WEBVTT
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Welcome to the Dear Menopause podcast.
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I'm Sonya Lovell, your host Now.
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I've been bringing you conversations with amazing menopause experts for over two years now.
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If you have missed any of those conversations, now's the time to go back and listen, and you can always share them with anyone you think needs to hear them.
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This way, more people can find these amazing conversations, needs to hear them.
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This way, more people can find these amazing conversations.
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Welcome to this week's episode of Dear Menopause.
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I am delighted to be joined today by Dr Lucy Burns.
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Lucy, welcome to the show, Sonya.
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Thank you so much for having me.
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It's an absolute delight.
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It's always a pleasure to have like-minded smart women on the podcast, and I know my audience are going to love what we're going to talk about today, which is predominantly metabolic health.
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So, Lucy, before we do that, why don't you share a little bit about who you are and what?
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you do Absolutely.
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So my name's Lucy, I'm a medical doctor in Australia and I started my life off as a GP and then, interestingly, toddled off.
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I worked for Defence for a long time, which sort of sounds weird, but it suited me that we live near a Defence base.
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And so I stepped out of general practice and saw mainly young people, came back into general practice and saw the older population, sort of midlife and beyond beyond, and realised in the 15 years that I'd been out that this explosion of chronic disease had just taken over and that people who were 55 were not the same as they were 15 years prior, that 55 had suddenly become, you know, the new 75.
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It was like what?
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And so, on top of all of that, a zillion drugs moving into the space and us having to know everything, and I thought, oh, this can't be right, I need to go step back and sort of look at the root cause.
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And so I went and retrained as a lifestyle medicine doctor then, looking at the root cause of a lot of our chronic disease around insulin resistance, and so that then became my little passion and really talking about insulin resistance, the management of it with you know, yes, potentially some medications, but really how can we improve lifestyle to optimize that and prevent chronic disease so that we can live our glory years having fun yeah?
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absolutely A couple of things I want to ask you in there what year was this when you kind of dipped back into being a GP after those 15 years in defence?
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Yeah, about 2018.
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Yes, a little while ago now.
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And look like lots of people, you end up in an area because it's somehow all about you.
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So it was, it was all about me and, interestingly, I had spent an entire lifetime, you know, dieting, going on a diet or going on a bender.
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So I was really good at dieting.
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I'm really diligent, really strict, good going to the gym, doing all of the things.
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I was either all or then doing nothing, doing nothing and just eating donuts and everything, until I get to the point where I think, oh my God, I can't fit into all my clothes going back into it.
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And that was all fine until well, it secretly wasn't that fine, but I thought it was fine until I got to a point where it sort of wasn't really working.
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And then I just thought you know what I'm sick of this dieting business.
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I'm just going to make peace with my elastic waist and pants.
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You know, my husband still loves me.
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I'm not a bikini model, I don't need to worry.
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Except then I actually got pre-diabetes and fatty liver disease.
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Wow, this is not good.
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I don't want to be a doctor with pre-diabetes and fatty liver disease and so, yeah, that was really, I guess, part of the impetus and seeing that, it wasn't just me, it was all the patients, as well, that was having this.
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We come from a generation of dieters, don't we?
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I remember when I was reading a little bit about you before we met and came together to talk, and there was something that you said that really jumped out at me because I totally resonated with it, and that was having the fat wardrobe and the thin wardrobe, which is, you know, that's what you had.
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You had the clothes that you wore when you had had those binge periods and you'd, you know, got so exhausted by the dieting.
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You know, you had your fat wardrobe and I, as much as I, have followed a similar path to you with making peace and just being so completely exhausted by dieting, not to mention unwell and not serving me any longer.
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But I still find that I hold onto clothes in my wardrobe for when I fit into them and I have, I catch myself now and go.
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No, they can go.
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They can go.
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Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely.
