Peri-menopause: Hormones, HRT, and why a personalised approach is the way of the future. Interview with Kristin Mallon

On this week's episode I am delighted to be joined by  Kristin Mallon, the visionary CEO behind Femgevity, for a deep dive into perimenopause and all things associated with that.

Kristin explains what perimenopause REALLY is, what the symptoms are and how you can best manage it.

We talk about HRT, the myths and the facts and the need for women going through the perimenopause to work with healthcare providers who specialise in it, rather than just your GP.

Kristin makes excellent points regarding the necessity of finding healthcare providers who are not just well-informed but who also specialize in hormonal imbalances and women's health issues, like endometriosis and fibroids. It's a clarion call to action for women to become the stewards of their own health, engaging with practitioners who can guide them through these complex decisions with seasoned expertise.
She also makes an excellent point regarding the complexities when you have children later in life and the symptoms of perimenopause might well be exarcebated by postpartum life, and the need for your healthcare and fitness- professionals to be aware of this and take it into account

The conversation then shifts towards a holistic approach to hormone balancing, advocating for strategies that include diet, supplements, and bioidenticals.

Kristin shares insights on the proactive steps women can take, akin to planning for financial retirement, ensuring their health portfolio is robust and balanced.

Finally I respond to some emails I had in after the Gut Health interview I did with Josh Dech. Some of you asked whether I agreed with his take that a high-protein high fat diet was the way to go. I explain what my thinking regarding this is and why I think soo many people feel better on a high-protein diet than they do on a carb-heavy diet..and it's nothing to di with protein and carbs!!

As always; HPNB still only has 5 billing cycles.

So this means that you not only get 3 months FREE access, no obligation!

BUT, if you decide you want to do the rest of the program, after only 5 months of paying $10/£8 a month you now get FREE LIFE TIME ACCESS! That's $50 max spend, in case you were wondering.

Though I'm not terribly active on  Instagram and Facebook you can follow us there. I am however active on Threads so find me there!

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Email peter@healthypostnatalbody.com if you have any questions, comments or want to suggest a guest/topic

Playing us out this week 

Transcript

Peter Lap: 0:00

Hey, welcome to the Healthy Post Natal Body Podcast with your Post Natal Expert, Peter Lap. That as w u, would be me. This is the podcast for the 11th of Feb 2024. You know, date before music means I have a guest on. I'm talking to Kristin Mallon, who is the CEO and CO founder of Femgevity. We're talking menopause and perimenopause and all that sort of stuff. We're talking absolutely everything to do with perimenopause and menopause, including some very interesting bits what is it, what the symptoms are and all of that sort of stuff. How a personalized approach to perimenopause is and menopause is by far the best and the overlap between menopausal symptoms and potential pregnancy symptoms when you start having your babies a little bit later. There's a really important point that Kristin brought up. You're going to love this conversation. It's only half an hour after that I'm going to do the Gut health thing that we spoke about a while ago.

Peter Lap: 1:05

This is something in response to the podcast that I did with Josh Dech a while ago. So, without further ado, here we go. Let's start with the basics. There's apparently still some confusion about this. What is the perimenopause and what are some of the symptoms?

Kristin Mallon: 1:43

That's a great question because even in people that are in the know there's still a lot of confusion. Menopause from a medical perspective is just one day. It's one day where a woman has gone 12 months without having a menstrual cycle around the age of 51. The average age of menopause is 51. And there's no other explanation for it. Menopause can happen to women in their late 30s, 40s. It can even happen after 51 into their 50s, and so when a woman doesn't have a period for a year it doesn't necessarily mean she's a menopause. It could be another issue, it could be something with the ovaries or an ovulation or something like polycystic ovarian syndrome. So menopause specifically is no other explanation and it's when there's been no period for 12 months and it's literally one day. Now, colloquially we kind of talk about menopause as that time around that day, so maybe like the year or two leading up to it and maybe the year after menopause happens and the symptoms that kind of go along with that. Perimenopause is really like, just for a general speaking, like a woman's 40s. It can be 10 years long, it can be two months long, but it's the time where a woman is still having a regular menstrual cycle, usually every month, but it's kind of different than what she was experiencing for her whole life up to her teens, 20s and 30s. It can be a little bit shorter, heavier, longer, more time in between and there's a lot of hormonal shifts and hormonal symptoms. So the symptoms of menopause are your classic what are called basermotor symptoms or VMS, and that's your hot flashes, or the symptoms of the significantly fluctuating estrogen level. The hot flashes come from estrogen being super high, then super low, then super high, and so the effects of that for women a lot of times are neurologic. They can also be cardiac for some women, especially women of color, where women might have heart murmurs or because of the electrical signals in the heart they might have palpitations, but it's mainly numbness, tingling neurological symptoms. Sometimes it's even headaches, fibromyalgia symptoms, joint pain, muscle pain, vague kind of neurological symptoms of menopause.

