They Lied To You About Menopause (Doctor Explains)

Added: 2026-05-12

[00:00:00]So, I'm doing a particular presentation today which is focused on menopause and pmenopause which is something I always talk about. I'm sure you know. I've written a book called Good Fat is Good for Women because I was so horrified by how menopause is propagandized to women.

[00:00:14]I'm Dr. Elizabeth Bright. My specialty is steroid hormones and hormones in general. But menopause being a 63-year-old woman, that's why I went carnivore almost 12 years ago because of how I saw how menopause was being depicted to women. So, we'll just talk about menopause tonight. Do women actually need hormone therapy? Is menopause a bad thing? Is pmenopause a thing at all? So, I've written three books. Good fat is good for women, good fat is good for girls, and the power of your thyroid and adrenals. And that's why basically I talk about hormones and how the highfat carnivore diet improves a woman's health at all ages in these books. And the reason why I wrote the first book, Good Fat is Good for Women in Menopause is because when you Google menopause, this is what you see. these horrible images of women who are miserable, women who are well, the phrase was coined the seven dwarfs of a menopause, degeneration, depression, being overweight, and of course the hot flashes. The symptoms that are depicted are myriad. Every single tissue in the body is affected by hormones. But that doesn't mean that these symptoms are caused by menopause. They are not caused by a reduction in estrogen, which is natural because menopause is a good thing. Menopause means that we can live to a ripe old age after 50 unlike chimps who die at 50 because they keep having babies. So menopause is something humans, particularly female humans and orcas and other whales evolve to do so we could live this long life because we have these big brains that we evolved when we started eating animal fat. So it's very scary. If you look up menopause, you see all these thinning hair, dry skin, loss of libido, vaginal dryness. They keep finding more because they keep learning that all tissues require estrogen. All tissues require testosterone. All tissues require progesterone, but that doesn't mean that those hormones go away when you're in menopause. So, there's just so many images that are negative about menopause. And because we are trying to make sure all women of all nationalities and races go through menopause, it's been an equal opportunity propaganda lately because the studies showed that women, as an example, were not treated as readily in emergency settings for heart attacks because women didn't act the same way as men acted. So the propaganda now has become more pointed to say we need to address women's health issues because women are getting the short end of the stick because we're not addressing their menopausal and permenopausal symptoms which is just not true. It has never been true. It's been true that women's health has never been considered as highly because women were thought to have been born defective anyway because they're women, right?

[00:02:59]Until modern day, women have always been seen as defective. And menopause is one of the reasons because we can't fulfill our supposed purpose, which is to have children when we are at menopause. And that's why I have a problem with this depiction because all these symptoms are not describing menopause. I've talked about the attitude change. They are trying to make sure that I mean a new article comes out in every single paper in New York Times, Guardian seems like every two weeks about how medicine is not addressing menopause properly. How again that women getting the short end of the stick because these symptoms which are bad absolutely and women do have them but they're not having them because of lowered estrogen. That's what I want to clarify tonight because our health has always been attached to our fertility. We have ovary and uterus which are supposed to make babies and any kind of health issue has been since Hypocrates and probably before that in other cultures the fact that we stop having babies at a certain age. All these diseases and illnesses it has been assumed that those come from the sessation of fertility. And in spite of the fact that there are more female clinicians, there weren't any female doctors until the mid 1800s. So even though today we have many female doctors and many clinicians and practitioners, money still talks louder than science.

[00:04:15]The reasons researchers started trying to prove HRT hormone replacement therapy reduced diseases in menopausal women is because in the 1980s they didn't even know that steroid hormones were continually made in the adrenals. They kept finding tissues, as I said before, that needed estrogen. So estrogen's receptors in cardiovascular tissue, estrogen receptors in the brain, and that was immediately equated with, "Oh my god, you're going to have Alzheimer's. Oh my god, you're going to have heart disease." So there was a search for the proof that HRT decreased women's risk of heart disease and other illnesses. And it became a self-fulfilling prophecy, finding all these new things that could go wrong in menopause with menopause. So they did the largest randomized control trial ever done, the women's health initiative. It started in 2002 and it was observational which is never 100% but the reason for this trial is that they were trying to see if HRT actually improved women's cardiovascular function if it reduced heart disease. And they stopped the study several years early because they saw that it worsened the risk of heart disease and breast cancer in women. And the medical community was shocked by this. How could this be?