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And I and I remember, you know, maybe having like going to an event, maybe a wedding or a formal function, and sort of praying that the dress will fit, and thinking, oh my god, if it doesn't fit, what am I going to do?
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And you know, then you'd go.
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So then you'd, you know, crash, start to try and squeeze into this dress and, yeah, yeah it was.
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It was totally exhausting and, yeah, at the end of the day, left me in a situation that was, yeah, you know, yeah, not ideal from a health perspective no, no, and so I guess that that then became part of what I, what I started doing, which was, yeah, lifestyle medicine around managing, you know and again, I use the word weight loosely because everybody knows the phrase weight loss but I'm really talking about metabolic health, and when we improve our metabolic health, weight loss comes along for the ride as a sort of just a little side effect, but it is not the goal per se.
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Yeah, I love that, that shifting of the goal from being yes, you'll get some weight loss, you know, like you say, as a happy side effect.
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But it's not our overarching goal.
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No One of the other questions that I have for you, and I'd love for you to expand on this, because it's something that I have recently become aware of and I'm really excited about.
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I believe that this is the future of healthcare and that is the lifestyle medicine.
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So can you explain for anyone listening that doesn't understand the difference between medicine and lifestyle medicine and also what was involved in that upskilling for you?
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Yeah, absolutely so.
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I mean in general medicine, it treats disease.
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So we talk about preventive care, but it's really even preventative care.
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What we're looking at is measuring risk factors and then working out well, high blood pressure, that's a risk factor for cardiac disease.
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So the preventative care is to treat the blood pressure.
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We are not very good at prescribing lifestyle changes within the current confines of our medical system, and there's lots of reasons for that.
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It's usually time-based, as one of them, but I think for a lot of doctors, they think lifestyle doesn't work and so they'll give it lip service and they go oh, yeah, yeah, lifestyle, but really what they're going to need is this blood pressure medication, or what they're going to need is you know, or what they need is weight loss, and then they won't need a blood pressure medication, whereas lifestyle medicine is a way that we can not only prevent disease but we can actually treat it.
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So it includes, you know, know again, moving your body, but moving it in a way that is not actually harmful, because not all movement is good for us, as we know.
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But so, you know, there's movement, there's nutrition.
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It clearly fundamental nutrition, and you know, the reduction of ultra processed foods would be the number one thing that we look at and sleep, optimizing sleep, stress.
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So there's a whole lot of pillars which I call we actually use the little phrase the six S's for success, so which is sort of a success successes.
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So the six S's, as I remember them, are sustenance and that's just because that is a good way to fit nutrition in with an S.
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So we do sustenance, we do sleep, we do stress management, we do strength training, we do sunshine and social connection, I know, and when we can optimise those, then we absolutely reduce our risk of further chronic disease.
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But we can even improve and treat chronic disease.
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So for me it's really about then being able to de-prescribe, so actually take people off their medications is exciting and so, yeah, so that's sort of how that started.
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So, yeah, I went through there's the Australasian Lifestyle Medicine Association, I did their training and I'm now a fellow of that college.
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There's some and again, like everything I think there's, it was initially.
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Their nutrition component was initially plant-based, and I'm not plant-based and in fact I've got some thoughts around plant-based nutrition.
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I'm an omnivore, very proud omnivore, and so.
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But at the end of the day, rather than looking at the differences, I think that really we want to look at, well, where are the similarities?
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And it really is around that reduction of ultra processed food.
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And then I guess part of then what I did was I thought, well, it's all very well to have these successes, you tell people this is what you need to do and that's all great, but then actually the implementation is where people fall down.
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So the knowledge is step one, but the implementation is step two.
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And so I went and had a look.
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I'd already had quite a lot of psychological medicine training as part of my general practice.
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Mental health was something I was really interested in.
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But then I did hypnotherapy course, which has been again life-changing and really exciting on many fronts, but also then a whole heap on behavioral change and understanding how our brain works, and then, I guess, being able to distill science into funny stories that then people can relate to and go yes, I can see that and I can probably do that now.
