Some Facts About Wild Yam Cream and Progesterone

Wild Yam Cream has be advertised as a treatment for menopause, hot flashes, night sweats, PMS, migraine headaches, mood swings, fertility, larger breasts, heart disease, and osteoporosis. The people who sell these products claim they contain "natural hormones" and "hormone like compounds." To many people, suffering from these conditions, this seems like the perfect "medicine" to help them. In most cases these creams are not effective because the product advertised does not contain the hormone claimed. The fact is, there is no progesterone in the wild yams, nor can your body make progesterone from the hormone like compound, diosgenin, in the wild yam. So, why is there such confusion about this? The reason this misinformation exists is because a few decades ago, wild yams were harvested and purified to produce the intermediate chemical, diosgenin, for progesterone and other hormone production in the lab. An intermediate means that this component of wild yams was reacted with other chemicals, in a laboratory, to make progesterone. People not familiar with this process thought that these wild yams actually contained progesterone. This belief is still persistent today and many unscrupulous business people sell products made from "wild yams" and claim that they can cure or relieve the symptoms of many diseases and medical conditions. As for natural sources of progesterone, that is a misnomer. Today 99.9% of progesterone is made in a laboratory. However, the synthesised version of natural progesterone is identical to naturally occurring progesterone and is referred to as bio-identical progesterone. The term "synthetic progesterone" is often used to refer to products such as Provera