Avoid This Mistake While
Trying to "Fix" Your Hormones
Why more supplements can mean more dysregulation
by Giacomo Kyle Hatanaka, LAc, MAcOM | Hidden Summit Acupuncture
She came in carrying a bag. Not a purse. A carry-on.
Inside it was an entire pharmaceutical-grade monument to trying really hard: collagen powder, DIM, a hormone support blend whose label made claims that would make an endocrinologist wince, high-dose B complex, magnesium glycinate, a separate magnesium threonate for the brain, myo-inositol, vitex, evening primrose oil, a methylated folate “just in case,” and a few others I’m forgetting. She laughed when she put it on the table. “I know,” she said, before I’d said anything. “I know, I know.”
Then she changed the subject.
I’ve thought about that moment a lot. Because the “I know, I know” wasn’t ignorance. She was smart, she was research-literate, she’d read everything. The issue was something harder to address than a knowledge gap: she’d built an identity around optimizing, and the supplements were proof of effort. Scaling back felt like giving up.
It took a few months of working together — and a lot of patient conversation — before she started cutting back. These days she has a purse’s worth instead of a carry-on. She drinks bone broth most days, eats at least fifteen different vegetables a week, and starts every morning with protein, healthy fat, and something green. Her hormones have been more stable than they were during the carry-on era. Her wallet has also noticed.
I tell this story not to embarrass anyone — because honestly, she is not unusual. She is the room. She is a significant percentage of the women in their late 30s and 40s who walk through our door. And the supplement industry, which is now a $50 billion annual enterprise built substantially on the anxiety of people who are trying to feel better, has done a masterful job of making sure she stays that way.
The Problem With
Isolated Compounds
Here’s the thing about supplements that the supplement industry would prefer you not think too hard about: your body did not evolve to absorb nutrients in isolation. It evolved to extract them from food, where they exist alongside hundreds of other compounds — enzymes, cofactors, fiber, fats — that make absorption actually work.
Take collagen powder, which has become almost a personality trait in wellness circles. The pitch is compelling: collagen is what keeps your skin, joints, and connective tissue intact, and production declines with age, so supplement it. Makes sense on paper. The problem is that when you consume collagen as a powder, your digestive system breaks it down into amino acids before it ever gets a chance to do anything structural. You absorb those amino acids the same way you’d absorb them from any other protein source. The collagen is essentially gone before it arrives.
Bone broth, on the other hand, delivers collagen in a form your body actually recognizes — slow-cooked, partially broken down, accompanied by gelatin and minerals that support gut lining integrity directly. It’s not a flashy product. It doesn’t come in a canister with a celebrity endorsement. It just works significantly better.
The same logic applies across the board. Magnesium from leafy greens, pumpkin seeds, and dark chocolate comes packaged with the fiber and phytonutrients that help your body regulate how much it absorbs. Isolated magnesium supplements — even the better forms like glycinate or threonate — bypass that regulatory system entirely. High doses can cause problems of their own: loose stools at best, interference with calcium and zinc absorption at worst. The “more is better” assumption breaks down pretty quickly when you look at how minerals actually compete for absorption in the gut.
The Hormone Support Blend
Problem
This is where I want to be direct, because I think this category of product is causing genuine harm.
“Hormone support” blends — the ones with names like Balance, Harmony, Femme, or some variation — are typically proprietary stacks of anywhere from six to fifteen compounds: DIM, vitex (chasteberry), maca, evening primrose, ashwagandha, dong quai, wild yam extract, and whatever else the formulator decided to throw in that week. Each of these compounds has some legitimate research behind it in isolation. The problem is that stacking them together, in unspecified doses, targeting the same hormonal pathways, all at once, is not medicine. It’s a guess. A very expensive, entirely unregulated guess.
DIM — diindolylmethane, derived from cruciferous vegetables — genuinely supports estrogen metabolism through the liver. But the dose matters enormously. Too little and nothing happens. Too much and you can actually drive estrogen lower than you want, which in perimenopause, when estrogen is already fluctuating, can worsen the very symptoms you’re trying to fix. The DIM in a “hormone support” blend is almost never dosed for your specific hormonal picture. It’s dosed for a label.
