Q: A friend of mine lent me a book that touted something called pregnenolone as the answer to aging and all the problems that come along with it. What exactly is pregnenolone? Is it something you recommend? If so, where can I get it?
JVW: You could say that pregnenolone is “the mother of all steroid hormones.” Our bodies make pregnenolone from cholesterol. From there, it’s metabolized into every steroid hormone you can think of (and probably some you’ve never even heard of): progesterone, cortisol, cortisone, all the estrogens, DHEA, testosterone — and that’s just to name a few.
Pregnenolone has actually been available in natural food stores without prescription since the mid-1990s. And judging from some of the hype about it, combined with the great anti-aging race so many people are in, you’d think that everyone over 40 should take it. After all, it seems logical that pregneolone would be the answer to aging concerns, since it is indeed the “ultimate precursor” for all of the natural, internally produced hormones, and since those signs and symptoms of aging that crop up more and more after you hit 40 are caused by your body’s declining production of those hormones.
Theoretically, taking pregnenolone does make sense, but unfortunately, in practice, it doesn’t tend to work very well. Instead of being evenly metabolized and distributed equally throughout the body, every person who takes pregnenolone seems to have a different (and frequently undesirable) end result. For example, one man took who supplemental pregnenolone found that his body metabolized it almost entirely into estrogens — three times as much estrogen as men should have!
Pregnenolone supplementation can be useful for some people, but please don’t take it without careful, comprehensive follow-up hormone and natural steroid testing! It’s absolutely crucial that both you and your physician know exactly “where the pregnenolone went.”