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Yeah, that's fascinating.
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I am really very interested in lifestyle medicine.
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I've got a girlfriend who's just started studying herself.
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She's a nurse, very highly qualified, highly experienced nurse, and she's constantly going.
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Oh my God, I've just learned this, sonia, this is right up our alley, and I truly do believe that this is the way of the future.
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Obviously, there are needs for medical interventions at different points in time, but lifestyle has to be those pillars that you talked about.
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You know so important, and I think, with the way I look at it is the way that our society has evolved and where we're kind of heading, they've become even more important to be reminded of.
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Yeah, absolutely, because the environment that we live in is not conducive to those lifestyle pillars.
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They don't happen easily, so we have to, I guess, hijack our current environment to make them easier.
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It won't happen without some intention.
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Yeah, and it's funny, isn't it?
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So even the things like you talked about the sunshine being one of them, and the social connection they're things that it sounds a bit wistful, I suppose.
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Sometimes when you kind of go, you know these are things that our grandparents did and they didn't think about doing them, they were just a part of their life.
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But we do have to actually now work at making those things part of our life.
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Yeah, yeah, because otherwise that won't happen.
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Our life is we get up, we go to work in the dark.
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If we even go to work, some of us work from home.
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You don't.
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You know.
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You can have days and days without going outside.
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A hundred percent agree, you know I find myself sometimes like I'll get up.
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It's now darker in the morning, so I could get up in the morning.
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I can still walk my dog outside, but it might be darker than it was previously.
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Then I go to the gym, which is inside, yes, and then I'll come home and I will work in front of my computer and I have to remind myself to get up.
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Go outside, you know, take a walk, get the sunshine, get the fresh air, because it is way too easy to just spend all your time inside.
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Totally, totally and again.
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And I mean going outside is kind of something that's relatively easy, like it's not painful, there's not a lot of barriers, but we still have trouble doing it, whereas you know nutrition, moving your body, they're a bit harder, so you can imagine the barriers for that are even more intense.
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You mentioned that addressing metabolic health, and particularly through the use of lifestyle medicine, can have a huge impact on chronic disease.
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So can you explain what you mean by chronic disease, what some of those diseases are, and then we'll kind of dive into your recommendations around avoiding those?
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Yeah, sure.
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So again, if we think about, the biggest chronic disease that we are facing these days is type 2 diabetes and obesity.
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So, again, obesity is a triggering word.
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I get it.
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It's been used as a slur, it's used as a marker that people are lazy and gluttonous, and all of that.
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It's nothing to do with that.
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It really is.
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It's a condition where, again, our metabolic hormones become deranged.
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Our body becomes very, very good at storing fat and it starts storing it in areas that it was probably never designed to store, so in particular, in and around our organs.
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So we can end up with things like fatty liver disease and, interestingly, fatty every other organ disease.
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So yeah people hear about fatty liver, but there's fatty pancreas and fatty heart, and these also cause separate diseases in themselves, and what ends up happening then is that we really accelerate the risk of cardiovascular disease as well with some of these conditions, and so people end up having heart attacks or strokes early in life.
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With type 2 diabetes, they end up with neuropathies.
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They lose their vision.
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Other thing that it exacerbates really is things like arthritis, and all of that affects the way we move.
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So, at the end of the day, the chronic diseases affect our functional capacity, and so we can't do anything like you have to go, you need a walkie frame, you've got to go to spend your life going to doctors, to getting pills, potions, hip replacements, and I kind of think, wow, people work hard their whole life, they work really hard.
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Australians are hardworking people.
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They want to enjoy their retirement, the glory years, as I call them and yeah, they're crippled by chronic disease of varying sorts.
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They're taking a lot of medications, it's expensive and that's not how it's supposed to be.
