You mentioned some research suggests that licorice reduces the dilation of DHEA to DHEA-S and allows more conversion of DHEA to testosterone. What is not so clear is, is this a good thing?

Chris Kresser:  Only if you’re low in testosterone. It’s not clear if it’s a good thing. It depends on the patient. We talked before about situations where a patient might have normal DHEA, but high or low DHEA sulfate depending on what’s going on for them, and there’s all kinds of different scenarios where a patient, if they have high testosterone or high DHT, then we wouldn’t necessarily want to see more conversion of DHEA to testosterone. On the other hand, if you have a patient with normal DHEA, for example, so the problem isn’t there, but they have low testosterone, then licorice might make sense for them. So it really makes, it depends on the patient.