Is Your Metabolism Sending You a Message

Hormones are key players in regulating weight, metabolism, blood glucose levels, as well as where your body deposits fat. As you age, hormonal shifts can trigger numerous symptoms including fat gain. Produced by your endocrine glands, hormones are powerful chemicals that travel around your bloodstream and tell organs, glands, and cells what too little. Too little or too much of a certain hormone can trigger an imbalance. At-home tests are readily available, convenient, and able to detect a variety of weight-related conditions using well-established biomarker to help identify the cause. Eating meals or snacks that include a good source of lean protein and/or healthy fats can boost the production and release of hormones that help you feel more satiated, which supports healthy weight loss and weight management.

Chemical messengers produced by your body have a wide range of effects in influencing weight gain, body fat, and a loss of muscle mass. Check out these common disruptors to hormonal balance:

• Leptin - Leptin hormone circulates in your bloodstream and triggers the brain to regulate food intake and energy expenditure. When stored fat increases, leptin suppresses appetite until the weight gain is lost.
• Ghrelin - Throughout the day, your ghrelin hormone levels can change dramatically and stimulate feelings of hunger. Ghrelin stimulates the brain, slows metabolism, and decreases the body’s ability to burn fat.
• Cortisol - Your body’s fight-or-flight hormone is cortisol, which is produced in the adrenal glands and is responsible for stimulating your fat and carbohydrate metabolism to create a surge of energy in your body.
• Estradiol - In both women and men, adequate amounts of estradiol are needed for healthy bone growth and development. In older adults, deficiencies can lead to osteoporosis due to loss of bone mass.
• DHEAs – DHEA is the highest circulating steroid present in the human body. Although it does not have much biological effect on its own, it is powerful when converted into testosterone and estradiol.

By accurately measuring levels of available hormones, our hormone test kit helps to identify the concentrations of unbound chemical messengers that your body needs to function safely and efficiently throughout your day. Salivary tests of estrogen, progesterone, testosterone, melatonin, cortisol, and DHEAs have become the standard for screening for, monitoring, and managing hormone imbalances that impact have you feel. Hormones regulate metabolism, respiration, growth, reproduction, sensory perception, and movement. Imbalances can wreak havoc on body’s production and release of chemical messengers. MRC saliva testing provides an easy and convenient way to collect samples to measure various sex hormones in women of reproductive age for the treatment of a variety of problems as well as in peri- or post-menopausal women.