VIDEO: Birth Control and Nutrient Depletion

Host: Let's cover another very popular drug that a lot of teenagers are on nowadays — the birth control pill. What nutrients can that deplete?

Dr. Stengler: Quite a few. They've studied this quite in-depth — I talked about it in one of my books. Most of the B vitamins are depleted by the birth control pill. One of the problems with that is that in women, when you start getting low levels of B12 and folic acid, you're more apt to get abnormal pap smears from a condition called cervical dysplasia, which is a stage before cervical cancer. That's concerning, especially when mothers think they're doing a good thing to help their daughters regulate their systems by taking the birth control pill — it's really doing more harm than good.

Host: So what do you tell parents when they come in with their daughters?

Dr. Stengler: Well, it depends why they're using them. If they're using them for hormone balance reasons because they get acne or painful menstrual cramps, we find those conditions easy to treat with diet and nutritional supplements — they do not need birth control pills to treat those issues. With good holistic treatment, you don't need that. But birth control pills also deplete other nutrients. They've done studies — for example, in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, they found that CoQ10 blood levels were 37% lower and vitamin E was 23% lower in women using birth control pills. Those have wide-ranging effects on the body, like lower energy levels. So again, these women on birth control pills — and I recommend more natural ways to deal with hormone balance — if you're going to be on them, you've got to be on these nutrients, because your health is going to suffer as a result.

Host: When these drug leaflets are there, the B vitamins being depleted is well known with the birth control pills — are those in the little leaflet?

Dr. Stengler: We have the B12 in the forecast, but not the other B vitamins like the B6, for example.

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