Latest / Empower Your Menopause / Episode 37: Guest Expert Sarah Brown - Gut Health

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Episode 37: Guest Expert Sarah Brown - Gut Health · Empower Your Menopause

• 0:14
  SPEAKER_00: Hello and welcome to Empower Your Menopause, the podcast where we bust myths, challenge outdated health advice, and empower women to thrive in midlife and beyond.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_00: It's coaches Julie and James here, and today we're gonna dive into an often overlooked but really, really important piece of the menopause puzzle, and that is your gut health.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_00: So if you've ever struggled with things like bloating, digestive issues, or food sensitivities that seem to have gotten worse in midlife or just appeared out of nowhere, you are not alone.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_00: There's actually a direct link between gut health and menopause symptoms, and addressing gut imbalances can have a significant impact on your overall well-being, everything from hormone metabolism to mental clarity and energy levels.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_00: So to help us navigate this topic, which is very complex but also very fascinating, we are thrilled to welcome a special guest, Sarah Brown, who is a registered nutrition therapist, certified metabolic balance coach, and founder of Good Food Works.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_00: So Sarah has been supporting women with IBS, food sensitivities, and stubborn gut issues since 2012.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_00: And she is passionate about helping women in midlife uncover what's really going on when bloating, fatigue, or brain fogs start to take over.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_00: So welcome, Sarah.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_03: Welcome, Sarah.
• 1:35
  SPEAKER_00: Hi, thank you.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you so much.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_02: It's lovely to be here.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_02: It's lovely to meet you both.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_03: Good.
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_03: So just Sarah, why don't we start off by just giving us a little bit of context?
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_03: You know, I I feel as though every coach that we've ever met has got a fascinating backstory uh as to how they got into it, why they got into it.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_03: So why don't you just tell our listeners a little bit about you?
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_03: Who is Sarah and why do you do this?
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_02: So so yeah, as with so many therapists in different modalities, I I came into nutritional therapy because of my own issues.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_02: I had um in my 30s, I was having quite bad digestive issues.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_02: Now that had followed a career um I was a holiday rep years ago.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_02: I was a holiday rep and I lived in India and lived all over the place.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_02: Um but when I came back to the UK, I noticed in my 30s I was having really bad digestive issues from bloating, diarrhea, stomach pain whenever I ate anything.
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_02: And it was an absolute nightmare that sort of plagued me all through my career, which was then in marketing.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but it took me until I was about 40 before I discovered this thing called nutritional therapy.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_02: And up until then, I've been sort of trying all sorts of different um solutions to try and sort my problems out.
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_02: Nothing was really working.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_02: Somebody said to me, You should go and see a nutritional therapist.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_02: And I was like, what is a nutritional therapist?
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_02: Um and and I I happen to live, I live very close to Richmond, so in Surrey.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_02: And in Richmond, you've got the Institute for Optimum Nutrition, which is one of the main colleges for training nutritional therapists to um high high diploma and degree level.
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_02: So I went to an open day, and um because I hadn't found somebody to work with, I ended up signing on for the course so that I could I could sort my own problems out, thinking it would be quite, you know, it would be something nice to do at the weekends, and that would be it.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_02: Oh my god, absolutely life-changing.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_02: Um, as you know, you know, it's a very intense course of study.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_02: You never stop learning with nutrition because it's such a such a new science.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but but over the course of the four years study, I did find that the solution for me was that I had picked up um H.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_02: pylori along my travels.
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_02: And once I knew that and I was able to deal with that, it led me to, yeah, I mean, it was life-changing.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_02: Um, again, you know, you probably know that when you've got gut issues and it's not just affecting your gut, but it's a it's causing brain fog or it's causing low energy, it really, really plays with your your well, your whole life, your career, you know, you can't um function properly at work, you can't participate fully in social events, all sorts of things are impacted.
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_02: So for me, it was such a life-changing experience that I was like, right, when I qualify, I am going to specialise in gut health because there are so many people around like me that have these debilitating symptoms, not too sure what to do about them, very often just live with them.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and and very often, you know, they've been diagnosed with IBS, but but they've been told there's nothing you can do about it, you just have to learn which foods are your triggers and learn to live with it.
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_02: Um, so that's why I I sort of came into working with with women with people with gut health problems.
