Latest / Libido Lounge / Hormone Myths Debunked: How to Thrive During Menopause with Dr. Betty Murray

Transcript

Hormone Myths Debunked: How to Thrive During Menopause with Dr. Betty Murray · Libido Lounge

0:00
Welcome to the libido lounge where we focus on all things love, lust, and libido.
0:05
We believe that fabulous sex is important to health as exercise and good food.
0:20
Hi, everybody.
0:21
Welcome back to another episode on the lounge.
0:24
I'm your libido expert, doctor Diane Mueller, and I'm so excited about the conversation we're
0:30
gonna have today.
0:31
We're gonna talk about hormones.
0:32
We're gonna dispel some myths.
0:34
We're gonna talk about some of the challenges women go through during menopause and some
0:39
solutions.
0:40
And we're talk about something we have not talked about on this show yet, which is the
0:45
role of toxins and toxins that disrupt our hormones and their role in hormones, menopause,
0:53
transition, life, health, and more.
0:55
And to help us with this conversation, I have with me a friend, doctor Betty Murray, who is
1:01
an amazing women's functional medicine health researcher, nutrition expert.
1:07
She's been featured on so many different stages, sharing stages with Celebrity Stitches,
1:13
doctor Mark Hyman.
1:14
So we have a great expert with us today.
1:17
Dear friend, thank you for coming and spending time with me today, doctor Betty.
1:21
Oh, thank you.
1:21
I'm so excited to have this conversation.
1:24
Yeah.
1:24
For sure.
1:25
And let's let's dive right in.
1:27
So we're gonna go a lot of different directions.
1:30
Definitely wanna get into the toxic component of this conversation right away.
1:35
Before we do that, I know there's people that are listening that haven't heard some of my
1:39
other episodes that have talked about dispelling some of the myths around fears
1:44
around hormone.
1:46
So just before we go deeper into talking about hormones, can we kinda work with us around some
1:52
of the myths that we hear as women around hormones and just kind of dispelling some of
1:56
those so we just capture more people that are not afraid of the information that is coming?
2:01
Sure.
2:01
Sure.
2:02
So I think, first, women need to understand,
2:05
for us to live into our eighties is actually unnatural.
2:09
Our average lifespan in 1900 was 57 years old.
2:12
And if you look back even to, the civil war, we were lived to our forties.
2:18
So for the first time in our human existence, we're living thirty to thirty five years on
2:22
average past fertility, and we're really one of two mammals that do that.
2:28
And so the the thing we have to understand is that those hormones are protective.
2:33
Right?
2:33
We don't see high mortality risk in women for any cause, whether it's heart attack, stroke,
2:39
dementia, osteoporosis, you name it.
2:43
It's it's we're basically protected.
2:44
And then when the ovaries peter out at menopause, that's where our our aging and our
2:49
lifespan and health band start to shorten.
2:52
And so the hormones are protective.
2:55
Otherwise, you would see women in their twenties with a massive amount of breast
2:59
cancer.
3:00
Right?
3:01
That was the thing is, I'm a very logical person.
3:03
Right?
3:03
Obviously, I'm a scientist.
3:05
And it never made sense to me that it's totally protective for me to have wildly fluctuating
3:09
hormones throughout my entire fertility cycle.
3:11
It's okay to give me really high dose birth control because it's much higher than what we
3:15
would normally make even the low dose birth birth control we do today.
3:19
And that is totally protective, but then this magical day when you're around 50, all of a
3:24
sudden those hormones are deadly and they're gonna kill you.
3:26
Yeah.
3:27
So for the women that yeah.
3:29
I was like, what?
3:30
Wait.
3:30
Hold on.
3:31
That defies logic.
3:32
So for the women that came before us up until 02/2002, hormone replacement was standard of
3:39
care since the fifties.
3:41
Forty to '80 percent of women went on hormone replacement without question with no increased
3:47
risk of breast cancer, ovarian cancer.