[00:05:24]Estrogen hormone replacement therapy has to fix everything. But they found that it increased risk of heart disease, breast cancer and venus thrombosis, uterine cancer. And they said that the risks outweighed the benefits. The pharmaceutical industry has a lot of menopause groups that continue to study and that actually continue to try to educate supposedly clinicians that women need hormone replacement therapy. As soon as the study was halted, there were a lot of papers that came out claiming that they debunked this research. It was found that the risks outweigh the benefits. And one of these was the menopause society which is funded by fizer which is a pharmaceutical giant that under a previous name was called Iris that actually was the first Canadian company that sold the first synthetic estrogen therapy. So this supposed debunking has to do with the HRT was a combined estrogen and progesterine. So we know now that synthetic progesterine increases cancer risk and thrombosis. And what they basically said was that well if you separate them there's less risk or if you take it via patch there's a reduced risk or if you take it earlier or later there's a reduced risk because if you take it younger they're going to give you less. If you start it at 50 HRT, though, the dose will be smaller because they're trying to replicate smaller doses, replicate supposedly a lower quantity of estrogen. So, you're taking less synthetic HRT. So, there's less risk because you're taking less. So, that's not really a debunk really. It's just changing tracks. There's the end result is that these substances are way too strong. And synthetic estrogen are associated with breast cancer, uterine cancer, headaches, breast pain, tenderness, increased bleeding, unexpected breakthrough bleeding. And progesterones are associated with blood clots, hypertension, stroke, loss of mineral density. Synthetic testosterones. Many women are now taking synthetic testosterones for energy because testosterone is linked with male vility. So obviously that means testosterone gives you energy.

[00:07:27]Testosterone helps you build muscle.

[00:07:28]This isn't true. These are androgen hormones and their androgenic side effects can include her pursuitism when you have facial hair or body hair or male pattern baldness, acne and alopecia. So why do synthetic steroids cause side effects? Well, they are steroids but the dose is so strong, hundreds of times stronger than the what your own body makes because you make your own cholesterol. You eat cholesterol, your liver makes cholesterol, and your adrenal glands and your ovaries or your testes produce in a cascade fashion all the steroid hormones you need to attach to those tissues. So, if you're taking something that's so strong, so much stronger than what you actually make yourself, it will bind to androgen hormones, gluccocortic steroid, it will raise cortisol levels primarily.

[00:08:15]These things will stay in your system.

[00:08:16]The halflife is much longer than the ones you make yourself that are excreted metabolically in your urine. and they can cause all kinds of side effects, but primarily this is because they're so much stronger than what your own body makes from fat. So, the fact that they can bind to other things is that they affect how long they act, right? I said the half-life, but how long are they going to stay in your system? There's something called, I'm sure you've heard of the negative feedback. This negative feedback, your body says, "Okay, I don't need any more of this right now. I have enough. Thank you." That will be affected. Cancer is hypoplastic tissue.

[00:08:51]It is growth that is a mistaken signal from tissue. Right? So if you have estrogen, one of the main things that the first scientists who discovered who synthesized estrogen from urine of horses and bhinald from actually concentration camp victims and prisoners, soldiers, they saw that the synthetic estrogen caused cancer. It caused cancer in all of the animal studies and they alerted to this.

[00:09:18]Doctors knew about it. So naturally, physiological levels of hormones will fluctuate. They would fluctuate within narrow ranges. So your body makes what it needs and that's it. At some point, the tissue can say, "No, thank you. I've had enough." Synthetic steroids, they're in huge, super physiological doses, and they're just hundreds of times more powerful, which is really dangerous.

