Internet Radio Show
Health During and Beyond Menopause
- Sally J. Duffell
- Download
- Click "" below to listen
In today’s episode of “Healing From Within” your host Sheryl Glick author of The Living Spirit Answers for Healing and Infinite Love welcomes Sally J. Duffell author of Grow Your Own HRT who suggests if you are a woman of a certain age and feeling menopausal you might want to forget expensive hormone replacement therapy and consider growing your own HRT.
Sally joins us today to discuss remedies for a natural transition from child bearing years to menopause which can be more symptom and anxiety free if thought of with right thinking and understanding the natural process.
Listeners of “Healing From Within” are well aware that Sheryl and her guests share intimate experiences and new insights into moving past duality or separation to know our combined spiritual and physical life issues so we may improve the quality of health prosperity and life in general, utilizing inner wisdom .
In today’s episode of “Healing From Within” we will receive excellent simplified instructions on how to grow hormone rich plants in just minutes a day and learn more about the many plant foods that heal and sustain our well being. Duffell also explains how to self diagnose, how much to take and which sprouts to grow for the symptoms you may or may not have, as a result of the changing hormonal structure of your body. Plus the book also contains studies on how sprouted foods can help with menopause symptoms cancer heart disease osteoporosis diabetes and autism.
Sally responds to Sheryl’s question which asks her to think back to her childhood and remember a person place or event that may have made an impression on them and may have guided them to find their life work or adult interests. Sally shares how as a sensitive and somewhat lonely child she had an imaginary friend in Spirit and like all sensitive soulful children have a hard time understanding the harshness of a physical world with so much suffering pain and less compassion and love than perhaps they may intuitively remember from their time before being born.
Sally tells us why would we should choose to grow our own HRT and why Western Women seem to have a bad time during menopause more so than women from Eastern cultures . What we should know is that we all evolved eating plant hormones and lots of illnesses have only become common since we stopped. Instead of buying supplements and taking drugs we can all grow them again ourselves. We can all harvest the benefits. No one has a financial interest in getting women to grow their own plant hormones—not the HRT industry not the supplement makers, not the soya marketers. It is simple to grow your own HRT even in a small space and you don’t need a garden.
Many books say that menopause happens when the number of eggs we have is so love that the ovaries can’t respond when our brain hormones what’s known as the hypothalamus, pituitary axis or HPA tell them it’s time to hatch. Jenni Murray in her book Is it Me of Is it Hot in Here says, “As the supply of eggs in the ovaries dwindles the pituitary gland recognizes what’s happening and frantically increases the production of FSH in an attempt to kick-start the reproductive system as normal. As things progress other symptoms such as flushes and sweats begin.
What gynecologist John Lee MD says in his book What Your Doctor May Not Tell You about Menopause is even more dramatic. It’s not just hot flushes and night sweats but perhaps mood swings fatigue feelings of being cold and inappropriate responses to other stressors. When our period stops altogether we can have dry skin sagging libido and are more prone to osteoporosis cancer heart problems and dementia. Now this doesn’t happen to all women. There are lots of women who don’t get menopausal symptoms and Chinese women who don’t even have a word for menopause. We need to find out what is happening in the body of women like Eskimo women and Native American women and many Asian who menopause without symptoms.
There are two ways to menopause and almost nobody mentions the second one. In 1996 Robert Wilson published his book Feminine Forever and stated that all menopausal women needed to take Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT) but even so not everyone believed him. However Wilson was focused on the women who came to him because they were feeling ill. He failed to notice all the women who were going through this natural transformation and were doing fine. Where the HPA axis in some women stopped producing hormones before the ovaries slow down production of estrogen side effects were minimal. Menopausal symptoms only happen when the ovaries fail before the hormones produced in the brain have decided it’s time to stop. The only true menopause symptom is erratic periods as hormones slowly rebalance themselves.
So given the right circumstances it seems that ovaries can go on for as long as we need them and even after menopause we so still need them. A healthy postmenopausal ovary still creates lots of hormones for us. Studies show that removal of ovaries with hysterectomies is associated with higher risks of coronary artery disease stroke hip fractures Parkinson’s dementia cognitive impairment depression and anxiety.
Robert Wilson thought estrogen replacement was a cure to what he considered the disease of menopause and it took a while to establish the link between the estrogen therapy and cancer, but by then menopause was seen by doctors as a disease and HRT was touted as the cure. Meanwhile the backlash led by the feminist movement went to the other extreme. They pronounced menopausal symptoms to be a natural phenomenon and Germaine Greer in her book The Change said that many women don’t go to the doctor for their menopause symptoms because of “their attitude to doctors and their coping style rather than to the extent to which they experience symptoms.