3:49
It was protective of heart attack, stroke.
3:51
All of the studies up until 02/2002 when the women's health initiative erroneously said that
3:56
it caused breast cancer, that's what happened.
3:59
And so women for decades have been terrified unnecessarily about hormone replacement.
4:05
And even in the women's health initiative, estrogen replacement alone reduced the risk of
4:10
breast cancer twenty three percent.
4:12
And to this day, I feel feel kinda like, you know, a Monty Python skit where they used to
4:17
just hit themselves in the head.
4:19
Now I'm really dating myself.
4:20
Where it's just because I feel like I it's like it's such an uphill battle to get this message
4:24
out.
4:25
And it's because women get gaslighted.
4:28
Yeah.
4:28
Yeah.
4:29
Absolutely.
4:29
And I think the stats and the numbers around that are really important.
4:33
I really appreciate you bringing the awareness of, like, wow, how long have we had these
4:38
really high levels of hormones?
4:39
And now we're talking about microscopic dosing compared to that.
4:43
And now all of a sudden, like you said, on this magical day, everything changes.
4:46
So such a such important point.
4:49
Now where does the the conversation go when we talk about things that people would read online
4:56
around endocrine disrupting components and toxins?
5:00
Can you talk a little bit about that and how some of those things play into the female
5:04
hormone cycle?
5:06
Yes.
5:06
So, obviously, we have our hormones that we make.
5:08
So we make three estrogens, estradiol, estrone, and estriol, and then we metabolize them in a
5:14
sort of elaborate process to kinda wrap them up and get them ready for the trash.
5:19
But we have all these external ingredients and toxins and things that we come in contact with
5:25
that have estrogenic effects.
5:28
So some of them are protective.
5:29
So things like phytoestrogens, plant lignans, like things found in soy genistein and flax and
5:36
your fruits and vegetables that are estrogenic like components in that plant.
5:42
Right?
5:42
And they have been found to be protective.
5:44
Right?
5:44
So they have a, like, anti cancer effect.
5:47
But what people don't realize is the pesticides, herbicides, plasticizers, PA,
5:54
phthalates, fragrances, hundreds of thousands of auxins that are environment for the most
6:01
part in our body act as an estrogenic like compound.
6:06
They're called xenoestrogens.
6:08
So the take home message here is it is not your estrogen.
6:11
It is not a plant based estrogen.
6:13
It sorta looks like that hormone key.
6:15
So if you think your hormone is like a key, it looks kind of like it.
6:19
And it basically can click into that same lock on your cells, but it doesn't provide the
6:25
protective effect your hormones do.
6:26
And so they are massively disrupting.
6:29
You know, we've got studies showing that atrazine will change a, which is a in a,
6:35
pesticide, and an herbicide will change the sex of a frog in environments where there's runoff.
6:42
So it literally will take a frog that's male and turn it into female.
6:45
Right?
6:46
So we have all the ingredients that are in our environment that are affecting how our ovaries
6:51
operate, how our tissues operate to these, to these exposures.
6:55
And and to be honest, we don't have a a real understanding of how much of an impact, but I
7:00
would say it's it's dramatic.
7:01
Because the reality is ovarian cancer, breast cancer, uterine cancer has increased since we
7:08
removed hormone replacement for women and increased over the last twenty, thirty, forty,
7:13
fifty years as our toxin level has increased.
7:16
And it's and it's not that we're doing more mammograms.
7:19
That's a detection that's a detection device, not a prevention device.
7:23
It's it's it's truly mind boggling how much we have in our environment and how much it's
7:27
probably impacting our health.
7:29
So the quick comment and a question.
7:31
So my comment is just for our listeners just to make, make sure everybody really heard the the
7:36
conversation around BPAs and phthalates because I think so many people now have the awareness
7:41
that BPAs are bad.
7:43
And we now know that plastics that are BPA free, people get so excited about, but they
7:47
typically have more phthalates that might even be more of a problem than BPA.