Kristin Mallon: 4:03

Harem, menopause is pretty much everything else under the sun and I always really educate women that if you're feeling something different or something not like yourself, or fatigue or any type of depression, anxiety, difficulty sleeping, it could be in your 40s, it could be related to perimenopause not always, but that's a really great stone to unearth that a lot of women don't unearth. So perimenopause is more of all the different types of symptoms. This is when you can have changes in your vision, you can have changes in taste and women will have breast tenderness. They'll have more PMS, more menstrual cramping. They'll have lots of issues with sleep. Brain fog forgetting things is pretty common. They'll have issues with anxiety, depression. And these are all because hormones are changing, progesterone is dropping. That affects the gabin neurotransmitters. You know that the science behind it is kind of complex, or it can be complex, and that is really a very long time leading up to the menopausal time, in the menopausal transition.

Peter Lap: 5:05

Yeah, and that's a great, very complete, coherent answer, because the interesting thing for me is I've been married for like 17 years now and my wife is a little bit older than I am, but not that much older, and I'm 49. So we've just been through that whole thing and the thing that mainly surprised me was the reluctance that a lot of my clients have the same my wife has is the reluctance to say perimenopause when the symptoms start coming on. And I am, as I like to remind listeners, I'm just a middle-aged white guy, right? So my wife presents symptoms and I immediately go well, if you consider it, it could be perimenopause, because I'm a jackass and I don't realise that there's a whole stigma attached to that side of things. Why is that stigma still so ridiculously prevalent? Now, if you mention something when someone is, say, 44, 45 years old, well, have you considered it could be dots? Let's say the reaction I used to get was not necessarily positive when I mentioned after Wendy.

Kristin Mallon: 6:08

Yeah. So I think that menopause really has women confront a lot of their mortality because they're losing reproductive longevity and they're losing the vitality or quote unquote vitality, because I think women can of course be equally vital after menopause, during menopause and kind of the archetype you know, to use Jungian archetypes of the maiden, you know, the fertile maiden, the reproductive, the reproductive qualities that women have is like a very significant contribution to society that is changing and evolving and transforming during the menopausal time. And so I think that's really difficult for a lot of women to confront. It's a real looming kind of overhanging. It's almost similar to like how some people don't talk about aging or some people don't even talk about death, and it's not that I want to say that menopause is like that, but in some ways it is the death of reproductive longevity. And there's, I think, a lot of work that needs to be done from the collective consciousness to kind of redefine and re-engage in this transformative time. You know, the butterfly doesn't look back at being a caterpillar and say, oh, I want to get rid of these wings and, you know, like, go back to the ground. So there is a lot of work to be done, but I'm a big optimist and so I like to look at, like, how far we've come in other areas of women's health, like, I think, how far we've come when we talk about miscarriage and when we talk about perinatal loss and when we talk about fertility. I mean 10, 15, 20 years ago those things were never mentioned, never talked about. It was incredibly taboo. And now we're starting to bring this topic to light a little bit more.

Kristin Mallon: 7:49

I don't think we've landed on exactly how we want to address menopause, what the word should be. If we just want to own menopause and be like this is the word we're going to use and we're just redefining it. Or if we want to kind of call it an upgrade, or if we want to call it a change or a transformation and similar to perimenopause. I think that the jury's still out on kind of how we're. Are we going to start calling it hormonal shifts or hormonal changes or hormonal adjustments, and that's kind of even like in my company, we use different marketing tactics because different words will resonate differently with different women. So women are like it's perimenopause. I'm so glad I feel heard. I want to get help for perimenopause. Thank you for not gaslighting me and addressing it. And some women are saying well, it's not perimenopause, because I'm too young for that, and it's just hormonal shifts or hormonal adjustments that are taking place.

Peter Lap: 8:37

Yeah, because the reason I'm asking is because the first step towards getting help is admitting that something might be occurring. Right, it's. I mean, I didn't bring it up just to be a jackass. Like I said, I'm a middle-aged white guy, so my default position used to very much be I'm trying to work on this when my wife presents a problem, I present the solution. Right, I'm of that generation.

Kristin Mallon: 9:03

I don't listen, I just go with the bomb, I can fix this right, that's perfect.

