Health food is good! Prescribed medicines are bad! Right?
Wrong.
You may not find many sharks off the American beaches but there are plenty in the American health food industry. The Mexican yam, for instance, known as barbasco or dioscorea, is rich in substances that can be made into female hormones. Indeed, many manufactures use the Mexican yam as a precursor for the manufacture of birth control pills and other hormone products. Substances in the Mexican yam can also be made into DHEA or dehydroepiandrosterone. Unfortunately, it takes a chemistry set to do this. Human systems do not have the capability to make these transformations.
Has this stopped people from selling Mexican yam as a substitute for DHEA or female hormones? Nope. There are a number of companies who tout their Mexican yam supplements as a substitute for hormones or for DHEA, some are even headed by people with a degree in medicine! Anyone who pretends to be knowledgeable in chemistry who tells you that the Mexican yam is going to be transformed into progesterone or DHEA in your body is selling you a bill of goods, you may have run into a shark, watch out!
There are many sharks loose in the American marketplace - yes, even in the field of health and nutrition. You are almost in need of degrees in chemistry and math to sort the fact from the fiction. And on the subject of multi-level marketing of these products, the old adage is as valid as ever: Buyer beware!