the last of the fats that we we're going to talk about we've talked about saturated fatty acids and unsaturated fatty acids we've spoken of prostaglandins we've talked about triglycerides and phospholipids uh now we're going to talk about steroids now the context that all of us have heard that word steroid is we've heard of something called steroid hormone now first what are hormones at the bottom of the page on D3 hormones are the name for chemicals that are secreted into our bloodstream that circulate in our bloodstream and affect changes in our body so they cause changes in our body's activity there are different categories different types of hormones they the hormones fall into two major categories two major categories steroid hormones and protein hormones so right now we're going to talk about steroid hormones and then either later today or next time we're going to talk about protein hormones now steroid hormones are actually made from cholesterol and I wrote that right here so steroid hormones and we've all heard that term steroid hormones are made from cholesterol now all of us have heard the word cholesterol it's just that again we probably don't know what it is so cholesterol in and of itself is not bad in fact we cannot live without it because all steroid hormones are manufactured or synthesized by cells from cholesterol this fat now where do we get cholesterol cholesterol is in our food uh and specifically it is in any food from an animal anything from an animal contains cholesterol so meat contains cholesterol fish contains cholesterol anything from an animal eggs contain cholesterol because they're from a chicken right milk contains cholesterol because it's from a cow but there is no cholesterol in anything from a plant there's no cholesterol in grains or fruits or vegetables in addition to there being cholesterol in our Foods we wrote that our uh the cholesterol can be synthesized it can be made from saturated fatty acids and I wrote in the word liver our liver that large largest organ in our body is a giant biochemical Factory and it can actually convert saturated fats in our food into cholesterol so for most of us cholesterol is fine we we don't have high amounts of it and we use that cholesterol to make steroid hormones but we know that people can have too much of even a good thing if you have you need sugar for energy but too much sugar having more sugar than you should have in your bloodstream is called diabetes you can't live without salt we all need salt in order to live and yet excessive amounts of salt too much can contribute to high blood pressure well uh saturate effects and cholesterol are needed cholesterol is used to make steroid hormones but having excessively high amounts of cholesterol contributes to the clogging up of Our arteries with saturated fats and cholesterol that condition which we've talked about previously is called atherosclerosis so too much of even a good thing is bad so for people who have high levels of cholesterol in their in their body so the doctors tell them look you got to reduce your intake of foods containing cholesterol and inally which common food has the highest amount of cholesterol of all common foods egg eggs eggs which part of the egg the yolk now this actually helps prove my point the cholesterol in and of itself is not bad it's just too much of it is bad because the purpose of a Yol is that a Yol contains all the nutrients needed to can build a chicken that's what the purpose of a Yol is it's got all the nutrients needed to make a little chicken grow inside of an egg show all right but so if if cholesterol was so bad why would nature why would God put so much cholesterol inside the egg Yol the answer is you can't build a chicken without it but if you have too much cholesterol in your body then you got to reduce your intake of foods containing cholesterol you also have to reduce your intake of foods containing saturated fats incidentally both cholesterol and saturated fats come primarily from animals right there's no cholesterol in plants and there's very low levels of saturated fats in in Plants as well we did write the cholesterol is used uh to make steroid hormones let's take a look at what cholesterol looks like all the chemicals that are shown in D12 are steroid hormones with one exception so these are steroid hormones these are steroid hormones in the third row the only one of these chemicals that are shown on this page D12 that's not a hormone is on the third row on the right that's cholesterol let's just look at cholesterol cholesterol is a uh it looks like a somewhat complicated uh molecule an organic molecule all it is really is just chains of carbon atoms with hydrogens attached and it's looped into about five rings now I want to remind you something uh remember a saturated fat a saturated fat just looks like this just a long chain of carbon atoms with hydrogens attached this is basically what a saturated fat looks like we talked about them previously so interestingly what our liver can do is our liver can take these long chains of carbon atoms with hydrogen's attached and simply Loop them into a ring shape so it just Loops them into a ring shape and it joins them together these are just chains of carbon atoms with hydrogen the and it just Loops them into a ring shape and that's called cholesterol now uh as we' seen in the case of sugars once we understand the basic structure and we know the rule coming off every carbon atom or four lines right so basically so that we don't have to draw every single carbon and hydrogen atom on all these other molecules on this page they just skipped drawing all the carbons and hydrogens all right but these are all made from cholesterol these are steroid hormones and they are made from cholesterol so in all the all these hormones on this page they just left off all the carbons and hydrogens now uh just to show you two examples of steroid hormones here's a steroid hormone on the third row on your left it's testosterone testosterone is the male sex hormone it's called testosterone because it's produced in the testes of a guy all right right below it it is estrogen estrogen is the female sex hormone it is the female sex hormone estrogen is produced in the ovaries of a woman now the thing that I'd like to draw your attention to is this when you look at this and you look at this they look almost identical in fact there this is one of the main differences between them I'm not asking you to remember this but this right attached to a carbon here is a double bonded oxygen and attached to a carbon here is an O I'm not asking you