Peter Lap: 9:10

But if, because, if you don't want to say that there's something happening or something, especially because it's tied to, like you said, this big scary thing of that. A lot of women, I think, especially certain generations, have been raised on this idea that after 50, life is over, and I know that they say 50 is the new 40 and 40 is the new 30 and all those slogans, but they never actually work and they never actually stick. They're just a reminder of the fleeting nature of time and vitality, if you will. And, like you said, it is getting a bit better, but it's. I think it's an important thing to have happened to that we remove that stigma around this, that we could say, okay, something is happening. I might ask some professionals, such as yourself, for a bit of help here, and because that way the conversation isn't uncomfortable.

Kristin Mallon: 10:05

Yeah, and so what we've also done, like at Femme Jeviti Health, is we've kind of we're using the word longevity medicine to kind of help women, you know, because we have a lot of women. It's interesting the generations are very different and as a certified nurse, midwife, I kind of saw this with birth how women in their 20s collectively look at birth and the thoughts they have about it are really similar not always, but generally. And then women in their 30s and across all different types of backgrounds and economics and even race, I find a lot of similarities in the generations, and so I think that that's kind of also happening here, because we have a lot of women that are coming to my company in their 30s like super excited. Oh my gosh, I'm so excited that you're doing longevity medicine and I want to understand perimenopause because I know I'm going to be in that in my 40s. Let's get started. Tell me what I need to do, what testing do I need to be run.

Kristin Mallon: 10:59

They're like super proactive, which is very different than how women in their 40s are. They're kind of in between, and women in their 50s are much more resistant to kind of what we're doing because they haven't had it for the 50 years of their life. They've only really been exposed to it for maybe for the past year, five years, 10 years, and so we use that phrase longevity medicine to kind of encompass more, that it's not just about perimenopause and menopause. It is because I always say if you don't kind of manage menopause correctly, it's the kryptonite of feminine longevity. It's really it can have women take significant setbacks if they don't kind of use it as an opportunity. It's really like a very significant swing. It's like the significant, huge opportunity to get on top of your health and if you don't move in that direction it can be like a, it can kind of be a dirt. So using that term longevity medicine helps us to kind of broaden the topic and make women that might be resistant to it a little bit more comfortable.

Peter Lap: 12:01

Yeah, because I see a lot of women who are, let's say, late 40s Women come to me in two stages, usually postpartum it's the one they've just had a kid or years after they've found a kid, right, because of you know, people have to go back to work and all that sort of stuff, and only after 10, 15 years do some of them find the time or are economically able to actually start working on themselves, on their own health a little bit.

Peter Lap: 12:31

They're finally finally at the top of the tree, so to speak, as I like to say. But what they often the reluctance to do anything with regards to, like bare menopause or menopause and even the hot flashes and all that sort of stuff. Everybody kind of remember, I don't know, not sure if you watch it, but House of Cards, the remake, so to speak, obviously when we could still watch it. So the first couple of series, she always stood in front of the fridge, right, she was sort of in front of the fridge to cool down and that was our cue as the viewer to realize that she was going through hot flashes. I don't think it was ever discussed. Kevin Spacey just walked past and go oh, you're feeling one again.

Peter Lap: 13:21

Then he walked out of the room because you thought he was a caring sort of president or whatever he was, but the reluctance I see with a lot of women that age to actually take action with regards to HRT. They're very concerned about HRT, especially on the NHS in the UK. So we have this basically, the way the NHS works is you go to your GP, you say I'm going for this, and they say, yeah, you're going for this. Here's a bunch of patches, let's see if these work. And if these don't work, then we'll try the different ones.

Peter Lap: 13:52

And they're very generic medicine. They work a treat for my wife. They don't work for everybody, but they're very reluctant to try this. And then, before you know it, they are talking to dentists and I kid you not that are also selling perimenopause sort of supplements and all that sort of stuff. And the trick, of course, is to only deal with people who know what you're doing, what they're doing, such as yourself, rather than that can actually help you plan things. So what are some of the things that you recommend women do to help make that journey a bit easier?

Kristin Mallon: 14:26

Yeah, so I think you touched on a lot of really important things, like one is to go all the way back to the beginning of what you just said, that the postpartum time, right, so women are having babies later and a lot of women are having babies into the perimenopausal period, and so this aspect of women giving birth in their late 30s, 38, 39, early 40s, 40 to 45, let's say, when they're postpartum, they're doubling, tripling, 10xing, possibly even, I believe, the symptoms of perimenopaus and postnatal, and so they don't understand why they're more fatigued, they're more tired, they're more depressed, they're more anxious, they have more vaginal dryness, let's say, or different symptoms that go along with both in their 40s than they do with their counterparts a woman who has a baby of the same age, that's in her 30s or 20s and I think it kind of leaves them sometimes feeling unheard and gaslit and lost. And I just am so eager to bring attention to the fact that your postnatal and perimenopausal. We actually have some information on our website about it and it's pretty popular content that's consumed on our website because I don't think it's addressed nearly enough in our society. So I just wanna give a little shout out to that and, as women kind of get into their 40s and they're experiencing their perimenopausal symptoms. A lot of times they just chalk it up to I'm experiencing fatigue because I have little kids, and that may or may not be the case, because, yes, it's that, but it could also be this and that, this, the postnatal time and the perimenopausal time, and the perimenopausal time. There's a lot to do about.