[00:09:37]receptor saturation, the receptors that are looking for them, all those tissues that want estrogen that you make, testosterone that you make in your adrenals, progesterone that you make in your adrenals, and when you're pregnant, in your ovaries, the receptors can be saturated. So, they'll be like, "Oh, I don't know what to do with this." And that can cause health issues, specifically cancer. There's a toxicity risk. Those hormones can go to the wrong tissues. So, it's just like, you know, there's no control. It's chaos in the body. This is specifically the power is in the synthetic but the biioidentical hormones are also not natural. They are also synthetic. So I just want you to understand that they do have fewer side effects in the sense that they are not hundreds of times more powerful but they are not natural. Okay? So you can have the same issues with higher cortisol levels because of the gluccocorticoid steroid. Your body will see them differently and again you're not making what your body needs. You're taking these creams or injections and your body knows how much it needs, how much it wants to make. The origin is from a plant, a wild yam, but it has to go through incredibly complicated scientific conversion called the marker degradation to turn that into a steroid.

[00:10:48]So, it is not natural. And you also have the same issues as you do with the synthetics. Offtarget binding problems are both a problem in synthetic and biioidentical steroids. So why take any risks with estrogen, progesterone or testosterone if you make it yourself?

[00:11:02]They don't actually decline. We have been told that the reason why we have these symptoms or anybody has these symptoms is because your hormone levels have declined as your fertility declines. But it's not true. Your body continues to make adequate estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone for these receptors after menopause at all ages.

[00:11:21]But the marketing is going so well that they've even run out of estrogen patches because of this new marketing theory to say make sure that women feel that they're getting the same amount of attention. These health issues are as much as a concern for medicine as other health issues and they should be but they're giving you the wrong answers, the wrong ways to address it. So that brings me to a little history about menopause. The way doctors see it, menopause is actually a new word. It was coined in 1821 by a French physician. He made up the word for the time women stopped menrating and in his book menopause udelage critique already burdening it with negativity. So menopause the word didn't exist until 1821. Obviously women going into menopause has existed since women evolved to have menopause. But menopause got worse when scientists figure out how to isolate estrogen when they discovered it as a metabolic waste product in urine. the medical focus has been on replacing and increasing estradile as if if you have a symptom that is associated with menopause, more estrogen is going to fix it. So, they're not looking at the root cause. They're constantly obsessed with this fact that fertility or aging in women will cause health issues. So, one of the first female doctors in the US became a doctor in 1871 and she said, "Don't listen to all these things about these menopausal symptoms. Just eat right and don't worry about it. It's not true." But something has changed, right? Something has changed. I was looking at propaganda clips, ads from the 1950s, commercials for HRT. And what has changed since the 1950s. What has changed is that we stopped eating cholesterol. We started eating more sugar, carbohydrates, and we reduced the quantity of cholesterol because we were told it would cause heart disease. So that happened in 1958 with Ansel Keys.

[00:13:06]So the food pyramid used to look very, very different. There was fat and food from animals, meat from animals. In the previous pyramid in the 1940s they had this round wheel really. So you should basically have a lot of fat, a lot of meat, some carbohydrate. But now you have this pyramid form which is teeny bit of fat at the top, a little bit of meat under that and a lot of fruits and vegetables and carbohydrates.

[00:13:29]Carbohydrates take up the most of this pyramid the bottom. So that is what has changed which is why symptoms have worsened. So menopausal symptoms have gotten worse and there are new flavors.

[00:13:39]There's pmenopause and post-menopause.

[00:13:41]There's no such thing. There was a doctor, an obstatrician from Durian University who said basically that pmenopause was invented as a way to overmedicate women who are going into menopause. It's been commercialized and overmedicated. Perrymenopause does not exist. Women are either fertile or menopausal. Humans evolve to be infertile in childhood, fertile after puberty, and then infertile with menopause. Menopause is an evolutionary adaption so that you're fertile after puberty and infertile with menopause so that you live a long life. We know that having many many children is very stressful to the body, very stressful to your hormones. So what is menopause?

[00:14:18]Besides no longer menrating, the only real symptom of menopause is that no longer menrating. The primary change, there are changes with aging, but the primary change to reproductive function is a decline in ovarian follicle regeneration, which means that there are fewer eggs. the endometrial tissue will create fewer eggs. And why is that? So eventually when we reach menopause, we will stop having babies so that we can live these long lives. It's us orcas and sperm whales. It's pretty special that we are the mammals who have menopause.

