You Don ’t Need to Balance Your Hormones

Hormones may not be the first thing you think of when it comes to your health—unless you’ve spent any time on TikTok recently. If your body’s moderating chemicals aren’t being churned out at exactly the right times and quantities, the app’s content creators claim, a cascade of symptoms including sluggishness, acne, headaches, and weight gain can ensue. But not to worry, they say: a “hormone balancing” regimen, based on eating certain foods and doing the right exercises at prescribed times, will fix that. This trend has two of the bright red flags of pseudoscience: It sounds too good to be true, and it’s built from the rejiggered pieces of valid concepts. Hormonal abnormalities are legitimate medical concerns, and there are various diagnosable disorders that require treatment or lifestyle management. But these are not the conditions that digital wellness messengers are focused on. Their concern is a broader, vaguer sense of “imbalance,” which some content creators claim might not show up in standard endocrine testing. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] Here’s what to know about the so-called hormone balancing trend. There’s no proof that it works The concept of hormone balancing is fairly new to platforms like TikTok and Instagram, but it’s been around for a long time. Norah MacKendrick, a sociologist at Rutgers University, has spent 20 years analyzing how hormone balancing has infiltrated...
Source: TIME: Health - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized healthscienceclimate Research Wellbeing Source Type: news