103. The Endocrine Web: How Everything Connects in Midlife with Dr. Deanna Minich

Welcome to Rooted in Wellness with me, wellness advocate and holistic nutritionist Mona Sharma. Together we will take a journey to discover natural healing practices from imbalance to balance, guided by ancient wisdom and modern scientific insights. I was raised living summers on an ashram, so I learned early on that food is medicine and your kitchen is your greatest source of healthcare and prevention. After facing two heart surgeries, anxiety, and weight challenges, I discovered that just because your symptoms are common doesn't mean that they are normal. Together with some incredible guests, we will explore the power of our mind, body, and soul connection, returning to our roots to rediscover our greatest well-being. Today's conversation is a return to what deep, wise wellness was always meant to feel like—whole, contextual, and attuned to the story your body tells as much as the signals your labs show. I'm joined by the incredible Dr. Deanna Minich, an internationally recognized nutrition scientist, functional medicine practitioner, educator, and author whose work bridges modern science and whole-person nourishment with elegance and depth. In this episode, we talk about why hormones are more than chemistry, why quick fixes like HRT don't always deliver the relief that women are hoping for, and how foundational supports like nutrient diversity, circadian alignment, and thoughtful lifestyle choices create resilience rather than quick patches. At the heart of this conversation is a deeper question around embodiment. Can we move from symptom management into systems thinking? So that health becomes an ongoing dialogue with our biology instead of a series of reactions to breakdown. Dr. Deanna Minich, PhD, is the Chief Science Officer at Symphony Natural Health, an international educator and speaker, and the author of The Rainbow Diet.

Dr.

Deanna, welcome to Rooted in Wellness.

Oh, it's great to be here with you, Mona, right here in your own surroundings, which are absolutely gorgeous. They feel so nourishing. Thank you.

It's been a dream. As we were talking before we started filming, you were one of the first people that I had on my list because you have such an incredible, eloquent way of merging ancient wisdom with the science that so many people need to really tune into the wisdom that I think that we all have. And the inspiration for this podcast was to really merge ancient wisdom with modern-day medicine and science. Um, but also kind of help my audience understand what it means to be rooted. This is rooted in your health, rooted in your happiness, rooted in the inner wisdom that I believe that we all have to heal ourselves. So to kick things off, I would love to know what are 2 or 3 things that help you feel rooted in who you are every day?

Well, a practical one would be breakfast. I was thinking about that even this morning. You know, how I start my day roots me into the rest of the day. So if my morning is really jumbled or frenetic, or I'm on sympathetic overdrive, it just feels like the rest of my day feels kind of jangled, like I don't feel grounded. So breakfast and my rituals in the morning are of utmost importance. The second thing I would say would be breath and centering in silence. I feel like so many of us have a deficit of just being alone, quiet, and in that space of being present. And I need a lot of alone time. I mean, in some ways that's why I like traveling, because even though you're around a lot of people, you're actually kind of on your own. So that's very nourishing to me and I feel very rooted. If I'm around a lot of people all the time, it just feels like it's taking, taking, taking, and it kind of ungrounds me. So those two things I would say keep me rooted.

Beautiful. We've recorded over 100 episodes and no one's ever said breakfast.

Well, I am a nutritionist, so maybe there's something with that. There's something about, I mean, it's just like the waking up moment, but then I need the food. The food grounds me, right? So if I don't have a proper breakfast, then I don't feel like— I am definitely a breakfast person. I'm a Pitta. So I need to have that metabolic fire quenched and nourished early on.

So. But doesn't it just make sense? You talk so much about food being information, but it really establishes the quality of what our day will be or will not be, right? We'll talk a little bit about fasting as well, but no more accolades for fasting into the lunch and evening hours. Really, breakfast can ultimately shift shift how you start your day and help you feel rooted. On the flip side, being on this journey, traveling the way that you do, educating, pouring into so many other people, what causes you to feel uprooted? No time alone.

You mentioned that being no time alone, just doing all the activity, like doing and not being. I'm kind of feeling that just a little bit now because I've been just recently at a conference with thousands of people and I did a book signing and I love it. I love to be around all those people and I feel like that's a great honor and privilege to have that opportunity to interact with so many people, but that can be also really unearthing. Also, I think too much in the way of travel where, you know, a little bit of travel is good, but too much brings me out of my home element of being grounded. So you have a dog, you have a puppy, I have a cat at home, and there's just something about being at home. I live in the woods. You know, you live in a forested area as well, and we do too. There's just something about being around all that green and nature that really brings me in. So if I'm away from nature, I feel very ungrounded.

It was really the greatest inspiration for moving here this year of all years, 2025. For so many of us, I needed to feel anchored again and rooted. I mean, obviously, to go back to the inspiration for this podcast is just something that could really attune my nervous system to how I wanted to feel. Yeah. So I made a big, bold move and I moved. That's great.

I can see why you did. It's gorgeous here. And I feel that sense of of presence and being in your home space.

Thank you. Well, I start with these questions because in a world where we've overcomplicated health and wellness, where people now are more confused than ever, often the practitioners sitting in that seat will recommend modalities that are free as being the primary things that support them in feeling grounded in who they are. So thank you for answering those. Let's now dive into some rapid-fire questions so that I can get some, some quick takeaways from you. The first one is, what is the biggest misconception about adaptogens?

That they work the same in all people. There is a lot of nuance in adaptogens. Oh, good answer.

I always say no Ayurvedic practitioner would put everyone on ashwagandha. No. It just wouldn't happen. All right. If someone could take away, take one plant medicine for hormonal health, what would you recommend?

I would say specific types of maca, not all maca, but certain kinds.

I can't wait to talk more about that one. What's the most surprising thing about maca? What has it taught you about the body?

That it has an intelligence that taps into our own intelligence, which is the psychoneuroendocrine immune system. So the hypothalamus, pituitary, thyroid, adrenal, ovarian axis. It's not just an adaptogen at the level of the adrenals, but it is connecting with our entire circuitry, which is really fantastic. There's science to show that.

And it's that systematic, like it's the interconnectedness of every system in our body. That's right. All right, we'll dive in that. One ancient remedy that modern science has finally caught up to.

Goodness, there are so many. Well, let's go with turmeric for that purpose because I'm just trying to think of all the many different studies. There are thousands upon thousands of articles on turmeric, which comes from, you know, if we think of India and all the many countries that have used it. So I would say turmeric, probably turmeric and ginger have so much benefit. Absolutely. Yeah.

All right, this will tie into our conversation to come. What color of maca match is your energy today? I had to throw in something fun.

Well, if there was a green form of maca, I would say that. I'm drinking chlorophyll water and I was feeling like today's a green day. But aside from that, I would say probably the yellow-orange color, which ties into ovarian health and what we're gonna talk about today.

Beautiful. All right, I'm sure you agree we're going through an incredible time when it comes to women's health. And it's a time that feels very liberating, very exciting, but also very complicated. And women are finally speaking up, yet so many women are still feeling dismissed. They're feeling confused. We're hearing incredible practitioners. In fact, I've had a lot of endocrine specialists come on this episode And I don't think— it's interesting that every single practitioner has had a different protocol.

I was just thinking that, actually.

And so we're told that, okay, this is just aging. This is what we're going through. And yay, women are finally having a time in the spotlight for us to be able to understand this. But can we maybe— let's start with what is actually happening in the woman's body during perimenopause, moving into menopause, when everything starts to feel harder, our energy becomes depleted, our mood changes day by day from intense highs to intense lows. The weight gain is on set, yet nothing else has changed with our diet. Our sleep becomes incredibly compromised, and yet our labs could be looking fairly normal to a general practitioner who's not trained to look at, you know, lows and highs. But what's actually happening in a woman's body during this time?