[00:14:50]So a prenatal female has 7 million osites. That means cells that can make an egg. That plummets to 2 million at 6 months of age. So if you're obsessing about how many eggs you have, if that means fertility, at 5 years old, it's down to 500,000. And when you're a teenager, you know, adolescent, which is what is supposedly the most fertile time, it goes down even more. Okay.

[00:15:14]Libri, who's the person who first illustrated that androgen hormones are converted into the hormones we need, estrogen, progesterone, testosterone, said that in humans, more than any other mammal, adrenal androgens are the highest serum concentration of any hormone. But this wasn't until the 1986.

[00:15:33]So they had been selling synthetic hormones since 1932. By puberty at the time most of associated fertility, the number oftes has reduced to 400,000. So the primary variation in menopause is a decrease in regeneration of ovarian follicle tissue. The follicles are reduced in number. They can't make eggs anymore. This is a mechanical alteration. It just means that you can't procreate. It doesn't mean that estrogen production ceases. We are programmed to have limited fertility. There are three kinds of estrogen. There's estrogen, estrone, and estradiol. The dominant hormone in the reproductive years is estradiol, which is why they're making it synthetically for you to take during pregnancy. Because you're pregnant, you don't want to have too much estradiol.

[00:16:15]Estrone is the most prevalent hormone during pregnancy. And that is the same with menopause. Estrone is the dominant hormone during menopause. It's an estrogen. So, you're going to have less estradiol because you're not supposed to be making any babies anymore because your body has had this time of fertility. Obviously, if you have IVF or you choose to do that, that's absolutely fine. But the way the body evolves is for you to have menopause. So the estradiol will be reduced, but you'll still be making estrone dominantly. And you'll be synthesizing it from androgens. And here are the molecules.

[00:16:49]So estrone is an adrenal. It's synthesized from androinadone. It's an androgen steroid hormone produced by the adrenal gland. So yes, when the ovaries have the same cascade, cholesterol to pregnnolone to progesterone to cortisol and then as you move right testosterone, andone and then testosterone and then estrogens. Okay, so this is happening all the time in the adrenals and the ovaries just in the ovaries. It produces less. It continues to be made via the adrenals. So we actually make 85% all our lives from birth to death in females in the adrenal glands and in males it's actually 50%. So the problem is that estrogen was discovered in 1929 a few years before adrenal hormones. So they didn't know how cortisol affected human tissues. Cortisol was isolated in 1936 quite some time after. The researcher who isolated estrogen worked for the company that became Fizer today the third largest pharmaceutical company in the world. And since the discovery of estrogen, the medical focus has been on how to replace or increase estradiol on the hypothesis that there is a decline of a secretion of estrogen with menopause. It's just a switch. You're reducing estradiol and you're making estrone. The hypothesis came about after surgeons noticed changes in women whose ovaries had been removed. From 1850 to 1900 having a ovarianctomy or ofctomy was one of the most common ways of treating all female diseases. So it was associated with female reproductive organs. So all illness was basically associated with female reproductive organs. Today menopause is marketed as a life-threatening disease that threatens most women with a variety of diseases.

[00:18:32]But that's just not true. Since medicine has always associated women's diseases with the reproductive system, medical researchers did not look beyond the decline of estrogen to explain the symptoms of menopause. And whe that's what I call the medical male gaze. They see a woman, they see reproductive organs. They don't see anything else.

[00:18:50]What we achieved after 500 million years of evolution is combination of the arrest of ovarian estrogen secretion.