7:51
So I just wanna make sure everybody has that comment.
7:54
And then I wanna take a step back to what you were saying about flax and soy because I feel
7:58
like one question our listeners might be having here is, okay.
8:02
Well, does this mediate if these things are phytoestrogen estrogenic and do have this
8:08
protective effect?
8:09
Should I go out and be eating tons of these things?
8:12
So when would we maybe advise somebody to say increase these phytoestrogens?
8:18
And is there a time where this might be a bad idea?
8:21
Yeah.
8:22
So like I said, lots of these plants have phytoestrogens.
8:25
Where the literature lies, so where the research really lies is looking at, kind of
8:29
anti cancer protective effects.
8:31
So flax in particular, the lignans that are in flax has has been shown to actually reduce
8:35
cancer cell growth.
8:37
Soryganistein has been studied to reduce hot flash frequency because it can kinda sit in
8:42
that receptor for estrogen.
8:44
And what I would say is or or even here even more so from a fertility standpoint, seed
8:49
cycling.
8:49
So cycling things like pumpkin seeds, soy sesame seeds, plaques can actually influence
8:55
your hormones a little bit because they have this estrogenic effect.
8:58
It's about dose and quantity.
9:01
Never in our human life have we eaten highly beyond normal physiological levels of any of
9:07
these foods.
9:08
So we didn't take, you know, eight cups of flax or whatever, grind it up, and drink it.
9:15
Never have we done that.
9:16
So I would say look at foods as what your grandmother or great grandmother would have
9:21
looked at.
9:21
They wouldn't have downed two cups of flaxseed a day.
9:24
You shouldn't either.
9:26
Right?
9:26
We don't have anywhere where we're studying this.
9:28
It's like, how would we naturally normally eat it?
9:30
Have a variety of these foods in our diet because they have a protective effect, but that
9:34
doesn't mean super dosing.
9:36
I think I mean, I'm a nutritionist.
9:38
If you wanna see people with really crazy dietary habits, talk to nutritionists.
9:42
Really.
9:43
Right?
9:43
Yeah.
9:43
Because it's always like, if a little bit's good, more is better.
9:46
I'm like, no.
9:47
Actually, variety and small bits, I think called hormesis.
9:50
It's about these small exposures across lots of different things that usually confer value.
9:57
Yeah.
9:57
Absolutely.
9:58
It's really important.
9:59
I've seen the same thing in people I work with around we go online, and the opposite thing can
10:04
happen too because for everything that's good, then we can find something about that food that
10:08
is bad.
10:09
And it can be maddening, right, where it's like, well, this has this quality that bad and
10:12
this is that.
10:13
You know, we have our lectins.
10:14
We have our histamines.
10:15
We have all of these different things that, not our lectins, our lectins.
10:19
And we have all these different components, right, of foods that can have, say, a good
10:24
property in them and a bad property in them.
10:26
So really making sure that we are eating that balance and not going, you know, overdosing on
10:32
any particular food, I think, is so, so, so important.
10:36
Let's go and talk about some of the things as far as where people go in menopause and
10:41
perimenopause.
10:42
I know so many women so many women I work with get gaslit all the time, and I hear things with
10:48
people that come into my practice around women coming and being like, oh, my doctor said I
10:52
just had to suck it up, and every woman goes through this, and I just need to suck it up.
10:56
And I've even heard women say things like, my doctor told me I had to grow some balls and get
11:00
through menopause.
11:01
Like, crazy stuff.
11:02
Right?
11:03
So this happens all the time.
11:04
So from that standpoint, what are what are doctors and clinicians getting wrong about
11:09
perimenopause and menopause?
11:11
What do people really need to know that, hey.
11:13
This might be something that your doctor might say, but that's not totally correct.
11:19
Yeah.
11:19
So, you know, forty
11:20
to eighty percent of women up until February got hormone replacement.
11:24
Now now the statistics are, as of twenty twenty three, one point eight three percent of women
11:28
get offered hormone replacement.