Meanwhile both sides were correct. There were some symptoms and some women have a natural menopause during which their ovaries keep working until the end with no symptoms. There is yet to be a specific study comparing the two models of menopause: the gentle wind-down versus the premature ovarian failure…Getting the ovaries working as long as possible is what women in traditional societies seem able to do.
It also seems the Western Diet is very different from Eastern Health directives and that may be a reason for many reactions in the body.
It was found by researcher Margaret Lock who studied Japanese women who lacked a specific word for menopause and the symptoms to go with it, as well as traditional Thai and Chinese women who enjoyed trouble free menopause, and speculated that the Asian diet of vegetables seaweed fish and soya was giving them a rich mix of vitamins minerals trace elements and plant estrogen. She also learned that these women lived in multi-dimensional households where the elderly are highly respected and wondered if this was not also a factor for aging gracefully. The women also took regular weight bearing exercise and there was a tradition of herbalism. Soya soon became the Eastern Wonder Food and the soya revolution in the WEST was underway
How we are slowly learning what plant hormones and other phyto-chemicals can do for us. We know that cress and mustard contain lignans for plant estrogen as well as being rich in plant progesterone and cancer fighting compounds. Cress is not the only place we used to get plant hormones from. Western women get plant estrogen from lignans found in whole grains beans berries nuts and seeds and especially flaxseed known as linseed. Women who ate a lot of lignans had reduced risks of all kinds of postmenopausal breast cancer. Asian cultures were sprinkling plant hormones in the form of alfalfa sprouts while those in Britain were getting the same from mustard and cress Western folk medicine uses red clover as herbal medicine for menopause symptoms packed with plant hormones…We found in a study by Dr. Andrew F. Currier in 1897 that peasants in Scandinavia Germany and Russia did not complain of symptoms from menopause When the Japanese started living off processed foods, pizza pasta they would have developed menopause symptoms and diseases of aging.
The most obvious thing that can go wrong if we don’t ovulate is progesterone level will be low and without progesterone there is nothing to clear out estrogen from our systems or tell our womb lining when to shed so it just keeps building up. If we consistently fail to ovulate we will become estrogen dominate and too much estrogen can lead to cell growth in our reproductive areas and endometriosis build up of womb tissue, fibroids lumpy tissue attached to the womb fibrocystic breasts of course infertility. In the long term lack of ovulation is also associated with osteoporosis heart disease and several cancers breast endometrial and thyroid.
There are three main kinds of estrogen: estriol estradiol and estrione. Estradiol is produced by women in their fertile years and is the strongest. Estrone is in the middle coming in at a third to two thirds as strong. Estriol is the weakest at about an eight as strong. Estriol is the predominant estrogen is older women. It is gentle and less likely to cause cancer. However the good news is that the body has a natural ability to convert all the different estrogens to each other. This is a marvelous tool for hormonal balance
So what is it about the Western World and lifestyle that is upsetting hormonal balance that a 2015 Norwegian research project reported that a third of women were not ovulating.
Stress is one factor that affects ovulation by depleting the adrenal glands. Blood sugar becomes unstable. Digestion goes awry so nutrients aren’t being absorbed and progesterone production drops. This leads to estrogen dominance which is unhealthy. The World Health Organization and those employed by the industrial and chemical industries which add to the problem for women are at odds and their agendas foster making money not health. Clearly women who don’t have symptoms should not be put on HRT as they are creating hormones on their own. If you do go on HRT you will be advised to come off it before age 60 because risk factors increase sharply after that. Some doctors unofficially and officially recommend plant hormones after that if women still have symptoms of discomfort.
Sally tells us something of bean and seed sprouting and how to begin. So plants have hormones When we eat certain plants and beans our body creates plant estrogen and progesterone Your own gut bacteria use the isoflavones and lignans and coumestrol and convert them into hormones. Plant estrogen is much weaker than that created by our ovaries. The Greek name for plant estrogenes is phytoestrogens and they fight off those industrial and chemical estrogens and keep our body healthy
Sprouts that contain kaempferol as well as red clover are alfalfa mustard c ress and broccoli. As they have some plant estrogens they really ae your complete hormonal package.Fenugreek not only has kaempferol but it’s high in apigenin. Apigenin is getting a lot of attention from scientists as it has been shown to stop cancer cells from spreading and in fact tells them to die.
