hormones can benefit from the vitamins, minerals, and antioxidants the fruit you eat have to offer.

Phytoestrogens

Phytoestrogens are beneficial to the hormones. As dietary estrogens, they help to control the estrogen levels in the body, whether excess or low. You can find them in certain plants, and adding them to your diet will help balance your hormones.

Sources of phytoestrogens include chia seeds, flaxseeds, lentils, alfalfa sprouts, fennels, and licorice. You can also get them soy which contains isoflavone, a phytoestrogen, which can help relieve hot flushes and lower the risk of ischemic heart disease.

Prebiotic And Probiotic Foods

In case you’re unaware, your gut has good bacteria in them, known as probiotics, and they feed on fibrous foods, called prebiotics, to flourish. As the largest endocrine organ, they synthesize and secrete over 20 hormones responsible for metabolism, appetite, and satiety.

To ensure those hormones are well-balanced, you should eat probiotics and prebiotic foods. You can get probiotics from fermented foods like miso, yogurt, kombucha, kimchi, kefir, and sauerkraut. Furthermore, prebiotics help improves growth and activity, and you can get them from leek, garlic, asparagus, oats, bananas, and tomatoes.

Cruciferous Vegetables

Cruciferous vegetables contain antioxidants that protect your body, help improve estrogen metabolism, and compact estrogen dominance. They also help the livers metabolize estrogen effectively. Vegetables within the Brassica family, like kale, broccoli, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts, cabbage, and bok choy, are good cruciferous vegetables.

Regularly eating them will help balance your hormones and protect your body from estrogen-dominant cancers. You can also get sulforaphane in broccoli sprouts, and it helps encourage estrogen detoxification. Add some of them to your diet for improved hormone levels.

Good Fat

Not all fats are bad. For example, omega-3 fatty acids are beneficial; however, the body cannot produce them. Therefore, you must incorporate them into your diet to enjoy their benefits. You should limit your consumption of saturated fats, eliminate trans fat, and eat more fats high in omega-3.

You can enjoy omega-3 acid in chia seeds, flaxseed, avocados, organic sacha inchi, walnuts, salmon, and albacore tuna. Mackerel, sardines, anchovies, and herrings are also high in omega-3. Furthermore, omega-6 is also important for cell function, and you can get it from processed or fried food.

However, you must maintain a balance between omega-6 and omega-3 because processed foods have their shortcomings. Therefore, you can replace them with eggs, nuts, chicken, and seeds.

High-fiber Carbohydrates

A high-fibrous diet is necessary for hormone balance. They can help remove excess hormones from the body. Lignan, a type of fiber in flaxseeds, can remove unbound active estrogens from the body.

Furthermore, you should eat more non-starchy vegetables and small portions of starchy vegetables like whole grains and potatoes. Get high-fiber carbohydrates from beans, whole grains, and root vegetables like sweet potatoes, carrots, and squashes.  Additionally, you can eat some starch during dinner to regulate cortisol and melatonin.

Conclusion

Hormone balance is necessary for healthy living. Eating the right meals will contribute to that. More than eating the meals listed in this article, you must eat less fried and processed food, sugar, and artificial sweetener and drink less alcohol.  In addition, you must cut down on stress, sleep and exercise well.