Kristin Mallon: 16:07

Postnatal, there's some stuff to do about too, but I think just that knowledge is super helpful when it comes to HRT and this is where the generations really, I think, speak really loudly. It just left when I was talking to a group of women and it was funny, cause like there were some in their 50s, some in their 40s and like a few in their 30s, and like they all, like they had the very similar generational views and I think it's just the type of content we consume for the ages that we are at different times in our lives. But HRT has an incredible stigma because of the WHO study that was published in 2003. And I don't know if you know a lot about that study, but it probably as a lot of the big longevity doctors in our time, like Dr Peter Atia and Dr Andrew Hubberman. It probably was like one of the biggest mistakes that medicine has made in the last 100 years by publishing a study and incorrectly publishing the data in the study to say that HRT causes breast cancer and that's now since been proven to not be true. And if you like you know I always say like if you don't read the evidence, if you don't read it yourself, you're gonna believe what the consensus believes, like what the general consensus believes. So there's a lot of really good resources. Now there's a great book called Estrogen Matters. That book, estrogen Matters, has a website which links to all the studies which kind of have disproven this theory.

Kristin Mallon: 17:29

We sometimes, even on Femjavid health, get into argument not arguments, but people. We post stuff about breast cancer and estrogen and we're posting facts and the general consensus is you're gonna give people breast cancer and you're gonna hurt people. And I have a brocogene and I can't take HRT, which is absolutely not true. So and I know that they're not reading the information, like I know that that's just like a collective belief that they're regurgitating it, someone else's belief that they're repeating to me because I'm like, if you read it, I know you would equally see, like what I'm seeing, that in the study, women who are in the estrogen only arm had a decrease in breast cancer.

Kristin Mallon: 18:06

So I think the hesitancy for the last 20, the last 20 years to use HRT by clinicians and to use HRT by women has left this huge gap in the understanding from the clinician side and from the patient side, and so that's why you have a lot of clinicians that don't know anything about it and the only thing that they really know and I don't know how it is in the UK, but I would guess it's a little bit similar that in the US we have drug reps that come in and the drug rep will come in and be like this is a patch you can use for estrogen, this is a pellet you can use for, you know, female hormone replacement therapy. And that's the only education that a doctor or clinician is getting about HRT. So for the last 20 years, my education had to come from international literature, self-educating, being in the small community of people who were prescribing HRT for years and years and years and decades and using it in clinical therapy over and over again, much, much beyond patches. And so I think, whenever, when it comes to what should a woman do, companies like mine, like Femme Jevedee Health are starting to crop up more, and they always tell women this you know women's health and again I'm gonna say this and you're gonna be like I thought you said you're an opanist, but women's health has been bucketed, so everything's just been like dumped into one category. So you have an OBGYN.

Kristin Mallon: 19:27

These poor OBGYNs have to be experts in childbirth, pregnancy, nutrition and pregnancy breastfeeding. Now we're gonna get into gynecology ovarian cysts, fibroids, cervical cancers like and gynecological surgery, in addition to C-sections and the surgeries that like the DNCs, the surgeries that go along with pregnancy. That is way too much for one specialty to handle, and so I always tell women, when you're looking for something in gynecology or obstetrics specifically, you wanna go to someone where, when they look, you look at their list of patients and they're seeing 25 patients in a day, or 15 patients in a day, or some people see 40 patients in a day. The bulk of the patients that they're seeing is what you're trying to have addressed. So if you have fibroids, you wanna go to someone that out of 15 patients, 10 of them are patients with fibroids. If you have endometriosis, the same thing. And OBGYNs are subspecializing themselves. They're picking and choosing. That's definitely happening in the US and I would assume it's gonna start to happen in other areas too.

Kristin Mallon: 20:31

We have OBGYNs now that are becoming breast specialists, so if you have a breast lump and abscess you can actually go to a breast specialist. That every single person that they see is coming to them for a breast issue. So they have lots of experience, lots of knowledge about that very specific topic. And hormone replacement therapy and menopause is no different, and so I always encourage women and it's usually gonna be an internist or an OBGYN, so probably not a dentist, because I bet in any given day, like 20 patients they're gonna see are about teeth you wanna go see someone who's working with patient after patient after patient on a hormonal balancing issue, a female hormonal balancing issue, and that can be broad. That could be PCOS, that could be fertility, that could be menopause, perimenopause, because they all do tend to go together. There's a lot of overlap there.

