317: Understanding Arousal

During the summer between 8th and 9th grade, I watched my classmate Jeff go from about 125 lbs to 180 lbs in six weeks. This scrawny, video game nerd turned into a force to be reckoned with through a combination of hard gym workouts and anabolic steroids he bought from his older brother. I'm not sure if you've ever seen a transformation like this firsthand, but it's not something you easily forget.

Enter hormones. They can make you skinny or make you fat. They can give you hot flashes, make you tired, or make you feel young and vital. Your ‘chemical body’ is responsible for how you look and feel most of the time, and yet it's often out of whack. Hormonal imbalance used to be rare and mostly found in older people, but these days you can find kids with massive hormone imbalances at any school around the world. So what do we do?

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Listen & Learn:

• How hormones can impact just about everything
• Why birth control pills, food, stress, age, and environment can all affect our chemical body
• How hormone theory is only a century old
• How hormone research is still new and developing

ABOUT OUR GUEST

Randi Hutter Epstein is a medical writer, author, and journalist. She has written for publications including The New York Times and The Washington Post. She is also a lecturer at Yale University and an adjunct professor at Columbia University School of Journalism.

She is the author of two books: Get Me Out: A History of Childbirth from the Garden of Eden to the Sperm Bank (2010) and AROUSED: The History of Hormones and How They Control Just About Everything (2018).

Nutritional Tip of the Week:

• Low Fructose Fruits

Links & References from the Show:

• Randi's site
• Randi's Book

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