Why What You Eat Matters During Menopause

Published Nov 27, 2024, 8:01 AM

Small changes in what, when, and how you eat can reduce menopause symptoms and even lower your long-term health risks. Sarah Berry is a professor at King's College London, and chief scientist at a nutrition science startup Zoe. With over 20 years of experience, Professor Berry shares fascinating insights from her research, revealing how diet quality and body weight influence symptoms like sleep disturbances, brain fog, mood changes, and more. 

Hello Sunshine.

Hey fam Today on the bright Side, it's Wellness Wednesday, and Professor Sarah Berry is here to share the research backtips on how you can minimize your menopause symptoms by simply changing the way you eat. It's Wednesday, November twenty seventh. I'm Simone Boyce, I'm.

Danielle Robe and this is The bright Side from Hello Sunshine, a daily show where we come together to share women's stories, to laugh, learn and brighten your day. Today's Wellness Wednesday is presented by Cooligard.

Welcome to the bright Side, y'all. We've got to kick off today's show with a very special announcement, the December pick for Reese's book Club.

I think that deserves a sound effects, Simone, Okay, Well, this December we'll be reading City of night Birds by the Fantastic Jew Hey Kim. Her book is out now and it's a perfect companion for all of your holiday travels. I promise we are so excited because we're actually going to be having her on the show this December as well.

I've already got my copy. I cannot wait to start reading. Okay, now let's talk about today Today's welles Wednesday, and we're talking to Professor Sarah Berry all about menopause. But today's conversation is going to be a little different. You know, we've talked about menopause on the show before, but we're not just talking about the usual symptoms or the changes we might expect. Today, we're talking about what you put at the end of your fork and how it can impact your menopausal health.

Oh, I'm so excited for this conversation because we've had the pleasure of talking to doctors and experts about menopause on the show before, sure, and we've learned some surprising symptoms. We've learned about the importance of exercise and what we can expect as our bodies change, which is all super important because I think the dialogue about menopause has finally been opened up in American society. But today we're giving you the researched backed tips on how nutrition, what we eat, when we eat, and even how often we eat can have a major impact on our lives. So Professor Barry has conducted nutrition research trials for more than twenty years. She's a professor at King's College, London and chief scientists at a nutrition science startup that helps users reach their health goals with personalized recommendations. And like you said Simone about the ends of our forks, I think sometimes the best medicine, so to speak, is our nutrition. So I'm really excited for this conversation.

Let's bring her in. Professor Sarah Berry, Welcome to the bright Side.

Thanks for having me on the bright side.

Now, you've recently published the largest ever study on the impact of diet on menopause symptoms. I'm so curious what symptoms you were tracking, what you were looking to understand.

Tell us about this study.

Yeah, so in ah Zoe, you credic cohorts. So this huge group we had over seventy thousand individuals who were either pery or postmenopause or women. We asked them to tell us about the symptoms they're experiencing, but also grade them each symptom on a scale of zero to five as to how much they impacted their quality of life. And I think what was most interesting about this research was just seeing how prevalent the symptoms were. We saw, for example, that eighty percent of women were experiencing sleep disturbances, brain fog, memory loss, mood changes, depression, anxiety. In more than eighty percent of women, and that sixty six percent of women had twelve or more symptoms. You know, that's huge, and you know many of them were reporting these to have a really big impact on their quality of life. And I think one of the things that I found most interesting doing this research is I came in very much thinking, Okay, menopause is very much about hot flashes and night sweats. You know, all of the search around diet or lifestyle modification has always been, okay, how does this impact what we call the phasomotor symptoms, So those symptoms related to blood vessel function, such as night sweats, such as hot flushes, but actually those were the least prevalent, and we found that it was only about thirty to forty percent of people actually had any type of hot flush or any type of kind of night swere it was all of these other kind of psychological symptoms that we know have such wide reaching impacts on other areas of people's lives that were most prevalent, which is really interesting.

In addition to looking at menopause symptoms, this study also looked at how symptoms and diet are linked. What did you determine by tracking symptoms and diet.