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Yeah, and I guess you know, and a slightly different tact, but another emerging set of conditions is autoimmune conditions, which are separate to these other ones.
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So these things that I was talking about are really related to insulin resistance.
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As the core driver, autoimmune, is separate, highly likely to be related to our lifestyle, but it is tricky to determine exactly which part of our lifestyle because it's going to be multifactorial.
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And when you're talking about autoimmune disease, can you give us a couple of examples?
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So thyroid, is that something that falls into?
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autoimmune?
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Yeah, absolutely, and that was one of, again, one of my light bulb things.
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When our general practice and intergeneral practice, at that 15 year gap, where, again, just looking after young people in defense, young people don't, they don't have chronic disease usually yet Coming back and going, oh, my God, everybody seems to have Hashimoto's.
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What is going on here?
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So, yeah, increasing Hashimoto's, increasing celiac disease, and again, some of celiac is because we've got better at detecting it, but it's actually just more prevalent.
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They would be the two biggest ones that I've seen that are increasing.
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And then you know there's rheumatoid arthritis, but that's been around for a long time.
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It's just the rate at which we're getting it now.
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Inflammatory bowel disease would be another one, wow, okay.
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Yeah, so what I'd like to explore with you and you did touch on this very briefly how our hormones play a part in some of this metabolic health and a lot of the things that we've just talked or you've just talked about.
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There are things that we talk about when it comes to menopause symptoms and also the impact on our quality of life long-term post-menopause.
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Yeah, absolutely so, you're right.
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I mean, everything I just spoke to about then applies to both men and women.
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And what we have as women and this is where my interest in menopause has come in to play is recognizing that pre-menopause estrogen in particular what a frigging super hormone that is, isn't it?
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It is it's so protective, cardioprotective, and it's got so many brilliant properties that then, when it disappears, it kind of unmasks all of these other risks into chronic disease and the thing that I guess that I see a lot of and is and I've kind of just coined this phrase, I don't think it's a real phrase, but I call it the metabolic triad of menopause.
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And so what happens is, as estrogen declines estrogen is really good at being insulin sensitizing.
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So as estrogen declines, our insulin levels will go up, our insulin resistance will go up, and as estrogen declines, interestingly, our cortisol levels will go up.
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So these three have a little tribe, because another interesting thing is that as cortisol goes up, estrogen can go down as well.
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So again, we look at that area in the adrenals, which I know you're really well educated in, but we always think of estrogen as just being made in our ovaries and obviously that is what stops once we hit menopause.
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But estrogen is also made in the adrenal glands, as is cortisol, and so we have this situation where if we're making extra cortisol, for whatever reason lots of stress or a pathological process well, that will cause estrogen to go down.
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As estrogen goes down, cortisol goes up.
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So as cortisol goes up, insulin goes up.
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So, or a pathological process well, that will cause estrogen to go down.
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As estrogen goes down, cortisol goes up.
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So as cortisol goes up, insulin goes up.
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So there's this little triad, that kind of-.
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There's this real interplay going on, isn't there constantly between cortisol and estrogen.
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Absolutely so, then we can go.
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Well, actually, we can help this process by again bringing back lifestyle into it.
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Because if we can help this process by again bringing back lifestyle into it, because if we can reduce our insulin resistance with lifestyle changes and look, a powerful driver is for us.
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We advocate a low carbohydrate lifestyle.
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This is not a no carbohydrate lifestyle.
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People always go how can you get rid of a whole macronutrient?
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It's like, well, I'm not getting rid of it, yeah, it's just reducing it.
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So reducing your carbohydrates really powerful driver of insulin resistance.
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Improving stress management Like again, I cannot underestimate the effect of chronic stress and I think what people think is that in order to have a stress-free life, they need to run away, they need to go off to a tropical island and you know, then they can't, there'll be nothing to To be stressed about.
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Yeah, exactly, but you know I don't own a tropical island.
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I don't know many people that do.
