Endocrine Wellness

02/22/2026

Eating a more Mediterranean type diet with lots of tomatoes could help in multiple ways!!! Don’t forget the mushrooms and bitter spices!

Chronic periodontal disease is strongly associated with systemic inflammation and has been linked in cohort and mechanistic studies to increased risk of cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, adverse pregnancy outcomes, rheumatoid arthritis, and even cognitive decline, largely via pathways involving bacterial translocation (such as for Porphyromonas gingivalis), endotoxaemia, endothelial dysfunction, and heightened cytokine signalling.

A large cross-sectional analysis of 1,227 US adults aged 65 to 79 used NHANES (National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey) 2009 to 2014 data to explore whether dietary lycopene intake was associated with severe periodontitis (PD).

Lycopene intake was derived from two 24-hour dietary recalls and categorised as sufficient (≥ 8 mg/day) or insufficient. Periodontal status was assessed by standardised examination in NHANES mobile examination centres. Survey-weighted multinomial logistic regression models adjusted for age, s*x, race, smoking status, education and BMI.

Overall, 77.9% of participants had insufficient lycopene intake and 5.6% had severe PD. After adjustment, sufficient lycopene intake was associated with markedly lower odds of severe PD (odds ratio, OR 0.33). Current smoking showed the expected strong association (OR 3.29) and the association between sufficient lycopene intake and severe PD was strongest in non-Hispanic White participants (OR 0.13) and not statistically significant in non-Hispanic Black participants.

The magnitude of these associations is large for a single dietary component and therefore warrants careful interpretation. The principal limitation is the cross-sectional design: exposure and outcome were measured at the same time, so temporality and causality cannot be established. Reverse causation is plausible, as individuals diagnosed with periodontal disease may have altered their diets. Lycopene intake was based on two-day recall rather than biomarker measurement, and the ≥ 8 mg cutoff was derived from other disease contexts rather than periodontal outcomes. Critically, the models did not adjust for overall dietary pattern (such as fruit/vegetable intake, Healthy Eating Index, fibre, total carotenoids), dental care access, oral hygiene behaviours, or detailed socioeconomic factors. Given that lycopene intake typically tracks with higher diet quality and healthier lifestyles, substantial residual confounding is likely.

Taken together, this study provides a statistically robust association between higher reported lycopene intake and lower prevalence of severe PD in older adults, but it is best interpreted as hypothesis-generating. The large effect size suggests that lycopene may function partly as a marker of a phytonutrient-rich, Mediterranean-style dietary pattern rather than acting as an isolated causal agent. Biological plausibility exist, lycopene has antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties, but the magnitude observed here likely overestimates any true independent effect. Clinically, the findings support encouraging whole-food, carotenoid-rich diets in older adults; however, they do not justify lycopene supplementation as a stand-alone periodontal intervention without new longitudinal or randomised trial evidence.

This is a well-executed analysis using nationally representative data and appropriate complex-survey statistics, but it remains observational and does not establish causality. However, the large effect size suggests a real association, at least with a phytonutrient rich diet.

For more information see: https://scitechdaily.com/could-a-tomato-nutrient-help-prevent-severe-gum-disease-in-older-adults/

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41391269/

02/17/2026

✨Attention all practitioners, Dr. Annette has a seminar coming up you won't want to miss! Make a trip to Springfield MO for her March 7th seminar or to one of the other locations later this year, and learn how to support your female patients!✨

02/16/2026

Small daily habits add up over time! Ditch the sweet milk chocolate for the dark and bitter chocolate! It helps to slowly work your way up to 75-80% cacao.

Notice that I waited until AFTER Valentine’s Day to share this post. You’re welcome! 😍

One of the core components of my microcirculation phytonutrient diet is cocoa, usually as very dark chocolate (85 to 90%), chosen for its higher flavanol density and lower sugar load. A 2025 systematic review rigorously evaluated the clinical evidence to determine whether cocoa flavanols meaningfully enhance microvascular function. The review included 19 randomised, placebo-controlled human trials, comprising 13 acute studies and 7 chronic studies (with one study containing both phases), spanning effects on skin, skeletal muscle, cerebral and retinal microvascular beds.

Participants were not simply eating ordinary chocolate. Most of the trials used standardised, high-flavanol cocoa beverages, concentrated cocoa extracts in capsules, or specially prepared high-percentage dark chocolate, delivering pharmacological doses of flavanols. Acute doses commonly ranged from 500 to 1350 mg total flavanols (with 45 to 255 mg of (-)-epicatechin), and some chronic studies delivered up to 900 to 1800 mg/day.