Kristin Mallon: 21:18

So that's the first thing, and the second thing is is if you're just going to your OBGYN and you don't know where to go and you're just trying to kind of get a lay of the land, or you wanna see like, what does my OBGYN know? And that's a very common place for a lot of women to start is to ask for labs, because a lot of there's still some debate. We know that labs are absolutely necessary. They're half of the equation. You need the symptoms, which are half of the equation, and the labs, which are the second half of the equation, to. If they're just kind of gonna give you a patch and send you on your way, just be like well, can I also get a hormone panel done as comprehensive as your insurance will cover and as comprehensive as they're comfortable with, because you can then take that information and that data and ultimately look and find for menopause or perimenopause or hormonal balancing expert and give them that information. So those are the kind of places I would say to start.

Peter Lap: 22:10

Yeah, and that is an excellent point that you raised there about, about data because I did an interview with I think it was Heidi Davis I'm sure it was Heidi Davis a while ago who is from a FemTech company. They're creating, or they have created, one of those wearable devices that can help women track their perimenopausal symptoms so that you don't have to self-report everything to your doctor. A lot of women here go to the GP when they have issues. That's their first stop, so they don't go to the OBG or GYN, they go to the GP first. It's exactly the problem they're encountering. It's exactly what you said.

Peter Lap: 22:55

I trained some GPs and for a long time there were some discussions about why are GP so terrible with postpartum issues. Then one of my GP clients said I see 2,500 people a year. The vast majority of them are older women with sniffles. I see maybe five pregnant women a year. He said how would I know anything about postpartum issues? I don't even see you when the baby is born. I see you for the six-week checkup to make sure that your baby is still alive. That's fundamentally what that's about. He said I know nothing about all the other stuff. Then I had a female GP who fundamentally said the same thing. She came to me with health issues and she said because I don't know what's happening here, I said no, that makes sense. I do this all day and you don't, and therefore you just don't know Seeing someone who really specializes in it, because it was something that Heidi mentioned this as well. It's really odd.

Peter Lap: 23:51

We have a women's health section, which is 50 percent of the population, which is indeed usually done by one or four percent. That's studied. Women's health and men's health covers everything and that's completely specialized and all that sort of stuff. I know that there's a lot of overlap between women's and men's health but, like you said, there are a lot of complicated things in Working with somebody who deals with this stuff all the time, who specializes in stuff, is, in my opinion, always a much better idea than working with somebody who just generically, is pretty good and pretty familiar with X, y, z and all that sort of stuff. The same goes for health and fitness professionals. By the way, if you're going for the menopause and you're working with a PT who only trains 20-year-olds, you need to find another PT. In my humble opinion, that is just. You're going to get better results with somebody who knows what they're doing.

Kristin Mallon: 24:46

Yeah, I'll say on the clinician side of that, it's just so true. Once I started specializing in, when I started my career, I was doing pregnancy. That was really the bulk of what I was doing, because I'm a midwife and I was working with pregnancy and I was working with women giving birth. It's a wonderful craft but a lot of it eventually becomes very similar. I was after a few years. I was looking for something that was a little more challenging and so I started to get into the field of hormone balancing, specifically around fertility, because a lot of women Very early in my career I started to look at data and symptoms and put them together. What I learned in so many years over the probably past 15 years of working with women with fertility, PCOS and hypothyroidism and all the different hormonal issues, is just I do it so much, Just my experience has taught me so, so, so much. That's just invaluable to a counterpart of mine who might only be doing pregnancy and childbirth or might only be doing gynecological cysts, so variances, cervical abnormalities, things like that.

Peter Lap: 26:02

Yeah, absolutely. That's the beauty. If you're part of what you are at Femme Jeffety Health, if you're part of a network of experts that know what they're talking about, then you have the network around you. Then you can easily go. This is not what I do, but this is what Dr Woss's name does. I'll pass you over to her, rather than there being this uncomfortable and I've seen people do this this uncomfortable silence when a woman asks a question and then almost in a yeah, there's some say I will get back here and they Google something, and then they come back with whatever Google tells them without actually genuinely understanding why Google tells them. Tells them, but whatever you said this, certain studies come out.

Peter Lap: 26:50

You read the study, like myself. I have a PhD in a non-health-related field, so I kind of know how to read the study, but that doesn't mean I am expert in the fields of that particular study. So I can read a nutrition study, I can see whether it's a good one or a bad one because of the data points and whether the data matches. But I can't. I don't hold the same qualifications as a registered dietician or some of the biolane. There's a PhD in that particular field. We're not on the same level. So if I have a question I can ask a specialist rather than having to blot my way through the answer in an effort to convince my client that I kind of know what I'm talking about. So one of the two things that you would always recommend somebody does when they think they might be going through that Pairing Monopausal stage, when they say 41, 42 years old and they, like you said, they're feeling a bit, they're feeling that things are changing a little bit. How do you even know whether it's Pairing Monopausal or whether it's something else?

