What are Bio-Identical Hormones and where do they come from?
The ovaries, testicles and the adrenal glands manufacture a series of hormones known as steroids that are all derived from cholesterol. Since the early 1960s, chemists have been able to synthesize all of these molecules starting either from cholesterol or from plant sterols found in nature. Bioidentical hormones are primarily derived from a plant oil called diosgenin, which is very similar in chemical structure to cholesterol. Diosgenin is extracted primarily from soybeans and wild yams, but is also found in several thousand other plants worldwide. The human body cannot convert this compound into steroid hormones. Diosgenin has to be chemically altered in a lab to exactly match the human steroid hormones. Since the manufactured molecules exactly match the chemical structure and effect of hormones that occur naturally in the human body, they are called bio-identical.
