Ever Heard of Diindolylmethane (DIM)?

I hadn’t heard of it at all until yesterday by chance on an acne forum where a woman had reported that her stubborn acne was greatly reduced after supplementing with DIM. I looked it up and DIM is something formed from indole 3-carbinol which is found in cruciferous vegetables like broccoli. If these websites are to be believed then DIM is perfectly safe in men and women and promotes healthy hormonal metabolism by essentially helping to metabolize bad estrogen in the body into good estrogen which in women helps to support healthy estrogen levels and in men helps to free bound testosterone so that in each gender a better hormonal balance is achieved. Hence the reason why it would seem this compound would help to clear up acne.

In any case, I am a man and am wondering if this might help me with mood stabilization and muscle synthesis so I may give this thing a try and see what happens. At the best, it would seem to simply free up my own testosterone and at the worst it would do nothing.

Now why might DIM be necessary or helpful? I am starting to think that maybe one of the reasons for the acne that prevails in the industrialized world and does not in hunter-gather groups is because of an excess of unnatural estrogen. First of all there is phytoestrogen which no hunter-gatherer groups would’ve consumed a huge amount of considering that the largest source of phytoestrogen that I know of is soy and that is a legume. Secondly, I remember reading somewhere that many of the pesticides that are used to grow produce can act as hormone disruptors in the body. Thirdly, apparently plastics have something called xenoestrogen which also acts as estrogen in the body. Fourthly, our water is contaminated with hormones I am sure from the waste products of contraceptives among other things. It would seem that all this would create an environment in which it would not be too difficult to produce hormonal imbalances in people. Use plastics, drink water, eat some soy, and eat some conventional produce and you probably have some of these fake estrogen compounds in your body. There is also the interesting point made by Don Matesz (in this post) that we probably are eating a lot less testosterone than we probably did historically. His argument is essentially that historically we likely ate a lot of bull meat since killing a bull would have very little effect of the fertility of a herd versus killing a cow. Nowadays, most of our meat comes from steers whose hormonal production is much less than that of bulls due to their castration. Add all this up and it seems like maybe DIM would be helpful to more people than just post-menopausal women and old men.

References:

http://www.wholeworldbotanicals.com/factsdimmen

http://www.dimfaq.com/site/toc.htm

Filed under: Acne, Diindolylmethane, DIM, Hormones, Strength training, Supplements