So I think what I found most surprising is just how closely associated diet was with symptom prevalence of symptom burden. And what we found is really close association with people's diet quality, so their oval helpfulness of the diet and their prevalence of symptoms. And for every kind of step wise improvement that people were showing in their diet, there is a reduction in symptoms. What we also saw was that people's body weight and their BMI, in particular their body mass index was also playing a role in this. So people who had a higher BMI who were living with obesity or overweight had a lot higher prevalence of symptoms, and that changing diet reduced symptoms, but also changing diet where modified body weight was also reducing symptoms, So I think that was really interesting. And what we found is those that were more adherent to a healthier diet had the biggest improvements in the menopause symptoms.

So interesting.

You've described menopause as a time of major metabolic upheaval. How does menopause affect our metabolism and does it actually as probably the other question.

Yeah, So I think when we think about menopause. So we need to think about it in two areas. We need to think about it in the areas that we've just been talking about. So it's symptoms. But what we also know is that menopause impacts our health and disease risk. So we also know that it impacts many many intermediary risk factors associated with chronic diseases. And so by this I mean blood pressure, insert sensitivity, blood cholesterol, inflammation, and so many other factors that we know are related to chronic diseases. And we recently published some research where we were looking at all of these risk factors as we call them, and we were looking at all different ages and males of females and according to menopausal status. And what we see is that in premenopausally, women are doing a lot better than men. Women have lower blood pressure, lower levels of inflamma, better in slid sensitivity, lower adiprocity, so less fatter around the waist, lower blood cholesterol, etc. Soon as the women hit the postmenopausal phase, suddenly these all go up, and suddenly they even in the case of blood pressure, for example, get worse than men. So suddenly women's risk of disease, where before they were quite protected because of estrogen suddenly changes and so does how they metabolize their food. And so this is why I think we need to be a little bit more mindful, not obsessed, but more mindful when you're peri and postmenopausal about the foods that we're eating, not just for symptom prevention, but also in order to prevent that big increase in risk that we see once you start the perimenopause transition.

As I was listening to you speak, I was wondering about all the different diets that are out there. The carnivore diet, ancestral diet, Mediterranean diet. Are any of these trendy diet it's beneficial to our menopausal bodies.

So a lot of the more popular or new diets haven't been researched in relation to menopause. There's actually very little research looking at whole dietary patterns. What we do know is that there are lots of studies looking at individual supplements, individual foods, individual nutrients and looking at how they impact menopause or symptoms. But the sum of that evidence is really inconsistent, partly because small numbers of participants have been recruited, that there's such variability in people's symptoms, that people symptoms vary day to day. It does mean it's quite challenging, I think for us giving guidance based on some of these smaller randomized control trials where also there's different doses used, and we also know that different people respond very differently to different supplements when it comes to menopause symptoms.

Well, it makes me wonder if we're even entering into menopause with our nutrition up to par because I just started taking zinc selenium vitamin A to kind of help balance out my hormones and it has changed my life. I have realized in the past couple of weeks I have been walking around this earth vitamin efficient for the past fifteen years. I don't have pain in my periods anymore, my skin looks better, I feel better, And I'm wondering if we're even if we're entering into menopause nutrients deficient.

Yeah, I think, you know, that's an interesting point. I hold a view that I think most people consuming a reasonable diet have all of the nutrients they need. Many of us that actually have the best diets tend to be the ones that over worry about it or health optimize as a psychll them the people that need to worry, the people that really have no interest in their diet or or you know, understand the importance of diet. But in the UK and the US, there's actually very small proportion in my opinion, who are actually deficient in certain nutrients. What we do know, though, is that different people absorb nutrients differently. Take for example, protein, we know that some people absorb all of the protein that they're eating. We know that some people absorb very little of it. And so I think this is where it's really important to see what works for you. So something for you, you felt differently after taking those supplements, but you you know, your friends or someone else might not feel differently after taking them. So I do think sometimes it's about thinking, Okay, you know, yeah, I do have a moderately healthy diet, but I don't quite feel right. Let me try something and see what works. And I think this really really applies to menopause supplements that are sold as well. So the one supplement that we know there is reasonable evidence for are soy eyes of Flay Vonnes And this is a great example of how we all respond very differently, and we all need to work out what works for us as an individual rather than listen to what one influencer or another kind of social media person might be advocating for.