Yeah, well, first and foremost, menopause is a natural process, so it's nothing that we have to fight against. We are all destined to move in that menopausal direction. The question is how. And I think that what we see happening with women in their 20s, 30s, 40s is that there's a rapid decline of the endocrine system. So we're already tugging at this internal circuitry. So let's just say in our teens, in our 20s, we might have adrenal stress or just we're tugging on our, our cortisol, our mineralocorticoids. And so already we start that tug. Then maybe in our 30s and 40s, we start to see some changes in the thyroid gland. We may have some ovarian dysregulation through our menstrual cycle, and that may even come through the gut gynecological access. So there's a connection between the gut, which is also endocrine, and how it informs the ovaries because they're all kind of in the same area. So it makes sense that one would change the other. So it's no surprise then when we see women start to go through very early symptoms of perimenopause where she's in her late 30s or her early 40s and she says, What's happening to me? You know, I— nobody prepared me for this, this change in my body. And perhaps that's going to be pretty tumultuous for her because she hasn't tended to her endocrine system. And as you know, in ancient India, this series of glands within us has been highly revered and also documented as like these chakras, right? Like, so even in yoga, we see this connection to this circuitry. So our health and well-being in so many ways is primed by how we tend to that endocrine circuit. So when we finally have our ovaries start to be on the decline, we start to see these changes in progesterone, followed by changes in estrogen, and then eventually that starts to be mirrored in our cycle. But beyond the cycle, it can be symptoms. Like you said, sometimes we may not see it in the labs, but we're feeling it in our bodies. And women, as you know, are so intuitive, and they, they can preempt a lot of these changes. They're feeling them before they're actually documented in the physical. Because they're happening in the emotional, the mental, even the spiritual. So I think what we need to do in some way is to help women prepare for this change in their endocrine system as early as possible, like really get in and looking at that hypothalamus, pituitary, thyroid, adrenal, ovarian axis. So I'll just call that HPTAO rather than saying that every time. But it is really the, the internal endocrine language and our inner intelligence that's built in. And if we think of it, hormones in functional medicine are the communicators. So if we have this internal circuitry, which is communicating really well, and we have an excellent biofeedback loop, so the brain is telling the ovaries what to do, the ovaries are saying, okay, we got it. And then we send that signal on up. There comes a time where that starts to break. That's not as streamlined. We don't see that, that looped communication anymore. And that's when we need to get in and help her along so that she doesn't have all these symptoms.

It's really interesting when we think about what all of us as women went through in our 20s and 30s. Living in today's modern world, we're taught to— those are our highest, you know, productive years. Go at it, make the most money, be driven, be hardcore, step into this world of overdrive. And I remember that's when my, my health started to decline. Doctors at that time didn't know how to speak to it. They certainly weren't talking about my gut gynecological access, really, to make connection between those two worlds. But looking back, I can definitely say there was balances within my gut and my digestion, and I stopped getting my cycle as well. And today, when we flash forward, you know, a recent stat that I saw, fewer than 1 in 4 women adequately feel supported by conventional care. And although I feel tremendously, um, optimistic around the education that's coming out, I think a lot of women are scared to speak up and ask questions now. So you put out a post recently on this HPTAO axis, and I just happened to look at the comments And we'll see a lot of everything. There's women who are really incredibly excited at the awareness of like breaking down, diving deeper. There was women who were acknowledging going on HRT and still not feeling incredible shifts within their physiology. Then there's women who are saying, well, what are you talking about? Don't ask any questions. Like, there was not even a safe space to even inquire around what was beneficial for them. And yet here we are with practitioners finally understanding how to connect the dots. I've never heard of the HPTAO axis before until I started following your work. And yet, if we're not taking this level of depth when it comes to personalization, how on earth can there be a singular protocol for, for people? A lot of people are starting HRT and they're not feeling as though their lives are changed. I, I saw HRT as a dangling carrot. Testosterone therapy. Ooh, more energy, more libido, more focus, putting on more muscle mass. Yes, please sign me up. Up. But I would say that it actually exacerbated a lot of my symptoms moving into perimenopause. And then I had to pull back, do more research for myself, and understand that that wasn't the case for me. So for women who are out there who are experimenting with HRT, they're starting on hormones and they're not understanding why they don't feel better, how are you kind of educating how hormones, they don't act in isolation? How are you helping women but also practitioners understand that we need to pull back the curtain a little bit more to understand what's going on in one's Yeah, you said that really well, Mona.

You know, I think I would liken it to being the shiny object syndrome. Women have felt that they haven't had the support or the clinician, I would say, guidance with their bodies. So now we're swinging all the way over to this shiny object, which looks like HRT. And just like you said, some women experience relief, but then you still have women who don't. And so the way that I'm educating is looking at hormones in a much fuller web. So we have the synthesis of hormones, we have the transport of them. We have activation at the level of the cell. We have metabolism and excretion. So there is a huge path that hormones travel. But right now we're only focused on let's just get more hormones, let's have HRT. And we're also missing the message of perhaps what those hormones that we're bringing in are bringing in in the way of endocrine disruption as well, because you look many of them are patches which have adhesives, or, you know, you look at even the Prometrium, the progesterone, and you can see, well, it's got dyes and other things. That bright orange casing isn't—

we should think about.

Yeah, yeah. And not to say, I mean, I know we have to weigh everything, right? But I know still what we're getting at here in this conversation is that women aren't experiencing complete relief with HRT, and they're expecting that because that's the message out there. That is the shiny object. So I think just to back up, what I think is really important is to focus on the whole self of the woman, looking at her nutrition, making sure that she is following. And you and I both come from this place of looking at a plant-rich, anti-inflammatory, high antioxidant value type of eating so that when she loses her estrogen, becomes more inflamed, that she, her body is equipped to deal with that. And then also certain targeted supplements. And then of course lifestyle. We really need to look at the bedrock. We need to look at the foundational principles before diving into a medication that we're going to be tethered to our whole lives. Not to say, again, there's not a place for HRT. It's just in the fuller context of a woman and addressing her physiology and psychology, it can be even more impactful. It's a really—

it's profound in our world. As much as we've seen, you know, diets and protocols and even gurus and, you know, these shiny dangling carrots that we all become. We're so desperate to feel better, to wake up feeling our best. And what I'm hoping this audience will take away is just the inquisition behind, well, you know, hormones, HRT could work for you, but let's just again dive in a little bit deeper. So you'd mentioned, you know, one, we're, we're moving into this hormonal cascade, let's call it, but yet our nervous system regulation, dysregulation probably started from our 20s, maybe even before. Yeah. And you and I know, you know, any, any food protocol, even the best food protocol, might not work for somebody who has a completely dysregulated nervous system. So can you make a connection between the endocrine system and nervous system regulation first? Because I'm moving away from even prescribing a food protocol immediately until I address what the state of the body is in first.

I like that a lot. Yeah, so I know that I've been talking about the endocrine system because that refers to the glands in the body that make hormones. The endocrine system is actually married to the neurology of our being. So our neurological system is connected to our psyche, our behavior, our mood state through neurotransmitters. So things like dopamine, serotonin, you know, glutamate, all of these different things that are rewiring our brain and changing our behavior. So it's the neuroendocrine system. So I really like what you're saying about getting that sympathetic nervous system back in balance. So that's where things like lifestyle can come in, right? So this is things that are available to everybody, like breathwork and making sure that we are grounded. We know how to bring ourselves back. It's not that we're never going to have stress, but how do we bring ourselves back? Kind of like bubble gum, you know, or just like elastic. Like, how do we— like, we come out here, but then we're able to go back quickly, right? And so it's almost like it's a form of spiritual fitness where we can exercise that muscle over and over again. So I think breath, I think being in nature can be very restorative. We look at the studies on forest bathing and how that can change our sympathetic nervous system in the way of heart rate, cortisol levels, also just, you know, overall improving our, our balance, our mood state. So nature, breathwork, better sleep, and being around a supportive community, I think is important too. As women start to go into the perimenopause and even before that time, women are very connected to community and to others. We like to, I would say we, we require that support in some way, healthy support. So I think that can be beneficial for the nervous system if it is set up in such a way that it's very nourishing and not depleting. Hmm. It feels really stressful.

A lot of us feel stressed about what's going to happen. We're really being shown a picture of the doom and gloom that comes with menopause and beyond. Yeah. And that creates and induces more stress. And I really don't think that a lot of practitioners out there who are prescribing HRT are asking around asking about stress. A question that I often ask my clients is, you know, whenever we meet as a check-in, really tuning into your body, asking on a scale of 1 to 10, what's the level of stress that you feel right now? And they'll typically answer something from a 6 and above, which is always pretty high, right? It's chronic, consistent stress. And then I ask an additional question where I say, all right, now if I were to step into your body, would I feel the same number or would I feel something higher? Like, whoa, like what is happening? Because this person is adapted to living with that level of stress for so many years. And it gets women thinking like, yeah, you know, there's a lot of stress that's living internally, and yet no doctor is kind of precursing, right, like moving back, digging a little bit deeper to understand that root cause healing that we're, we're talking about. They're going straight into, into hormones. So for people who are listening then going through this transition where we're focusing so much on estrogen loss stress, what would you prescribe as like, what are some preliminary questions or insight that one should have into their system before we just blame estrogen?