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_02: And as I've sort of got older and gone through menopause age and so on, um, it struck me that there are so many people, so many women who have either had perfectly healthy guts up until they're menopause, and then suddenly found that you know things are going out of kilter, or they've always had IBS, but because it's got so much worse at menopause, that's when they've started looking for solutions.
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_02: So, so I'm finding myself working now more and more now with women aged between sort of 50 and 60 in that sort of phase of life.
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_03: Sure.
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_03: There's a fascinating story.
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_03: Um, it's incredible when you look back at people's history, isn't it?
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_03: How just sort of like a trip abroad.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_03: I know you're a holiday rep and you're out there for a long time, but a trip abroad like 10, 20, 30 years ago, can set you on a course of illness and pathology that you wouldn't be aware of, and and whose mind goes back to those 20 or 30 years, right?
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_02: No, exactly.
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_03: And that's why what we do, I think, is so crucial when it comes to this, and particularly for you working gut health specifically.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_03: I think it's really important that there's somebody there who can ask those questions about going further back than just common symptoms.
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_02: Exactly.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, it's it's about getting that history and really understanding where the problems seem to start.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_02: Sometimes it relates back to a trip like that, a trip to somewhere fairly exotic where something some bug's been picked up.
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_02: Sometimes it just leads back to a very stressful period in someone's life where you know stress has had that massive impact on their gut, everything's been thrown out of kilter, and they've never known to go and look at things to rebalance.
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_02: Um, so yeah, there's there's lots of different things that that actually you can do.
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_02: And that again is the the wonderful thing about working with gut health.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_02: There are so many things that you can do to get back onto the straight and narrow and to get somebody back to to living their life, you know, completely freely and and how they want to, rather than having to think about where the next loo break is going to be, or whether where you know, plan their journey by where the toilets are going to be, or are they going to go to this social function because they don't want to eat the food that they're given, they've got this special diet, and you know, all these things you can stop thinking about when you find a solution to your gut problems, you can stop thinking about them and just go out and have fun.
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_03: Sure.
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_03: So, as you've been doing this for longer, you've said before you work more now with women, 50, 60-ish, in that kind of age age bracket.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_03: We tend to call that the menopause transition because we'd like to work with people starting in their 40s and preparing them for menopause.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_03: But then obviously, postmenopause is such a crucial period for female health as well.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_03: I wonder if you could speak to us a little bit then about why gut health is so crucial during the menopause transition years and maybe talk about the kind of gut-related symptoms you actually see most often when it comes to women going through the menopause transition.
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, absolutely.
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, I as I as I mentioned before, I tend to see sort of two groups of women, um, some that have experienced gut issues before the menopause, and those that have have developed them, you know, after, and very often put all of their symptoms down to menopause, but actually it's it's the effect that that's having on their gut that needs looking at.
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_02: So, you know, we're talking about the same types of symptoms, all of the range of gut issues from bloating, um constipation, diarrhea, uh, gut pain, to the associated things like fatigue and brain fog and mood disorders, all of those sorts of things can come back to the gut.
• 8:56
  SPEAKER_02: And um sometimes it's it's it is a direct impact of the the gut microbiome and the the um the estrogen um factor, which Julie mentioned earlier.
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but sometimes you know the problems are already there.
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_02: We're talking about maybe a dysbiosis where you've got an imbalance of gut flora, historically, or like like in my case, you've got a pathogen that's been with you for years.
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, parasites and pathogens, they are crafty little things, they they cause problems to us, but not bad enough problems that we go and find them and get rid of them because they've got a posy little home in the gut, they don't want anything to upset that.
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_02: So, you know, sometimes the symptoms are just a bit annoying, but not bad enough to go and sort them out.
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_02: But they can be causing brain fog, fatigue, you know, depending on what type of microbe you're talking about.
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_02: Um, you've also got um food sensitivities, which is another big area that I deal with where you know IgG-mediated food sensitivities, where foods are triggering antibody production, and it's those antibodies and the immune system that is actually involved in creating the digestive symptoms and inflammation in the gut, but also again, things like headaches or um joint aches and pains, or uh skin disorders, respiratory problems, poor sleep, everything like that can be connected to something like a food sensitivity that starts in the gut.
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and and other things, you know, you've got histamine intolerance, you've got um what else, what else?
• 10:41
  SPEAKER_02: Lactose intolerance, high FODMAC foods, all sorts of different triggers going on.
• 10:45
  SPEAKER_02: So you've got that range of things that might be at play before menopause hits.
