Sharing Recent PCOS Research Updates & Celebrating a Milestone!

We've hit a milestone of 50,000 downloads, and we're thrilled to celebrate this achievement with you! We've been on an incredible journey together, and as a token of our gratitude for your support, we're diving straight into the heart of the latest PCOS research to talk about major changes and studies that have happened in the last couple of years . Fear not, we've made the science palatable, ensuring you're well-equipped with the knowledge to manage PCOS effectively.

Mentioned in the Episode:

To see more on the upcoming PCOS Essentials Academy Group, click here: https://hannah-s-school-09e9.thinkific.com/courses/pcos-essentials-academy

My favorite matcha https://aprikamatcha.com/?ref=wr8dlu4hup

NAC https://s.thorne.com/NRI4c

COQ10 https://s.thorne.com/eFAEK

Fish Oil https://s.thorne.com/MwXez

Inositol https://s.thorne.com/esr0F

Resveratrol https://s.thorne.com/S4z5L

For those interested, below are the PMID numbers for today's episode

The GUT

• PMID: 37208218
• PMID: 37559119

IBS risk

• PMID: 37494961

Cinnamon

• PMID: 35365881

Green Tea

• PMID: 35504067

Antioxidants

• PMID: 36437750

CoQ10

• PMID: 35941510

Circumin

• PMID: 36387924

Fish (omega 3)

• PMID: 36932420

Folate

• PMID: 36657915

Fit, Healthy & Happy Podcast
Welcome to the Fit, Healthy and Happy Podcast hosted by Josh and Kyle from Colossus...

Listen on: Apple Podcasts   Spotify

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:42

Welcome back to an Amber a Day, the Functional Nutrition Podcast. I am your host, amber Fisher, and today is a very exciting episode for me personally and hopefully for you too, especially if you are a longtime listener because today is a little bit of a milestone episode we're celebrating today. We are celebrating the fact that the podcast has now maybe not at this exact moment that I'm recording, but probably by the time this podcast comes out has officially hit 50,000 downloads over the course of its life, and that's very exciting milestone. A lot of podcasts don't make it past the first. I think the statistic is like the first five or six episodes or something like that.

Speaker 1: 1:23

It's just very exciting for me to see things come to fruition, something that I put a lot of effort into and I hope has provided a lot of value. One of my favorite things is when I meet a new client or somebody DMs me or something and they tell me that they are a podcast listener and that they love my podcast. I'm like, wow, you know about my podcast. It's so amazing to me I know I've said this many times before, but it's so crazy to me that you might be in your car or you're cleaning or something and you're listening to me talking right now, because I'm just up in here in my little office by myself wearing my comfy shirt, because it's Labor Day right now when I'm recording this and just talking to myself essentially. But I do always have this kind of person in my mind that I'm hoping is listening and getting value out of the things that I'm saying. So if you're here, if you've been here for a while especially, thank you, I appreciate you.

Speaker 1: 2:25

I thought what can I do to celebrate this milestone and usually big milestones of the podcast? I like to kind of take a look backwards and just sort of reassess, because a lot has changed for me in my personal life, in my professional life, just as a person. I've grown up and changed quite a bit, and the last when was 2018? Was that five years ago? I should probably do the math, but it's been a while and so a lot has changed for me. I became a mom. During that time, I took my work totally virtual and now I do group programs and social media and it's completely different.

Speaker 1: 3:10

So I like to do little episodes every once in a while where I kind of get wax nostalgic and think about what's changed and what's different and rather than waste everyone's time by getting too sentimental here, what I thought I would do actually is I just got the idea to kind of go search on PubMed. Pubmed is the National Institute of Health Research website where you can pull up abstracts and things of different research studies. Anyway, dorky people like me spend a lot of time on there but it's kind of like the premier place for do your own research and getting good quality research rather than just Googling something. So I got the idea that perhaps I should go and search PubMed from the last few years, since I've done a real deep dive, and see if there's anything new that's come about that might be interesting to share with you all. Because one of the things that always amazes me is just how much PCOS the understanding of PCOS and the nature that it has, or the relationship that it has to our nutrition and lifestyle just how much that has changed even since I got my master's degree or since I started practicing nutrition or since I was first diagnosed. So much has changed. It hasn't been that long of a time, right, it's been you know what 15 years, something like that. So the fact that the research and nutrition landscape for PCOS looks so different now than it did even maybe six or seven years ago is always so amazing to me. And you know it's hard when you're being a practitioner and you're working day to day and you're you know you're helping people it's not always easy to kind of stay up to date with all that. So I thought, well, that might be fun. I'll go look back and see if there's anything you know new that's dropped that I haven't seen, or any more further conclusions on different things that I've kind of been following for a while, and update you guys.