Well, first of all, to back up into what you're saying about stress, I think that that is really powerful because if we do not get a, I would say, a harness on our stress response, then just adding in more estrogen just adds fuel to the fire, right? Because we haven't dealt with the triangle of cortisol, glucose, and insulin. So that is, I would say, like the first tier of our hormones, right? And so we don't often see much connection of talking about estrogen and progesterone as it is connected to cortisol. I kind of see that as the root. You know, if we go back to the root and being rooted, I think of cortisol and the adrenals being that first line of, okay, now I feel grounded. And then we start to move with the creative expression of estrogen and progesterone, right? Which is kind of like the icing on the cake, but not the foundation. The foundation truly is cortisol. And then, you know, back to your previous question about adaptogens, I think this is where women think, oh, you know, I need a supplement for stress. Let me just get ashwagandha or any number of the different adaptogens that are out there, right? There are so many, and some of them are in combination. They actually conflict with each other. And then she thinks that that'll take her stress away, and it won't. We really need to get into that day-to-day type of just rewiring how we respond. So I want to really acknowledge that stress will help to inform our bodies better in terms of how we respond, because ultimately we want to take stress into resilience, because even saying the word stress will stress women out. Yeah, don't remind me of it. So I think what we want to do is say, well, how can we become more resilient? Because stress is never going away. And as we move our way into our 50s, 60s, and beyond, And how do we become that elder who has that sense of wisdom and we can deal with the stresses because we see that as what we can deal with because we have developed some kind of mechanism around that. So I think from a nutrition lifestyle perspective, there are certain things that we can get at in order to help that cortisol, glucose, and insulin triad that is always working within us. And I also wanna mention too that insulin, and cortisol very closely connect with melatonin. And what happens as a woman starts to age, and for men as well, is their endogenous melatonin from their pineal gland, so another gland in the endocrine system just further on in, it starts to decrease, right? So now circadian rhythm gets disrupted. I just gave a talk on circadian rhythm and aging and how we have a new syndrome called circadian syndrome where we have sleep disturbance, but now we have metabolic syndrome, we have mood disorders, and people are not sleeping well. They have exposure to artificial light at night. That in and of itself is very stressful. So I just wanted to give a little bit more context to what you were saying about the stress component. Yeah, it's, it's really huge.

And the more that we understand— you used a really powerful word, resilience, which I love, is starting to trend. And I think that 2025 is really a threshold year where people are starting to pull back and understand, like, okay, well, maybe 'Is this good for me?' Or, 'I see it being advocated everywhere, but is it right for me?' And I guess looking back, although it was my greatest challenge, my greatest blessing was this time that I was sharing with you going to the ashram. So I went from doing what media society was telling me to do in terms of the Atkins diet at that time, how I was working out, the foods that I was consuming, being part of this hustle culture, which was all very normalized and celebrated.. And I went to the ashram, and I started doing the antithesis of what society, media, and even my doctors were telling me to do. I was eating more carbs than ever before in my life. I was not working out hardcore. I wasn't lifting heavy. Instead, I was meditating, and I was breathing. And the gift from the ashram— and I always say I wish everyone could go and experience it— but the environment was set. The environment was set for my endocrine system. The environment was set for my nervous system. The environment was set for my digestion. And what I, what I take away from that wisdom is the interconnectedness, but also the integration. And when I became a nutritionist, I was fascinated and I still am. We talk about integrative healthcare so often, but is it actually happening? Are the doctors, the endocrinologists, the, the gut doctor, the digestion, the, the family doctor practitioner, no one's talking to each other. No. Right. And we're giving information on this very symptomatic approach. Whether it's cortisol, if there's something that's going on with our glucose, with our melatonin, with our thyroid, and it's this still symptomatic approach. And we're, we're causing it— we're calling it root cause healing because we're tuning into the imbalance and the biomarker, but it still isn't addressing root cause. Yeah. So can you talk to us about what you believe is the transition that's happening in supporting women and understanding that if we really understand the integration within the body— and maybe we can tie this into the, the HPTAO axis, right? That integration, that communication within the system. Yeah. Then it's now we're pulling back a little bit to understanding where to go first.

Well, I think me as a nutrition scientist, I would start with nutrition. How do we fortify the endocrine system, the HPTAO? And so I think of the macros, the micros, the phytos, the macronutrients. Of course, we hear so much about women needing more protein as they start to go through this transition, which makes good sense because we start to have more changes within our musculoskeletal system, and we, we start to develop some issues with pain or, you know, just breakdown, more osteopenia, osteoporosis. So protein, we definitely need to look at that. And protein is also informing detoxification pathways which are relevant to hormones. Then we have fats, making sure that she's set up in a way to have an anti-inflammatory ratio of fatty acids rather than an inflammatory ratio. That's going to help her significantly and also to help the cell membrane structure for the optimal function of the cells. Then the other thing from a macro perspective is, of course, we think of sugar and all the things not to have, but I'm gonna talk about the things that she does need. And I'm thinking about prebiotic fibers. I'm thinking about polyphenols, which can help with the gut microbiome. And as a woman moves into menopause, her gut microbiome starts to shift. To look more like that of a man's. So we need to bring that back to get her back to short-chain fatty acids, to butyrate that can help to inform the brain, the immune system. So that's setting the stage for everyday nutrition, which ultimately will form the bedrock of her being, right, for all of these different hormonal changes. Separately, the micronutrients. I think about the water-soluble and the fat-soluble nutrients. Water-soluble, of course, we need vitamin C and the B vitamins to run the metabolic pathways and also for cortisol. So that's important. And those are the vitamins that are being excreted rapidly through sweat, through urine. So we constantly need to replenish those. Then we have A, D, E, and K and the carotenoids. I'm going to include those in. I'm gonna talk about those with the phytonutrients, but those fat-soluble nutrients, like especially, you know, we hear a lot about vitamin D. Yeah. And there's vitamin D as a nutrient, but we, we can't leave this sun out of the picture because we also need much more from sunlight than just vitamin D. Yeah. Vitamin E is a, a potent antioxidant, but very limited to fat-soluble tissues in the body. Vitamin K to help with coagulation, blood vessels, vitamin A to help with the immune system. So we need all of those. The phytonutrients are also really important because I think most people, are getting what I would call the bland diet, brown, yellow, white, and not like the nutrient-dense kind. It's, you know, depleted. So in this, you know, even when I was studying nutrition, we spent so much time studying carbohydrate, protein, and fat macros.

Yeah.

And not in like the pendulum, the low-fat, high-fat, you know, all the debates. It's like, I'm so tired of all of that because, you know, we have to look at the whole, right? So the phytonutrients are what I call the underdogs of nutrition where there are thousands upon thousands of these different, I would say they, they had, don't have calories, they're not vitamins, they're not minerals, but they're doing other things at the level of the cell. They're helping with hormone signaling. So these would be about 10,000 to 25,000 different compounds that we don't see on a food label. We only see them primarily through color, but sometimes not even, they're just in the plant. So I think of glucosinolates, which are in cruciferous vegetables, also maca, actually glucosinolates are important for healthy hormone metabolism. Metabolism. I think of carotenoids, which are what make plants look pretty, as I would say. I studied them in grad school. They're the red of lycopene, the orange of beta-cryptoxanthin, beta-carotene, the yellow of lutein, which is important for the eyes. We have a lot of eye changes as we go through menopause. So when we are eating all of those plant nutrient-dense foods, it's kind of like it's the full package. We get the fiber, we get the micro So, and I left out minerals even. I mean, there are macrominerals, there are microminerals, there are ultra trace, and minerals compete with heavy metals. And that is something we have to look at as well, that as a woman goes through menopause and she starts to lose her bone mineral density, she starts to liberate what has been stored in her bone over time, i.e., lead, lead, and other things, right? Metals, right? So I think when you ask like, where does she where do we start? I would say we start with what we do every day, which is what are we eating? And I know you and I would align on that because that's what we study and that's what we do and that's what we know and love. And then I think, you know, we can start to talk about supplements because even the best diet, you know, we try, we can eat organic, but soils are depleted, water is contaminated. We're up against a lot in the way of chemicals on the planet. You know, it's been estimated that we have something on the order of 86,000 different chemicals, and then our body takes those chemicals in and then converts them into even more toxic metabolites. I don't want to scare everybody. I think, you know, what we want to do is leave people with empowering messages, but this is a reality that this could actually compound a woman's menopausal experience because it's, you know, many practitioners aren't looking at total toxic load as it relates to endocrine disruptors or parabens, phthalates, plastics that we have, and how does that inform hormone communication?

