Christian, since you have mentioned a cortisol/testosterone relationship before in neurotyping discussions, I was wondering if you could help me understand this short article.
The author SEEMS to me to be saying that high cortisol does not rob raw materials from testosterone. He does say that high insulin can increase testosterone binding or decrease DHEA, and of course high cortisol tends to boost insulin, but is he really saying that cortisol doesn’t deplete test and does his explanation make sense to you? Or maybe you can explain to me what he’s saying.
I WANTED TO ADD that I thought it was a very informative and useful article. I’m just confused on the cortisol/testosterone relationship.
It’s a pretty good article. The author doesn’t say that high cortisol production doesn’t decrease T or DHEA, he says that:
High cortisol is correlated with low DHEA but then say that correlation is not causation. I agree, but with what we know about how the body works, there is still a strong possibility that both are strongly related.
He mentions that, yes, cortisol is made from pregnenolone (like testosterone). But that the body doesn’t have one limited pool of pregnenolone to pick from, that the body can produce more pregnenolone from cholesterol. Which is true. But that doesn’t mean that producing more cortisol, which will lower pregnenolone levels, will not have a negative impact on testosterone levels. See, when pregnenolone stores are depleted, you can make more of it. That’s true. But that’s one more physiological steps which can make testosterone production more difficult. So yes, IMHO, overproducing cortisol WILL have a negative impact on testosterone.
He mentions that cavemen had more stress than we do today. Maybe. Just like people living in the middle ages likely had more stress than us too. But that has nothing to do with cortisol not having a negative impact on testosterone. Who is to say that caveman didn’t have periods of low T? Just because it is not reported, didn’t mean that it didn’t happen.
That having been said, it is a solid and well researched article. I just don’t agree with that specific point.
It occurred to me that since sex, childbearing and child rearing are energetically expensive, it might have been beneficial for cavemen to have a drop in T during periods when food was sparse.
I wrote incorrectly in my first post though. Low insulin levels upregulate SHBG and it seems to me that that could be an adaptation to limit hypertrophy and sex drive (both energetically expensive) in famine conditions, but I was also wondering what happens to the bound sex hormones? Do their raw materials become available to make cortisol? Are they just broken down for amino acids?