Update: So, I've had less luck with the recommendations in this book than I would have liked. I've had to give up the yoga, which I enjoyed, because it badly aggravated an old back injury to the point where I've had to get physical therapy on it. The chaste berry extract didn't seem to help my PMS much either - though I haven't been able to find the exact tincture Gottfried recommends, either. Overall, I would say that this book is a good introduction to hormone imbalances, but I think you really need a doctor to help you make real changes. So far, I haven't found one who really even thinks hormones are that important, but I'll keep looking.
I'm 33, and have spent the last five or so years of my life feeling crappy much of the time. Conventional medicine has pretty much failed to help at all (no thank you doctor, I don't want an anti-depressant for my fatigue), so I've turned to some alternatives. I heard about Sara Gottfried and her book The Hormone Cure through one of Sean Croxton's Underground Wellness podcasts and immediately thought: I have to get that book.
I'm glad I did. The Hormone Cure was a crash course in how the body works (honestly, I've probably learned more about biology in the last year from reading nutrition books than I learned in my entire educational career). Proper hormone function is so vital to our well being but most of us know almost nothing about it. I'd never even heard of pregnenalone - but I should have, because it's the precursor hormone to almost all our other hormones - cortisol, estrogen, testosterone, progesterone etc. Mind you, from what Dr. Gottfriend says, even medical students don't learn much about hormones - they are only taught how to treat the obvious, critical hormone problems such as Cushings disease and really have little insight or interest in anything else (to be fair, they are busy, pressured people in high stress jobs).
Sara Gottfried is a medical doctor, so you don't have to worry that her advice is totally naturopathic and new agey. She's great because she's interested in alternative treatments for problems that regular medicine sucks at treating (like PMS, PCOS, difficulty conceiving, hot flashes etc) but she also wants to know that they're backed up by science. So when she recommends yoga and meditation for regulating cortisol, she provides clinical evidence that they work. She's very into randomized controlled trials.
The three main hormones that affect women are cortisol, estrogen, and thyroid. Gottfried calls them the hormonal Charlie's Angels (there's a bit too much of that cutesy stuff in book but it's still incredibly informative). She should probably include progesterone in that, because it's the balance of estrogen and progesterone that make you feel good and make you fertile (I learned that from this book, and also that many women are estrogen dominant, which can lead to PMS and infertility, among other things). There are a variety of things that throw off hormones. Some of the biggest offenders are stress, sugar, gluten, stress, aging, stress, and chemical endocrine disruptors, aka xenohormones (such as BPA, phthalates, parabens) - yeah, I know that I wrote stress several times but it definitely seems like it's one of the worst culprits. You can't eliminate all these things - you're going to age, you're going to be stressed sometimes, and unfortunately you'll never avoid all the nasty xenohormones in the water, air, food, and personal care products, but you can remove some of them, limit others, and learn to deal with stress better.
The nice thing about this books is that, for every hormone imbalance and its attendant symptoms, Dr. Gottfriend lays out a protocol for treating it. Top things I have done after reading The Hormone Cure - take up yoga, get a massage, buy a glass drink bottle, replace my plastic tea kettle with a stainless steel one, buy a water filter for the kitchen, and start taking chaste berry for my horrendous PMS. I'm really liking yoga, so far. It's hard, but it makes me feel good and I always sleep like a baby afterwards. Massages are obviously pure bliss. The rest I've only changed in the last couple of weeks, so I'll have to wait and see if they help.
My only real critique of this book is Gottfried's misunderstanding of the Paleo diet. She gets that it's about going low-carb, but she also thinks it's about eating lean protein. If you've read anything about the Paleo diet, you know that you're supposed to eat quite a lot of fat on it - good fats such as coconut oil and grass-fed meat fat - because it keeps you full and helps your body make hormones and cholesterol (we need cholesterol for so many functions in the body, like making myelin sheaths for our nerves and making vitamin D from sunlight). I actually have a hard time eating enough fat - but I'm not full Paleo, honestly. I just can't give up yoghurt and cheese and I do get a lot of fat that way. Though Dr. Gottfried's willing to look outside the box when it comes to hormones, I would have liked to have seen her look at fats with an open mind, but that's ok, since others such as Mary Enig, Gary Taubes, and Catherine Shanahan have done just that in their books. One thing that I was really pleased to see is Gottfried's emphasis on how harmful gluten can be for those with thyroid problems.
Also, and this is not Gottfried's fault at all, but this is a book that would be much better to read in print, rather than on Kindle or Nook, because it's essentially a reference book - after you've read it, you'll want to refer to specific chapters to get to the lifestyle, herbs, and hormone recommendations. But trying to do that on a Kindle is a royal pain in the arse, and makes me want to re-buy the book in print. Actually, though, I'd quite like to have this in print anyway, to lend to people, so it may be more of an upside than a downside.