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, but then when we get to menopause and we start going through the menopause uh perimenopause, and you get that fluctuation in estrogen levels in particular, that's where we start to feel more of an impact on the microbiome.
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_02: So it comes back to how our gut bacteria are interacting or being affected by estrogen levels.
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_02: So estrogen can very much um influence and moderate what goes on with the microbiome.
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_02: There are actually specific bacteria involved in the microbiome called, if I can say it right, the estrobolum, um, which are those particular estrogen-sensitive bacterias that or bacteria that um the the metabolize and modulate estrogen levels throughout the body.
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_02: So so if once your estrogen levels start to change during menopause, it can affect your whole gut bacteria balance.
• 11:47
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 11:47
  SPEAKER_02: And that can that can then allow some of those other problems to develop.
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_02: So if your gut bacteria suddenly becomes um imbalance and you've not got the right microbes to help metabolize food and break down food, you're going to start getting bloating and um digestive pain because you're you're literally having food passing through the gut in a poorly broken down state.
• 12:13
  SPEAKER_02: It's not able to be digested fully because you have the biome as well, it's imbalanced.
• 12:18
  SPEAKER_03: And that tends to be where you get that um inflammatory response, isn't it?
• 12:24
  SPEAKER_03: Of your body actually seeing the food as a foreign invader, if you like, in inverted commas, and then your immune system comes into play, you've got those IgG antibodies that you were talking about.
• 12:35
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, so in which case it seems as though there's a lot of uh intertwining of the symptoms and the causes and things here.
• 12:46
  SPEAKER_03: So I'm gonna put you on the spot now, then.
• 12:49
  SPEAKER_03: What comes first in a chicken or egg scenario?
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_03: Is it gut health or menopause?
• 12:56
  SPEAKER_02: Um I would say it is it is it's gut health, but understanding the impact of estrogen and hormones, sex hormones generally, on the microbiome.
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_02: So it's the microbiome that is at at the key, is the key to all of this.
• 13:16
  SPEAKER_02: Because that's the part of the gut that changes most frequently.
• 13:21
  SPEAKER_02: You know, it can change from day to day because the microbiome is trillions and trillions of living bacteria.
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and every day you could eat the same thing, but one day you could feel fine, the next day you could feel terrible.
• 13:35
  SPEAKER_02: And it's all to do with the fluctuations in those bacterial levels.
• 13:39
  SPEAKER_02: So one of the if you if you start off with a healthy balanced microbiome, I would say that you're more likely to not feel as bad effects as your estrogen levels change and as that starts to affect your microbiome.
• 14:00
  SPEAKER_02: What happens is as your estrogen levels fluctuate and ultimately decrease, your microbial diversity decreases.
• 14:09
  SPEAKER_02: And that's where we find that you know you don't have the bacteria that are necessary to metabolise certain foods or to support your immune function and to help you produce um antibodies or neurotransmitters.
• 14:26
  SPEAKER_02: So, you know, that's where a lot of mood disorders can come from.
• 14:29
  SPEAKER_02: If you don't have the bacteria that produce neurotransmitters on the gut wall, you may feel that you've got low mood more often, which is obviously very common with menopause again.
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_02: So um, so that's one of the many things, and I'm beginning to lose my train of thought because I'm I've got so much a work.
• 14:46
  SPEAKER_03: That's quite all right.
• 14:48
  SPEAKER_03: So so it sounds then like you're potentially starting off with a microbiome that and I appreciate that you said that it changes every day, but if we view it like a garden and we want to sort of like have the healthier bits flourishing and do a little bit of weeding, and we've got a nice balance there, then having that balance before you go into into the menopause years is probably a good place to start.
• 15:17
  SPEAKER_03: So there's an argument, I suppose, for starting to work on your gut health way before you even enter perimenopause, right?
• 15:23
  SPEAKER_03: So in your 20s and 30s, so so you've already got that, um you've got it in the bank, if you like, for when oestrogen does start fluctuating up and down.
• 15:34
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, that's a really good way of putting it.
• 15:36
  SPEAKER_02: It's it's a really good way of putting it.
• 15:37
  SPEAKER_02: And I think um the effect of the gut and the effect of the microbiome is one of the most underestimated areas of health because it does such a great job of balancing us out and and supporting us that it gets quite a lot of abuse, quite a lot of dietary abuse, um, and it can still keep going.
