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