So yeah, I think we, we do need to keep shouting from the rooftop what's happening in our environment, in our modern world, especially if that is the, the greatest impact to our health and as women, our endocrine system. And you're making me think of the two pillars of Ayurveda. There's no protocol given until we optimize digestion and optimize detoxification, And I would love to know of all of our listeners, if you were given a protocol for HRT, did your practitioner talk to you about digestion and detoxification? Right, that's primary. Yes, primary. So let's start with, uh, detoxification. All right, so I've seen more this year— there's a lot of my clients who would start, um, an estradiol patch, even in a low dose, and the pendulum swung, right? Numbers started going up. Up, but they became incredibly elevated, right? And she didn't feel better necessarily. Her pants were a little bit tighter, her— she had a little bit more breast tenderness and stuff like that. Can we talk about estrogen detoxification through the detox pathways also, and why that's something that's so necessary to consider prior to HRT?

You know, and even mainstream allopathic physicians don't acknowledge this, even gynecologists. I'm thinking about even the gynecologist that I have been to because I've had different health conditions and and there was never once talk of, let's get your urinary estrogen metabolite profile and see how your body's metabolizing estrogen. So environmental health, how, uh, what are we doing as it relates to detoxification? So what's really unique, and, um, you know, just thinking about this, this is a real pivotal point that our bodies detoxify hormones like they would detoxify an environmental pollutant or a contaminant. They go through the same pathways. So when our body makes estrogen or takes in estrogen from a patch or a pill or a pellet, whatever the form is, it still has to go through all of these different sequences. And that requires nutrients. It requires energy, which means that the mitochondria have to be working well, which means that our nutritional status has to be sufficient. So it goes through phase 1 detoxification, which adds hydroxyl group, makes that estrogen a little bit more water soluble. And that takes energy, that takes B vitamins, it takes certain minerals, then it moves along. And then we can create more of a, a reactive estrogen that can be problematic. This is where we start to see more of the genotoxic or more of the kinds of estrogen that we would be concerned with as it relates to cancer risk. Right. So it's not the estrogen per se. Per se. It's more what our bodies are doing to the estrogen. And some of us have genes that make a little bit more of a genotoxic estrogen. So wouldn't we want to know that before somebody goes on estrogen? Yeah. So that's really key. And then following on from that first phase and then moving into that more of a reactive form of estrogen, it then moves into what we call phase 2. So phase 2 is where you have like a glucuronide group or a sulfur group added to the hormone in order to get it out of the body. Either it goes through the bile and then goes out of the gut. And this is where your other point of digestion and the gut comes in, because we need a good, healthy gut microbiome to continue that process that the liver and other organs have all worked in concert to do. And now we take it out of the body.

I've recommended bile supplementation more this year than I can remember than previous years for that reason.

I think that's really important because the lipophilic hormones that have been metabolized typically come out in bile and then come out into the intestinal tract. And, you know, for women, I think that there is an issue with bile formation and also flow. We need to tend to our livers, you know, for women especially. So my husband does traditional Chinese medicine. Wow. You talked about Ayurveda. Lucky you. What I think both of them have in common too is they do look at different organ systems in the way of all working together, right? You talked about integration. So when it comes to women and hormones, we need to be tending to our livers. Yes. You know, the house of anger, the house of rage, the house of even depression. You know, there are emotional signatures of these organs. Yeah. So for a woman who is taking in all of these hormones without tending to the metabolism, there might be some issues with lipids or even liver health that we need to be thinking about at not just a Western allopathic way of thinking, but also even in Eastern ways of thinking and thought around emotional intelligence and organ reserve.

Liver care, I think, is essential, and I think it's something a lot of people will check in on their liver health through biomarker testing. Numbers can still look normal though. Yes, basically. Yes. Liver panel without understanding the depth of of, um, support that your liver has accumulated toxins, right, or its ability to function at its best. Are you relying on biomarker testing, genetic testing? Do you think that this should be a prerequisite for HRT?

I think we have to look at a full spectrum approach. So in functional medicine, which is what I'm trained in, it's not just laboratory biomarkers that would denote functionality. That's one piece of it, and I think it's an important piece, but it's not everything. I do think that looking at genetics can inform us as to a person's constitution and where they might skew in the way of certain metabolites, or where they might need a little bit more support. But then we have symptoms, just like you said before. Like, some women have symptoms, but they have no laboratory indications. And you could say, is that because the lab ranges aren't geared towards women at a certain time of life? I know in functional medicine we have more narrow laboratory ranges, right, so that it's a little bit more discerning. So insulin is not 2 to 20, it's like 2 to 5 or 2 to 9, right? Like you're— it's been suppressed. And even for women, those are not even sex-specific, right? We could be thinking about women going through her lifespan where she has different ranges for different things, and we haven't quite reached that degree of sophistication. So what do we rely on? We rely on that woman as her own control. So monitor— and that's why I often say to women, get your hormone panel early, like in your 20s. Like, let's look at what you were working from baseline, right? Now, for some women in their 50s like myself, you know, it's a little bit too late to kind of go back and do all— I did all of that. But for women who are now in their 50s and thinking like, oh my gosh, I didn't do all that, well, then working with a practitioner who's really knowledgeable— and it's not just about dumping more HRT, it's looking at number one, the sequence: optimize your HPTAO access, optimize your gut, optimize your pathways of detoxification. Like, just even when I'm teaching for the Institute for Functional Medicine on detoxification, we never talk about like just moving right in to like gearing up the liver. We first have to be sure that everything is moving through the gut, right? Because if you transform all of those metabolites and dump them into the gut and then you have constipation, right? So there's a proper sequence that I think is important for women. You know, just the things that we just talked about, I think, are kind of a nexus of what needs to be looked at before she starts to move into HRT.

Yeah, I think it's so important to find a practitioner who's your partner in healing because we still are so desperate to feel better, and a lot of people will jump into a liver detox or a gut detox protocol without considering the previous pathways that need to be optimized in order for that organ to function at its best, right? And I'm curious too, with listening to you, are we falling back on HRT as a form of preventative healthcare because we're so desperate to feel better, you know? Is there— I'm really understanding that there's so much more that needs to happen before HRT should be recommended. And I'm sure even saying those words might like ruffle some feathers of people listening, especially if it created a profound impact. But we need to understand like the shift that's happening during the transition, but the shift that's happening in the terrain of the body also. And in Ayurveda, similar to Chinese medicine, we call it accumulation, right? This accumulation that is built up that maybe you just need to optimize that terrain in order for your system to function better. And I love that you brought up your husband as well. When I started to experience like a little bit of hot flash— this was after mold exposure, after testosterone pellet therapy, which completely went sideways for me— a couple of sessions of acupuncture completely took those hot flashes away. And was the support that I needed to get off testosterone pellet therapy.

Interesting. Although not surprising. Not surprising, right? Yeah. No, because let's just take hot flashes for a second, because that's one of the most bothersome symptoms for women going through perimenopause. And if you look at, well, what is the root cause of hot flashes, you start to see that there is this sympathetic nervous system disregulation. There is also cardiovascular type risk to be looking at. So a woman who has this thermodysregulation in her body, so there's something that's not aligned between certain temperature control centers in the brain, the nervous system, and the heart. How are they all speaking to one another? So with acupuncture, what I think is we're aligning the meridians, we're changing the flow of energy, and we're also, from a medical perspective, we're creating a better sense of resilience, back to what we were saying about that sense of stress response. So, but you know, there will be some women, and I would say probably about 20 to 30% of women that will still continue to experience severe hot flashes and other types of symptoms. So I don't wanna discount them either. Like, oh, you just need to get your nervous system in check. It's not that easy sometimes, especially if you've lived a lifetime of not having that regulation. And then all of a sudden, you have a wake-up call at 45 and you gotta get it all in order.

Exactly.

It can be a lot, that can be adding stress to the entire picture. Mm-hmm. So I think too, going back to the HPTAO, there can be certain things that we can bring in in order to reregulate and to create healthy communication again through that circuitry to give her a different kind of baseline to work from so that she has that internal support and nourishment.

So let's break this down then. Our women who are listening, they're hearing you. This HPTAO access is paramount.