• 15:59
  SPEAKER_02: So, and if you if you know, if you are one of those people that has always had digestive issues, you know to look after it, you know to support it.
• 16:07
  SPEAKER_02: But if you've never really had to worry about it until you get to your sort of mid-40s, then it becomes a bit of a shock.
• 16:15
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and and that's you know, that's where you may have to look at some fairly big dietary changes.
• 16:21
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 16:22
  SPEAKER_02: For sure.
• 16:22
  SPEAKER_00: So I know I've I've experienced that firsthand, most definitely.
• 16:27
  SPEAKER_00: So now you've talked about how estrogen declining also shows a decline in the microbiome diversity.
• 16:35
  SPEAKER_00: So, how do estrogen and progesterone really directly affect or do they directly affect gut function?
• 16:44
  SPEAKER_02: They yeah, they do.
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_02: Um uh progesterone normally is sort of is is calming things down and settling things out, but it's the estrogen levels, um, particularly versus there's a there's a really interesting study, and I can't remember the name of it specifically, but there's a an interesting twin study where twins were their microbiome was studied, and when they got to puberty, a male twin, his microbiome would be very, very different to the female twin.
• 17:16
  SPEAKER_02: And then when they went through as they as they aged, and then they got to that point where the woman was going through menopause, her microbiome started to look a lot more like his.
• 17:29
  SPEAKER_02: So you can see that you know that there are, and obviously there are so many more, as with everything, there's always so many more studies that need to be done to really draw clear conclusions from everything.
• 17:41
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but there's certainly a hormonal, a sex hormone influence on the diversity of the microbiome.
• 17:48
  SPEAKER_03: Uh let's move on to maybe talking about some practical strategies for supporting gut health, then.
• 17:56
  SPEAKER_03: What kind of things from a dietary lifestyle habit thing do you see that can help support a healthy gut?
• 18:05
  SPEAKER_02: So for me, a lot of the time I'm speaking to people at the moment about moving away from very much the processed food end of things, which is where a lot of people, you know, we're we're sort of often talking to people who are stressed and time poor.
• 18:20
  SPEAKER_02: Um, so that often leads them towards a processed or or ultra-processed diet.
• 18:28
  SPEAKER_02: So the first thing to do is to move away from that as much as possible towards a clean diet, by which I mean sort of eating making your meals from scratch with good quality vegetables, good quality protein, um, and good um healthy carbohydrates.
• 18:43
  SPEAKER_02: The reason for that is that the processed foods contain chemicals, additives, emulsifiers, preservatives, they can have an impact on estrogen levels and hormone levels, but they also have an inflammatory effect on the gut generally.
• 18:59
  SPEAKER_02: And that is going to disturb the microbiome.
• 19:01
  SPEAKER_02: It's also potentially going to aggravate the gut wall, leading to the food sensitivities that we mentioned before.
• 19:09
  SPEAKER_02: Um, so lots of different reasons why getting away as much as possible from processed foods is going to be beneficial.
• 19:17
  SPEAKER_02: And then in terms of supporting the microbiome itself, it really is about introducing as many and as varied a diet in terms of fruits and vegetables and fibre.
• 19:30
  SPEAKER_02: So the microbiome thrives when it has fibre or fermented foods, that you know, the sort of the sauerkrauts and the kimchi and so on, the prebiotic foods, they feed our friendly bacteria.
• 19:42
  SPEAKER_02: Um, whereas sugar, a diet that's high in carbohydrates or sugar, is going to feed the pathogenic bacteria, the bad guys, which we don't want to do.
• 19:52
  SPEAKER_02: Um, so so those are the sort of the first two things.
• 19:55
  SPEAKER_02: Clean up your diet generally, um, make sure you've got plenty of good quality fibre to feed those microbiome, uh those microbes.
• 20:04
  SPEAKER_02: Um I normally talk to people about trying to get 30 different fruits or vegetables into their diet each week.
• 20:13
  SPEAKER_02: So I do something called the 50 food challenge with people, but 30 of those foods I want to see being uh a vegetable or a fruit or something fibrous.
• 20:25
  SPEAKER_03: Um and what would the other 20 be then in that case?
• 20:29
  SPEAKER_02: Well, uh I I I'm sort of fairly open to that, but yeah, yeah, dairy or protein or whatever.
• 20:34
  SPEAKER_02: So long as I've got my 30 fruit and veg from people, I'm quite happy.
