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The Female Factor: Making women’s health count – and what it means for you

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And I think it was Matthew Walker who said that this is like emotional first aid. So it's really important for how we feel in our emotional wellbeing. And if we get less of it, So if we've had a bad night's sleep, we tend to feel a bit more groggy, a bit more irritable, maybe a bit more emotional the next day, and we see that drop in that REM sleep in that lal phase. So really to be doing the best research, we should be taking urine tests, blood tests as well, to find out where women are at the cycle. And for researchers, that's a huge inconvenience, a huge expense, and it's just easier not to do the research. So there needs to be a bigger drive there and. Like you, you mentioned it may change how we, how women respond to treatments, how women present to hospital with different conditions. We'll say that an average menstrual cycle is about 28 days, but anything between really 23 to 35 days can be considered normal. They're extremes of normal, but anything in between there tends to be normal. And so this is basically fluctuation of hormones. There's four main hormones. We mostly talk about estrogen and progesterone.

And the reason I think that it's so poorly diagnosed is there's not a huge amount of information out there available. I don't think medical professionals are fully aware of the symptom spectrum and what it might look like. And like I said, I think we normalize a lot of these symptoms as a society that is just part and parcel of being a woman. Jonathan Wolf: And so can you see that difference if you were a, I'm guessing probably not for the average person in the street, maybe, but if you are a, you know, sort of top end athlete, can you see differences in performance, different points in the cycle?The more I shared female-focused research (albeit limited) and content online, the more women responded asking to be listened to. It made me want to learn more, to share more, to empower more. I knew there was an unmet need here and wanted to find some answers. Hazel Wallace: yeah, it's something I get asked a lot and I think because there's less known about it, and I think when people from my experience, from people who have come to me, they find it very hard to get a diagnosis.

Dr Hazel Wallace founded her platform The Food Medic, an educational blog and podcast about diet and health. Dr. Hazel Wallace, author of “The Female Factor” told CNN she wishes she could be more direct in how she speaks about the female body and hormone cycle, including menstrual health. However, said has learned that “to educate people, you almost have to play the game.” Jonathan Wolf: How much do you know about menstrual cycles? Half of you will be a lot more informed than the other half, but whether you've had a menstrual cycle or not, I promise you'll learn a lot during this episode. Even if you aren't having periods, I'd say it's important you listen to better understand and support the people in your life who are today.

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Jonathan Wolf: And why is it so complicated, Hazel? So I think I had a, like a really simplistic idea, something to do with the estrogen. It goes up and. Down because you wanna trigger like an egg. That's the start of potentially having a baby. You're describing something much more complicated, like what's going on and do we have any understanding about why it affects all aspects of a woman's body rather than you might think it's like just going to affect, you know, your womb.

So the cutoff is too high. And only recently I actually had a friend send it to me now in hospitals, they've got now sex specific cutoffs. Now it's not across the board, not all hospitals, they're trialing it in certain hospitals, but it just goes to show how for very long, We've been having cutoffs, which are too high for women, and the amount of women who would've been turned away, sent home. However, female reproductive experts tell CNN that the advertising policy is still too restrictive and is creating barriers for how younger people around the world access information about female reproductive health issues, including the menstrual cycle, which can start as early as 8 years old. Seems to be something that works really well for most people. So it's interesting to hear the caution. By the way, it's miserable for me. I'm one of these people who's tried intermittent fasting and did it in this study and I hated it. It was bad for my mood, but interesting. It's the reverse of the average, which again is down to, I think one of the things we believe a lot here about this personalization, that's not one answer for, for everybody. Our bodies are so complicated. Gut issues are quite common, so thinking about potentially how you might need to adjust what you eat. And then I think at the end, we talked about intermittent fasting where you're quite cautious and it sounds like you're mainly cautious about people eating enough calories, enough food, so it can potentially work, but don't just assume that this is this wonder solution actually, it sounds like you, you're concerned there might even be some issues here.

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You’re born with a reproductive system. Whether or not you’re having sex, you still have that system in your body, and it’s still affecting your body in different ways,” Lindeman reasoned. Explain how that varies through the phases that you've just described. How does that actually feel? what are people experiencing, and I guess not just our top class Olympic athletes. Probably not many listeners right now who are going to be competing in the next Olympics, but a lot of people who either go through this or everybody will know people who are, and I think would love to understand that better.

Hazel Wallace: Yeah, that's a really good question. it can change threats, so it's very rare for someone to have the same. kind of pattern of a cycle from puberty all the way up to the menopause. Different things in our lifestyle can also change the length and how we experience our menstrual cycle, whether that's stress, that we're under nutrition, even sleep, and also if we go through things like pregnancy, we're in a postpartum period. Dr Kristi Funk is a breast cancer surgeon and provides a comprehensive guide of caring for your breasts, understanding them, reducing your cancer risk and alerting you to treatments. Health issues and also bone health issues. And this is because estrogen affects how our arteries dilate and expand. And so we get a sharp increase in blood pressure, which increases the risk of things like heart disease Jonathan Wolf: and what you get out from doing this? You start to understand, I guess, what your normal is. What can you do as a result?Hazel Wallace: Yeah, absolutely. Cycle syncing has become quite, big in the last couple of years. Essentially, it's just about syncing your lifestyle to the faces of your menstrual cycle because as we mentioned, those different hormonal phases cause our body to have different needs be that sleep needs, nutritional needs. And typically women will have some physical symptoms of PMS as well. So the things that we mentioned, like headache, mood disturbance, cramps, things like that. But they'll have significant mood disturbance and that will impact their day-to-day quality of life. So they'll find that, you know, a lot of women will even use their annual leave because they'd feel like they can't go into work, which is something that is not okay. Now Dr Wallace has released The Female Factor which is a bold, comprehensive and easy to follow guide for countless aspects of women’s health. If a woman doesn't become pregnant, then the lining falls away. That's the period and we start the process again. But estrogen, for example, I think the menopause is a great example of how important that hormone is because we go into a low hormone phase during the menopause, estrogen declines, and we see increases in cardiovascular.

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