How Food Affects Menopause

hormones can what you eat really make a difference we're about to find out as I interviewed dr. Neal Barnard on the exam room today's topic is the single most requested that we have ever had from listeners got dozens and dozens of messages and emails asking can we please talk about the change of life and so here now to help us break it all down is dr. Neal Barnard welcome back to the show my friend great to be with you Chuck I am so glad that you are here are you surprised at all that so many people are writing in so many women asking for help with this well I have to say I'm not surprised because it's an issue that affects all women it's always gonna happen let's do it sooner or later and for some women some women sail through it but other other women have problems with menopause where it causes all kinds of symptoms and they they're looking for answers and rightly so and we'll we'll end the show with a couple of listener questions they've written in and I've picked a couple that I think a lot of women can relate to but before we get to those let's just kind of take a take a little dive in here I mean my first question is what role does food play when it comes to menopause well first of all I should maybe say what menopause is not also because some people imagine that menopause is just this artificial thing that occurs because women are living longer you once in a while hear this argument back a hundred years ago the average lifespan might have been 50 and so now that women are living into their 80s well she's just living past her sell-by date and you ought to expect your problems let me tell you something there is nothing to that whatsoever it is true that average life expectancy was shorter in years past but that really wasn't because everyone was dropping dead at 50 but it was was because there was a lot of infant mortality and that factors into the average so if you have half the population living to a ripe old age of 80 and the other half dying in infancy of infections and things like that then the average would be 40 uh-huh but people have always lived long lives and the the idea that somehow you're past your sell-by date that is just complete nonsense what menopause really means is that the ovary has run out of viable oo sites these are our eggs it's not releasing them anymore that causes hormonal changes and so the periods stop and yeah foods do seem to play a role and we we have seen this both when we look at international comparisons where people are on different kinds of diets they get a different experience of menopause and as their diets change say westernization in Asian countries then the experience of menopause changes too so we have a lot of evidence that diet plays a role sometimes a harmful role but it can be helpful to the eastern diet you know we've talked a lot about that on the show when it comes to Blue Zones in particular you know look at the Okinawan diet you know not a whole lot of animal products and they're very light on that and animal products by and large have a lot of hormones in them so I'm curious what role do those hormones found in animal products play in this whole process you're right and it's not just Okinawa if he Okinawa the very bottom of Japan but Japan overall it didn't follow exactly the Okinawan diet which was very heavy and sweet potatoes for example that was the Okinawan favourite staple right now for the rest of Japan it was rice soy products some use of fish but it wasn't a humongous chunk of fish in the middle of the plate it was rice in the middle of the plate really effectively no cheese very little dairy meat all these kind of things and that's important for the reason that you that you mentioned dairy products have hormones in them because the cow is pregnant and many people have hypothesized that if you're pumping up the amount of hormones in your body prior to menopause and then when it menopause arrives the amount of hormones in your body comes crashing down because your body's not making them anymore you effectively have sort of hormone withdrawal that is much more accentuated than if you weren't eating those hormones along with it now it's not just the hormones in the food but foods certain foods help your body to eliminate hormones so a woman's hormone levels if she is on a meat-based diet without fiber with a lot of dairy products could be 25 30 percent higher then when she's on a healthier diet is is that why some women experience when the hot flashes a lot is made of those so is that why some women have a more or are more affected by hot flashes than others you just talked about that 25 30 % difference and then the hormone withdrawal essentially I would assume then that that affects the hot flashes that's not that's the hypothesis exactly and I didn't mean to say that that it's all the hormones in the food but it's the diet that causes the hormone levels to be higher so it's a little bit of it is the hormones in the cheese but a lot of it is just the way foods cause the body tang to handle hormones differently can the change of life occur earlier or later depending on a person's diet is there been any research into that evidence suggests that the reproductive window if I can put it that way between the time at menarche when the periods start and menopause when they end that that window can can change and it's been changing really for more than 150 years at the in in the teen years if you look back around 18 the mid 1800s the average age of the first period that girls would have it could have been as high as 17 18 years of age today that's unheard of that doctor that that girl would be brought to her doctor's office like what's wrong with you you know now you'll have girls having their periods at 10 11 earlier than that sometimes and if you think about it you're not ready to be a mother at that age you're not psychologically mature enough why should you be physically able to raise it to have a baby at that point and some of us have been concerned that it's hormonal changes that are coming from the foods that we're eating on the other end of life there does seem to be some stretching of that menopausal window as well that said the menopause is going to happen it's part of life it's it's a normal part of life and it's not a disease it's not a diagnosis it's not a bad thing in my view it's in part nature's way of protecting you might sound funny but but what I mean is that during a woman's reproductive life every month she has a surge of estrogenic hormones that are bathing the cells of the breast and the uterus and all the rest of her body in hormones that also in addition to the good things that these hormones do they also cause cancer hmm if a woman has too much estrogen in her blood and too many of these estrogenic surges her risk of breast cancer is higher same with uterine cancer so let's assume for the moment if we can put it this way that nature Nature has some wisdom about it and so a woman can be fertile for a limited window but not beyond that and when you're 51 52 55 this is not a time to have a toddler on you in the floor of your kitchen this is a time to get on with the rest of your life for sure you have a lot of stuff to do at that point and a lot of and you need some time to do that so the reproductive window is is relatively short you mentioned these hormonal surges and estrogen in particular and you earlier mentioned also fiber being able to regulate estrogen how does that work together what's the correlation there is an interesting thing the liver filters have estrogens out of the blood actually the liver filters a lot of things out of the blood estrogens testosterone medications you might take the liver is like a filter and it says what's this doing in the bloodstream it takes the estrogen out it sends it through a little tube that's called the bile duct that goes to the intestinal tract and there that estrogen goes down the bile duct into the intestinal tract and it hooks onto fiber which is the roughage in plants right and the that carries it out with the waste but if your lunch was chicken breast or salmon or cheese these don't have any fiber in them at all so the estrogen still is pulled out by the liver and sent down the bile duct but when it gets into the intestinal tract there's no fiber for it to hook on to what happens it's reabsorbed back into the circulation into the bloodstream and it goes around again and the liver finds that very same estrogen molecule and says what are you doing here I thought I got rid of you and it said well I wanted to leave but there's no fiber for me to hook on to so the liver again and sends it down the bile duct back into the intestinal tract there's still no fibre there so it circulates back into the bloodstream this is this is called enterohepatic circulation and Turo means intestinal tract hepatic means deliver light like hepatitis sure so enterohepatic circulation means the circulation of hormones and other substances from the intestinal tract up to the liver back down to the intestinal tract up to the liver has time over and over and over again all day and then that effect is a woman has more estrogenic stimulation than she should have and that spells a higher risk of cancer and all kinds of other problems Wow so the answer is when if let's say you're on a plant-based diet which is what I recommend for for anybody right every mouthful has some fiber in it a little or a lot that fiber is what your body needs to get rid of the things that the liver is trying to eliminate otherwise you're recycling your garbage if you liked that video if you like what you just heard go ahead and subscribe to this channel and leave a nice comment below and then to hear the full interview with dr. Beauregard go ahead and subscribe to the exam room podcast by the Physicians Committee on Apple podcast on Spotify on stitcher wherever it is that you get your podcast from that's where you can find us new episodes every Wednesday

Channel: Physicians Committee

Views: 246,393

Keywords: menopause, diet, horomones, plant-based, healthy, Neal Barnard

Id: 8uDc9ILdhxY

Length: 10min 18sec (618 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 25 2019