Where do we start? So one of the things we can do in this, I'm coming from a personal story on this as well, and it just kind of aligned because I became chief science officer at Symphony Natural Health. This was when I was going through perimenopause and it was like divine intervention. Thank you. Because I wasn't even putting it all together, but, um, they actually have these live life stage products for women called FeminEssence, right? Like feminine essence. Yes. And so I went on the perimenopause one, which is called FeminEssence Maca Life, and that helped me significantly in terms of re-regulating and supporting the HPTAO. So, you know, my hot flashes— I did have hot flashes. In fact, I was so surprised, even for myself, you know, the person who I think I, I do everything right, or I try to, right? I was eating right, eating right, exercising to the degree that I could, sleeping right, but still I was one of those women that still had an issue. So the Feminessence definitely helped me. And also there is good literature. There are 4 published clinical trials showing support for women that are going through peri and postmenopausal conditions and symptoms and having these symptoms and even supporting her with bone health or cardiovascular health and body composition. Because what the FeminEssence does is it helps with not only the symptoms, but also naturally supporting hormones. So it's helping the brain to better connect with hormones and to connect to the ovaries as well as the adrenals and the thyroid. So that helped me as like the foundation. So yes to good eating. Yes. Yes to movement. Yes to everything that we're saying about stress and then bringing in targeted supplementation like FeminEssence Separate from that, I also, I fell in love with melatonin. This was another thing that kind of was a wake-up call for me. Published a research paper on that with a whole team of people back in September of 2022 in the Nutrients journal. And the title of the paper, you might find this interesting, 'cause it, the title was, "Is Melatonin the Next Vitamin D?" Fascinating. And what we see with melatonin is that it starts to, decrease from the moment we hit puberty and on into our later years. Like, it's like a roller coaster. It just keeps going down. So by the time we hit our 50s, we're at like 10% of what we had as a child. Wow. 10%. 10%. And that's pineal melatonin, not from the skin, non-pineal, but from— and that helps us with circadian rhythm, right? The sleep signal. It's not really just about sleep. I think that melatonin has had a bad reputation because people think, oh, it's supposed to put me to sleep and keep me asleep. It's really not about that. It's sleep is a byproduct of melatonin being released from the pineal gland, which then goes out to signal and get all of your clock systems synchronized, right? It's really beautiful if you think of it like melatonin is getting us in alignment with nature's signal. So it's a conductor. Conductor. It's a conductor, but you will love this. Okay, so what I found out later on melatonin is that between 2 and 4 AM, now in Chinese medicine, this is liver time. Yeah. 1 and 3 is liver time. So between 2 and 4, we see a peak in melatonin. We also see a peak in other enzymes that connect to antioxidant response. So things like glutathione peroxidase, superoxide dismutase. So between 2 and 4, this is like the highlight of our body is really going into repair and rejuvenation. And I— if you look at some of the research on the glymphatic fluid exchange, so what happens when we're sleeping, especially in certain phases of sleep, is that our brain cells start to shrink so that the perivascular spaces can open up. And essentially, we— our brain starts to release release a lot of toxic metabolites into that glymphatic fluid, which melatonin is a part of, and then out when we wake up in the morning, lymphatic flow, right? We are hearing so much about, you know, tending to our lymphatic system, especially around the neck, the ears, the back of the, the head in order to engage and get that out of the body after a night of sleep. So melatonin is pivotal for that process.

Fascinating. Yep. So you've seen melatonin has been, you know, just on a pedestal for a while and then not. How do we know to supplement with it or not?

Well, I think we just have to assume that with age we're going to be losing some, right? And I think what has happened for the people who love melatonin, they are going way overboard. Exactly. It's like double digits, triple digits. Let's use a suppository, let's use this, let's— I like to stick close to whatever nature has given us. And also let's just replenish what we've lost. Let's go physiological rather than supra physiological pharmacological. So 0.3 milligrams is along the lines of what we would be missing with age. And the reason why that's important is because there's more and more research now. This is from Dr. Russell Reiter, Dr. Tan. I mean, I've interviewed a lot of these people to really get an understanding of this, but there is an association between lower melatonin and also increased risk of neurodegenerative disorders, right? Right, okay. So for women especially who may be more vulnerable to some of these conditions, you know, I do think about these lower dose supplementation of melatonin, which could help in that regard. I mean, we don't have, it would be great to have more prospective studies looking at that, but already there are thousands of studies. And that's why I can't understand why people are so, just kind of polarized about melatonin. I'm thinking, that's crazy. It is crazy. Yeah. So one of them that I do like, and it is from that same company that has Feminessence, is Erbitonin. Okay. Erbitonin is from plants, alfalfa, chlorella, and rice. So it's actually green. And it's been studied against synthetic melatonin and found to be 6 to 9 times more active in terms of its anti-inflammatory and antioxidant activity. And that is some of the activity that most people don't realize that melatonin gives. Melatonin is both fat-soluble and water-soluble. That's called amphiphilic, so it can flex. So what's really unique then is that it can go into many different tissues of the body, whereas vitamin C typically in water tissue. Yeah. And vitamin E in the fat. Melatonin is right there in the middle and can traverse through many different body systems. So I just take it for healthy aging. I don't take it for sleep. I take it for just quelling and making sure that I'm filling the potholes of whatever I'm losing with age.

I think the neurodegenerative aspect is like really profound as well, especially with our exposure to technology and stuff like that that we've never had before.

When do you take melatonin? At night, right before bedtime. So think of it this way, vitamin D is, the vitamin connected to the sunlight. Melatonin is the circadian nutrient connected to the darkness. And when I think of darkness, you know, it's even as it starts to get dim, as it starts to get dim, our eyes are perceiving the absence of blue light. And then there starts to be this communication between the eyes and the suprachiasmatic nucleus of the brain. So this cluster of neurons, and then it starts this communication with the pineal gland. Right. Yeah. Right. And so I just feel like this artificial light at night is the most societally accepted endocrine disruptor. Yes. It's disrupting all of our hormones. So again, back to like, what do we do before HRT as part of like the nutrition and lifestyle aspect? I mean, I really think we need to be attentive to circadian rhythm as much as possible. It's not that our biology supersedes time. Our time controls our biology. We can never buck nature, or we can't buck the day-night cycle or the seasonal rhythm. And this is what Ayurveda and TCM are so good at. Absolutely. Like, they know that you eat differently when it's winter versus summer. You live differently when you have certain amounts of daylight versus more darkness. So I feel like what melatonin is, is that molecule of darkness the yin, the feminine. And vitamin D is like the, the yang, you know, it's the daylight, it's the brightness. But they actually work very closely together. They're like brother and sister. They're almost like two sides of one coin. Yeah, they share a lot of functions like immune regulation, mitochondrial function, which is why a lot of biohackers love melatonin because they know the literature. But also the, like I mentioned, the brain effect. Effects and looking at just neurotrophic factor, having the antioxidant activity, having the anti-inflammatory response. During COVID when people were coming out with all these protocols, they put melatonin on. That actually got my attention because I'm thinking, wait a minute, I'm a nutritionist that knows about the vitamin A, vitamin C, zinc, and all of that, but why are people talking about melatonin in that way? I didn't realize. So I've had to come up to speed on all things melatonin, to understand that, wow, our immune cells are responding to melatonin.

I think it's fascinating through the lens of, you know, it's wonderful that circadian rhythm is having a moment right now. I really hope that it continues to trend moving forward. Unfortunately, it's one of those things, it's still in the woo category. Like, yeah, yeah, I understand it, but it's almost like it's too easy I think people, they're either looking for the really quick fix or a protocol that might feel a little hard so they feel a drastic change. But when we focus on circadian rhythm healing or alignment, the shifts are subtle. It's just like nature. We don't feel a change from one night to the next, but it happens over time. Yeah. And I love that you brought this up because this year I noticed a lot of my clients, they— I saw a lot more thyroid antibody activation, autoimmune activation this year as well.. And we really focused on circadian rhythm before protocol or before throwing more things at the system. And I definitely— there were noticeable improvements, whether it was through sleep, through energy, through metabolism first thing in the morning. And I want to point that out because what if we move this to the first pillar of healing? Yes, right before product or protocol or HRT or anything else. And it does go back to that terrain healing as well within the body. And I think something that you speak about so eloquently is the shining light, optimizing the light connection within the body, whether it's through color, through the chakra system as well, and noticing how that illuminates the body, the body's function within.

Yes, light and darkness, right? Yeah, you know, I just remember even growing up and being afraid of the dark. Yeah. And kind of having this feeling of like, oh, it's not good to be in darkness, you know, nothing good comes of the dark. But actually, we need that darkness when nature gives us dim light and darkness, we need to be right there with it. And it's interesting that something that's free and available to all is so difficult. It's so difficult. Yeah. It shows the degree of addiction that we have to whether it's technology or constantly being on or not being able to downscale and really go within. Because I feel like that's what the dim light and darkness are calling us to do is to actually go on the inside and go into being rather than doing. Yeah.