Kristin Mallon: 27:57

Yeah. So a lot of times it can be really hard. It can even be hard for us as clinicians to diagnose Pairing Monopausal specifically. Sometimes. In a lot of cases, it is a diagnosis by exclusion checking to make sure it's not some other type of anemia or vitamin deficiency, methylation issue or hypothyroidism which very much mimics the Pairing Monopausal symptoms. For sure, and that's where the data really comes into play. I mean, we also just have the facts that hormones start to go down at 31.

Kristin Mallon: 28:32

By the time a woman is 40, she's lost 80% of her progesterone that she had in her early 20s and progesterone is a precursor sex steroid hormone and what progesterone is responsible for in terms of the GABA pathways in the brain and calming the brain down, cns excitation and how that will affect sleep, anxiety, depression, all of those feelings that can then, you know, lack of chronic lack of sleep can then trigger into many, many other symptoms.

Kristin Mallon: 29:01

So it's a little bit of just having the conversation with an expert and someone who can kind of like I do, like be like okay, I've worked with thousands of women over this many years and they've kind of said similar things.

Kristin Mallon: 29:12

I see these patterns here and then this is what I would recommend, based on what you're saying, so that I think, getting the data, the laboratory information, and not being afraid of hormone balancing. And when I say hormone balancing, that can be done in a lot of different ways. It doesn't have to just be done with HRT. It can be done with topicals, it can be done with creams, it can be done with bioidenticals, nutraceuticals, supplements, especially in the early stages, when the symptoms are kind of vague that's usually when not needing hormones and using diet and supplements can be very, very effective. And so to the earlier that started, the more support a woman is going to feel and the less of the crash that happens in menopause, when you know the hormones are coming down, down, down, down, down and then, boom, all of a sudden the symptoms are coming to the surface. And so I think that those can kind of be some really helpful tips, and just this conversation of the awareness of, oh, I'm in my 40s and what I'm experiencing might be related to hormonal shifts.

Peter Lap: 30:16

Yeah, especially because it's like you said. It's a normal thing to occur, so there is no need to feel embarrassed or ashamed. Everybody in their 40s, every woman in their 40s let me put it that way is going to go through something like this. And although one of one of my these friends, like you mentioned earlier, she had it very early on in her life and she went for everything ridiculously early on. But those are the exceptions and it's still. It's going to happen at some stage, right? Unless you believe the wrong kind of doctors that say you can put this stuff off ever and ever and ever, usually through cutting out sugar and whatever they sell. You're going to go through this at some stage, or your friends are going to go through this at some stage, and you're probably best off dealing with it at the early stages rather than later on so do you recommend, when people get their labs and all that sort of stuff, that they learn how to look at their labs for themselves a little bit as well?

Peter Lap: 31:17

Why are you like? Actually, as long as you have the data you could take to your GP, you'll be okay.

Kristin Mallon: 31:22

Yeah, so I think I'm very different about labs and I think the average clinician and probably even the average consumer I'd like to think I'm ahead of my time but I really think every person and I really do women's health more than men's health, but probably for men's health too should get blood work done every year. Yeah, there's a lot of different ways to categorize that and put that. There's a lot of different apps now that will start to chart these labs for you really really well, it's just another form of tracking. So people use rings and they use wearables to track their exercise. Well, lab values at least every year is really helpful.

Kristin Mallon: 32:05

I think, starting early, like 18 even so, I know that seems very counterintuitive because I think, most especially in the older generations, you only go to the doctor when you're sick, and that makes sense. That that's why we have sick care. But there's more companies like mine, more doctors like the type of practice that we are coming to the surface, which are really working more towards optimal health care or optimizing health. That's where we're really going to want to look at that data and be able to say, okay, here's the data that we've been collecting every single year. Here is the wearable data so we can track sleep and we can track exercise and we can track meditation or sauna use I mean everything and then we can start to see patterns emerging. That's so valuable.

Kristin Mallon: 32:48

So I always say the earlier the better, because people are like when do you recommend someone get Permanent Apostle Labs? I'm like now, today, how old are you 18? Today, get it at 18, get it at 36, get it at 54, whatever age you're starting at. And I always say it's like investing in a 401k or investing in some sort of retirement. There's a lot you can do to make up for it, because a lot of times, if you feel like you know my mom says this to me she's like I'm in my sixties and I missed out. And you know, I feel like I'm too old and I can't do all the things that I should have been doing and I'm like that's absolutely not true. Like you have more money, you have more time, you have the ability to, like, put your life and energy into. So there's things that you have that a woman in her 30s with two young kids doesn't have. So optimize those and let's use those to catch you up, so to speak, in terms of the investing in the health retirement fund.