We've got to take a quick break ball we write back with Professor Sarah Berry, and we're back with Professor Sarah Berry.

Professor Berry, I was interested to see that you've studied snacking in the past.

What's the truth about snacking?

Because some people say it's okay as long as it's high protein, and some people totally write off snacks altogether.

So hit us with the facts.

I love that you've asked me about snacking. It's one of my favorite topics. So what we know is that we get a huge amount of our energy from snacks. So in the UK and the US, we get about twenty five end of our total daily calories from snacks. Now what's great about that is it means it's the single simplest dietary strategy that we can implement to improve our health. If we're getting a quarter of our calories from just snacks, which tend to be under our own self control because my dinner is dictated by what my fussy kids will eat. My lunch is dictated by where I happen to be in the office, out on the streets, etc. But snacks, for many of us, we can actually control ourselves. We did some research looking at whether snacking itself is bad for our health or whether actually it just matters what you snack on or how important is the time of day that you snack, And what we found was that this grazing style pattern of eating or having multiple snacks, as long as they were healthy snacks, were not associated with any unfavorable health effects. When it became a problem was purely if you were eating unhealthy snacks. Another thing we looked at was the timing of snacking, and there was a large proportion of individuals who were snacking after nine in the evening. Those individuals came off worse in terms of health outcomes. They had poorer insulin sensitivity, they had higher bloodcholesterol, higher blood pressure, greater antiprocity so fab tissuer around a belly, which we know is so many unfaithful health outcomes, and yet people who were snacking earlier in the day, we weren't seeing the same thing. And this was even for those people who were snacking on healthy snacks after nine o'clock. And I did a study about ten years ago where all we want you to do is change your snacks to either consume these test kind of dummy snacks that are representative of a US snack or nuts in this case as Holman nuts. Let's see how it impacts your health. And what we found was just by changing people snacks improved their blood cholesterol, improved their insolent sensitivity, improved their blood vessel functional and the improvement that we saw in blood vessel function actually equated to a thirty percent reduction in cardiovascular disease risk just from changing snacking. And I love to use snacking as an example of where yes, for pairing post menopause women, we've talked about how diet impacts their symptoms and how diet is really important because of their sudden change in risk. So actually, you know, thinking about focusing on something simple like your snacks could have a really profound impact on your own for long term health.

Is it more important to focus on when we eat or what we eat for snacks?

I would say it's more important to focus on what we eat for snacks, but I would say it's also important to consider when we eat, but I would say not just for snacks, for food overall. We know that, you know, it's really important to consider our circasian rhythm. We know that in our body, every cell has its own little body clock. We know that if you eat too late in the evening, whether it's this or your main meal, that actually you're not eating in tune with your body clock, and that we know that therefore how you metabolize the food is slightly differently, and that it increases risk of many of these intermediary risk factors like your blood cholesterol, like your you know, blood pressure, like your inflammation, et cetera. We also know if you eat later at night, you actually wake up more hungry the next morning, which is kind of counterintuitive. So if you're eating your snacks or your main meal later in the evening, you're going to feel more hungry when you wake up than if you finish your meal slightly earlier in the day. And I think this is really important again for pairing post menopause or women, because our hunger signals are also changed during menopause. You know, we have estrogen receptors in or nearly every cell in our body. We have loads of estrogen receptors in our brain and in our gut, and so how we perceive hunger changes slightly as well. And I often hear people saying, you know, I'm eating exactly what I before the menopause, but I'm hungry all the time. Well, it's because our estrogen also impacts our perception of hunger. And so this is why, again it's so important to think about the timing that you're eating, given that we know your hunger signals also change.

