Here is an interesting chapter I read about the birth control pill from Pamela Levin’s book The Female Hormone Journey.  Please feel free to leave your comments below.  I would love for you to share your thoughts, other helpful resources and any concerns you may have. Thank you!

“Birth control pills have changed the lives of women and their families by giving them the most reliable form of birth control available, short of abstinence, hysterectomy or having their tubes tied.  They have also increased women’s breast cancer risk by a factor of three.  Three hundred million women worldwide have used “the pill”, an estimated 100 million currently take it.

Recently doctors have been prescribing a new kind of low-does birth control pill for non-birth control purposes.  Products such as Alesse, EstraStep, and Loestrin are being used for minimizing perimenopausal symptoms such as bad menstrual cramping, hot flashes, confusion, vacillating blood sugar levels, trouble sleeping, irritability, heave menstrual bleeding, mood swings, difficulty focusing and memory problems.  However, carefully consider all their effects, not just those that control fertility or menopausal symptoms before staying on them for any length of time.

Both regular birth control pills and the newer, low dose pills work by providing a combination of progestin (synthetic progesterone) and estrogen, which make your body’s levels greater then usual.  That signals your pituitary that your levels are sufficient, and so it does not release the hormones that signal your ovaries to stimulate ovulation.  Failure to ovulate means failure to get pregnant.  In other words, birth control pills turn off regular ovulation and substitute the estrogen and progesterone your body produces with the synthetic ones in the pills. After suppressing your own hormone production, they make your body estrogen dominant via this synthetic route.

(This is not always the case….some women still will have break through ovulation with can lead to unforeseen miscarriages while taking the pill)

If the “up” side is almost totally reliable birth control if you remember to take all the pills, what’s the “down” side?  Some possible side effects while taking the pill include weight gain, emotional swings, circulatory and vascular symptoms, including increased blood pressure, gastrointestinal upset, blood clots, liver problems and even cancer.  Oral contraceptives increase glucose -intolerance, while progestin (not natural progesterone) create insulin resistance and raise triglyceride levels.

In addition, they create certain nutritional deficiencies, most notably the B vitamins, folic acid, B12 and B6.  Without B6, for example, your body will not be able to release hormones into the circulation, even if enough are made in your ovary or adrenal glad.  Other deficiencies include zinc and vitamins C, E, and K.  Especially significant if you want to become pregnant, taking the birth control pills strip your body of folate (folic acid), the lack of which causes fetal abnormality spinal bifida and cleft lips and palate.  These drugs may also raise your copper and iron levels, which in turn can contribute to depression and emotional symptoms, some of which may reverse by supplementing manganese and zinc.  If you are currently taking birth control pills or have recently stopped, it is essential to your own health as well as the health of a potential baby should you become pregnant, that you supplement to provide the above nutrients.  These artificial female hormones can also build up in your liver. 

But the biggest risks are that while taking the pill you are at a slightly increased risk of cervical cancer, breast cancer, stroke, and other diseases of your own circulatory system.  And if you smoke, the risk is substantial.  The pills make you estrogen dominant, and cancer cells love estrogen.

A 25-year, long-term study of 46,000 women who took the pill when they were younger concluded that there were no long-term negative effects.  However, it is worth seeing how the study was designed before breathing a big sigh of relief.  First, the study only looked at women who had stopped using the pill for 10 years or more.  Second, although its conclusion stated these women had no more health risks them women who never used the pill, how these health risks were defined were not reported.  For example, the study looked at the risk of dying rather than at the risk of breast cancer, a method that averaged risks of other varieties and skewed the results so the conclusion that there were no greater health risks could be stated. It was not reported who paid for the study.

According to John Lee, M.D>, author of What Your Doctor May Not Tell You about Menopause, synthetic ehtinyl estradiol, which is the molecule commonly used in estrogen supplements and contraceptives, is even more of a breast cancer risk then estradiol, which is what your body makes.  (Estradiol is 1,000 times more potent in its effects the on the breast tissue then estriol.”)  It is slowly metabolized and excreted, which means it builds up in your body.  Some brand names of such birth control pills include Alesse/ Apri / Brevicon/ Demulen/ Desogen/ Estrostep/ Genest/ Levlen/ Levlite/ Lavora/ Loestrin Lo/ Ovral/ Mircett/ Modicon/ Neolova/ Nordette/ Norinyl/ Ortho Cyclen/ Ortho-Cept/ Ortho-Novum/ Ovcon/ Ovral/ Tri-Levlen/ Tri-Norinyl/ Triphasil/ Trivora/ Zovia.

Two products, which are only synthetic progestin without the synthetic estrogen, are Depo-Provera (injected with a needle) and Norplant (placed under the skin).  A recent study confirmed that women using Depo-Provera lost an average of 2.8% of bone after one year of use and 5.8% after 2 years.  Provera costs ten time more per month then transdermal, bioidentical progesterone.  Like other synthetic hormones, it is a substitute for your body’s own hormone production, and as such, can lower your blood levels of real hormone or even shut their production all together.  Whether delivered by patch, pill, injection, or implant, and whether designed to be taken daily or four times a year, prescription birth control is still all synthetic hormones.

 (This includes the ring and IUDs)

Last, en effect you probably weren’t informed about involves your effect on drinking water if you’re taking the pill.  That’s right – your urine contains birth control pill residue, affecting the ecosystem as it moves through the water table.  As your birth-control laden urine moves through sewage systems, the waste water that flushes out after processing still contains the synthetic estrogen.  This water, whether contaminated from birth control pills or synthetic hormone replacement therapy, has the effect of feminizing male fish, meaning some male fish exposed to the residue can develop eggs in their testes or can’t reproduce.  Scientists are investigating whether estrogen and other chemicals that act like estrogen might be effecting human males as well.

What You Can Do

The thing to remember is that, since birth control pills are made of synthetic estrogen and synthetic progestin, and because they can build up in your liver, they create the problems of estrogen dominance (I will discuss more about estrogen dominance in a later blog) and those that occur when taking synthetic progestin.

Last, if you go off the birth control pill to get pregnant, before becoming pregnant be sure to take a whole food source of folic acid to prevent birth defects such as spina bifida.  As stated previously, birth control pills strip your body of folic acid.  Pages 164-168

here are some other resources to look into:

Breast Health and the Pill

www.femcap.com