And using that, recognizing the balance between the two, right? I think we're so focused on arriving at health, arriving at optimization, whatever that means, instead of the beauty that comes through the journey of it all. And recognizing that day to day, your body might communicate with you through different symptoms. And those symptoms are actually incredible messengers from this, like, phenomenal physiology that we have.

I know.

You start to listen and tune into what those symptoms are.

Mona, I wanna say something about that because I, again, I just gave a talk on this and this is something that people may not realize as well, that there's a connection between accelerated aging and circadian dysregulation. So if we do not attend to circadian rhythm in that way of like day and night, what ends up happening is as we get older, we have increased risk for certain things like just greater death, mortality, increased risk for certain chronic diseases. Just because of not getting proper light. And also, as we make our way into the latter decades, the opacity of the lens starts to change. Again, everything is about the eyes. So if we tend to our eyes and we're off screens and we're getting more nutrients to help the eye— omega-3s, lutein, zeaxanthin— yeah, we help with the fluidity of the eye, which helps with the light connection. Because as people become older and the lens becomes more opaque, we become more immune a little bit to the effects of blue light at night, but then we have a weaker flattened cortisol rhythm in the day. It will take more during the morning to get going. And if you notice, like many older people, they, they get just tired through the day. Yeah. Because their eyes aren't responsive and not able to be in that circadian flow. So good melatonin means also good cortisol and waking up during the day. Like you have to bookend your days. I know I talked about breakfast for myself. Yeah. Yeah. Starting the day, but then it's also your nighttime ritual. Are you having your, your salt bath at night? Are you like just winding down? You're not going to the gym under fluorescent lights and getting all sympathetically driven. Yeah. But you are moving into the parasympathetic, right? I mean, it sounds so common sense, but it does not.

But no one practices it, right? Yeah. I think even as a practitioner, I'm like, yes, I need to be reminded of, of doing that. And a beautiful way that I describe it to my clients is if you were to parent yourself in those bookends, as we do with our children, do the exact same things. And even as we move through these hormonal changes, I think that it's important to talk about sleep training and just like resleep training ourselves and the things that we need during, maybe even during different phases of our cycle and how to get that nourishment again. And I really want to go back to hovering on femininescence as well. And like, is there the herbs that go into that? Can you tell us just a little bit about the, the lineup, when we should be looking at that? And I know that you believe also, like, we can't, we can't supplement ourselves out of poor habits and poor rituals every day that are destructive or kind of working against our circadian rhythm. So can you maybe talk to us, talk to us how we can incorporate them therapeutically? Yes. Through a system, if people are really curious right now, where do we start?

They need this. Yeah. And most people don't even know about FeminEssence. No. So there are 3 life stage products for women. One is for menstrual health. So for women who are looking for more hormonal balance, I wish I knew about it then because I had so much dysregulation, right? Whether endometriosis, PCOS, just dysmenorrhea. There are also case studies on FeminEssence Maca Harmony. So that's the one for menstrual health, right? And so for some women, that's where they're at. And that may not be something you have to take forever. You just get your, your period back on track. You know, you take the product, you get that endocrine circuit speaking again, and then you're, you're cycling. And that may take 2 to 3 cycles in order to kind of get that into balance. Then there is FeminEssence MacaLife, which is the pink colored one. That's for perimenopause, and that's to deal with perimenopausal symptoms. All of these 3 products actually have have certain maca phenotypes. One thing that I never knew until I started doing research on it, but there are up to 17 different kinds of maca phenotypes. They have different DNA, different physiological effects, different profiles phytochemically. So each of these different products have different maca phenotypes that have the functional benefit of whatever that woman is seeking in that particular life stage. So there's the perimenopause one, which again is FeminEssence MacaLife, and then there is FeminEssence MacaPause, which is the one I'm on. It's the purple one, and that one is more geared with an enrichment of certain maca phenotypes that would help longer term with things like bone health and also cardiovascular, body composition, even mood. So it's really just working on all of the different systems in the body in order to nourish the HPTAO access. Beautiful. So the 3 different, and I love the fact that there are 4 clinical trials in the actual population of who needs to take those products. So it's not like when you go to a store and you get a supplement and it's kind of like, well, there's a bunch of stuff in here that looks pretty good. Maybe I'm getting a lot for my money, but then it actually hasn't been tested in the target population. We don't know if all of those things work together or work against each other. So I've been in the supplement industry for a long time time. And some of the telltale signs of a good supplement is that they have science on that actual product. So not just borrowing the science from others, but actually doing science on the product. It's safe. It has a history of safe use. Like with FeminEssence, it's been in the market for 18 years. And also quality. What I love about working with Symphony Natural Health is that they're vertically integrated, where they actually grow the maca in Peru. Wow. Support the local farmers. And so they know exactly where they're getting the maca. And there's maca grown for women's products that are grown in a different location than where you would get the maca for men's products. They do have some men's products, but we won't talk about those today. We're focused on women here. But it's kind of neat. So I feel like this is one of those best-kept secrets and they only have like 7 products, but they're all targeted and all really focused on hormones. So I love working with them because I wouldn't work with a company that wouldn't have science or quality. Of course. Yeah.

Yeah. In the supplement world, that's becoming the Wild West. And just like a CPG brand, brands are getting purchased by bigger companies that have nothing to do with health and wellness whatsoever. It's simply for profit. Yeah. So hearing these stories is so important. Can you share any studies or stories or success cases of women who have merged into feminisms from HRT or pre or post?

Yeah, I think it's always interesting to look at the women who will reject the product because they feel like they've tried everything. Yeah. So one of the stories actually comes from somebody who was working at a natural food store who had a number of issues with her cycle and felt like, you know, she had taken a maca product and felt like it just made things worse. And that's the thing. If you don't know what you're taking exactly in terms of the maca phenotype, it can actually have an androgenic effect. And if you have PCOS, it could make things worse. So in the case of this woman, she had talked with some members of our team and they kind of coached her along with it and said, no, no, no, this is different. This is not just your regular old maca product. This is a well-studied product. So she went on it and initially she wasn't really sure because her cycle was changing.. And it was like, you know, her period was like reestablishing itself and, you know, she was kind of comfortable with where it was, but they said, no, just hang in there. Just continue for a couple of cycles because your body is reregulating and recommunicating through that HPTAO access, right? So, um, a couple months later she reached out to the medical team and she was thrilled and she was like completely hormonally balanced. She was cycling and, um, she eventually got pregnant. Pregnant, which was her goal. So when you ask like, what is a success story? We have so many. And I would say, you know, ultimately, you know, having— I wouldn't say that the FeminEssence caused the pregnancy per se, but it did help with the hormonal balancing that led to healthy cycles, healthy hormones, and then ultimately to take her to that end goal of being more fertile and being able to carry her baby.

So, yes, thank you for sharing. What a beautiful story. Really. What, what I'm thinking is, I feel personally that we're falling back on HRT and calling it preventative healthcare because we're so desperate to feel better quickly, when preventative healthcare is really looking at going deeper, thinking of prevention through optimizing the body, perhaps through ingredients like this, using something like maca or something that's synergistically proven to help the female endocrine system years in advance. Because there are some people who go through menopause and they flow through it. You know, I know a lot of the women in my family who are South Asian, it didn't really faze them. And I think it had a lot to do with, you know, the diet, the phytochemicals that we were talking about, the prebiotic fiber that they were taking in, the environment that they were living in, and so on and so forth. But again, when we think about— I just, I think about prevention. I remember learning in nutrition with maca, it was just maca libido. Yes, that was it, right? Not understanding the depth that it could go. And what gets me so excited, and this is where I think my mind is blown a little bit, is nature really does hold so much of what can support us, and we're not looking there first.