When you think about sugar in your study, do you think about and test for the difference between natural sugars from fruits and sugar from dessert type items.

Yeah, good question. So in the research in our cohort of seventy thousand women, where we've looked at the association between diet and different symptoms, that's where we're starting to tease a part added sugar sugar in fruit. We haven't actually specifically looked at x grams of sugar in fruit versus x grams of added sugar. What we do see those that fruit is associated with a lower prevalence of symptoms yeat added sugar or products that we know of that kind of very heavily processed high in sugar, like cakes and pastries, associated with higher prevalence of symptoms. But I think that what we need to remember is that as well as thinking of the nutrients I either sugar, we have to think about food as well in terms of the matrix of the food, so the food structure. And this is something I've spent many years researching, looking at how changing the structure of the food changes how we metabolize it. And this is more and more important in the current food landscape we live in where so much of our food is processed. So this matrix is structure of food is change. And so whether you're having food is whole fruit, pure d fruit, fruit smoothies or fruit juice has quite a different effect in terms of how we metabolize it based on how intact the actual structure that original food matrix is.

You've got to say more about that, because all the Ariwon burlies a chill went down their spine when you said that we metabolize the fruit and smoothies differently. So what do you mean by that?

So I think we need to think as three main areas. So nutrients, I fraid you know, macronutriants, PROTD fat, fiber, carbohydrate. So if we take almonds as an example of this, if you look at the back of pack labeling for almonds, that it says that there's one hundred and seventy calories per serving of almonds, but actually the matrix are the structure of almonds means that we don't absorb all of that. We actually only absorb about one hundred and twenty five rather than one hundred and seventy calories. And that's because nuts contain thousands and thousands and thousands of cells with really rigid cell walls, and it's the fat and the calories are contained within these really rigid cell walls. We swallow us when there are quite big chunks, so they're normally about one to two millimeters, but the cell particles, the cells inns, are tiny. They're less than a grain of sand. So actually a lot of that remains intact and it just comes out in your poo. The same thing happens in fruit, for example. But what happens is is you absorb all of the nutrients, but you change the speed at which you absorb these. So if you take a whole apple, for example, and then if you take apple pure, what you're doing is you're changing the texture of the feud, so you're changing how fast you eat it. And so what we know is that it would take you on average about six minutes to eat an apple, It will take you about forty seconds to eat the equivalent of pure es, centering your stomach more quickly so that you're then releasing it into bloodstream more quickly, so you're then getting this big glucose peak. This can cause a glucose dip, So two to four hours after the meal, you have a dipping glucose. If you have a glucose dip after a meal, we know from our own research most people go on to eat their next meal thirty minutes earlier. They go on to eat one hundred calories more at their next meal, three hundred calories more over the whole day. And so there's some fantastic research that was published many years ago by this guy called Haber. This was in the Lancet, This was in nineteen seventy seven where he fed people whole apples, pureed apples or apple juice, and he saw this big difference in the speed in which people were eating their apples. And he saw this big difference as well in people's self reported hunger and fullness level. So the whole apple kept people full of for longer. The apple purea, the apple juice didn't keep people us full. They went on to consume more. And we see this play out in our own studies as well. And what blows my mind that these are foods that have exactly the same backupack labeling, but how you process them is very different just because of the structure. And this is why one of the reasons that heavily process foods are not so healthy for us. It's not all about the additives or all about emulsifiers or what people you know, talk about a lot. It's also because you're changing the texture and you're changing the structure, and you're changing the availability of the nutrients as well.

Wow, so it sounds like slower is better like slower absolutely? Yeah?

Absolutely?

Wow. Are there any startups that you recommend or services that we can try in order to really take a comprehensive assessment of our nutrition and just make sure that we are completely up to date and nourished. Yeah.