[00:18:56]This is libery. The availability of high circulating levels of DHEA and the expression of the peripheral sex steroid forming enzymes have permitted the appearance of menopause with a continuing access to inticular sex steroids for the individual cells tissues without systemic exposure to circulating estrogen. What does that mean? We keep making estrogen in other tissues. So the adrenals make estrogen precursors and other tissues, bone tissue, liver tissue are actually synthesizing the estrogen. Hormonal changes throughout life are driven by adrenal production of DHEA and cholesterol. So this DHEA thing is really important. It spikes at birth. It spikes during puberty, after sexual development. Most steroid hormones, estrogen, testosterone, progesterone continue to be synthesized throughout life in the peripheral tissues. So not in the ovaries or the testes. In the 1980s, scientists discovered that most sex hormones are produced outside the reproductive glands. So throughout their lives, men produce 50% of their testosterone outside the testes. They found that out because they had men who had bechemically castrated because of prostate cancer continued to make the same amount of testosterone. So menopause does not cause a reduction in estrogen, progesterone or testosterone.

[00:20:12]Even before menopause, 80 to 85% of our steroid hormones are made via adrenal synthesis. So symptoms blamed on menopause and pmenopause more recently since the 80s are caused by hormone imbalances related to cortisol and thyroid function rather than ovarian failure. High cortisol and insulin are caused by high carbohydrate diet and low-fat diets. We have seen the increase of started in 1958 but really increased dramatically in the 80s when women were told to eat less fat and eat more carbs.

[00:20:44]Endocrinology focuses on hormones made in glands distributed through the bloodstream. Entrinology which is how these hormones are made. Most of our hormones steroid hormones throughout our lives are made locally within tissues without a significant release in the bloodstream. Meaning if you're measuring your hormone levels in your blood, you're not getting the right measurement. Should always be saliva.

[00:21:05]Androen hormone levels are huge in the body, a thousand to 10,000 times higher than estradiol. They provide a large reservoir for steroid hormone production in skin, bone, atapose tissue, breast tissue, endometrial tissue, all of the tissues really. Okay? So a woman's body evolved specifically to remain fertile for a limited amount of time. a very estrogen production is no longer necessary for a woman's well-being after menopause. So why haven't doctors looked into this? Why aren't science looking into this? So I'm giving a different explanation for the menopausal symptoms.

[00:21:37]Why aren't they doing this as well?

[00:21:39]Because they're not looking at the hormone cascade. They're obsessing with this supposed decline in estrogen. So they're not looking at the actual steroid hormone cascade, which comes from cholesterol. All of these hormones come from cholesterol. They don't want to say that. Oops, we were wrong.

[00:21:54]Cholesterol is actually important.

[00:21:56]They're synthesized from DHEA. So, it's not that unusual that you have these symptoms with menopause because if you're not eating fat and you're eating a high carbohydrate diet, you're not going to be able to make these hormones.

[00:22:07]You're not going to be able to properly synthesize them because they are made via aromatase. An enzyme is regulating the synthesis of these steroid hormones.

[00:22:16]But aromatase enzyme cannot do its job if you have high insulin levels or high cortisol levels. Meaning if you eat a lot of sugar or you avoid fat or as we know women lose their periods if they over exercise. So a high carbohydrate can cause high cortisol and high insulin levels and estrogen dominance meaning that you could have xenorestrogens in your system and you have the wrong kind of estrogen. Your body is not making the kind of estrogen that the receptors are actually looking for. So makeup a lot of foods are high. Flax seeds, soy are xenoestrogens. That can totally mess up your ability to properly synthesize the hormones you actually do need from animal fat and insulin lowers levels of aromatase. So, if you're eating a high carb diet, you're going to have higher levels of insulin. But they don't look into this. They don't go higher on that steroid hormone cascade because cholesterol is supposedly bad for you.

[00:23:03]It's also natural. You can't patent it.

[00:23:05]You can't make money off of animal fat unless you're selling tallow. So, this happened in 1960. We had on the cover of time Anel Keys telling us all that animal fat will cause heart disease even though at the same exact time John Yudkin came out with a book called Pure White and Deadly demonstrating that sugar causes heart disease. And then in ' 84 we had the unhappy face on the cover of Time underlining that false theory again. So what happened to the pyramid? Well, no fat, no animal fat, very little meat, and lots of fruits and vegetables and a lot of carbohydrates, a lot of grain. Menopausal symptoms are due to a deficiency in cholesterol.