to remember that but the point I'm trying to make is just a slight difference in the chemical structure of that molecule creates a profoundly different effect on the body there's a big difference in the effect of testosterone versus estrogen on the human body so it is these very slight differences in structure that creat all these differences and effect just to look at uh these hormones in the first row it shows uh hormones that I'm not even going to talk about in this class called mineralocorticoids in the second row it shows uh in the second row other steroid hormones called glucocorticoids I am going to tell you a little bit about those and they include cortisol and cortisone I'm going to explain more about these in a second uh in the third row it shows testosterone and and something called adreno Androgen these testosterone and adreno androgen are called androgenic hormones Andro means male or masculinizing so these are both masculinizing hormones they create mess as it were all right we'll have more to say about both of those in a moment in the bottom row it shows two female sex hormones estrogen and progesterone I'm going to tell you about those and then on the bottom right is another steroid hormone it's listed as Vitamin D but you'll notice that its chemical structure looks pretty similar to these others and it's made from cholesterol so it's actually another steroid hormone so let's talk a little bit about some of these steroid hormones there are hundreds of them in our body we're just going to talk about a few so on page A1 so we mentioned let's speak very briefly in terms of colesterol uh on a11 so uh we now know that uh cholesterol is essential in our diet just we don't just want don't want to have too much of it which foods contain cholesterol so we mentioned earlier today that cholesterol is found only in animals there is no cholesterol in in plants so that you don't get cholesterol by eating vegetables fruit or grains but anything from an animal has cholesterol so you get cholesterol in meat cholesterol in fish cholesterol in eggs you'd say why eggs because eggs come from an animal cholesterol in milk you'd say why milk because milk comes from an animal your liver has biochemical processes where it can hydrogenate the unsaturated fat turning into a saturated fat and then takes this long chain of carbon atoms with hydrogens and folds it into that ring structure called a steroid chain or cholesterol so our liver can form cholesterol even from unsaturated fats okay it turns unsaturated fats into saturated and saturated fats into uh cholesterol so because of that uh the uh we had said earlier today the most uh prescribed drug in the United States is what lip or a torist Statin what does it do how does it work how does it lower your cholesterol levels so we wrote the way that Lipitor and other statin drugs work is they inhibit an enzyme that converts saturated fats into cholesterol that's how it works so by interfering with that enzyme in the liver that can is capable of converting saturated fats into cholesterol it lowers the total amount of cholesterol in our uh body so uh doctors still want people to try to reduce those Foods uh that contain cholesterol but even sometimes people who do that you know do you know of anybody who actually eats right and still has high cholesterol it is possible and uh the reason why if you're wondering how's it possible if somebody can eat right and still have high cholesterol uh they chose their parents poorly and what I mean by choosing your parents poorly is there are genetic factors hormones are chemicals that are carried in the bloodstream that affect uh the very uh various cells of our body uh and so there are steroid hormones and there are protein hormones right now we're talking about steroid hormones so androgens what does Andros mean male masculinizing testosterone is the potent masculinizing hormone secreted by the testes now masculinizing or androgenic hormones have four major Act and it's a mixture of both anabolic and catabolic you say what do you mean so testosterone and other androgenic hormones speed up anabolic reactions the word anabolic which you should have learned in a biology class means growth reactions here's how you've heard the term anabolic steroids have you ever he that anabolic steroids promote growth growth of muscles obviously guys typical guys are more muscular than the typical female you know we're not talking about women uh Olympic Champions but uh on average so uh it promotes growth of Bones and that's why average guys are taller than women uh on average and they have more muscle mass those are anabolic or growth processes promoted by uh anabolic steroid hormones but they also promote catabolic reactions what's the word catabolic catabolic is the breakdown of organic molecules for energy uh think of a catastrophe and a cat catastrophe thing BR breaks apart so um or just think about how cats rip up everything but uh in a catabolic reaction there's the breakdown of food for energy so guys who have testosterone have a f uh break down Foods at a faster rate for energy so they uh can eat more every day right you probably have heard that you know it's not fair guys can eat more calories of food every day because they break down food at a faster rate that increased release of energy results in most guys can run faster than most women they uh they perform at a higher level you know this is why every time they want to get women playing on the same basketball team that the guys do they get decimated because they can't perform at that same level uh uh so at this I always like to point out that when women think this is like unfair because guys have that faster quote metabolism and they can eat more food every day there is a cost to this the fact that this speeds up these chemical reactions uh results in guys living seven years less on average than women so the cost of this is they don't live as long it's like driving your car one person is driving their car 50 miles an hour and somebody else is driving their car 75 miles an hour and uh eventually it causes wear and tear on the engine and their car engine's not going to last as long if you drive it at a faster speed so that's kind of what's going on in guy's body so there is a cost to this increased biochemical reactions uh furthermore uh for some reason anabolic steroids like testosterone increase hair growth average guy is hairier except for one place he may not have as much hair on his head uh baldness but uh everywhere else tends to be hairier face chest and so on and it also increases libido or sex drive