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

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Jonathan Wolf: Correct. And I think one size fits all is definitely not something we believe there or anything else. Hey, I have lots of questions, but we definitely hit time. I'm gonna try and do a summing up and please correct me if I got any of this wrong, if that's okay. so. I think the, you know, my first takeaway is it's a very complex cycle. To make it worse, when we do receive a diagnosis that finally gives us a feeling of validation, there is so much conflicting advice from various doctors that it makes it impossible to manage symptoms consistently and effectively. Jonathan Wolf: How much do you know about menstrual cycles? Half of you will be a lot more informed than the other half, but whether you've had a menstrual cycle or not, I promise you'll learn a lot during this episode. Even if you aren't having periods, I'd say it's important you listen to better understand and support the people in your life who are today.

Jonathan Wolf: when you say sleep architecture. I love the idea that I have sleep architecture. Can you explain a little bit more what that means? It's how we can essentially cycle sync. But, Keeping the individual and personalized to us, and I'm a huge fan of that instead of, we can use the research as a guide, but not the rule. The most important research that you can get is from yourself. Jonathan Wolf: I think no one here is ever gonna say you shouldn't eat like that. But you're saying we all know the reality of how we're balance life and balancing this, that actually. If there's a period when you would want to be closest to what many people listen to this, we'll think about as sort of probably their ZOE diet, like that week in particular can have the biggest impact and can it really affect how you feel? It's not a great place to be. And actually eating this sort of really gut healthy diet that, you talked about, can potentially really reduce that level of inflammation and therefore reduce your symptoms, make you feel better, presumably be good for your long-term health. And this is all the classic sort of high fiber plant led diet. Jonathan Wolf: and what you get out from doing this? You start to understand, I guess, what your normal is. What can you do as a result?Jonathan Wolf: We're now running the world's largest nutrition science study, and this is an area that Sarah and others are really interested in because actually the scale of the data that we're now starting to to get allows us to start to piece together some of these changes. Although you obviously. Hazel Wallace: Yeah, that's a really good question. it can change threats, so it's very rare for someone to have the same. kind of pattern of a cycle from puberty all the way up to the menopause. Different things in our lifestyle can also change the length and how we experience our menstrual cycle, whether that's stress, that we're under nutrition, even sleep, and also if we go through things like pregnancy, we're in a postpartum period. To celebrate the upcoming publication of The Female Factor by Dr Hazel Wallace, we’re giving you a chance to win some incredible prizes. Gut issues are quite common, so thinking about potentially how you might need to adjust what you eat. And then I think at the end, we talked about intermittent fasting where you're quite cautious and it sounds like you're mainly cautious about people eating enough calories, enough food, so it can potentially work, but don't just assume that this is this wonder solution actually, it sounds like you, you're concerned there might even be some issues here. The Female Factor is an all-encompassing book on women’s health from Dr Hazel Wallace; who is an NHS doctor, registered nutritionist and bestselling author. She started ‘The Food Medic’ blog in 2012, as a medical student, in a bid to bridge the gap between conventional medical advice and the latest thoughts and developments in nutrition and other areas of lifestyle. The blog has now extended to various other platforms and publications including social media, books, and a podcast.

Jonathan Wolf: and then is it true that these cravings are towards particular sorts of food? I'm tending to think about things like fats and things like is that real? Jonathan Wolf: Okay. And finally, you're, you're allowed to more than a yes or no. Now, what's the most unexpected thing you discovered about the menstrual cycle through your research? Hazel Wallace: So it's beneficial for a cardiovascular fitness and also in the high hormone phase in the menstrual cycle when estrogen is high, just before ovulation. We do see that as well. There may be some benefits to cardiovascular fitness, for example, for endurance sports.We found that it increased engagement because it doesn’t flag your content as being inappropriate to certain audiences,” Wallace outlined. Hazel Wallace: so you, in theory for a girl, she would start her first menstrual cycle when she goes through puberty, and this can vary between the ages of like nine to 12 really. And you would end it on your last menstrual cycle, which would be the menopause. And the average age in the UK here is 51, but the perimenopause, which is that transitional phase, and I'm sure that you guys have discussed this a lot in the podcast, that can be anywhere between four months for some women to 10 years. Hazel Wallace: Yeah, absolutely. It's something that I've discussed at length with Tim Spector about when it comes to fasting and women, and we've both agreed that we definitely need more research there to really understand how it affects the menstrual cycle and how we can optimize. Both that protocol to suit women who are menstruating because it might be, we have to tweak it at certain phases of the cycle.