Peter Lap: 33:41

Yeah, no, I completely agree with that. It's one of those things that someone else said this to me I can't remember who her name was on the podcast. He also said listen, the future of medicine has to lie in individualized self care, right as in, because everything is ranges currently. So you go to the GP and my wife goes to the GP, and you're both saying I'm not feeling well, and the doctor just come back and say, oh, your bloods are within range, right, and that means normal and that means there's nothing whatsoever wrong with you, whereas your doom might usually be at the very bottom end of the range and my wife might well be at the high end of the range, and then all of a sudden that switched around. That means there's something individually not quite right for you that needs to be addressed, and you only know that if you're indeed if, like you said, you're measuring trends and all that sort of stuff, right, so that makes complete and utter sense.

Peter Lap: 34:40

We've covered quite a bit and I know you're on a very tight schedule. Was there anything else you wanted to touch on?

Kristin Mallon: 34:46

I think that's good. I really want to thank you for giving me the opportunity to share, like really specifically the postpartum perimenopausal kind of crossover and overlap. I think that that's like a really important take home. And then the the significance of laboratory data and symptoms when it comes to perimenopause and menopause, the menopausal time, and and I would love to hear from anybody that has a thought or an idea about the whole like should we just go with menopause and embrace it and redefine it? Should we come up with new taxonomy and words to describe menopause and perimenopause? I would love to hear what people have to say about that.

Peter Lap: 35:23

No, that is a good point. I will throw that out on Fred's this afternoon and this episode will come out end of January. For anybody, this is recorded just before Christmas. But I will finish out on threads this afternoon and maybe put something in the outro when I do, before I actually do all the editing and all that sort of stuff. Lovely, I'm not happy. Note I will press stop record here, which, as always, is exactly what I did.

Peter Lap: 35:51

Thanks very much to Kristen for coming on. I mean, she's a ridiculously busy woman, so to take half an hour out of her day really is epically cool. Check out them, jevity. I will link to it them. Jevity healthcom. It's. It's an interesting approach. You know, I did something a while ago with regards to trackables and For those wearable things, and with regards to parent menopause and picking up Symptoms and having more reliable data and all that sort of stuff, and this ties in really nicely with that. So just, it's a telehealth company, so you know so and they personalize the approach and, like I said, there's some. There's an interesting overlap here between Between becoming a mother later on in life and by later on I mean anytime after 35, right, but especially early 40s and the potential for some of the the things that you're experiencing during pregnancy, actually being parent, menopause related as well. That's a really interesting point that that that Kristen brought up. So definitely go check them out.

Peter Lap: 37:05

Now I have had some reactions to the girls health episode I did with Josh deck a while ago and that's what we're going to talk about. That's what we're going to talk about now, because I had one or two emails coming and they mainly related to to the diet point. Now you know the gut health, like I like I said the reason I had Josh on, because it's not only because I like the Like the topic of gut health and also that he's not selling anything and he's been doing this for a long time. Right, and like he said, fundamentally, there's a lot of people who are not selling anything. And like he said, fundamentally the entire episode. Like he said he's not telling supplements and anything like that. But that doesn't mean we necessarily agree on everything. And because I had some emails coming saying Pete, you don't like the high, the high meat diet and that is fundamentally true. I very much.

Peter Lap: 38:09

I think the focus on protein in is massively over exaggerated in India. In the West, I Think most people hit their Protein macros well enough. The average American gets a hundred grams of protein, between 90 and 100 grams of protein in, and that's the sedentary Americans. So you know, and it's roughly the same, the same in the UK, according to the latest figures and I saw. I think fiber is much more interesting now.

Peter Lap: 38:39

The reason a lot of people feel better and because it does make sense, right, because what Josh was talking about was, you know, eating well for your gut. And one of the things, one of the go-to things for them, is Cutting out rubbish, cutting out especially ultra processed, hyper palatable foods and all that sort of stuff, as as, as he was pointing out as well, now his and you see this a lot of people on High protein diets, carnivore, keto and all that sort of stuff. They feel significantly better for it. And the my theory, my theory oh, why, because I can't seem to get the word out properly today my, my, my theory on that is that it is not so much due to the high fat, high protein content. I Think it's much more due to the fact that it's the fact that it's a whole food thing. But if you eat whole foods all the time and you know red meat and all red meats, like steak and all that sort of thing, is a whole food, then you're putting less Crabby stuff in your body and therefore your body responds better because you're eating more actual food. And my theory is and this is just my, my thinking, behind this right, there's very little research that that shows any of this, other than what Every dietitian in the world will tell you. You get your fiber in, you get eat main the whole foods and and it's and you'll feel better. And we know this, we know from. When I say there's little research, I mean there's little research specifically into why people feel better on a keto giant diet other than you know, for epilepsy and all that sort of stuff, the God's biome Needs the fiber, the, the little bacteria in in your Colon and your large intestines and all intestine and all those sort of needs that fiber to to work on and you know that's. That is why you feel great when you have a Fibrous diet.