Speaker 1: 5:21

So I'm going to try to make this really, in layman's terms, easy to understand. You know I'm not going to like try to go over your head too much with scientific jargon, because if you've ever tried to read research studies you know it can get a little bit intense. I'm going to try to keep it simple to understand and I'm just going to skim through some of this stuff just so you can kind of see. But if you want the links to the actual abstracts and then from there some of them are free, full text, like you can just literally go read the whole study, so we have to pay for. Anyway, if you want the links to those. You can find them in the description box. I'll put a list of them and kind of look what the topic was that was covered. So we're going to get into that, and we're going to do that today, and so I hope that sounds fun to you If it does stick around.

Speaker 1: 6:13

Before we get into that, though, just a couple of housekeeping announcements. It is you were listening to this on Tuesday, september 5th 2023. And that means that officially, enrollment is now open for the PCOS Essentials Academy Group Program. So this is a four week group program that I am running with Hannah Mule, who runs the conscious nutritionist accounts on Instagram, tiktok. She's also a PA, physicians Assistant. She is a dietitian. She is a PCOS nutrition expert like myself. When her and I love to run group programs together, we have very complimentary strengths and we've run. This will be the fourth group program that we've run together, and so what it's going to be is four weeks where we meet live. Now I know, because I get this question a lot people are like, well, I would like to join it, but I don't think I can come to the live meetings, and that's totally fine. Every group program we've ever run, we've had people from other countries. You know people outside the US or whatever who couldn't be on the recording at the recording time because it was the middle of the night for them or they had to work at night or whatever, and so we do record every meeting and we post them the next day. So if you're enrolled in the program, you can do that, you can watch the recordings and you'll still have access to like the group chat and you know you'll be able to get your questions answered by Hannah and I.

Speaker 1: 7:44

The way it kind of works is that we divide up the four weeks into four lectures. They're about an hour long, usually go a little longer because we do question and answer sessions. We try to keep the groups fairly small. Usually we have anywhere from 10 to maximum 20 people that we've had in the past. So we try to keep things on the smaller sides, that you can get more individual attention and either Hannah or myself will do a lecture on DCS topics that are, you know, important and will guide you through it the way that we would if you were a one-on-one client. You know it's coaching just in a group setting, right. So we will teach you all of the specific information that you need to know and from there you will have the opportunity to integrate that material with us to help.

Speaker 1: 8:34

So, whereas a self-paced course like my course is PCOS foundations or functional PCOS or something like that, you're doing all that work on your own without access to really anybody to you know, bump things off of or ask questions for you know if you get confused or whatever, you're kind of on your own. This is a situation where what you're paying for for the most part is not just the information but that access. So you know you get access to for one, a two, for one special me and Hannah and we're both experts in PCOS nutrition and we both bring different perspectives, but her and I also are on the same page nutritionally about the very vast majority of things when it comes to PCOS. So it's a lot of fun. We always get really positive feedback from the women who have been part of the groups before and we stay close and you know I love to hear how they're doing. We've had pregnancies come out of the groups, we've had people regulate their cycles, we've had people clear their acne. Everybody pretty much leaves the group at least feeling a lot more energetic and just a lot more balanced, and so it's a great.

Speaker 1: 9:50

It's going to be a great program, since it's four weeks. We are going to be jamming a lot of important information, but we're going to make sure that you guys have everything that you need so that you know what to do. It comes with meal plans, grocery lists, recipes for every day of the program and along with, like, a lot of different resources and documents and just different things to kind of help you integrate. You'll have access to everything for a full year. So even if you can't attend live, you got access to it.

Speaker 1: 10:17

Okay, enough of my little spiel, but if you are interested in joining us, enrollment is going to close on September 15th, so you don't have a terribly long time to decide, and if we fill up, we will close registration, and we've had to do that before. So definitely get on it If you're interested. It is a little bit more budget friendly than some previous groups we've run, just because it's a bit shorter. So anyway, if you've been waiting for that, here's your chance. The link to the page with all the information is in the description box of this episode, so check it out. I would really love to see you. I love meeting everybody in the group. So I think it's a lot of fun. Okay, let's get into today's episode, shall we? Let's go. So I'm going to pull up my little Google Doc that I have here where I went through these different research studies and kind of divide them up by topic.