A conventional meta-analysis was not possible because the studies varied widely in assessed vascular beds, measurement techniques (Laser Doppler, plethysmography etc), and stimulus conditions (reactive hyperaemia, hypoxia, mental stress, exercise). The authors therefore used vote counting, a Cochrane-recognised fallback method. In this approach, each study subgroup was assigned a “vote” based solely on whether cocoa performed better than placebo (1) or not (0), regardless of statistical significance or effect size. They then tested whether the proportion of positive directions exceeded chance (50%).

Using vote counting (direction-of-effect analysis), 12 of 14 acute subgroups (85.7%) showed improved vasodilator responses with cocoa flavanols, a proportion significantly greater than chance (p = 0.013), with 100% of the low-risk-of-bias (higher quality) acute studies favouring cocoa. For chronic supplementation, the direction was also generally favourable but less robust: 8 of 11 subgroups (72.7%) showed improved vasodilator responses and 7 of 9 (77.7%) favoured cocoa at rest, but these proportions did not reach statistical significance. (Note that some trials generated more than one subgroup for analysis.)

Hence the strongest signal was for acute enhancement of microvascular reactivity within 1 to 3 hours after ingestion, coinciding with peak circulating flavanol metabolites and nitric oxide-related activity. Chronic effects were less consistent, and there was little evidence of structural microvascular remodelling or reversal of established disease. The current clinical data therefore position high-dose cocoa flavanol extracts as performance enhancing short-term endothelial modulators that may enhance vascular responsiveness under stress (cognitive demand, hypoxia, reactive hyperaemia).

The fact that the clinical evidence favours acute effects from cocoa does not rule out benefits from long-term chronic intake. However, it does highlight that the use of a multicomponent sustained input, as per my microcirculation diet, is more likely to have the greatest impact on chronic microvascular compromise.

For more information see: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40217225/

01/31/2026

Love this!!!

01/29/2026

This!!!! ♥️♥️♥️

A new paper has revealed a clear human fingerprint on medicinal plant diversity and reframes herbal medicine as an emergent, co-evolved system, rather than an accidental pharmacological curiosity.

The human fingerprint of medicinal plant species diversity argues that the global distribution of medicinal plant diversity is not simply a reflection of overall plant biodiversity or ecological richness, but is strongly shaped by long-term human cultural, medical and historical factors. The authors show that regions with high medicinal plant diversity often correspond to areas with deep, continuous traditions of human settlement, healing systems and ethnomedical knowledge, rather than just botanical “hotspots” alone.

Using global datasets, the paper demonstrates that medicinal floras are disproportionately enriched in certain plant lineages and regions, reflecting selective human use over millennia. In other words, humans have acted as powerful evolutionary and ecological filters: repeatedly identifying, cultivating, trading and conserving plants with perceived therapeutic value. This has created a distinctive “human fingerprint” on medicinal plant diversity that differs from patterns seen in non-medicinal plant species.

They write: “A key unexplored topic is whether variation in the duration of human interactions with a flora has influenced regional heterogeneity in medicinal plant knowledge and diversity. Here, we investigate and compare these influences on the distribution and diversity of 32,460 medicinal plant species and on global vascular plant distributions. We identify significant regional variation in medicinal plant diversity, including "hotspots" (India, Nepal, Myanmar, and China) and "coldspots" (the Andes, New Guinea, Madagascar, the Cape Provinces, and Western Australia) of diversity. Regions with long histories of human settlement typically boast richer medicinal floras than expected.”

The study also highlights that medicinal plant diversity is tightly linked to cultural diversity and traditional knowledge systems, and that erosion of indigenous and local knowledge threatens not just cultural heritage, but the functional diversity of medicinal floras themselves.

Overall, the paper reframes medicinal plants as a biocultural phenomenon—emerging from long co-evolution between humans and plants—rather than a random subset of the world’s flora. This has major implications for conservation, emphasising that protecting medicinal plant diversity requires safeguarding both ecosystems and the human knowledge systems that shape them.