Exactly, exactly. And that's our own nature, and then it's external nature connecting to plants. Yeah, that's what I love about plants specifically, not I'm not like somebody has to be a vegan or vegetarian, but I do get concerned when I don't see people eating enough in the way of plants because the plants do contain a number of these different factors. In fact, there's almost like a polarization away from plants, which, you know, I have some concern about because of then like, what about the fiber? What about the phytochemicals? You won't be getting what you need in order to reestablish that cellular intelligence. So yes, you know, Feminessence in the way of supplying certain maca phenotypes, that's it. It's enriched, it's bioavailable, it's been gelatinized, it's in a format that will help with the uptake. And again, to give accolades to Symphony, they observed how the natives in Peru were also working with the plant. And so they began to grow it in a similar way. They began to dry it in the way of doing it more traditionally. So not just coming in and doing this commercial, I would say, operation and thinking that they knew, knew better. They were really attentive to, okay, let's, let's really harness that traditional wisdom of this land. Because I don't know if you know this, Mona, but back in the late '90s when Viagra came out, and like you said, it was maca and libido. So what happened was maca was taken from Peru, its native country in origin, into places like China and Tibet in order to grow. But again, if you take a plant out of its native environment and you're growing it at a different altitude, you will get different phytochemicals. You may not have the same efficacy. So that's why knowing where something is grown and the processes that are involved in it all align to its, I would say, alignment with your body, its efficacy. And to me, what you and I, I feel, are so resonant with is, again, not going against nature. Like, looking from the soil, how something is grown, how it is harvested, how we honor that land and make sure that we rotate the soil and don't deplete the soil, then packaging something in such a way to preserve it. Because, you know, so often we see with supplements, people just have like these big open jars and and they open it. My husband does this sometimes 'cause we do have a vitamin C that we use and it's like, Mark, close the lid because it'll oxidize. We won't have anything by the time we get to the last one. That's so true. But the packaging, you know, all of these things count if we are trying to connect with the plant. In fact, I even coined this term phyto, P-H-Y-T-O, neuroendocrine system to acknowledge that we are interconnected with plants and nature. It's not like it's just us, right? I feel like, you know, I don't want to just use the plant for our beingness.

Yeah. And think of that through the lens of women right now who are being told to eat more protein than they've ever consumed in their life ever before, right? And, you know, my mom is meat and potatoes from Denmark, and my dad's Ayurvedic Indian, just purely plant-based, right? And growing up, Growing up, there was always a focus on— my mom would always make sure there was color when she put things down on our plate because she understood my dad's background. But my dad would talk to us about the pranic energy that comes to us through different colorful foods. And we now know, and you, my gosh, are, are the expert in just advocating and educating on how these colors communicate that light to our body in order to optimize and bring harmony. And I think that a lot of the diets that people are consuming today because it's so convenient is boxed, processed, dead, packaged foods. And whether you eat animal protein or not, it's, it's your choice. But again, it's dead food, and often dead food with additional hormones and pesticides, herbicides, the laundry list that goes with it. So knowing where your food comes from— and this is one of those foundational healing protocols where you're just looking at what's on your plate and whether or not there's color, and could that be— bring harmony to your endocrine system? Them, right? What if you believed it did on top of that, on top of looking at the studies?

Yes. Yeah, absolutely. I feel like I could tell you this. I don't often tell this to many people, but, you know, I'm kind of a nerdy scientist and, you know, I would say science is about seeking the truth. Yeah. So even when I was studying science, I was a biology undergrad, I started taking yoga. I took my first yoga class when I was 19. Wow. And as I was doing my study of biology, I was also taking world religions, and I was taking literature. I was taking more liberal arts classes because I felt like I'm just not a scientist. Like, I don't fit into this box, right? And then into my graduate school training, I continued to explore things in the spiritual world, and I started to see, like, wait a minute, I'm studying the carotenoids in graduate school, but I'm starting to see a connection with what I got from yoga, what I got from learning about the chakras, because I was very drawn East Indian spirituality. So you and I talked about Paramahansa Yogananda. I did all kinds of things and explored and even have been to India. So I started to see, well, wait a minute, is this endocrine system, which I'm calling HPTAO, but also including the pineal gland as well, is this really just— is this the chakra system that the ancient rishis had observed in terms of activity in the body and then the color resonance So these lights started to go off in my mind as far as like, okay, nature has a color code. And when my book first came out, it was called Chakra Foods. And I remember talking with people and they said, oh, people aren't gonna get that. And I said, I know, but the publisher wanted to have Chakra Foods. And I said, you know, this is 2008. Many people aren't gonna know. And just the yoginis are gonna be resonant with that. So let's, let's talk about the rainbow from within. Right? Because then I can speak to my mother about it who doesn't know about chakras. So what I love in this conversation is that you and I really love that ancient wisdom, but yet realize that we are living in a modern time of science, quantum physics, subtle biology, sound and light. I put those two words together. So it's kind of like we are looking at what the ancients saw, but with modern eyes and saying like, oh, that's how some of this stuff works. Works, and that satisfies our intellect, right? But here in all of this conversation about the endocrine system, there is something deeper for me. It truly goes back to ancient wisdom.

Dr. Deanna, this is why I— if I do go on social media, which isn't a whole lot these days, I'll go to pages like yours because you're one of the leading voices who can really merge the science with the wisdom. And even seeing it through the color, and if you haven't gone to Listen, if you haven't gone to her Instagram page, please do. It's just the wisdom that you provide through really tangible scientific education is profound, and it feels like a very safe space. And it feels like, for me, it feels like, okay, she actually sees what's happening in my body. There isn't a speaking to, as we experience so much with the Western medical system. There is more of an empathy that happens there. So whether you share that story or not, I really do pick up it through it, through your education.

Thank you so much. That means a lot. That means a lot because I've started to come out as more of a spiritual scientist, right? And to allow that to come out and for all of us to share in that, because I feel like we are living in this divine feminine masculine blend, right? Like it's everybody's voice matters truly.

And what I really wish I was hearing right now by prominent practitioners is less about the doom and gloom, less about so many of the symptoms that happen to a woman during this change, and more about the wisdom that's happening. You know, I wish that I could walk into a room of grandmothers, even great-grandmothers, and just be surrounded by them and understand the shift that happens during this phenomenal phase. Walking into perimenopause and menopause with that light, to me, feels like I'm ready to embrace it instead of right now the feeling of like, all right, buckle up, You're going to go through it. Let's get on the roller coaster. Here you go. There's such a difference in energy that's reactive versus the embracement and nourishment of it all. So for listeners today who are really engaged with the way that you're prescribing, looking at nature, understanding this HPAO axis, what is the recommendation that you give them? What do you really want them to hear as they move into perimenopause and menopause?

I would say to look at this next phase of life as a time of redefinition. It's a time of transformation. So when I look at it, I'm looking at it with physical eyes. You know, we spoke a lot about the physical today, but then there's also the emotional aspect of looking at who are you becoming from an emotional standpoint. And at the age of something like 50, we have a different relationship with our emotions than we had at 20. And then we have the mental aspect, our brain, how we think about things. We're so neuronally plastic and advanced when we are menopausal, right? We've got this menopausal brain that is wired in such a way to really, I would say, nourish us and to give back a lot of our life experiences. And then finally, I would say spiritual. You know, I feel like in this second half of life, this is about our meaning, our sense of purpose. This is about what are we leaving behind. This is about the legacy. This is about mentorship. It's about being an elder. It's about about the sacred. So I kind of see life as a series of— we live through the chakras. So 0 to 10, we're in that adrenal root chakra time of establishing the survival. We move into the teens, into the sacral part, a lot of flowing emotion and playfulness. The 20s, we're up into that solar plexus of power and, you know, our professional lives. Then we move up into the heart, you know, in our 30s. We might be starting a family, in our forties, we start to become a little bit more truthy. But then we've got our fifties, sixties, and on up, and we move up here. We are up into that intuitive, wise self that we are, and that we spent our whole lives becoming. So it's truly like we arrive at the rainbow. We arrive at that pot of gold after all of that journey that we've been through. So for me, I mean, And I look forward to it because I feel like, okay, I'm, I'm just about 55 this month. And I'm like, you know, this is, this is really great. Like, I love not having my period anymore. I love that I can start to focus on the younger generations and provide mentorship and that people just are coming to me in that way. So I feel like it's a time of redefinition and it's a time of like, a great coming into the full beingness of who we've spent our life becoming. So I hope that others feel that as well.

I don't doubt that one woman listening to that was all in with you and just wanted to align with that philosophy of thinking instead of the fear and the doom and the gloom that's existing out there. Maybe this is a really bold question, but would you say, is it too soon in our 30s and 40s to start HRT? Is it necessary for everyone? I know we're taking a bio-individual approach. I really recognize that. But can you pull back the lens and really understanding in everything that we've talked about today in terms of the interconnectedness of our body and looking at those pathways, should we consider that before HRT?