Speaker 1: 11:08

Just because a research study exists does not mean that it's well-designed or that the conclusions are accurate. And this is one reason why just because you see one study come out doesn't mean that everybody changes their opinion. Good example of this is the duck out eggs. Right Over the last like 30 years, nutrition science has flip-flopped on eggs. Are they good for you? Are they bad for you? Are they going to raise your cholesterol? Are they not going to raise your cholesterol? Like, what's the deal? And this is because, with each research study, research usually starts in animals, then it moves into human studies, smaller human studies, then it moves into larger human studies.

Speaker 1: 11:46

One good sort of way to look for research is to start by looking for what are called meta-analyses. Meta-analyses are when people look at the wider body of evidence of various research studies on a particular topic and then they analyze all of that and put that into a research study. So it's kind of like condensing down. The condensing down and weeding through the evidence of multiple research studies. Meta-analysis is one of the better things to look at when it comes to just looking for research evidence of something. Anyway, meta-analysis is a good place to start when you're searching for a large body of evidence condensed into a pretty package for you to sort of read. That's what I pulled today. I went and I put meta-analysis from the last couple of years. I went back into 2021. I was going to go all the way back to 2018 when the podcast started, just for kicks, but there was too much. I got tired after going to 2020 and I'm like okay, I know the research up until that point, let's just go 2021 to today.

Speaker 1: 13:02

Specifically, I picked out studies that related to nutrition in some way. Of course, there are tons of studies that have come out on the role of metformin, for example positive stuff with metformin or metformin and spironolactone together versus just metformin alone, things like that. There are studies on birth control. There are studies on I saw some interesting studies on IVF miscarriage rates, some interesting studies on cancer risk. Surprisingly, almost the majority of the studies were about nutrition in some way, that they were about a certain supplement or they were about a certain element that related to nutrition.

Speaker 1: 13:41

We pulled some studies on the gut. We pulled some studies on weight loss. A lot of the weight loss ones in the next category, which is nutrients, in general overlap. Most PCOS studies are going to account for weight in some way. Then I have a whole category on nutrients, which is mostly just different components of plants or supplements themselves. Then we pulled some lifestyle studies. There's a study on exercise, study on sleep, that kind of stuff.

Speaker 1: 14:45

I just did a little sampling of what I thought was the most interesting. Definitely not all of it, but hopefully you will find some of this interesting. A lot of this is really fascinating for me just to watch the change in what's being said, because when you read an abstract from year to year, you can watch the change in the scientific communities view about different things over time. If you look back 10, 15 years studies on the gut and PCOS, it's going to be very like a mixed bag controversial, not enough evidence whatever. Now we're finally starting to get some meta-analysis that are really confirming a lot of the things that nutrition professionals have been saying about PCOS for a long time, which is that inflammation and gut health are intricately connected, the catch-22.

Speaker 1: 15:44

Cool thing, but also bad thing about that, is that nutrition is something that plays an integral role in our gut health. That's good if you're wanting to change your nutrition and you're working on it. It's not great if you want to pretend that nutrition plays no role. But I just find it very interesting how these studies were actually related to diet, exercise, nutrition in some way, because when I was diagnosed with PCOS, the consensus at large was that it played no role at all. It was almost seen as hokie or pseudoscience to suggest that changing your diet could do anything for your PCOS. But now we know, of course, that PCOS is primarily lifestyle-based, at least if you want to modify it. Of course there's a genetic component. There's questions to be answered about. Why do some people develop PCOS versus others, even if they eat the same diet? Well, because there's the genetic component here. But when it comes to managing symptoms and reducing symptoms, it plays a huge role, to the point where most of these studies are about different things that can be done with a diet or different supplements that can be taken, and supplements are usually just different herbs or they're different foods concentrated into little pills. So let's get it, shall we? I think I've been rambling about this long enough.

Speaker 1: 17:10

So a couple of the studies on the gut were interesting. So the first one was looking at microbial diversity. So what does that mean? In our digestive tract, specifically our colon, is a community of bacteria and other organisms, not just bacteria. There's also fungi in there and different stuff, but bacteria make up the majority of it. And these bacteria are all different types, species whatever, and they kind of exist in a harmony or a balance with each other. And depending on your diet, your life, even things outside of your diet like stress, trauma, exercise, all those kinds of things they can all manipulate the balance of those gut bacteria. And the importance of that is that those gut bacteria play a very large role in your immune system, your immune health. About 80% of your immune cells sort of reside there, in that bacterial environment, and so if the bacterial balance is off or the diversity is decreased, meaning you don't have as many bacteria in there, then those all spell out sort of negative for the rest of your overall health, including and especially your inflammation levels, because your gut and your immune system play a big role in that sort of creation of inflammation.