11:30
A hundred percent of us go through menopause, eighty seven percent are highly highly
11:34
symptomatic for eight years on average.
11:36
Right?
11:37
Symptoms are not just the only problem.
11:39
Mortality is the big problem, and dying early or having a poor health span.
11:43
So doctors, in most cases, get less than three hours of training, if at all, about menopause.
11:49
That includes our our gynecologist and and OB GYN.
11:53
Right?
11:53
So they are not hormone masters.
11:55
They are surgeons first.
11:57
Right?
11:58
So there are not very many women physicians that are experts in hormones.
12:02
And I would say even if they've been trained in hormones, it's often at a very surface level of
12:07
repaste the hormones.
12:07
If somebody feels better, awesome.
12:09
Right?
12:10
Like, okay.
12:11
Yeah.
12:12
So my vasomotor symptoms might be better, but I don't know if I'm protecting myself.
12:16
So doctors will off just gaslight you, kinda be dismissive, because they don't want to say they
12:21
don't know, or they haven't read a journal, particularly in the last five years, where all
12:25
of this has been debunked.
12:27
So my first thing that I tell women because I don't I don't personally prescribe, obviously.
12:31
I'm a PhD.
12:33
I have people that work for me then prescribe is if you have a doctor that treats you like
12:37
that, you can and should fire them and rapidly.
12:40
There is no reason to put up with somebody that treats you like that.
12:44
Number two, if they give you an answer where they start wanting to drug stack, oh, you need
12:48
an antidepressant, you need a sleeping pill, You need Adi for your libido.
12:53
You need all these things.
12:55
Without looking at hormones first, you should demand that they provide hormones or find
13:01
somebody else.
13:02
Because the reality is they're just there there there's a lot of conventional practitioners
13:06
that just aren't gonna go there.
13:07
You know?
13:08
And, yes, it's natural.
13:09
Okay?
13:10
And it's it's natural for us to die by 57, but that doesn't mean I wanna die in two years.
13:15
That's right.
13:16
Yeah.
13:16
That's absolutely right.
13:17
So then what about testing?
13:19
Because another thing I hear so many women say is, like, my doctor says they're gonna put me
13:23
on hormones, and they say that we're just watching for things, like you said, like the
13:27
vasomotor symptoms changing.
13:29
Maybe all of a sudden you don't have hot flashes anymore.
13:32
So where do you find that testing is important?
13:35
Because I find so many people come to me and say, like, well, I don't need testing.
13:38
My doctor said I just pay attention to it, but my hot flashes go away.
13:42
Right.
13:42
So, you know, there's, at least at my count, at least six nine common symptoms.
13:47
So these are 69 common symptoms to menopause.
13:50
Hot flashes and night sweats are the ones that people talk about.
13:54
But I can tell you, I've never had either one of those.
13:56
I had horrible perimenopause.
13:57
Never had a hot flash or night sweat.
14:01
So being able to track symptoms and then replacing hormones to symptoms, many of them
14:07
that you don't feel.
14:08
You don't necessarily feel social urinary syndrome activity until it gets too far.
14:14
Right?
14:15
You don't feel some of these things that women go through.
14:18
And so the reality is is you could replace hormones and not get to a physiological dose,
14:23
meaning maybe you don't get hot flashes anymore, but you're not at the level of
14:28
replacement that actually protects your heart, your bone, your brains.
14:31
Checking it in the blood is what I call kind of a quick and dirty way to make a guesstimate of
14:35
where you're at.
14:36
But the blood levels so all of our hormones have taxicabs that drive them around.
14:41
They're called binding proteins.
14:43
And when you look in the blood, you can't tell how many hormones got out of the cab or that
14:47
are still stuck in the cab.
14:48
So it's not the most precise, but it's a quick and dirty way to make sure you're in the
14:52
ballpark.
14:53
Right?
14:54
Symptoms first, ballpark next.
