Are your hormones out of balance?

Does your life feel like a song played badly out of tune?

If so, the problem may have to do with imbalances in your hormones, which are wreaking havoc on your body and mind.

There is one hormone in particular I am going to focus on today, and it could be at the root of your problems.

I will share with you 12 tips you can start using immediately to begin rebalancing your hormones and bring your life back into tune.

But first, ask yourself these questions:

• Do your mood and energy swing up and down, making your life crazy?

• Do you crave sugar or salt?

• Are you overweight and putting on more and more belly fat?

• If you are a woman, do you have premenstrual syndrome, painful or heavy periods, and a low sex drive?

• Are you depressed? Do you sleep poorly?

• Do you feel tired but wired?

• Do you need coffee to wake up in the morning and a few glasses of wine to calm down at night?

If you answered "yes," your hormones may be out of balance, and you are not alone ...

In fact, this is how most Americans feel because we are living out of harmony with our natural biological rhythms. This is because small molecules in our bodies that we depend on to keep us in balance are running haywire.

These messenger molecules are involved in almost every function of the body, and they are critical to our well-being.

They are our hormones -- messenger molecules of our endocrine system -- and neurotransmitters -- messenger molecules of our brain and nervous system.

Understand how and why these systems get out of balance and you will go a long way toward understanding why Americans are so tired, depressed, and overweight!

Is being heavy in your genes?

Not so fast.

Obesity genes account for only 5 percent of all weight problems.

But what about the other 95 percent of weight problems?

And why are we seeing such an epidemic of obesity in America today? It is the single most important public health issue facing us.

If genes do not account for obesity, is our high-fat diet to blame?

Wrong again!

But fat contains 9 calories per gram, so shouldn’t eating more fat (and more calories) make you gain weight?

Nothing could be further from the truth.

In fact, pioneering research by Harvard Medical School’s David Ludwig shows us the real reason that low-fat diets do not work -- and reveals the true cause of obesity for most Americans.

He correctly points out that careful review of all the studies on dietary fat and body fat -- such as those done by Dr. Walter Willett of the Harvard School of Public Health -- have shown that dietary fat is not a major determinant of body fat.

Let me repeat that.

==> Dietary fat is not a major determinant of body fat.

Breaking news!

Some newly discovered compounds have just been found to turn off all of the genes that cause diabetes.

Are these compounds found in a pill bottle? No!

Instead, you’ll find them on your dinner plate -- in rye bread and pasta.

(As I recently wrote in one of my blogs, rye contains special phytonutrients that turn off all the genes responsible for diabetes -- in just a few weeks.)

Last week, I explained how to find out if you are pre-diabetic or diabetic. Half of the 24 million people with diabetes don’t know they have it and nearly all the 60 million people with pre-diabetes don’t know they have it.

Today, I want to share with you more information about what you can do NOW to prevent and reverse diabetes and pre-diabetes.

And rye bread isn’t the only answer -- I’ve got a lot more good advice, too.

But first I want to emphasize new research that should be headlines news but never saw the light of day. Do our current drugs treatments for diabetes actually work to prevent heart attacks and death?

Surely lowering blood sugar in diabetics is an effective strategy for reducing the risk of death and heart disease. It would seem obvious that if diabetes is a disease of high blood sugar, then reducing blood sugar would be beneficial.

However elevated sugar is only a symptom, not the cause of the problem. The real problem is elevated insulin unchecked over decades from a highly refined carbohydrate diet, a sedentary lifestyle and environmental toxins.

Most medications and insulin therapy are aimed at lowering blood sugar through increasing insulin. In the randomized ACCORD trial of over 10,000 patients, this turns out to be a bad idea.

In the intensive glucose-lowering group, there were no fewer heart attacks, and more patients died. Yet we continue to pay $174 billion annually for this type of care for diabetes, despite evidence that lifestyle works better than medications. We also pay for cardiac bypass and angioplasty in diabetics when evidence shows no reduction in death or heart attacks compared to medication.

So now that we know what doesn’t work, let me review what does work.

Diabetes is not reversible and controlling your blood sugar with drugs or insulin will protect you from organ damage and death.

That is what the medical profession would have you believe, but medication and insulin can actually increase your risk getting a heart attack or dying.

The diabetes epidemic is accelerating along with the obesity epidemic, and what you are not hearing about is another way to treat it.

Type 2 diabetes, or what was once called adult onset diabetes, is increasing worldwide and now affects nearly 100 million people -- and over 20 million Americans.

We are seeing increasing rates of Type 2 diabetes, especially in children, which has increased over 1,000 percent in the last decade and was unknown before this generation. One in three children born today will have diabetes in their lifetime.

Yet this is an entirely preventable lifestyle disease.

In a report in The New England Journal of Medicine, Walter Willett, MD, PhD, and his colleagues from the Harvard School of Public Health demonstrated that 91 percent of all Type 2 diabetes cases could be prevented through improvements lifestyle and diet.

Today, I want to review in detail this new way of thinking about diabetes and outline the tests I recommend to identify problems with blood sugar. Then next week I want to tell you exactly how to prevent, treat, and reverse Type 2 diabetes.