Speaker 1: 18:44

We know that in PCOS we tend to have low grade inflammation going on. So this meta-analysis found that over 14 studies demonstrated that those with PCOS possess significantly lower microbial diversity compared with control. So that means, compared to people who don't have PCOS healthy adults who don't have PCOS those with PCOS tend to have a lot less diversity, so a lot less bacteria, which means that their guts are not as resilient, their immune systems may not be as resilient, and that could feed into more inflammation. Of course I'm making jumps here, but that's where I usually take any kind of gut study If I'm trying to figure out how can I implement this kind of information into the change that would occur in a person's body. It's what can I do with nutrition to increase the diversity? So what we know about that is that bacteria the good kind of bacteria especially love fiber and they love different plant nutrients, like they love things like polyphenols, which are plant components. They love all kinds of stuff like that. So basically, we feed it more fiber, we feed it more veggies and fruits and fresh plant-based foods, and that's how you increase your diversity. So it's really actually simple at the end of the day.

Speaker 1: 20:04

A little harder to implement One of the studies that I found. I don't think I included it in this, but one of the studies that I found was a study of the diet to those with PCOS. It was based on a diet recall, which has its weaknesses, but compared with those who didn't have PCOS, what they did find was that those with PCOS tend to have, overall, significantly lower levels of fiber in their diet. They just weren't choosing fiber-rich foods. And one of my frustrations with nutrition science in general and kind of like the whole overwhelming viewpoint of those with PCOS, is that we tend to be sort of looked at as like we're the problem. It's because we're not eating right that we are having these problems, and the reality is a lot more gray than that. It's complicated because I can't say 100% that we're not, on average, playing a role in this because we are.

Speaker 1: 20:58

I mean, the studies sort of demonstrate that again and again that those with PCOS tend to choose diets that are not as beneficial for their PCOS symptoms. On the other hand, what is the reasoning for that? I think a lot of that has to do with the drivers, these hormonal drivers, that sort of trigger more starch cravings, insulin resistance, triggering more sugar cravings, those kinds of things that it pushes other things out of the diet. There could be a lot of reasons for it, but to say that it's all just your fault, the way that you're eating, is an oversimplification. But to say that the way that you're, to say that, on average, those with PCOS are eating super, super healthy, done and to suggest that they're not is blame or whatever, both of things are not true and both of these things are true. There is an element of responsibility here in, specifically in fiber consumption, which we can see in a lot of studies. So that's what this one says. It says lower levels of diversity.

Speaker 1: 21:59

Then there was another study that found dysbiosis in PCOS, which we already knew, but it was nice to see a little bit more. Dysbiosis would be imbalanced bacteria in the gut, and so what the study says is that gut dysbiosis in PCOS, which might be characterized by the reduction of short chain fatty acid producing and bile acid metabolizing bacteria, suggests a shift in the balance to favor pro inflammatory rather than anti inflammatory bacteria. Essentially, what that saying is that, because of the imbalance of the gut bacteria, the particular way in which they are imbalanced, which is driven by a multitude of factors, diet choices being one, those with PCOS tend to have bacteria that are more inflammatory, so they're producing more inflammation via the gut, which could have told you that, but it's nice to see it on a minute analysis though. So those are the ones that have come out on the gut in the last couple of years. Now one more kind of related to the gut is about IVS risk. So any girly with PCOS can tell you that the majority of us are dealing with some IVS or some irritable bowel stuff not everyone, but most of us are and so this analysis indicated that that is likely the case. So it revealed an almost two times higher risk of IVS in comparison with controls. So they looked at. They said there's a significant association between PCOS and increased odds of IBS. However, more high quality and well controlled research is essential to increase the robustness of our conclusions. So we've known that there's a link between PCOS and IBS for a while, and now we've got some stronger data to suggest it, but it's still not strong enough for them to come out and say yes, absolutely, with PCOS you're probably really at risk for IBS. Nevertheless, interesting to see, all right.

Speaker 1: 24:04

So then there were a couple of studies that were specific about nutrients and weight loss, and I found these interesting. There was one cinnamon that showed that the results of the study showed that supplementation with cinnamon significantly reduced BMI and body weight, and the impacts were greater in doses of more than or equal to three grams a day. So this one was really interesting because it's like a ton of really high quality evidence that cinnamon impacts much else, but it did definitely show an increase in body weight which long term could improve insulin resistance. And since I know that weight loss is such a hard thing for a lot of us, I just thought that was interesting. So maybe add a little bit more cinnamon to your diet.

