A carrot a day keeps bad hormones away! Here’s a raw carrot salad recipe for hormone balance!
High Hormones = Health Issues
Too much of anything is bad. The same applies to hormones. Excess hormones lead to a host of health problems.
Most of the time, it’s women who are affected by health issues caused by excess hormones, in particular, estrogen, the primary female sex hormone.
That’s because every single day, we are exposed to xenoestrogens or synthetic estrogen (chemical compounds that mimic estrogen when inside the body).
This is in form of makeup products, cleaning agents, plastics, pesticides sprayed on fresh produce and more.
Certain foods such as soy contain phytoestrogens (plant estrogen that can mimic the real estrogen in the body).
When there are high levels of estrogen in the body, it is very easy to find yourself suffering from irregular periods, heavy periods, ovarian cysts, severe PMS, hormonal acne and infertility.
Too much estrogen in the body has also been linked to cancers such as ovarian cancer, breast cancer and uterine cancer. Another thing excess estrogen can cause and worsen is fibroids and endometriosis!
Not just women, watch out – men can also be affected by high estrogen levels in their bodies which causes issues such as low muscle tone, high fat, having man boobs, erectile dysfunction and infertility.
Why Eat Carrots for Hormone Balance?
Eating raw carrots helps balance your hormones.
In Dr. Ray Peat’s hormone research, he says that eating a raw carrot salad improves the ratio of progesterone to estrogen and cortisol, and so is as appropriate for epilepsy as for premenstrual syndrome, insomnia, or arthritis.
He also found that eating one raw carrot a day for three days in a row significantly reduced bad or excess estrogen in the body.
It turns out raw carrots have special fiber in them that bind to toxins in your intestines and transport them out of your body.
One of these toxins include excess estrogen floating in your body.
The liver is responsible for breaking down and detoxing toxins such as excess hormones and since hormones are cholesterol-based they are excreted in stool.
The fiber in carrots help by sticking to the excess hormones in the gut and carrying them safely all the way to the colon to be eliminated through bowel movements.
When you don’t have any fiber in your diet, you won’t be able to successfully eliminate excess hormone wastes stuck in your body. The excess can even get reabsorbed in the gut!
You need to include fiber-rich foods especially carrots, which have been shown to have unique fiber that helps flush out excess estrogen.
What about those with Low/Normal Estrogen Levels?
If you have low estrogen levels, eating carrots won’t lower it even further. In fact, including carrots in your diet has the chance of balancing your estrogen levels back to normal.
Likewise, if you have normal estrogen levels, don’t worry about carrots reducing them because there won’t be excess estrogen wastes in the gut for the fiber to bind to, in the first place.
How to Eat Carrots for Hormone Balance
It’s important to note that there is a certain way to eat carrots to benefit from their hormone-balancing properties:
The carrot must be raw. You can’t cook it or juice it as this will get rid of the unique fiber.
You have to eat it for at least 3 days for it to take effect. You can eat it the week before your periods or during ovulation to fight PMS!
It can get boring very quickly chomping on a carrot a day, so that’s why there’s an easy recipe I’m sharing that you can have as a side with your lunch or dinner every single day!
Raw Carrot Salad Recipe for Hormone Balance
Ingredients
- 1 fresh carrot
- ½ tsp extra virgin olive oil (where to get it)
- ½ lemon
- A pinch of ground black pepper (where to get it)
- Himalayan pink salt (where to get it) or sea salt (where to get it) to taste
Directions
- Wash your carrot and scratch off the skin using a sharp knife.
- Next, choose how you want to cut your carrots – you can simply chop it into circles, grate it using a cheese grater or use a spiralizer to make the carrots into a noodle-like form.
- Now place the chopped carrots into a bowl and add in ½ tsp olive oil, squeeze in juice from half a lemon, throw in a pinch of black pepper powder and enough salt to taste.
- Toss everything together and voila! Your carrot salad for hormone balance is ready to eat!
margie says
Looks like there is quinoa or sesame seeds in the photo of salad.