Vitex works on progesterone pathways — potentially useful, but it operates through the pituitary gland, which means it affects the entire hormonal communication loop, not just one endpoint. Taking it alongside other compounds hitting the same system is like having six people simultaneously adjust the same thermostat. The outcome is unpredictable, and “more support” does not mean better regulation. It often means more noise.
This is not a fringe concern. I have seen patients whose hormone panels looked genuinely chaotic — not because their bodies were failing, but because they were running six different interventions on the same system with no way to isolate what was doing what. When they simplified, things stabilized. The body, given a little space, is surprisingly good at regulating itself.
What High-Dose B Vitamins Are
Actually Doing
B vitamins are another one worth examining, because they’ve become almost reflexively recommended for women in perimenopause and the dosing in most supplements is wildly out of proportion to what the research actually supports.
B6 and B12 in particular get megadosed in ways that assume more is always better. B6 toxicity from supplements is more common than most people realize — it can cause peripheral neuropathy (tingling or numbness in the hands and feet) at sustained high doses, and the threshold is lower than the doses in many popular B complex products. B12 in food is absorbed through a careful mechanism involving intrinsic factor in the gut. Flood the system with high-dose oral B12 and you mostly just make expensive urine, because the absorption mechanism saturates quickly and the excess goes nowhere useful.
Meanwhile, eggs, meat, fish, and leafy greens deliver B vitamins in forms and doses your body knows exactly what to do with, alongside the cofactors that make the whole process work. A breakfast with two eggs, some smoked salmon, and a handful of spinach is doing more for your B vitamin status than most B complex supplements — and it also happens to be delicious, which the supplements are famously not.
The Real Cost of
the Carry-On
Beyond the money — though the money is real, and a well-stocked supplement shelf can run several hundred dollars a month — there’s a subtler cost to the carry-on approach that I think gets overlooked.
It keeps the focus entirely on inputs. If I just take the right things, something outside of me will fix this. And that orientation, while completely understandable given how overwhelming perimenopause can feel, tends to crowd out the interventions that actually recalibrate the underlying pattern: food quality, sleep, stress, and yes, acupuncture — which works on the regulatory systems themselves rather than trying to chemically override them from the outside.
There’s also something worth naming about what the supplement stack signals emotionally. For a lot of women, it’s a form of control in a season of life that feels distinctly uncontrollable. The hormones are doing whatever they want, the body feels unfamiliar, and the supplements are something to do about it. I understand that. I’m not dismissing it. But control and regulation aren’t the same thing, and the carry-on approach tends to produce the former while undermining the latter.
What to Actually Do
Instead
Eat more things, not take more things. That’s most of it.
Fifteen or more different vegetables a week — which sounds like a lot until you realize that variety matters more than volume, and a stir-fry with six vegetables counts — supports the gut microbiome diversity that underlies almost everything else: hormone clearance, mood, immune function, sleep quality. Cruciferous vegetables two or three times a week give you actual DIM in an actual dose your body can regulate. Bone broth gives you actual collagen alongside actual minerals. Fatty fish twice a week gives you omega-3s that are orders of magnitude more bioavailable than fish oil capsules.
A breakfast with protein, healthy fat, and something green sets your blood sugar up for the day in a way that directly influences cortisol rhythm, which directly influences how your hormones behave for the next sixteen hours. This is not a small thing.
If you want to keep a few supplements — a good magnesium at a reasonable dose in the evening, a vitamin D if you live somewhere with limited sun, maybe a B12 if you eat little to no animal protein — that’s a purse, not a carry-on. That’s a reasonable supporting cast for an already solid foundation.
The goal isn’t optimization through accumulation. It’s a system that’s actually regulated. Those are very different targets, and only one of them requires a bag with wheels.
If this sounds
familiar
If you’re somewhere in the carry-on era and you’re not sure where to start, that’s exactly the kind of conversation we have at Hidden Summit Acupuncture. We work with women across Boise, Meridian, Nampa, and Eagle who are done throwing things at the wall and ready to actually understand what’s going on. Book a visit — and leave the bag at home if you want, or bring it. We’ve seen bigger.
Giacomo Hatanaka is a licensed acupuncturist and co-owner of Hidden Summit Acupuncture in Boise, Idaho, where he focuses on pain, nervous system regulation, stress physiology, and helping overwhelmed high-functioning people feel like themselves again. He’s especially interested in why so many intelligent, capable people can function at a high level while feeling terrible almost all the time.