Speaker 1: 24:50

The other study was on green tea, which you guys know I'm a lover. Matcha is just powdered up green tea, by the way, if you didn't know, so it's a little bit stronger than just green tea on its own. But they found with regular I think it was daily consumption of green tea that they found a significantly lower body weight. They found differences in body fat percentage, body mass index, daily caloric intake, waist circumference, hip circumference and waist to hip ratio and they found that green tea has potential positive effects for the reduction of weight. And they say we reasonably expect this to be an option of adjuvant treatment and PCOS clinical management. So they are stating that they expect that down the line.

Speaker 1: 25:43

It may be common to hear you know, oh, to have some green tea every day. That's great for PCOS. You know how we talk about experiment tea it's great for PCOS. Now they're going to say green tea. I mean, if you look at like PCOS influencers on Instagram, this is already happening. We're already talking about matcha all the time, you know, and it's not just because most of us can make a commission off of selling some matcha, which we can. You know, my favorite month is always linked and I do make a little commission when people buy it.

Speaker 1: 26:11

But the reason that I got on the matcha train and I got it so much is because in my personal life, I started drinking matcha, not for PCOS, but just like in general, because I'm kind of anxious with caffeine, and so I was looking for a little pick me up that wasn't going to like make me really anxious, and I also wanted to get more like antioxidants. And I think it was another person who I follow, who she always. She did like her matcha latte recipe and I was like, what's a matcha latte? Maybe I should try it. So I started drinking it and I realized I really liked the taste of them after I got used to it. At first it tasted like grass, but I really started to like it and I liked the way I felt on it, and so the more that I incorporated, the more regular it became as part of my lifestyle.

Speaker 1: 26:58

I have a matcha just about every day and I've done that for the last few years and it has really positively impacted me in a lot of different ways my energy levels, my concentration, my focus. I think it's helped my skin a lot. So I talk about it so much because it's helped me so much, and it's helped a lot with different people, sometimes for me too. So anyway, I think it's stuff like that is easy to share about, because I know it works anecdotally for me and I've seen it work for a lot of clients over the years, and so anyway, it's cool to see some sort of preliminary evidence coming out about green tea specifically for PCOS. So those studies were basically focused mostly on weight in PCOS, though Now the rest of these studies on nutrients are more focused on overall parameters of PCOS. So different symptoms that are going on in PCOS, different blood work markers, and what's cool is that different ones of these kind of impact different things and they don't not every study tests for every single marker, right. So we don't know, like some of these, if they would have impacted other ones too, but it's just kind of cool to see the differences.

Speaker 1: 28:12

So this first one here is just on antioxidants. In general, antioxidants are present in most plant based foods leafy greens, berries, all those kinds of things. So they found that supplements with antioxidants, which would be I don't actually know the specific antioxidant supplement that they used, but there are a lot of different antioxidants out there People use, often in acetylcysteine. That's one that I recommend a lot because it helps produce glutathione, which is a key antioxidant vitamin E, I mean. They're they're right. But what they found was that antioxidant supplements significantly improved insulin resistance, fasting insulin levels and fasting glucose levels, so improve the blood sugar balance in those with PCOS. But they did not find any evidence that improved lipid profiles in PCOS, except for triglycerides, which I thought that was interesting because triglycerides are the ones that we're the most worried about, right. So still kind of a net positive there.

Speaker 1: 29:18

But they're always looking when, when it comes to specific nutrients or supplements, they're always kind of looking for something that maybe they could potentially, I think, make into like a like a prescription I mean, I don't know that to be 100% the case, but that's sort of like what I'm assuming and so they're measuring different markers, because this is this. Does it do enough that it would be worthwhile to kind of like recommend that people take something like this all the time? And, yeah, antioxidants significantly improving insulin resistance parameters. That's important for PCOS. So, rather than go out and look for an antioxidant pill, which you could exist, the best way to get more antioxidants would be to increase the diversity of your diet. So we always talk about something called eating the rainbow, which means that each individual fruit and vegetable you know how they're all different colors, right? You get your red bell peppers, you get your leafy greens, you got what else? There's all kinds of different things and they're all different colors. Each of those different colors actually represents a different nutrient, a different type of antioxidant or polyphenol or other plant component that's going to be beneficial for your body. So the best way to get more antioxidants is just to actually eat more plant foods so you can get. I just found that interesting because if you increase the antioxidant content of your diet, you can see a direct connection between the fact that it might also improve your insulin resistance and I just think that's really cool.