[00:23:43]Vitamin D comes from the fat we eat and the carbs we eat are going to increase inflammation which causes an increase in insulin resistance. High insulin and high cortisol will cause a disruption in estrogen synthesis. So the symptoms are not because you are older or menopausal.

[00:24:02]You have symptoms if you do because you're not eating dietary cholesterol.

[00:24:06]It's the source of all your steroid hormones. estrogen, estrogen, estradiol are synthesized from animal fat, as is testosterone. The higher cortisol levels and insulin levels, the higher these levels are, the more quickly estrogen and progesterone will be needed. You'll need more of those hormones to keep insulin and cortisol in check. So, what you're doing when you're taking HRT is you're eating all these carbs, you're overex exercising, you're insulin resistant, and you're taking more of these hormones because you're causing a disruption. But with this diet and with some lifestyle habits. So with conversion and hormones, it is clear that how this kind of high carbohydrate diet can impact severity of menopausal symptoms cause them in fact. So medications were initially approved only for hot flashes only only for hot flashes and this were in women who had had surgical menopause. One of the scientists Charles Dods who actually synthesized dial stillbestrol which is DES which is seen to have caused horrific birth defects in three generations. Never ever meant for healthy women meaning menopausal women to take this substance. The side effects of menopausal medications are myriad.

[00:25:10]Every single tissue in the body can respond negatively. So let's talk about the side effects besides cancer endometrial breast ovarian gallbladder cervical and venus thrombosis selling HRT and biioidentical hormones is way too profitable. So even though these side effects have always been known as I said since 1929 when was first isolated estrogen was first isolated from urine scientists was known about the cancer-causing risks of these synthetics. All right. So, women in the ' 50s, anti-depressants, if a woman was acting up or overreacting or sad.

[00:25:45]Doctors were told to give them HRT, hormone replacement therapy. So, hot flashes, what is a hot flash? A hot flash is a vaso motor reaction. You have them when you're a kid and you're nervous before a test. Your skin gets hot, your blood rushes to your limbs.

[00:26:00]It's part of the stress response. Has nothing to do with menopause. It has to do with cortisol issues. So, if you have a cortisol imbalance, if you have a test and you're 12 and you have a hot flash because you didn't study or you're nervous about it, well, that's your cortisol is going to go up. If you're 55 and you have a hot flash, it's because you have irregular cortisol levels for various reasons. Vaginal dryness. The doctor who actually started using this as a menopausal symptom used synthetic estrogen on girls who had gorrhea. They were his study group. So, of course, they were going to have vaginal dryness, right? they had infections. So, your vaginal tissue will not atrophy. It does not affect your ability to lubricate the vaginal canal. That's what cortisol does. High cortisol and low cortisol can prevent all mucosal tissue from producing mucus, which is all lubrication is. So, here these women are unhappy because they have painful sex.

[00:26:54]Sex is painful. That's not because the vaginal canal is menopausal. It's not because they are not able to produce mucus. It's actually because they have high cortisol levels. And a scientist Odblad who actually studied the different kinds of secretion in women saw that contraceptive pill actually made it worse reduced lubrication. If you're talking about cortisol, that's going to be mostly the sympathetic nervous system, not the parasympathetic nervous system. And you're going to have not enough ability to lubricate because the vaginal lubrication is actually a parasympathetic state. So if you're nervous, this vaginal lubrication will be reduced as will sex and libido. If you're nervous and scared, you're not going to want to have any intercourse.

[00:27:38]So libido is definitely affected by cortisol levels. Your brain won't work as well. If you're nervous, absolutely there are receptors in the brain for estrogens, but it's more a cortisol issue if you have cognitive issues and also a thyroid issue. So part of estrogen's role is set aside to steer glucose into the human brain for use as fuel. This is part of our emergency stress reaction. Okay? So, if you're in a fight orflight state, you're going to have that vasim motor reaction. You're going to have blood sugar go to your limbs so you can run like hell and so you can think your way out of this danger. You're not going to be able to think about other things. You're just going to think about how to react to this stress. So, too much stress and too much insulin will absolutely include brain fog, depression. It does not mean that menopause increases the risk of Alzheimer's. So, women eat less meat.