Short answer is yes. Let's look a little bit more under the hood. Let's look at what's happening in our bodies physically, emotionally, mentally, and even perhaps spiritually, and get that endocrine system more in balance. Because if I think back into the 30s of what a lot of women go through, there's a lot of hormonal imbalance. Women are starting families, uh, there's pregnancy there, there's postpartum. There are conditions that start to arise that are more inflammatory, like endometriosis or even polycystic ovarian syndrome, PCOS. So what might look like perimenopause might actually be hormonal dysregulation. So I think just adding more fuel to the fire of more estrogen or progesterone might just cause an exacerbation or not really be what we need at that deep physiologic and even psychological level. Right. And even through perimenopause, I feel like sometimes that can be too premature because we have so much flux. We have like phases of perimenopause where hormones are doing different things. So do we just want to blanket over them with more estrogen and progesterone and not have, again, a full understanding of what are those symptoms telling us as to what we need to do. Like you said, those symptoms are messengers. Yeah. I think for us going through that menopausal transition where we start to lose our cycle, those, so what is menopause? It's 12 consecutive months of no cycle. And then we reach that day of voilà, we have hit menopause and now we're postmenopausal. I think around that time is a time to consider. And if a woman decides to do the Feminessence, she may need less less, right, of the HRT, because now the endocrine system is more optimized and nourished and can better receive something like HRT. So I think about it just in terms of, you know, friends, family members, clients. I would really caution you away from this HRT message too early, because it's like, you know, what I see is many women go from birth control with these high levels of hormones in their 20s and 30s, and then they jump right into HRT. And you never really get a biological breather where it's like, who am I at the level of my hormones and how does my endocrine system communicate? You know, I think it's, again, this is our body's intelligence, as we know from the ancient wisdom, as well as even modern science. I mean, hormones are in picograms in our blood. This is a really small amount, but they have such power. So if we just usurp that power over to something pharmacological without really even going deep and understanding, like, what is my body telling me? What about insulin? How is my cortisol? What is my stress response like? So that estrogen, progesterone, those aren't the only hormones. Those are like two little dots on the web of all of the other hormones. So when we start to change those hormones, we start to change the web. So we need to be really careful because we have this delicate symphony within us of each one playing their own tune, their own vibration. So I would say really reflect, get a healthcare team. And I know that right now it just feels like there's a lot of HRT talk because women feel like they've been wronged. Yeah, they want a quick fix to something that feels very problematic, or at least they feel that they need to be urgent. And I think having an integrative functional medicine provider who truly understands it's not just about adding more hormones It's about how you process those hormones. How are you eating? How are you living? How is your circadian rhythm? If they're not asking all of those questions, you may need a different practitioner.

I couldn't agree with you more. It's the ultimate opportunity. I don't think there's a shortage of women spending a bulk of their lifetime hating their body, wanting to change something, wishing something was different, wanting to change parts of themselves instead of the opportunity to truly fall in love with getting to know it and recognizing what is it actually asking for. Before I throw something else at the wall. And I'm really curious to see the studies that come out. Like, there are really no long-term studies of being on these adhesives to our skin every single night and that impact on being on that, you know, bright colored pill of progesterone every single night. What's the impact of that? We talk about toxins all the time, but what about the toxins that come from these? We talk about where our food comes from, but where do these ingredients that come from pharma come from, right?

I totally agree. In fact, I would— because it is an adhesive, I was really curious. So I started to look at the ingredients and I'm thinking, ladies, this is, you know, we're just thinking if we do that patch every day of our lives or, you know, every 3 days, we just better tend to our metabolic and excretion pathways, right? It's not to say not to do it, but let's just be sure that detoxification, gut health is in alignment. That's going to be really important because your skin is being bombarded with that day after day.

Absolutely. Oh, that is so good. All right, I want to make sure that we talk about your book, The Rainbow Diet. I want to make sure people know when you're, when you're questioning how to get to this 30, 40 grams of fiber every day, this phytonutrient intake, it's actually easier than you think. There's so many ways to do it through teas, through herbs, through sprouts, through veggies, through fruits. I mean, um, and you showcase that within your book. Can you talk to us a little bit about the takeaways from The Rainbow Diet?

Sure, there are 4 principles in the Rainbow Diet. One is color, the obvious one, so getting one of each color. And so I talk about red for the inflammatory immune system, orange for the endocrine system, yellow for digestive health, green for the cardiovascular system, blue, purple, black for the brain, and white for detoxification. So, and I put tan and brown under yellow, so the fibrous plants under that. So there's the color code. So you'll see that and you'll see recipes. Then I have creativity. I talk about the role of creativity. I feel like it's an undervalued, underutilized aspect of our vitality and talk about creativity with food. Then I get into exactly what you just said about diversity and how important it is to have 30 to 50 unique foods every 7 days. You know, we get in food ruts and so how do we shake it up? And we need to shake it up because of the gut microbiome, which then fosters a healthy immune system, helps the brain to work better, You know, all paths lead to diversity. And that's even life experiences, right? Like that helps the brain. So, and then the fourth principle is rhythm. I brought rhythm in, I would say just over the past 2 years in talking with people after I learned about circadian rhythm in the ways that I know it now. And, but it's beyond just circadian rhythm. It's also seasonal rhythm and lunar rhythm. I don't go into this in the book, but it's also, think of the month of your birth because there's even science to show that the month in which you were born may set the stage for certain things to come later in life in terms of health.

Wow. Can you come back for a full episode? That's fine.

Well, I don't know if I'm the expert on that, but that is something I was intrigued with because, yeah, it makes sense. Because if you think about yourself in utero. Yeah. And so I'm a December birthday. When is your birthday? Like June? In June. Okay. So yeah, if you think you were in utero within the winter and the spring months, So you have to think about the vitamin D levels. Like, when were we exposed to things like vitamin D, melatonin, but the nutritional status, what were our mothers eating at that time of year? It all informed us and it structured and created us in this way. So yes, I, I think it's something to consider. And there's a really neat study with a lot of people in it where they looked at hospital records and they looked at birth dates and then what people died of. And there were patterns. Wow. Now that's not deterministic, and the association wasn't strong, so we can't say like, oh, because you have a June birthday, you will automatically have X, Y, and Z. We always have this ability to change, right? Of course. Our DNA is not our destiny, but there could be some epigenetic tags that were placed in utero, so we might want to look into that.

And again, it's just pulling back, and I think everything about what you just said is so in line with not only traditional Chinese medicine, but Ayurveda as well. It's not uncommon to see an Ayurvedic practitioner dinner and then see a Vedic astrologist right afterwards to get full scope of what's happening, right?

Yes, it's time. It's time.

The aspect of time. Let's pull back. All right, I really want to make sure everyone catches you on M Factor. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Yes, thank you. I'm going to be featured in the M Factor 2.0, which is coming out March 19th, 2020— or yeah, 2026. And so I'll be talking about nutrition and lifestyle because it's all about women's Health. The first M Factor talked a lot about HRT, and now this is a follow-up to give women more solutions and strategies to what else she could do as she goes through the peri- and postmenopausal period.

I cannot wait. I'm excited. I'm excited too. We're going to link everything out below so people can, can tag on. And wrapping things up, I would love to know what, what excites you now most about science and what you're learning with your science brain. What's to come in the future of science that you're excited about?

I love that question because my mind is always to the emerging. I think about the subtle aspects of what is informing us. You know, you and I have for many years studied food, like physical matter, right? Connection to the earth. What I'm also really interested in is what you're studying is looking at the quantum, looking at light, looking at wavelengths, looking at sound, looking at the things you can't see. Because when I think of function, I think, well, what precedes function? It is form. Form, but then also the field. The field informs the function. So what do we want to back that up? So I'm very interested in that from a consciousness perspective, because I feel like consciousness is the nexus point of science and spirituality where they come together into that tryptophan, serotonin, melatonin triad of, you know, just looking into like our state of being. So I'm excited for that. And to connect the frequency of food. I don't wanna lose ties with nutrition. I wanna bring nutrition along for that kind of quantum ride.

Incredible. Yeah, I think there needs to be, it's finally time to put consciousness into healing. Yes. The way that it's intended and for people to really own everything that they were given, right? From the day that we arrived. Thank you so much for everything. In a world that feels so complicated and over-fragmented I think that your work really brings us back to the essentials and what's foundational, and a lens that we can look at healing, but through a lens of gratitude, right? And just acknowledging our uniqueness through colors, through rainbows, through diversity, through foods, through science, through wisdom. Thank you for that reflection.

I can't wait to share this with the world. Oh, thank you, Mona. It's been a pleasure to be here with you in person to feel your energy, which is fantastic. And again, I feel like you and I are sisters in this because you've been doing so much of this work already. So we're on the same wavelength. More to come. You'll be back for sure. Thank you. Thank you.