Speaker 1: 30:52

So another one is on CoQ10, which has been around and sort of the ethos about PCOS for a while and the conclusion says that based on the current evidence, it could be considered that the addition of CoQ10 is a safe therapy to improve PCOS by improving insulin resistance, increasing sex hormone levels so it increased FSH, follicle stimulating hormone, reduced testosterone and improving blood lipids, so reduced triglycerides, ldl and increased HDL, which is sort of like your good cholesterol. So CoQ10, I've been using with clients for a while when it comes to supplementation. One of the key things to remember is that just because it says that it contains CoQ10 on the bottle doesn't mean that it's going to be that helpful, simply because supplements are not super well regulated with. Well, with a lot of things they're not really well regulated. But a big thing that I find people doing is they're just like oh, I should take CoQ10. Okay, and they go on Amazon and they're like CoQ10, they just search and then whatever is like the cheapest one that comes up, they're going to buy that.

Speaker 1: 32:05

The potency is important. So with something like CoQ10, I mean, you can get ranges of milligram amounts, and the cheaper the supplement generally, the less potent it is. So if you could be taking something every day and it might be helping, but if the potency is not strong enough, is it really going to do that much for you? This is why, when it comes to supplementation, I'm big on kind of a you get what you pay for attitude, and I know that that gets tough with. Supplements can be very expensive, especially good quality ones. That's why I recommend all my supplements through Fullscript, which is a practitioner, specific sort of supplement wholesaler, I guess, and they only carry certain brands that like are more what we would call therapeutic grades, so they're going to be higher potency, higher quality, they're going to be third party tested so they don't have like a bunch of lead in them and stuff, which is a big problem in supplement industry. Anyway, that's another story for another time.

Speaker 1: 33:11

Thank you, be careful about taking any of this information and being like okay, I'm gonna go to I don't know HB and buy like the Nature-Made CoQ10. It may help, but if you're looking to really target something specific in PCOS or you want to take a supplement and it actually do something for you. I generally think like sticking to one thing that you can pay more for the higher quality, more potent version of, as long as it's safe to do so, don't get yourself into trouble. Taking too much of something is the better option than being like I'm gonna take this really low quality CoQ10 and this and this and this and this and this and that You're gonna get more bang for your buck by just spend 60 bucks on the really good CoQ10 and, just you know, don't do the other stuff or do the other stuff later or fix your diet or whatever it may be.

Speaker 1: 34:07

Another study on curcumin showed that the ingestion of curcumin decreased body mass index. Love. That for us improved the fasting glucose, the insulin resistance cholesterol and, interesting enough, c-reactive protein, which is a marker of chronic inflammation. So that was cool. You know one sort of little piece of evidence that curcumin could be potentially something helpful for inflammation. We've known this in the sort of functional nutrition space for a long time. A lot of the anti-inflammatory sort of compounded supplements that you'll see on something like full script if you search like inflammation are going to have curcumin in them.

Speaker 1: 34:55

There's a product that I use a lot for like if I get like a headache or something that has a lot of curcumin in it and it'll knock it right out, because it's kind of a similar effect to ibuprofen, right, but just like in a more in what more natural way. So anyway, I thought that was interesting. There was also a study on omega-3s which come from fish consumption, and this one found that if you didn't take the fish oils for more than eight weeks it could improve the insulin status a bit. But you would get the most effective use of that fish oil supplement for alleviating metabolic issues if you took it for longer than eight weeks. And I included this one because we've known forever that eating more fish is like good for you. Everybody talks about that, right. But what I thought was interesting was their kind of conclusions here that, based on the different studies, they could tell that you know the studies that were shorter it started to show maybe a little bit of improvement, but the longer that the person took the fish oil, the more improvements happen. That makes logical sense, right.

Speaker 1: 36:07

But a lot of nutrition studies or supplement studies, unfortunately, are kind of designed in a very short period of time, and there's a lot of reasons for that. People are not super compliant about taking things and it can kind of mess up the study and whatever. But what I always tell my clients as a practitioner is like if you're going to do a supplement, give it three months at least before you give up on it or before you change something else. Just because supplements are not like prescription medications, they can work. They can do a lot. If they couldn't, then there wouldn't be so many warnings, warning labels about them and stuff. If they were totally benign and couldn't do anything for you, they just flushed right out of your body. There wouldn't be so many problems with people, I don't know, overdoing it on vitamin D or whatever.

