by Kal Sellars
Health Secrets) A few years ago I had a student who complained that she was being driven crazy with hot flashes and did not want to go on hormone therapy. She decided to come see me professionally. I spoke with her and quizzed her about her diet. She had been following our health program exactly. I figured that she just needed an infusion of plant based hormones.
[Sponsor link: ]
I explained to her that plant hormones are large, weak structures that fill up the hormone receptor sites in the body and keep them satisfied as needed without ever reaching toxic strength. When the body releases hormones erratically (as happens during many times of life but especially during menopause) those hormones can be absent or can be at toxic levels. With plant hormones filling up the receptor sites all the time, you never even know that the levels are up or down and potential toxic levels (which some say cause estrogen-dependent cancer) are never reached.
The best part of all this, I told her, is that your body will stop working so hard at meeting hormonal needs and will get to rest and re-set itself to a new level of health.
I explained that if we all ate natural diets all the time, we could not avoid huge amounts of plant hormones every day, and that our bodies really are designed to get most of their hormone needs from the diet.
She, of course, wanted to know what to do.
I told her about fava beans. These are the most estrogen dense food known. When sprouted, they become far more so, 3-30 times more.
I had her sprout dry fava beans (which took one afternoon in a bowl of water) and then low-heat them. Low heating is a technique described in two book: Traci’s Transformational Kitchen Cookbook and Traci’s Transformational Health Principles, which allows the bean to stay alive (in fact it will grow during the process and in the fridge thereafter) while softening the hard exterior.