• 20:39
  SPEAKER_02: I'm not talking about 30 portions across the week, I'm talking about 30 different because obviously all the fruit all the different fruits and vegetables are feeding different types of microbes, so that's that's where you're gonna get your diversity from.
• 20:54
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 20:54
  SPEAKER_03: When it comes to things like gut health, and people talk about the gut lining and intestinal permeability and all this kind of stuff, and basically what we're talking about there is sort of like some gaps in the gut lining that allows undigested food to get to the bloodstream and cause some uh intolerance style reactions or allergenic style reactions.
• 21:15
  SPEAKER_03: Is there anything women can do at this stage of life that can help actually protect that gut wall that is the wall that is, I suppose, supporting the microbiome and the microbiome's living on?
• 21:28
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
• 21:30
  SPEAKER_02: So, my my go-to strategy normally, I I'm you can use um things like um bone broth, which will um provide a lot of the nutrients needed to support the gut wall.
• 21:44
  SPEAKER_02: My go to, because a lot of people don't just aren't into bone broth, and and you know, if you're not, I'm not going to ever push somebody to make something or eat something that they really, really don't like.
• 21:54
  SPEAKER_02: Um I supplement with L glutamine.
• 21:58
  SPEAKER_02: So L glutamine is an Amino acid, it's a protein that um uh helps us rebuild smooth muscle.
• 22:06
  SPEAKER_02: And because the gut is one long tube of smooth muscle, glutamine is actually the preferred fuel to help the gut cells rebuild and and replenish.
• 22:16
  SPEAKER_02: So that's that's sort of a really good um preventative.
• 22:22
  SPEAKER_02: I work with a lot of people that have IgG food sensitivities and therefore you know have the leaky gut um scenario probably happening.
• 22:31
  SPEAKER_02: Um so so glutamine is the sort of the go-to for for supporting that in particular.
• 22:37
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, so just to recap some of that advice then for for listeners, we're talking about trying to reduce processed foods as much as as much as we can, reducing things like sugars and easily digestible starches, promoting a diet really, really high in lots of colourful veg fruit, high in fibre.
• 22:59
  SPEAKER_03: So, as you said, 30 different um uh fruits and veg there a week, and then also from a gut health perspective, potentially a bone broth, and I agree with you, some people tend to love it and some people hate it.
• 23:11
  SPEAKER_03: Personally, I can drink it like I would do a cup of tea, other people find it quite hard to do that.
• 23:17
  SPEAKER_03: Um, and then the other thing would be as well, potentially an L-glutamine supplement.
• 23:21
  SPEAKER_03: So, so just for anybody who doesn't know about that, Sarah, could you just tell us a little bit about what form that comes in?
• 23:28
  SPEAKER_03: Are there any specific types of supplement they might want to look for?
• 23:32
  SPEAKER_03: How would they take it?
• 23:34
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, so glutamine comes as a powder, it's it's um it's a synthetic replacement of glutamine that we can produce in the body.
• 23:44
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but it's um it comes as a powder or as a capsule, and I normally recommend taking um about a thousand milligrams a day, which is normally if you take it as a powder, you just mix it into some water, um, just a teaspoon, and then drink that down.
• 24:02
  SPEAKER_02: I think from memory it tastes like licorice, so it's quite a nice taste.
• 24:05
  SPEAKER_02: And if people don't like drinking water, it will give your water some flavour, so that's always quite a good bonus as well.
• 24:12
  SPEAKER_02: Um, or you can take it as a capsule.
• 24:14
  SPEAKER_02: You know, some people like to just take it as a capsule, get it out of the way for the day, um, just take it first thing in the morning.
• 24:20
  SPEAKER_02: That's all you need to do.
• 24:21
  SPEAKER_02: This the it will still reach the site of action, there's no preference whether it's a um uh a capsule or a powder that you're taking, um, they will both be as effective.
• 24:33
  SPEAKER_02: Um, what was your other question?
• 24:35
  SPEAKER_02: Sorry, James.
• 24:36
  SPEAKER_02: Sorry about it.
• 24:38
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, any brands?
• 24:39
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 24:40
  SPEAKER_02: Um, yeah, I mean, in terms of brands, uh everybody, I mean, all the major brands will have a glutamine um supplement of some sort.
• 24:50
  SPEAKER_02: When I'm working with people, I've always tended to work with a brand called NutriAdvanced.
• 24:55
  SPEAKER_02: Um, it's very you probably know it, yeah, it's very well responsible.
