Red Clover Shown to Improve Bone Mineral Density and Lower LDL Cholesterol
by Barbara Minton, Natural Health EditorSee all articles by this author
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(NaturalNews) Red clover, that versatile flower little girls use to decorate their hair and string into necklaces, has been shown to be very good for big girls too. Women have a history of using red clover to alleviate the symptoms of estrogen insufficiency and help restore hormonal balance. Red clover has long been a staple of natural healers as one of their evidence based therapies. New studies are now documenting and quantifying the many benefits of red clover for women and also for men.
Recent studies show red clover provides a wealth of benefits to women in hormonal decline
Hormone replacement with synthetic or conjugated estrogen drugs has fallen out of fashion. These drugs don't really even offer a replacement to estrogen at all. They offer only an alternative to estrogen. Because these drugs do not replicate the natural estrogen made in the body, they have a long list of side effects associated with them. Since they are foreign substances that are not recognizable by the body, they produce a response from the immune system, taking the immune system away from the job it was meant to do. They need to be detoxified in the liver, and they prompt the body to mount resistance to them.
As reported in the November edition of the journal Gynecology Endocrinology, researchers looking for alternatives to estrogen drugs studied red clover to determine its effect on the lipid (another word for fat) profile of postmenopausal women with increased body mass index. Sixty postmenopausal women aged 40 and older who were not users of hormone therapy were randomly assigned to one of two groups. Group one took capsules containing 80mg. of red clover isoflavones daily for a 90 day period. Group two took a placebo. After a seven day period to allow the isoflavones to clear from the bodies of group one participants, the groups were switched so that at the end of the study both groups had taken the isoflavones.
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