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I mean, it sounds really appealing.
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It does.
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It does, although, interestingly, if you go to a tropical island all by yourself, well then you're dealing with loneliness, which is another one of the S's that we have to measure.
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I think we have this expectation that the only way we could be unstressed is to not have any external stressors, and so if everything else outside of our environment was hunky dory, then we wouldn't be stressed.
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But again, that's not realistic.
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So it's really looking around the stress cycle and we need to have periods where there is some stress, because that's normal, and we also need to have periods where we rest, because that's also normal, and that's how we're supposed to be.
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But women in particular are not very good at that.
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We don't actually ever stop.
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We, you know rest is considered lazy, we're not being productive, we're not making good use of our time, so we fill up any periods that might where we could potentially rest with and that's conditioning, that's societal conditioning, that and you know, modeling from families as well, probably from previous generations of women within our families.
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Yeah, yeah, that's that's created.
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We're stuck in that cycle now aren't we Of that stress cycle?
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Yeah, yeah.
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So again, yeah, it's, it's being so, it's so.
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It's chronic stress as opposed to acute stress.
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Acute stress just means short-term high, you know, and then resolves.
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Chronic stress is this low level, but chronically always on.
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So we're always getting stressed when we don't sleep properly.
00:20:30.818 --> 00:20:35.057
All of those things really impact again that cardiac metabolic triad.
00:20:35.057 --> 00:20:41.897
So that and part of the thing about the cortisol levels is that cortisol does increase our glucose.
00:20:41.897 --> 00:20:44.403
It's its job.
00:20:44.403 --> 00:20:55.039
One of its jobs is to increase blood glucose and that was all designed so that if we needed to run away from something, that we had enough fuel to do so.
00:20:55.140 --> 00:21:05.300
To do so, yeah, so what we've got then is declining estrogen, increasing cortisol, increasing glucose, so hence the insulin.
00:21:06.150 --> 00:21:10.455
Yes, yes, so that's where that side comes from.
00:21:10.455 --> 00:21:10.616
It.
00:21:10.616 --> 00:21:13.502
Declining insulin increases.
00:21:13.502 --> 00:21:21.538
Sorry, declining estrogen automatically increases insulin anyway, because it's one of its things that it does.
00:21:21.538 --> 00:21:26.575
There's some extra components in there as well, because we know that declining estrogen, you know, affects our muscle mass.
00:21:26.575 --> 00:21:29.101
Muscle is our metabolic organ.
00:21:29.101 --> 00:21:31.157
The more muscle we have, the lower our insulin.
00:21:31.157 --> 00:21:32.150
The less muscle we have, the lower our insulin.
00:21:32.150 --> 00:21:35.016
The less muscle we have, the higher our insulin.
00:21:35.016 --> 00:21:49.917
And so there's this hugely complex interplay between estrogen and our metabolic health, which is why women got premenopausal women are protected and then go through menopause, their cardiac risk factor skyrocket.
00:21:49.917 --> 00:21:51.020
They've got no idea.
00:21:51.020 --> 00:21:54.648
No one told them that Suddenly their lipids are all over the place.
00:21:54.648 --> 00:21:59.731
They've developed hypertension, they've put on weight around their belly, they've got fatty liver disease and thinking, holy hell, what happened?
00:21:59.731 --> 00:22:02.718
Yeah, yeah.
00:22:02.917 --> 00:22:36.700
So then, and this is one of the areas that I find really fascinating so if we talk about hormone therapy for just for a moment I know that's not what we came on to talk about, but one of the conversations that has become very loud and it's a really strong narrative now that is used from clinicians and a lot of doctors when they're talking about the benefits of taking hormone therapy is not just that immediate symptom management side of things, but the longevity impacts, so the things that we're just talking about there, so the healthy bones and the healthy heart and the cognitive protection as well.