14:56
Then I like to look at how and my practitioners and and on my team look at how your body wraps
15:04
them up to get rid of them because our body has to detox pretty much everything that it either
15:09
makes or comes in contact with.
15:11
And that's a place where we can have a lot of patients that makes us either better at it or
15:16
worse at it, regardless if we're doing hormone replacement.
15:19
But that can be checked in the urine.
15:21
And when you look at it in the urine, you see not only how many are out of the cab of every
15:25
hormone, and you see how your body gets them ready for trash each step to gets it to the
15:30
trash.
15:31
And that to me is safe and protective hormone replacement.
15:35
And that's the paradigm my tree train team works in.
15:38
Because at that point, even if you're not doing hormone replacement, your risk for breast
15:43
cancer goes up in menopause as your ovaries die off, right, and stop making hormones.
15:48
So the reality is this pathway is important even if you don't replace hormones.
15:52
And so this is something we can check and we can monitor long term.
15:55
And then you adjust dosing to that because you wanna protect your brain, your heart, your
15:59
bones, not just hot flashes.
16:02
Yeah.
16:02
Absolutely.
16:03
And I think one of the things too to throw in there that I find is super helpful for women to
16:07
understand is that some of these pathways you're talking about, right, we know as
16:11
researchers that some of those pathways create estrogens that damage our DNA.
16:15
Right?
16:16
So when we're talking about all the things that we don't wanna have happen, you know, all the
16:20
anti all the aging, say, negative problems that will come up for people, There's a lot of
16:25
reasons for that, but certainly keeping the DNA healthy is gonna help with any antiaging
16:30
processes for sure.
16:32
So from a standpoint, so we're talking hormones, we're talking about toxins, making
16:36
sure that people are really avoiding these things.
16:40
Beyond hormones, beyond toxins, do you see, like, kind of standard things that are just,
16:44
like, major treatment things to consider or testing things to get, etcetera, or just big
16:50
red flags.
16:51
We're going through menopause.
16:52
Make sure you consider beyond hormones, beyond toxins, x y
16:56
z as well?
16:57
Yeah.
16:58
So, you know, this is why I went back for my PhD.
17:00
I was already in functional medicine.
17:02
I'm like, why is my perimenopause so damn bad?
17:04
You know, I'm asking all the luminaries.
17:06
They're like, oh, this, that.
17:07
I'm like, no.
17:08
I'm still not getting better.
17:09
I have a lot of genetic mutations in those estrogen detox pathways.
17:13
So some of the red flags, maybe you need to take a deeper dive regardless if you're doing
17:17
hormones or not.
17:18
If you were a woman that had heavy periods, crampy, clotty, fibroid, fibrocystic breast,
17:25
endometriosis, you know, ovarian cysts, those are all red flags that there's probably issues
17:32
in this pathway.
17:33
Right?
17:35
Some of the other ones that people don't necessarily think about is a lot of women will
17:39
say, you know what, Betty?
17:40
I could handle champagne, wine, and beer, whether you're gluten free or not.
17:44
And then all of a sudden, when I get into my mid forties, it's like I can't handle those
17:48
things anymore.
17:48
I get a histamine response or I get a headache or I get bright red or I feel bad.
17:54
Those are also classic signs that the last step of wrapping up your hormones don't work very
17:58
well.
17:59
You know?
17:59
So a lot of times, I can just ask a lot of questions, and I can start, like, honing in
18:03
very quickly on, we gotta test your hormone detox pathways to see how you do it.
18:08
You know, and and even, you know, the sort of weight gain around perimenopause.
18:16
So all women on average have a risk to increase their body weight by 10 to 15%.
18:21
So if you're a hundred and fifty pound woman, you can expect 15 to 22 pounds of body weight
18:25
gain as you go through your cause.
18:27
There's a ton of reasons why, but the women that have those estrogen pathways that don't
18:33
work very well tend to clinically what I see anecdotally, I don't have data behind this,
18:39
have more of a weight gain as they get into that path that time period and a harder time
18:44
losing it.