Speaker 1: 36:53

So they do something depending on the potency again, but you're not going to get very much out of a supplement if you take it. It's a week or you forget it or you're just not taking it. That often. You're not sticking with it. You're taking it, taking one bottle of it and then giving up. They're just not going to do much for you unless you're consistent with them. It's very similar to eating your fruits and veggies. If you're not consistently eating your fruits and veggies every day, it's obviously better to have one serving of fruits and veggies a month than to have none. But you're going to get more of a benefit from that sort of daily habit and change because a lot of supplements are, they're concentrated components of food and you got to eat a lot of food to start noticing changes, anyways. So that's.

Speaker 1: 37:41

I thought that one was interesting to include. Another one that I thought was interesting on folic acid. I found that folic acid supplementation so folic acid is a B vitamin that's in a lot of prenatals, improved BMI, and in those with homocysteine levels higher than 15 and in women with PCOS. So the reason I included this one obviously everybody knows it's good to take a multivitamin, a prenatal I love a good prenatal.

Speaker 1: 38:11

But what I thought was kind of interesting here was and of course they didn't specifically say this but the connection because those with PCOS do tend to have higher homocysteine levels. Homocysteine is kind of an inflammation marker, but it also can be high in those who have the MTHFR gene mutation, which is the gene mutation that makes it difficult for you to methylate or properly break down B vitamins. And so if you are struggling to break down B vitamins and you're kind of low in folic acid or whatever, then your homocysteine levels can get higher. Your homocysteine levels can also get higher if you eat a lot of fast food and things like that. But what we kind of see a connection between is MTHFR gene mutations and those with PCOS. So I just thought it was interesting that folic acid improved the BMI in those who had high homocysteine levels, because that's indicative of potentially methylating issue and women with PCOS. So what I'm getting from that is like potentially more of a connection between MTHFR and PCOS, right, like maybe being more at risk for that, which I definitely think is probably true.

Speaker 1: 39:17

And then also the fact that having an issue, a genetic issue like that, with breaking down B vitamins, could be something that might inflame you to the point where you might have difficulty letting go of body weight and so just simply taking a B vitamin supplement, even a non-methylated one although I think a methylated one would be even better, so that would be methylfolate, but that could potentially help you drop some body fat. There are a lot of things like that with PCOS where it's kind of mysterious. It's like well, why is this person holding on to so much fat? I mean, they're eating the right amount, they're doing this, they're exercising, they're doing that these little subtle sort of genetic things and hormonal things that can get in the way, and so I don't know. I just thought that one was interesting to include.

Speaker 1: 40:07

I'm going to do an analysis about anositol. You guys already know about anositol, but it was kind of cool to see another study sort of showing that the anositols like you would get in ovozitol that's the popular one that everybody talks about but there are a lot of different formulations of anositol products that are the same thing as ovozitol, just different brands. By the way, I will link to ones that I have links for, supplements that I have links for or ones that I have recommendations for in the description of this episode, if you want to check them out. And obviously if you buy through those links, I'll get a little commission. So I appreciate it, but I would not steer you wrong. I will only put links to ones that I actually use with different people or myself, ones that I would trust. I don't have a link for every single one of these things, but anyway, what I thought was interesting about this was that, even though we've known for a while that anositol is something good for PCOS, it's one of the few supplements that actually most people agree on. What was cool was that it found that regular use of anositol was pretty much just as good as metformin, if not maybe better, and definitely better if you combine the two. I just thought that was pretty neat, because everybody talks about supplements like they can't do anything for you or they're just throwing you, just throwing your money down the toilet. But no, this is showing better outcomes or potentially on par outcomes with even a prescription medication. So yeah, love that for us.

Speaker 1: 41:45

There was another study on NAC, which, if you guys have listened to podcasts of mine before, you'll know, is one of my favorite supplements for PCOS. I recommend it a lot. Nac is short for inacetylcysteine and it is a precursor to glutathione, which is your body's sort of master antioxidant. The reason that I usually recommend taking NAC rather than just glutathione is that glutathione on its own is not real well absorbed, so you don't get as much out of it, whereas NAC is going to convert to glutathione in the body and you tend to get better conversion results that way, so you get more benefit. This is this specifically they were looking at some hormone levels in PCOS, so a lot of these other ones were looking at metabolic parameters like insulin, glucose, weight, you know that kind of thing. But this one was looking specifically at hormones. So it found that NAC significantly reduced total testosterone levels, increased follicle stimulating hormone levels which we like and estrogen levels. Now, if you're estrogen dominant, don't get freaked out about that, because estrogen is a complicated subject. So this is an increase in beneficial estrogens, but it's nice to see that kind of thing.