00:22:36.700 --> 00:22:52.263
So am I right, then, in assuming that if somebody was to use hormone therapy, so there's that hormone top-up, if you like, that that does also help protect against some of these metabolic diseases that you're talking about?
00:22:52.750 --> 00:22:55.616
so I think the tricky bit is that initially.
00:22:55.616 --> 00:22:59.311
So we've known about this face with estrogen for a long time.
00:22:59.311 --> 00:23:01.942
That's not new news, it's not my news, it's it's old news.
00:23:01.942 --> 00:23:06.796
And then again, back in 2000, women's health initiative study we all know that.
00:23:06.796 --> 00:23:08.579
And they'll give an oral estrogen.
00:23:08.579 --> 00:23:24.638
And oral estrogen goes through the liver, which increases the clotting, which is not so great for cardiac health and increased there for the some heart disease or heart attacks in women who were already a bit older.
00:23:24.638 --> 00:23:30.558
So this wasn't women in their 50s, but women who were starting this oral estrogen in their 60s and 70s.
00:23:30.558 --> 00:23:34.713
So we know that for them that wasn't ideal.
00:23:35.256 --> 00:23:43.498
However, transdermal estrogen my favorite thing in the world it has no effect on clotting, none above your baseline.
00:23:43.498 --> 00:23:52.000
And now we know that, particularly if it started within 10 years of menopause, that it is cardioprotective.
00:23:52.000 --> 00:24:02.134
So those women who started somewhere within that 10-year period will go on to maintain their cardiac benefits while they're taking it.
00:24:02.134 --> 00:24:05.243
So the cardiac benefits do stop once you stop.
00:24:05.243 --> 00:24:16.523
So if you're only planning to take it for a few years to manage your flushes, you're not going to get the long-term benefits from it, and we know the same is true with bone health.
00:24:16.523 --> 00:24:25.776
The same is probably or possibly going to be true for brain health, and it seems to be likely, but there's just not the data yet.
00:24:25.776 --> 00:24:27.621
But it's promising.
00:24:29.230 --> 00:24:41.017
But I think, coming back to what we did come on to talk about, is that, even for somebody who does choose to use hormone therapy, that these other pillars that you're talking about need to also be considered.
00:24:41.017 --> 00:24:42.741
So the two things need to go hand in hand.
00:24:42.741 --> 00:24:43.490
That you, you know.
00:24:43.490 --> 00:24:48.814
I think one of the things we need to always talk about if someone is taking hormone therapy is that it's not a silver bullet.
00:24:48.814 --> 00:24:57.654
And, yes, you do get that estrogen protectiveness back, but you must also be addressing the lifestyle factors that you're talking about as well.
00:24:58.257 --> 00:24:59.319
Yeah, absolutely.
00:24:59.319 --> 00:25:12.413
And again, my favourite thing is it's not this or that, it's this and that, and that sometimes taking MHT or HRT can help you implement your lifestyle factors, because suddenly your joints aren't so sore.
00:25:12.452 --> 00:25:13.134
So you're happy to go.
00:25:13.134 --> 00:25:15.561
You're sleeping better, you've got a bit more energy, yeah.
00:25:15.670 --> 00:25:16.712
Yes and again.
00:25:16.712 --> 00:25:21.611
You know, because life's always you know all about me or whoever's talking For me.
00:25:21.611 --> 00:25:33.093
Part of my interest in menopause became again when, despite doing all my lifestyle stuff, having been the world's best sleeper and rarely stressed, I started getting hot flushes.
00:25:33.093 --> 00:25:39.875
Not hot flushes during the day, night sweats, night sweats, waking up at 3am thinking what am I doing awake.
00:25:39.875 --> 00:25:46.417
And then, interestingly, I woke in the morning with just this ridiculous anxiety in the pit of my stomach.
00:25:46.417 --> 00:25:49.874
It'd be like I'd wake up going and I think what am I worried about?
00:25:49.874 --> 00:25:50.194
What's going on?