Peter Lap: 41:02

I believe people who go Extremely high protein and low, low carb say low carb diet. The main reason they feel better is because they cut crap out. If your carbs consist of high quality carbohydrates, you know, then you are much like this feel much better for it. So To feel much better for it as well, instead of having like low quality carbohydrates and all that sort of stuff, does not make any sense. Do you know what I'm saying here? I said I think the benefit For that people feel from going high protein, high fat, but still whole food, is predominantly because it's still whole foods. Right. When you hear people talking about the carnivore diet and that eats take all day, every day and all that sort of stuff, they feel terrible for a few weeks and then they feel better. But they mainly feel better because they're not eating rubbish anymore. They're not feeling better because humans are designed to live on meat and meat alone. That is kind of what my point is. So I can see where Josh is coming from, but I don't necessarily agree with him that that is the solution. That's the high fat whole food diet. The high fat, high protein whole food diet is necessarily the way to go.

Peter Lap: 42:27

I personally don't think it matters that much. You know, I always say start your day with the fiber, as in when you're plowing your plate. Most people are fiber deficient and they're not protein deficient. So I think for most people to then start focusing on the protein kind of. I know why they're doing it. But if you're not protein deficient but you're fiber deficient, then you should probably focus more on the fiber element than you should focus on the protein element. That makes sense, right. Focus on the bits you're deficient in first. You don't focus on the stuff you already get enough of and then improve the quality of that. You focus on the stuff you don't get enough of to function optimally.

Peter Lap: 43:11

And a lot of people again, mainly in the west, but a lot of people in what we used to call first world countries they just get nowhere near enough fiber and the products they get with the protein and it could be low quality protein, but the products they get with the protein is low quality. Carbohydrate, right, and you need some starchy stuff and all that sort of stuff, sure, but you need your fiber, you need your veggies, you need your vegetables and you need your food. And most people don't get their fiber day. We know this from all the research. It's only fiber day and most people don't even reach up. So I think that's why people feel better and that's why I don't necessarily agree with Josh that the high protein, high fat diet alone is the solution. But again, like he said, he feels better for it. And if he feels better with that approach and he's tried several different ones, then I'm not going to argue with them.

Peter Lap: 44:14

I'm very much like I said in the podcast episode I'm a diet agnostic. I don't care what you eat. I genuinely don't. If you eat as well as you for yourself, as you can, and you feel great, then that's fine. Certain basic rules we should adhere to with regards to what's healthy for us and all that sort of stuff. Right, you can't eat pigment McDonald's every day, but I'm not going to slag somebody off if they vegan or vegetarian or take a sensible approach to, like an Atkins type approach, any sort of keto diet, because keto is nothing fundamentally wrong with doing keto for a little while. I just don't think it's a permanent and I don't think it's something you should try for a really, really long duration, like you shouldn't be on a diet for a year plus, unless you have a medical reason to be so, of course, or you have a ton of weight to lose.

Peter Lap: 45:09

But even then I would probably take a different approach. Anyways, like I said, I wanted to aim those with regards to that. When people say hey, but Pete, he always said the other way. Yeah, I disagree on him, I disagree with him or not, but that doesn't mean he was too far out that I had to correct and cut bits out of the episode. I tend not to. I tend to be more than happy to disagree with people and say, yeah, you know, there's a different approach. So Josh has a different approach than what I have, and I'm not a gut health guy, I'm not a gastroenterologist and all that sort of stuff, and even some of those, as some of you will have seen on Fred's this week, even some gastroenterologists have biases that go beyond their expertise or that take them outside of almost. They start arguing against their own expertise.

Peter Lap: 46:06

Right, anyway, that's the podcast for this week. That's me done. Next week I'm doing a hell of an amazing chat with a lady called Tessia Watson Tessia Watson this week, this morning actually, and this was about her new book, rejuvenated Moms and Happy Kids and all that sort of stuff, and it was a great conversation. You're gonna love that. We're gonna do that next week and the week after that. Well, we'll see. We'll see right, peter, at healthyplusnatalbodycom if you have any questions or any comments. You have a tremendous week and I'll be back next week. All right, bye now.