18:45
And for me, that was like that.
18:46
I gained 35 pounds.
18:47
It felt like it was overnight.
18:49
And I had been a bodybuilder, so I knew how to manipulate body comp.
18:53
And everything that I'd ever done before my forties never worked again.
18:57
I had to completely change everything I did.
18:59
And I got it off and I've kept it off for six years, but but it it took going back to school
19:04
and triggering this stuff out to do it.
19:06
Yeah.
19:07
Yeah.
19:07
I think there's probably a couple, big light bulb moments for people in what you just said,
19:12
especially around things like, that change in alcohol, those change like, the inability to
19:17
have just those tiny little things that we do where it's like, oh, we can get away with this,
19:21
and all of a sudden, it's like, woah.
19:23
I can't get away with anything anymore without having a pretty significant, repercussion,
19:29
whether, like you said, it's some sort of just redness on the face or headache or something
19:33
small from a glass of champagne or it's the weight or whatever else.
19:37
So that's good information today.
19:39
I wanna make sure that people know about your hormone imbalance quiz.
19:44
So that's quiz.metabolicblueprint.com.
19:47
So we will have this in your show notes.
19:50
Can you tell us a little bit about that quiz?
19:52
Because I that's a that's a totally free quiz, right, for everybody?
19:55
Yes.
19:55
It is.
19:56
So that quiz so when you're in perimenopause and menopause, the first thing I'm gonna know
20:00
is you already have a dominant hormone problem.
20:03
Estrogen and progesterone, all your sex hormones are all over the place.
20:06
But often, there's also other hormone imbalances like thyroid goes along with it,
20:12
adrenal and cortisol, for sure.
20:15
Often, we have too much stress, and then also blood sugar management and and how our body
20:20
kinda processes insulin and those other hormones.
20:22
So this quiz helps you figure out your most dominant problem, right, and how to address it
20:27
both nutritionally, and then there's also some suggested supplements that help that
20:31
I created.
20:32
So yes.
20:33
Okay.
20:33
Amazing.
20:34
Thank you for that gift.
20:35
And then before we wrap up, I just wanna ask, is there any, like, takeaway final point?
20:41
Like, we have to say this before we wrap up thing today to leave us with.
20:46
Yeah.
20:46
So I I think my my absolute final statement is hormone replacement is protective.
20:53
Right?
20:53
Hormone placement is protective, particularly if you use topical estrogens.
20:57
You use, oral progesterone to help particularly with sleep, and you gotta replace testosterone
21:02
too.
21:02
It's not just a men's hormone.
21:04
It's a women's hormone.
21:05
And if there are, you know, additional things we wanna look at and, like I said, I'm very
21:09
much of personalized medicine, the deeper dive of looking at your hormone metabolism and and
21:15
your genetics help you understand that.
21:17
But hormones are not the dangerous, you know, burglar hiding in your car kind of thing that's
21:22
gonna carjack you.
21:24
They are protective, and we need to quit scaring women around that.
21:28
And if we felt better, we would be able to do better.
21:31
We'd be able to have the life that we deserve in this next act.
21:36
Amazing.
21:36
Thank you so much.
21:37
And, everybody, we'll have every all the information about the quiz as well as how to
21:42
work with doctor Betty and her team to balance your hormones, balance your life, just to get
21:47
back on track.
21:48
Well, all of that in the show notes today.
21:50
Thank you so much for being here with us today.
21:53
Thank you for having me.
21:55
And, everybody, this is doctor Diane signing off, reminding you to stay sexy, stay classy,
22:02
be a little badassy.
22:03
We'll see you next time.
22:07
Thank you for listening to the Libido Lounge.
22:09
Please don't keep me a secret.
22:11
Please share this with your friends.
22:13
You can find me on YouTube, on Instagram, as well as how to work with me at mylibidodoc.com.