[00:28:26]They eat less butter. They eat less fat.

[00:28:29]That's really what the problem is. They eat more bread. They eat more bagels.

[00:28:33]They eat more pasta. These are all stimulants. Insomnia is not related to menopause. It has to do with a reduced production of melatonin because if your cortisol levels are high, you will not be producing melatonin at bedtime. And this is one that always bothers me.

[00:28:47]Saggy breasts. I'm 63. I don't have saggy breasts. Actually, fat gives you elasticity. Eating fat gives you elasticity. And we know that skin loses its elasticity if you don't eat enough fat. So they have something called butter boobs. I've heard patients talk about when they started eating fat again, their breasts actually had more form to them. So an image like this, it's a part of a propaganda from plastic surgeons who want you to have implants which are bad for you. So research from 2016 demonstrated that adolescent girls who ate a diet high in saturated fat, that's someone we're told is bad, had a higher breast density ratio than girls who ate less saturated fat. Okay? So it really helps to eat fat for your wrinkles as well. So every single cell membrane should be made of at least 50% of saturated fat. It is the saturated fat that makes skin cells elastic. Women are worried about bone density because they get the dexa scans. Osteoporosis is not caused by menopause. It's actually caused by a high carbohydrate diet, inflammation, cortisol. I was taught in school not to adjust people who had had cortisone shots because their bones would be so easily fractured. A high carbohydrate diet leeches the minerals that you need and the collagen for bone formation. Okay? And vitamin D comes from fat. So, I always ask, how much fat do you eat? If you knew it didn't make you fat, but it protected you from all of these symptoms that we've talked about, would you eat more? And it's important to remember that women have been avoiding fat all of their lives. I mean, I fasted when I was 15 and I lived off a 500 calorie diet and I fainted on a ski trip so often since adolescence.

[00:30:22]They may also have been following a high cardiobased exercise. They will also be avoiding salt. All the things we've been told, but we actually need. Medicine has always linked menopause to depression.

[00:30:33]male physicians assume that women would be unhappy with the supposed degeneration that comes with menopause.

[00:30:39]So recently I saw an article associating bipolar syndrome with permenopause. This is pretty upsetting because that's just another way to sell hormones to younger women. What they actually found is that bipolar and mania disorder was related to women who had had postpartum depression. So if they had had postpartum depression, there was a higher risk of them developing bipolar disorder. Why is that? Because they already had a hormonal imbalance during pregnancy. Postpartum depression is often due to low thyroid levels and cortisol issues. So it's very depressing to see an article that just came out a couple of weeks ago linking pmenopause and menopause to bipolar disorder. It has nothing to do with that. Women have been following health advice for years.

[00:31:29]It's just been the wrong advice because we've been told the wrong things. We've been told that menopause causes these symptoms, but it doesn't. Women don't feel well. They're afraid of chronic illness, but every time they go to any doctor, every clinician tells them they need HRT or BHRT. But they also know instinctively that there's something wrong with this picture. The women in our group, mostly we have women in the group, we also have males in the group.

[00:31:53]They have the same issues. They have cortisol issues. They have thyroid issues. They're not told they're menopausal. But what works with these symptoms that we've discussed and anything that's associated with symptoms that are supposedly caused by menopause is reducing carbohydrates, increasing fat, lowering your stress levels, which can be done by reducing carbohydrates, increasing fat, but also getting off of the treadmill. I love to exercise. I'm a paddleboarder. I used to do kung fu, but too much exercise will always raise cortisol levels. So you have to be aware that exercising is not going to make you lose weight. It's not going to make you live longer. It's going to give you good muscle tissue so that when you fall, you don't break. That's basically it. So that's what we focus on in the group is explaining that to all the members and I look at their labs. I explain how these things relate and so many people feel better. It's just amazing. If any of what I've said resonated with you, and I hope it has, the way you can find out more about the protocol and how I work and what I recommend is by clicking the link below in the description. Thank you very much for listening. It's a long one, but it's a lot of information. It's very important, and I hope it clarified things for you. and I'll see you with the next