• 24:58
  SPEAKER_03: There's supplements that we recommend for people as well.
• 25:00
  SPEAKER_03: We're big fans of Nutri Advanced, yeah.
• 25:03
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah, me too.
• 25:04
  SPEAKER_02: So NutriAdvanced and Biocare are probably my go-to supplements for most things.
• 25:09
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and then obviously, you know, other other brands for for different purposes.
• 25:14
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, but those would those would be the go-to.
• 25:16
  SPEAKER_02: That's the sort of standard that you want.
• 25:19
  SPEAKER_01: Great.
• 25:20
  SPEAKER_00: Speaking of supplements, oh sorry, sorry.
• 25:24
  SPEAKER_02: I was just gonna say, I just mentioned about water as well, and that's obviously also very good for gut health.
• 25:31
  SPEAKER_02: Um, you want to make sure that you've got plenty of water in your diet, particularly if you're suddenly increasing your fibre.
• 25:38
  SPEAKER_02: So if you are somebody that is going from a processed diet and saying, okay, I'm gonna work on this and I'm not gonna go straight to 30 foods a day, but I'm gonna get up there.
• 25:46
  SPEAKER_02: You want to make sure that you are um having a lot of water with that, otherwise, it can cause more problems than it resolves.
• 25:54
  SPEAKER_02: So you might find that you know you suddenly start getting bloated when you didn't get bloated before, and that's gonna be because you're having too much fibre too quickly.
• 26:01
  SPEAKER_02: So if you are starting from zero, build it up gradually, have plenty of water.
• 26:06
  SPEAKER_02: The other thing with with water is just to say, in terms of elimination, that's a big part of gut health as well.
• 26:16
  SPEAKER_02: You know, making sure that you are not constipated, you're not retaining um any stools.
• 26:23
  SPEAKER_02: If you retain stalls, it's possible there are certain enzymes in the gut that can deconjugate, which means separate the things that they're removing, that the stool is removing when it's collecting waste from the body through the bowel.
• 26:38
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and one of those things can be estrogen.
• 26:41
  SPEAKER_02: So, you know, sometimes it can be a useful thing to extract estrogen and recycle it in the body.
• 26:47
  SPEAKER_02: Other times you don't want that to happen.
• 26:50
  SPEAKER_02: So again, you want to make sure that you know you are having regular bowel movements, and that's going to be helped by a combination of the fiber and water.
• 27:00
  SPEAKER_02: Sure.
• 27:01
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 27:02
  SPEAKER_00: Definitely.
• 27:03
  SPEAKER_00: And I yeah, I I was told a much more crass way to remember that, but I um to loop the tubes, lube the tubes.
• 27:12
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but yeah, and I I I can say that L-glutamine has been a game changer for me personally, and we even use it for our dog because he's got very sensitive digestion ever since he was a puppy.
• 27:24
  SPEAKER_00: And so we've been feeding that to him with his dinner with bone broth that I make, and he's it just helped him immensely.
• 27:32
  SPEAKER_02: So that's fantastic.
• 27:37
  SPEAKER_00: So we're down the supplement line, just quickly.
• 27:40
  SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, L-glutamine is great, and you also see everybody talking about oh, you gotta take your probiotics, oh, you gotta take your prebiotics, you gotta take this supplement, that supplement.
• 27:50
  SPEAKER_00: What are there other things that that you support people taking, or things that you recommend people use caution with?
• 28:01
  SPEAKER_00: Because I know just throwing a whole bunch of um drugstores supplements isn't necessarily a good approach.
• 28:10
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, no, absolutely.
• 28:11
  SPEAKER_02: So, you know, there are there are there are good some supplements and there are some that you know aren't aren't really worth it, and that's why I stick with brands like NutriAvanced and Biocare and you know a few other key ones as well.
• 28:23
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but I uh in an ideal world, it wouldn't be necessary, and I, you know, I would I wouldn't tell people you need to take a probiotic.
• 28:32
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but I think if somebody's starting off from a place where possibly they've had a very stressful um period in their life, stress, just to sort of touch on that if I can.
• 28:45
  SPEAKER_02: Um when we have high levels of stress, it really plays habit with our gut.
• 28:50
  SPEAKER_02: The reason being that it raises our levels of cortisol and cortisol downregulates our digestive function, by which I mean it it slows down or stops the production of stomach acid.