Australia presents as an apparent anomaly in the analysis, showing a low recorded medicinal plant diversity signal despite one of the longest continuous human occupations on Earth. This pattern does not contradict human-plant co-development, but instead exposes limitations in how medicinal knowledge is captured in global datasets. Aboriginal medicinal systems were profoundly disrupted by colonisation, leaving extensive therapeutic knowledge undocumented or fragmented. In addition, Australian healing traditions emphasise holistic, ecological, and spiritual frameworks—a cultural sophistication poorly reflected in Western-style materia medica inventories. Rather than a true exception, Australia illustrates how low recorded medicinal plant diversity may arise from disrupted documentation and knowledge transmission, especially from an oral tradition, not from an absence of deep human-plant co-development.

The authors write: “By contrast, colonial influences and modernization may have contributed to geographically uneven erosion or non-documentation of this knowledge, highlighting the need to better preserve and explore traditional ethnobotanical practices. For instance, profound demographic collapse in Latin America and Australia from colonization likely led to significant losses in ethnobotanical knowledge, thereby weakening the continuity of medicinal practices. By comparison, Africa and much of Asia retained stronger cultural resilience, allowing traditional practices to persist more robustly and continue shaping medicinal plant diversity.” And they later conclude: “Regions we identified as medicinal plant diversity coldspots, such as the Andes, New Guinea, Madagascar, the Cape Provinces, and Western Australia, likely have unrecorded or unrecognized medicinal plant resources and therefore require knowledge revitalization.”

What this study shows overall is that medicinal plants are not chance. Over millennia, humans have acted as powerful selective forces—identifying, protecting, propagating and trading plants with meaningful bioactivity. In turn, these plants shaped medical traditions, therapeutic intuition and systems of care. Medicinal floras are therefore not random subsets of biodiversity, but biocultural archives.

This study makes it clear that herbal medicine is not a discarded relic of pre-scientific thinking, but a living knowledge system embedded in human psychology, culture and practice. The global patterns of medicinal plant diversity it reveals reflect enduring human selection, memory and meaning, not historical accident.

Herbal medicine persists because it aligns with how humans perceive illness, healing, and the natural world—shaped by a long co-evolution that is not superseded by modern biomedicine. Far from being obsolete, it remains relevant precisely because it is woven into the ecological, cognitive and cultural architecture of human health.

For more information see: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41151580/

01/03/2026

Something for all of us to strive for as we go into the New Year. Wishing everyone more joy each and every day in 2026. 🥳🎉💗

This next year,
I’m choosing joy.
Not because life suddenly became lighter,
or because every unanswered prayer found its ending—
but because I’ve learned what it costs
to carry heaviness longer than necessary.

I’ve learned that sorrow can take up residence
if you let it.
That grief doesn’t always announce itself loudly—
sometimes it slips in quietly
and settles into the ordinary days.

So this year,
I’m choosing joy on purpose.

I’m choosing it in the mornings
when my body reminds me of all the years I’ve lived.
In the mirrors that tell the truth about time.
In the memories that ache and bless me
all at once.

I’m choosing joy in the small, overlooked moments—
coffee growing cold on the counter,
laughter drifting in from another room,
the sound of someone I love just being here.

I’m choosing joy without waiting
for life to make sense first.

Because I know now—
waiting for perfect is how joy gets postponed
until it’s almost forgotten.

This next year,
I’m choosing joy even when the house is quiet.
Even when the calendar is full
and my heart still feels a little empty.
Even when I miss people
I can’t call anymore.

I’m choosing joy that coexists with sadness.
Joy that doesn’t deny the hard things,
but refuses to let them have the final word.

I’ve carried enough “what ifs.”
Enough “if onlys.”
Enough seasons where surviving
was mistaken for living.

This year,
I’m living.

I’m choosing joy in slowing down.
In saying no without guilt.
In loving deeply without keeping score.
In being present instead of productive.

I’m choosing joy that doesn’t need permission
or approval
or explanation.

Joy that looks like peace.
Joy that sounds like gratitude.
Joy that feels like finally exhaling
after holding my breath for years.

I don’t know everything this next year will bring.
I don’t know what it will take
or what it will ask of me.

But I know who I am now.

And that’s someone who chooses joy—
not because life is easy,
but because life is precious.

This next year,
I’m choosing joy.

And I’m not waiting another season
to begin.

12/30/2025

Shatavari is good for so many things related to women’s health! So nice to see the benefits post-partum for our breastfeeding mommas. ♥️

Clinical support for Asparagus racemosus (shatavari) is rapidly expanding. Building on a positive 2022 clinical trial shared earlier on my page, a newly published RCT by a separate research team has also found that shatavari significantly enhances breast-milk production in lactating women.