Speaker 1: 43:00

People are on the fence, I think, in general about how beneficial it is for PCOS or not, I think a lot of it has to do, honestly, with the fact that there are different phenotypes of PCOS. Those who have more of an inflammatory style of PCOS are going to benefit more from those antioxidants, nac being one of them, versus if you're very insulin resistant, you might benefit more from other things. But yeah, I just thought that was a nice one to see a little bit more evidence for NAC Response for resveratrol, which is also a component of plant foods. Resveratrol they talk a lot about with red wine, right, but you really get more of it from things like dark chocolate or berries Dark berries, it's kind of that dark grapes, that kind of thing and so they found that resveratrol was effective at reducing levels of testosterone luteinizing hormone, and DHEA sulfate, dhea-s. So resveratrol was also helpful in combination with other treatments for hyperlipidemia, so high cholesterol stuff like that. So another plant food. Okay. So those are the nutrients.

Speaker 1: 44:19

I don't know how long this podcast has gone on. It may be too long. If I put this into two parts it's because I feel like I've been talking forever about reading these studies. I hope you are, if you are still here. You are invested and I love you for staying.

Speaker 1: 44:36

But last couple things are lifestyle related. So exercise and sleep. There were a couple of studies on that that I thought were really interesting. So the exercise study found that exercise could significantly lower these serum levels of C-reactive protein, so CRP remember that's that inflammation marker and especially in individuals who were older than 30 years of age, it was really, really helpful. So we've talked before about as you age with PCOS, inflammation becomes more of a problem typically, and so you need to alter things to kind of focus a little bit more on that. And what's cool is that we know that exercise improves insulin levels, but it's nice to see that it also can improve inflammation levels.

Speaker 1: 45:27

They don't specifically say what type of exercise, just regular exercise, and the more that I read about exercise, the less convincing I find the evidence that you need to only do gentle exercises for PCOS. I've never really totally believed that. What I do believe is that you should not push yourself too hard. I think a lot of us with PCOS kind of have like body image stuff and we tend to be perfectionists and so sometimes we can like really overdo it. You know, I do pole dancing, which is like it's like a type of acrobatic, so you're up on the pole, you're pulling your body and all that. And I was thinking of back to how, when I was really really invested in it, I was going like four or five times a week and I kept injuring myself Even though all the people around me weren't.

Speaker 1: 46:14

Well, part of the thing about it is that with PCOS you got to be gentler with your body. You have to give your body a little bit more time to recover from things. So there's a fine balance with that and with not doing enough. But inflammation is kind of a big key here, because working out, tearing muscle fibers is a little bit inflammatory and so there has to be enough rest and that's why I'm not like huge on waking up at 4am to go to boot camp. I just don't think it's that good for your hormones. Anyway, that said, any kind of exercise that you find fun is going to be beneficial and can help to reduce your inflammation.

Speaker 1: 46:52

The last one was a sleep study, which I love because obviously we've been talking about stress and sleep and how that impacts your hormones for a while. But this one found that, specifically in those of PCOS, not getting having sleep disturbances which was more common in PCOS as well was associated with having significantly higher cholesterol levels, glucose levels, having a higher BMI all these different things that waste circumference, and so sleep is multifactorial, right? Sleep disturbances are not always your fault, especially if you know if you have a good bedtime routine and you're trying to get enough sleep, but you can't. That's another issue. I do have a podcast about that, by the way, you may want to look back at like, like, if it says anything about, like, adrenals, cortisol, that kind of stuff that'd be interesting for you. But having more sleep is going to be much better for the balance of not just your energy but also these other factors, and it just leads, lends credence, to the idea once again that getting enough sleep is just as important as eating well or exercising for PCOS, because if you're not getting enough sleep, you're raising your risk of this other stuff and it can be a vicious cycle. So if you are not getting enough sleep because you're not placing it as a priority for yourself, place it as a priority. If you're having other issues, look into your adrenals. Anyway, so those are some of the studies.

Speaker 1: 48:29

I hope you found this interesting. I definitely found it interesting perusing them and you know, if you've never checked out PubMed, you might love it. You might have the time of your life on there. So definitely look at it if you never have. Definitely a much better place to go if you ever have a question, rather than just googling stuff, because you know anything can come up on the internet. But, yeah, thanks for being here. Thank you guys for being one of those 50,000 downloads. I appreciate you and if you haven't yet, if you enjoyed this podcast, please leave a review. Five Star Reviews really helped the podcast. I'd love to get to 100,000 downloads right, gotta have a motivator for me. So, yeah, if you haven't done that, please do. And if you are interested in joining that group program, definitely check that out. Would love to see you and, yeah, thanks for being here. Talk to you guys soon. Bye.