• 29:04
  SPEAKER_02: Stomach acid is the main component or well, it's it's the main thing that that protects the gut from anything passing, you know, anything that we ingest goes through the stomach.
• 29:16
  SPEAKER_02: Any negative bacteria, anything that we don't really want going through, should be killed off by our stomach acid.
• 29:22
  SPEAKER_02: But if stomach acid is low because we're stressed, there's more chance that we're going to end up with an imbalance of gut flora where we've got too many bad bacteria competing for space and very often winning that space over the friendly bacteria that we want.
• 29:37
  SPEAKER_02: So if somebody is coming to me or they're, you know, their symptoms through menopause are being exacerbated because they're going through and menopause itself is so stressful.
• 29:47
  SPEAKER_02: So it's highly likely that you know they're going to be um uh feeling worsening digestive issues because of this side as well, in which case I'm fully supportive of taking a good quality probiotic and just boosting up the friendly bacteria.
• 30:04
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, so you know, in an ideal world you would be getting and you would have the sort of microbiome that just by feeding it with all the the vegetables and and the fibre that we've mentioned would be enough to support it.
• 30:19
  SPEAKER_02: But in the real world, that you know, it let's let's be honest, it doesn't always happen that way.
• 30:25
  SPEAKER_02: So a bit of a boost of a good quality probiotic supplement um is is very helpful for a lot of people.
• 30:35
  SPEAKER_00: That's great.
• 30:36
  SPEAKER_00: And and with all of these things, just one other question is are there tests like functional tests that that people can women can take to get some of these answers?
• 30:47
  SPEAKER_00: How how do they do that?
• 30:49
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, absolutely.
• 30:50
  SPEAKER_02: So um they can do they can do food sensitivity tests.
• 30:54
  SPEAKER_02: So if they feel that you know you've got this this cascade of high stress, sudden onset of bloating or digestive issues or fatigue or whatever, and they think actually it might be linked to a food, but they can't identify which one it is, because with food sensitivities, it's notoriously difficult.
• 31:12
  SPEAKER_02: There's there's quite a big gap, two to two to 72 hours after eating a food before you can get symptoms sometimes.
• 31:19
  SPEAKER_02: So you can do food sensitivity tests.
• 31:22
  SPEAKER_02: I work with York Test um in the UK who do a good test.
• 31:27
  SPEAKER_02: I also recommend for certain people if they feel that actually problems have existed before menopause, but actually they've never done anything about them and they think maybe it might be microbial, um, doing a stool test is is really effective.
• 31:44
  SPEAKER_02: And um, that is best done with a practitioner.
• 31:48
  SPEAKER_02: So find a nutritional therapist or naturopath that you can work with who can get that test organised for you and then can do a full analysis on the results and provide you, you know, tailored um advice of of how to go about things when you've got those results.
• 32:06
  SPEAKER_02: So those are probably the two main tests that I would use in clinic food sensitivity test and and stool testing.
• 32:13
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 32:14
  SPEAKER_03: Um and I think I think um it's worth just saying as well that when it comes to the food seven sensitivity testing, you know, I know you use your York test, very well-known company here in the UK.
• 32:26
  SPEAKER_03: I think it's important just to highlight as well that people don't fall for some of these deals that they see where people are claiming and diagnose 400 different sensitivities from one strand of hair and the the kind of bioreson thing and things that know.
• 32:40
  SPEAKER_03: So we're talking about here when you do a York test, it's a finger prick blood test, isn't it?
• 32:45
  SPEAKER_03: It's sent back to the lab and it's the blood that's been analyzed.
• 32:49
  SPEAKER_03: That is where you can't tell what the IgG levels are like rather than trying to get a piece of inert material, which would only show things like heavy metal toxicity and and and things like that.
• 33:00
  SPEAKER_02: So exactly, yeah, yeah.
• 33:02
  SPEAKER_02: There's there's a lot of of sort of um baseless um tests out there that you know you can't tell food sensitivities from a hair sample.
• 33:12
  SPEAKER_02: The bioresonance I'm not a fan of.
• 33:15
  SPEAKER_02: Now that I I I must admit, before I trained as a nutritional therapist, and when I was still looking for answers for myself, I did go to people that did bioresonance and I did follow their their process, and it helped to an extent, but never.
• 33:28
  SPEAKER_02: But that was probably because they were telling me to put to take out of my diet the the things that we knew are key triggers, you know.
