How your body transforms cholesterol into hormones

Ajouté : 2026-06-03

[00:00:00]So basically, if you were to chart this out, right, you'd have a cholesterol and then you'd have an arrow going to pregnenolone. And then from there it branches out. You can go any number of directions. You can go towards a path that takes you to cortisol, eventually.

[00:00:11]You can go towards a path that takes you to aldosterone, eventually. You can go towards a path that takes you to testosterone, estradiol, other hormones.

[00:00:19]And so there's this sort of complex branching pattern, and all of it funnels back to pregnenolone and ultimately cholesterol. But as you said, you can give pregnenolone and it doesn't necessarily evenly increase or boost the levels of all of the potential downstream steroid molecules you could be thinking about. What sort of What determines, like, what gets made from the starting materials cholesterol and then pregnenolone? Is there genetic variation in the enzymes that, you know, make one person produce some of these hormones and steroids more than others?

[00:00:52]Are there environmental or diet-induced impacts that determine, like, whether or not you're going to mostly use the starting materials to go down one branch versus another?