We need to eat brassicas which contain a whole host of the most wonderful vitamins minerals and antioixidants including cancer fighting chemicals. Brassica vegetables are often called cruciferous vegetables and include bok choy, Brussels sprouts, mustard greens, cresses cauliflower kale cabbage Chinese cabbage collard greens horseradish cohlrabi radish rutabaga turnip and watercress. Sadly not all brassicas lend themselves to being sprouted. If you are wondering why sprouts are amazing it’s because they are baby plant and are at the peak of nutrition. Another food that sprouting can rapidly turn into a powerhouse of nutrients is legumes or pluses consisting of beans peas and lentils. We need to get these pulses back into our diets. We can also add Asian sprout mung beans. Its plant cousin good old alfalfa sold in health stores has some very interesting beneficial phytochemicals. Don’t forget mustard and cress. And finally there’s fenugreek to boost testosterone.. also necessary for women.
The bottom line is we are trying to keep our ovaries working Eating sprouted foods can help us transition through menopause without symptoms.
Menopause symptoms are not the first health problems to be exacerbated by bad diet. One of the most famous is scurvy . It was so rampant during the eighteenth century it causes more deaths at sea than other diseases storms shipwrecks and even war. We now know that scurvy was caused by lack of fresh fruit and greens which contain vitamin C. Some maritime surgeons and herbalists did use berries vegetables and cresses as a cure but had to do it under the radar orthodox physicians had different ideas. They concluded scurvy was caused by laziness foul vapors and dampness to blocked perspiration and divine disfavor. They concluded sailors needed flogging or bleeding…none of which worked.
Similarly menopausal women used to be accused of being depressed of being afraid of aging or so spoilt that they had nothing better to do than make up symptoms. Once HRT was invented and big money was involved menopause officially became a disease. Sally and Sheryl are amazed at how the medical professional in the past and even now look past simple explanations such as diet exercise the body’s need for relaxation and reducing stress to improve most health situations and often allow the body to self-heal or by preventive methods decrease illness greatly.
Sally mentions plant hormones in relation to prevention of other diseases such as cancer osteoporosis dementia and heart disease? We can assume the medical practitioners are not offering these suggestions and probably do not know enough about supplements other than traditional Western medical treatments..medication and surgery.
Sheryl says…You can go back to a misunderstanding by physicians in regard to scurvy and other illnesses when not enough is known about the pre-existing life style, diet, exercise practices or lack of exercise, along with the stress factors and genetic predispositions of a patient, we cannot conclude it is simply emotional.
Sally tells the story of her friend who had a successful response to the use of HRT practices. Kate Tyms a forty eight year old mother of three teenage girls generally fit and healthy suffered period wise from PMT which worsened as she got older and she experienced a great deal of sweating. Her periods were heavy on day 1-2 and then petered out. The routine she followed that seemed to help 1. Ground up some flaxseed and sprinkle on muesli every morning. 2. Sprout things..red clover mung beans and broccoli and sprinkle on whatever I am eating. 3 Avocados 4 No parabens 5 Banana bread to keep off processed sugars. 6 Using Aveeno instead of Nivea body lotion. As diet included more muesli and flaxseed and nuts symptoms improved
Sally J. Duffel an expert in an area that is attempting to offer natural solutions to many of the complex health issues that modern society is dealing with by offering changing thoughts on the issues surrounding menopause and other conditions. .
In summarizing today’s episode of “Healing From Within” we have seen that by understanding that the body is a complex mechanism of biologic hormonal and energetic influences and by returning to the simple dietary routines of the past or alternative methods known before Western medicine concluded that disease can only be cured or managed by drugs or surgery we might move past the debilitating symptoms of many illnesses that have developed as a result of the Industrial Age. We might remember how scurvy was handled by people like James Lind in 1753 when he promoted his lemon cure. He also discussed at that time sprouting mustard and cresses so that ships companies could grow their own salad cress aboard ships and keep their sailors from developing scurvy. Sprouting is a part of a long European food culture and it’s helped keep us healthy for generations. But we must return to essential truths that our fundamental needs as human beings involve good nutrition, plenty of rest and basic hygiene.
Sally wrote, “ That is the story of menopause too. We industrialized. We stopped eating whole foods. We processed and refined foods. We tried to bring them back through artificial ways, through drugs and supplements. And now we are faced with the fact that we need ways of getting whole foods back into our diets. Human beings are so clever in what we can achieve and so stupid in that we keep forgetting the fundamentals. It’s not too late to go back to it all….We can borrow from all the different traditions. We can copy the Chinese and sprout mung beans or alfalfa. We can look to folk medicine and grow red clover mustards and cresses…We need to make up for the deficiencies in our diets.”
Sally and I would have you remember that within a sense of ancient inner wisdom and within our bodies we have the ability to self-heal: we must allow ourselves to improve our thinking about how to care for ourselves utilizing the best of herbal alternative and modern day western medicine to find healthy simple ways to live well.