A total of 120 women who had recently given birth took part in the study. Half of them took 300 mg/day of a shatavari root extract (10% shatavarins, extract ratio not specified), while the other half were given a placebo, and the results were measured after 72 hours. Researchers observed statistically significant positive changes (compared to placebo, per-protocol) in milk supply volume, the time it took for the mothers to feel their breasts were full, and how satisfied the mothers felt with breastfeeding.

Effect sizes were good. At 72 hours, shatavari supplementation produced no difference in the timing of milk expression compared with placebo (p = 0.961), indicating that the intervention did not alter feeding or expression behaviour. In contrast, milk volume expressed at 72 hours was significantly higher in the shatavari group (97.98 ± 14.34 mL) compared with placebo (85.36 ± 14.19 mL), with a mean between-group difference of 12.63 mL. This corresponds to a large effect size (Cohen’s d = 0.889; p = 0.001), indicating a substantial and clinically meaningful increase in milk production.

Additionally, shatavari was associated with a significant reduction in time to evident breast fullness after the last feeding, with mothers reporting earlier fullness compared with placebo (mean difference −0.56 h). The effect size was moderate (Cohen’s d = −0.504; p = 0.002), suggesting improved mammary refilling dynamics.

Importantly, no side effects were observed in any of the mothers who took Shatavari root extract. These results suggest that immediate post-partum use of Shatavari root extract is a safe and effective natural option to increase breast milk volume.

For more information see: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41055223/

12/25/2025

Wishing a safe and happy holiday season to everyone! This time of year can be the most joyful and also the most challenging for some people. Many of us will be remembering those that have left us a little more than usual at this time of the year. Hoping everyone finds joy and happiness this year! ♥️🎄

12/04/2025

✨✨Reminder to all of our patients✨✨
We will be closed for the holidays Dec 20-Jan 5. Please take a look at your supplements and let us know by Tuesday, Dec 16 of what you need to get through the holiday! That way if we need to place any order we have time! Thank you!

11/23/2025

Why is it that women experience stress more intensely than men? Drs. Daina Parent and Annette Schippel discuss the connection between women's hormones and the effects of stress on the female body. Dr. Schippel offers invaluable clinical tools and takeaways to create a strong foundation for any woman to navigate stress management and optimal wellness with nutrition, herbs, lifestyle and more.

Why is it that women experience stress more intensely than men? Drs. Daina Parent and Annette Schippel discuss the connection between women’s hormones and th...

11/19/2025

Ok mommas! Check this out!

Could the answer to the current allergy epidemic in our children be as simple as feeding them blueberries? A rigorously run infant RCT suggests that adding blueberries as one of the first solids may nudge immune balance in an anti-allergic direction and help allergy-type symptoms settle during the first year—while also shifting the gut microbiome in potentially favourable ways.

The first year of life is a critical window for establishing immune competence and preventing allergic diseases. Dietary exposures during this period can influence the induction of immune tolerance, epigenetic programming, and gut microbial succession.

In a double blind, randomised, placebo-controlled feeding trial in Denver, USA, exclusively breast-fed infants (n=61, start age 5–6 months) received freeze-dried blueberry powder (10 g/day) or an isocaloric, colour/flavour-matched placebo until 12 months of age.

The blueberry group started out with more respiratory/allergy-like symptoms at baseline yet showed a greater resolution over time vs placebo (trajectory p=0.05). Immune biomarkers: IL-13 (pro-allergic/Th2 response) fell significantly with blueberries (p=0.035); IL-10 (anti-inflammatory/regulatory) trended up (p=0.052). However, the changes in these cytokines could not directly explain symptom changes. However, specific gut microbiome changes at 12 months correlated with the cytokine changes, hinting at gut-immune crosstalk.

In a companion paper in the same cohort, blueberry introduction altered gut microbiota composition/diversity (trends toward higher alpha diversity; increases in short-chain fatty acid-associated genera such as Subdoligranulum/Butyricicoccus and reductions in potentially unfavourable organisms such as Escherichia/Streptococcus).

The findings align with broader evidence showing that diverse, fibre- and polyphenol-rich complementary diets plus early allergen introduction help shape the gut-immune axis toward tolerance.

For more information see: https://bit.ly/4i7mr2M
and
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40944184/

11/18/2025