so uh that's usually uh greater in guys than in women so uh that's what testosterone does now we mentioned adrenal Androgen it is a weaker androgenic hormone it is found in both men and women the the women vary in how much adreno Androgen or DHEA dehydroepiandrosterone they produce and depending upon how much of this adrenal Androgen that is secreted by a woman's adrenal glands it primarily affects these two things so it can primarily affect hair growth and libido it doesn't so much affect uh those first two things all right the female sex hormones uh estrogen is the feminizing hormone that causes the characteristic uh feminine features progesterone we had said literally means to prepare for pregnancy or gestation that's what uh gestation means and uh how does the body prepare for pregnancy it involves a number of things that we'll be learning about more detail including increased growth of blood vessels in the endometrial lining of the uterus and every month or every cycle uh progesterone causes the growth of blood vessels in the endometrial lining of a woman this is whether she gets pregnant or not blood vessels grow because they every woman's ovaries release this progesterone hormone if a woman gets pregnant those blood vessels will nourish the baby you'd say well what if what if she doesn't get pregnant well if she doesn't get pregnant that those blood vessels are shed and they are shed out of the womb out of the uterus out the vaginal canal and that loss of blood vessels and blood is called menstruation or having a period so if a woman is having a period we know she didn't get pregnant if she's not if she expected to have a period and she's not menstruating that's the classic sign that you if you're sexually active you are pregnant whether you have that period or not so went the shedding of the endometrial Ling all right uh mineralo cortica steroids now these are steroid hormones P secreted by the outer part of the adrenal gland the so-called adrenal cortex and they're called mineralo because they regulate mineral balance in the body specifically sodium and potassium mineral or electrolyte levels they are extremely important and we're going to have a lot lot more to say about them and we will eventually get into what's known as the reninangiotensin aldosterone reflex homeostatic reflex very very important um on page A3 a 13 the glucocorticosteroids now gluco means sugar and cortico refers to the adrenal cortex the outer part of the adrenal gland and it not only secretes the mineralocorticoids like autostone but the glucocorticosteroids such as cortisol and these hormones have many actions including the fact that they raise the blood sugar level during states of stress and we will have a lot more to say about the glucocorticosteroids just to I I when we get to it I'll expand upon this but some of you may have heard these disc discussions where uh you may have heard about how stress can promote belly fat have we ever heard of that and that's true and that has to do with the release of the glucocorticosteroids like cortisol we'll get into that uh all right the uh AIC calciferol what the heck is that so this is a steroid hormone actually made by our skin cells uh there are cells in our skin that manufacture steroid hormone from cholesterol and secreted into the bloodstream in order for our skin to manufacture this steroid hormone it requires cholesterol just like it does for all the other steroid hormones and it also requires sunlight so we need sunlight to convert cholesterol into the steroid hormone now what does this steroid hormone do it circulates in our bloodstream and it is needed it it is required in order for uh us to absorb calcium from our dig gestive tract in order to absorb calcium from our intestines that's why it's called calciferol sometimes it's called col calciferol why Ki because it's name from cholesterol so uh we need it in order to absorb calcium for example if you had a glass of milk milk is a good source of calcium drink the milk if you've got this steroid hormone circulating in your bloodstream you you will absorb that calcium into your bloodstream but what if you didn't have this steroid hormone this calciferol circulating in your bloodstream then you would not be able to absorb the calcium into your bloodstream and the calcium would pass out in your feces in your stool so you got to have this hormone to absorb milk now in the N 1940s 1950s nutritionists uh back then recognized that uh pointed out to the uh government that uh increasingly fewer and fewer people were working or spending much time outdoors in the sun now you need sunlight to form this steroid hormone in the skin if you're in high school or Elementary School you start out like 8 n in the morning you get home two in the afternoon or something like that and you know in the old days kids at least when they got home from school then they' go outside and play you know what they do now they play video games indoors they don't play outside and as adults nobody's working outside you know there's not a lot of farmers out you know here in Los Angeles everybody is uh working on a computer terminal as we said before nurses are spending a 12-hour shift inside of a hospital and some people of course even live in poor uh worse climates than we do where they can't spend a lot of time Outdoors it's either way too hot and sunny or too cold much of the year so anyhow it's uh it's believe that uh that we weren't making enough of this steroid hormone so they decided they got approvement by the US Department of Agriculture to start putting this steroid hormone in milk the problem is this if you tell people they put a steroid hormone in the milk is anybody going to drink that milk or give that to their kids to drink you say they put steroid hormones in the milk I'm not g I'm not GNA give my kids that so instead of calling it calciferol they called it vitamin D you can look at all the milk you by it says contains vitamin it says D3 take a look at it it says D3 so it said vitamin D oh it's got vitamin D in the milk yes they put vitamin D in I love that stuff I love vitamin D which brands got the most so in other words it's very interesting the words we use because everybody agrees they put a chemical in the milk but if they caught it a steroid hormone which is what it really is nobody would drink it but if they call it a vitamin people love it but that's that's what it is so uh why they put it in milk because milk is commonly given to Children is a good source of calcium and that puts the steroid hormone in the milk and that way you can absorb the calcium