• 33:35
  SPEAKER_03: Take out all the key common allergens, and guess what?
• 33:38
  SPEAKER_02: So, yeah, yeah, exactly.
• 33:39
  SPEAKER_03: Things tend to get better.
• 33:41
  SPEAKER_02: So and now I know better, and I know that you know, with something like, like you say, with a finger prick blood test, they're analyzing your blood sample to see if you're producing antibodies against particular food triggers.
• 33:54
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 33:55
  SPEAKER_02: The other good thing that you want to look out for, and something that you do get with York Test is if you buy the test direct from York Test, you get a free 30-minute consultation to talk you through your results and to explain to you what you need to do, how you need to change things.
• 34:11
  SPEAKER_02: So, I mean, that's a brilliant add-on.
• 34:13
  SPEAKER_02: And again, if you if you do a general test that you find on Instagram, if you don't have that support, it's really, really confusing and it can be terrifying.
• 34:23
  SPEAKER_02: You can get some results through with loads of results on, and you don't know what to do because you don't get any advice.
• 34:29
  SPEAKER_03: 100%.
• 34:30
  SPEAKER_03: And I I think the advice generally of having somebody who knows what they talk about when it comes to this thing.
• 34:35
  SPEAKER_03: I absolutely concur on stool tests.
• 34:37
  SPEAKER_03: I've done stool tests on clients before.
• 34:40
  SPEAKER_03: It's hard enough for people like us who are schooled in the microbiome and know what we're looking for to actually work out what the the nuances are.
• 34:51
  SPEAKER_03: So if you just had one done or you try and read it yourself, it would be uh almost impossible to to read the wouldn't it?
• 34:58
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, yeah.
• 34:59
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, perfect.
• 35:00
  SPEAKER_02: And it's it's actually taking things, you know, you it's not a straight read through this this is high, this is low, this is it's taking it all together so it can do the interpretation um in a in a way that you know it yeah, it takes training and understanding of these things to to be able to to interpret things correctly and communicate that back to someone.
• 35:21
  SPEAKER_03: So yeah, fabulous.
• 35:23
  SPEAKER_03: Okay, Sarah, thanks ever so much for coming.
• 35:24
  SPEAKER_03: It's been a absolutely fascinating talking to you.
• 35:28
  SPEAKER_03: For anybody who's interested in finding out more about yourself and how they could potentially work with you, where's the best place for women to come if they want to improve their gut health?
• 35:39
  SPEAKER_02: So at the moment, if you come to um my website, which is goodfoodworks.co.uk, um, you can contact me there.
• 35:47
  SPEAKER_02: We can have a discovery call if you'd like to chat.
• 35:50
  SPEAKER_02: That you'll find lots of information on the site.
• 35:52
  SPEAKER_02: I also have an Instagram feed, which is which is good foodworks one.
• 35:56
  SPEAKER_02: Um so so either of those channels uh is where I'm most active at the moment.
• 36:01
  SPEAKER_03: Okay, we'll pop those both in the show notes as well so that people can access them directly.
• 36:07
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 36:08
  SPEAKER_00: Definitely.
• 36:09
  SPEAKER_00: And for our listeners, look, if you're if you're struggling with menopause symptoms, if you think gut health might be part of the picture, well, you don't have to think because gut health is going to be a big part of the picture.
• 36:21
  SPEAKER_00: Please, please don't ignore it.
• 36:23
  SPEAKER_00: Addressing your gut issues can be a real game changer for your whole experience and your health, generally speaking.
• 36:30
  SPEAKER_00: So we really appreciate your time, Sarah, and and uh your expertise.
• 36:34
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, that's it.
• 36:35
  SPEAKER_02: It's been it's been lovely chatting to you.
• 36:37
  SPEAKER_02: It's great to meet you both.
• 36:38
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you so much for inviting me on.
• 36:40
  SPEAKER_03: Thanks a lot.
• 36:41
  SPEAKER_03: Okay, so tune in next week, everybody, as we continue to break down the science of thriving in midlife.
• 36:47
  SPEAKER_03: And don't forget to like and subscribe if you've enjoyed today's episode and maybe share it with somebody if you know somebody who's challenged with their gut health.
• 36:54
  SPEAKER_03: Um, in the meantime, it's been James and Julie with our new friend Sarah here, reminding you to stay strong and stay fabulous, and we will see you next time.
• 37:02
  SPEAKER_03: Take care, everybody.