So, first thing I'd recommend is to try our Zoe menoscale. This is a menoscale calculator. It's free for anyone. You can go to the Zoe dot com website and then it's forward slash menoscale and this is a calculator that allows you to measure the burden of menopause symptoms that it has on you. And this is really important because we're talking about how diet or life might help reduce your symptoms. But it's very difficult to measure your symptoms because it's so subjective and you know, it's difficult to think, ohll, how did I feel yesterday? So it's the first thing you can do. You start tracking our symptoms. We often, you know, talk in science, right if you can't measure it, how can you change it? So it's the first thing, start measuring them if you do want to change, whether it's through drugs like hormone replacement therapy, or whether it's through dieting lifestyle. The other thing you can go to is our Zoe website. So Zoe is this science and nutrition company that I'm the chief scientist of and there is so much actionable advice on our website. We also have a podcast called the Zoe Science and Nutrition Podcast. We do a lot of episodes around women's health, menopause. But it's all about how we can use diarting lifestyle to improve our health, whether you're menopausal or not. And so you can just go to the ZOO website and find out all about those different opportunities.

Thank you so much for that. Those are great resources, Pleasure.

Professor Barry, it was wonderful to speak with you. Thank you for joining us today.

Pleasure, thank you for having me on.

Sarah Barry is the chief scientist at ZOE and a professor at King's College in London. We have to take another short break, but we'll be back in just a minute.

Don't go anywhere, and we're.

Back, Danielle. As you know, we've teamed up with our friends at Exact Sciences, makers of the Coliguard test, to clear up some misconceptions about screening for colon cancer. So today I thought we could put some of our knowledge to the test.

There's nothing I like more than making sure our bright side besties are informed to make the best decisions for their health.

Okay, I'm going to give you some scenarios and you let me know if it's a fact or a misconception. You ready, Let's do it first, up, Many patients with early stage colon cancer have no symptoms and are diagnosed through screening.

That's a fact.

You're right. Many people think that colon cancer always has definitive symptoms, but that's a complete misconception.

Okay.

Next up, If you eat a healthy diet and exercise, you are at a low risk for colon cancer.

That's a misconception.

You're right. No one is at a low risk for colon cancer. Even with no family history, you're still at an average risk. I was surprised to learn that seventy percent of people with colon cancer have no family history.

That's what makes testing so important. Okay, I have one for you, Simone. You should start screening for colon cancer at the age of fifty.

You know, I have heard that before, but based on our earlier facts, I actually think it should be younger than that.

Exactly, if you're at average risk. The recommended age to start screening is forty five, and if you're eligible, the colon Guard test is easy to use.

I know that is a fact. The Colargard test is an easy to use way to screen for colon cancer. It's non invasive, you don't have to take off time from work and there's no special prep needed. It's delivered to your door and after a sample is collected at home, you ship it back to the laboratory for testing and results are available within about two weeks.

And the Coligard test can detect pre cancerous polyups and helps address any issues now before it becomes serious if left untreated.

How do you know so much about all this?

I have friends that have been diagnosed with colon cancer and luckily they caught it early, so I know how important this is. So if you're forty five or older and at average risk, ask your healthcare provider about screening for colon cancer with the Coliguard test. You can also request a Coliguard prescription today through a telehealth provider at coliguard dot com slash podcast.

The Coligard test is intended to screen adults forty five and older at average risk for colorectal cancer. Do not use a Coligard test if you've had adenomas, have inflammatory bowel disease and certain hereditary syndromes, or a personal or family history of colorectal cancer. The Colliguard test is not a replacement for colonoscopy and high risk patients. Colliguard test performance in adults ages forty five to forty nine is estimated based on a large clinical study of patients fifty and older. False positives and false negatives can occur. Coliguard is available by prescription only. That's it for today's show. Tomorrow, it's Thanksgiving, y'all, and we are ringing in the holiday with an encore presentation of one of our favorite episodes, all about the art of gathering with expert gatherer and author Priya Parker. You don't want to miss it. Join the conversation using hashtag the bright Side and connect with us on social media at Hello Sunshine on Instagram and at the bright Side Pod on TikTok oh, and feel free to tag us at Simone Voice and at Danielle Robe.

Listen and follow The bright Side on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

See you tomorrow, folks, Keep looking on the bright side.

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