#107: Perimenopause Relief Plus Fertility Help- Dr. Deanna Minich/Maca

One molecule of melatonin can quench up to 10 free radicals.

Welcome to Wellness. I'm your host, Ashley Daly. I'm a certified sports nutrition coach and former personal trainer and Pilates instructor with a degree in kinesiology. I'm here to help elevate the quality of your life through biohacking. If you're listening on Spotify, Apple, iTunes, YouTube or anywhere else, leaving a review helps support this show. And your support means more than you know. Did you know red wine doesn't actually stain your teeth? It's the artificial dyes they add to the wine. But that's not the case with dry farm wines. This is an exclusive wine club which brings you natural organic wine sourced from farms across Europe who practice regenerative farming. All wines like this one are completely sugar free and fully fermented with less than 1 gram of sugar per liter. Plus their wines are under 12.5% alcohol, which means you can enjoy your wine without any artificial dyes, preservatives or sugar. Because you're a loyal listener of welcome to Wellness, you'll get an extra bottle for just one penny on your first order. That's just one penny for a beautiful, natural organic wine. Visit dryfarmwines.com AshleyDaily Today's guest is Dr. Deanna Minick, a nutritionist, scientist and international lecturer, educator, and with over 20 years of experience in academia and the food and dietary supplement industries. Currently she's the Chief Science Officer at Symphony Natural Health and she's been active as a functional medicine clinician, in clinical trials and in her own practice, food and Spirit. She is the author of seven consumer books on wellness topics, four chapters and over 50 scientific publications. Through her talks, workshops, groups and in person retreats, she helps people transform their lives practically and artfully through nutrition and lifestyle. Deanna, welcome to the show.

Ashley, great to be here with you.

I've been following your work for years because a little side story and shout out to my friend Heather. She turned me on to and told me about your product maca, which helped her get pregnant. So I'm so excited to talk about all things hormones, women's health, health, reproductive health. There's a lot to dive into today. What is psychoneuroimmunology?

Wow, that's a big question. Psychoneuro and sometimes it's neuroendocrine, immunology, pnei. It is the interconnection between psychology, neurology, which would involve the neurotransmitters, endocrinology, which would be the endocrine System and. And then immunology, which of course is the immune system, and how those four pieces work very much in alignment. But actually, the whole body is really a systems web. It's not like there are just certain, I would say, parts of the body that work together. But this is just one way to acknowledge the integration and the interconnection of those specific body systems. So since we're going to be talking about hormones today, many times we just think of that as the endocrine system, but we actually know that it's a lot bigger than that. Like the gut is involved, the neurological system is involved. I mean, so many other pieces of our physiology that we need to look at when we're looking at hormones.

Okay, so is this also a way of saying if you think that that food that you're going to eat is going to cause deleterious effects, then it will.

There is the power of the mind, which is why we have placebo effects and why one of the best study designs is incorporating a placebo. Because we need to account for the power and the belief that we have about something, that we're taking. The psychology of where we're at with what we think about something can have some clinical impact, does encompass the mind, our beliefs, as it relates to hormones, neurotransmitters. Hormones are the communicators, as we think about them in functional medicine. Many times they are communicating emotions. And that's why many times we think about emotional health, this psychological imprint that we each have, being very closely tied to hormones.

Let's go into hormones and food, because where I would really like to start is with fertility.

Deanna in order to set the body stage for becoming pregnant and being more creative, we need to ensure that we have a robust foundation of nutrition. And in fact, I mean, I work with clients who are preparing for pregnancy, and many times they say, deanna, how do I get my body healthy? How do we actually set the physical template correct so that I can bring in a new life and actually hold that life and give it its nutrition when it's conceived? When I think about nutrition for pregnancy and fertility and enabling the body to be more creative, I first start thinking about the macronutrients. I do think about protein, carbohydrate, and fat. So many people are deficient in the balance of the essential fatty acids, the omega 3s and the omega 6s starting there. But in the improper ratio, they are in health, they are unhealthy, and they can create inflammation, which would go against fertility in the body when it Comes to protein, I think healthy amounts of dietary protein and different diverse sources. So we get the full complement of essential amino acids. And then I think about carbohydrate. I know that sugar, as part of the carbohydrate umbrella gets a bad reputation, as it should, because it can spike our blood sugar and cause all kinds of hormonal issues. And that we especially see for women with polycystic ovarian syndrome that there can be a glucose, insulin imbalance there. I'm thinking lots of fiber, insoluble and soluble fiber to nourish the gut microbiome. When we think about fertility, the uterus, the ovaries, we need to be sure that our gut health is working well because it shares the same space. It has been acknowledged that there is this gut gynecological axis us. So our gut microbiome might actually change markers of inflammation in the body, which could impact our gynecological health and change our fertility. So those are the three classes of macronutrients that I think of. And of course, there's the full complement of vitamins, of minerals. And for women who are seeking to get pregnant, I think it's really important that they get a nutritional status checkup, that they actually look at their laboratory biomarkers just to see how are they in terms of things like magnesium, selenium, looking at zinc and iron, you know, a lot of these different essential minerals, but then also vitamins. So looking at B vitamins, you know, this might be a time where she may want to do a genetic panel just to look at her genetics and see what she can, I would say, personalize a little bit more because some of us may have greater need for certain things. But you wouldn't technically know that unless you did some labs, you work with a clinician in order to look at signs and symptoms. And then, of course, I think that one of the reasons why we're here is to talk about feminescence. And feminescence is a line of products designed for a woman's life stage. And when we're talking about pregnancy and fertility, we're looking at fence maca harmony we, which is designed with certain maca phenotypes to ensure healthy hormone balance in a woman's body. And whatever that is, is it a little bit more progesterone, a little bit less estrogen, and essentially the maca phenotypes that are in feminescence. Maca harmony help to nourish the hypothalamus, pituitary, thyroid, adrenal, Ovarian access. So we're working at the level of the brain, which is actually signaling the ovaries in proper ovulation. So from the standpoint of, yes, good, healthy foundational nutrition. And when I think about nutrition too, I also think about hydration, Ashley. So thinking about hydration, proper levels of, I would say salts like Himalayan crystal salts, making sure that we get again, the full array of different minerals that we're taking in with our water. And I do think that a lot of people are under hydrated and this can lead to low energy changes in brain function. So the whole aspect of nutrition, so really important to be working with a practitioner. And for some of us, if we don't know if we're meeting those foods and nutrient needs through our diet, we may need to bring in a supplement like a multivitamin, multimineral, to help us to patch the gap wherever there might be a gap. So that's my general thinking about pregnancy, fertility, the pre menopausal years when we have a menstrual cycle. And you know, we're so diverse through the month, we have different nutritional needs through the month. I was even just looking at a paper last night showing that in healthy women, her metabolic, I would say, whether it's hormones or different metabolites as part of metabolic cycles, they're different day by day. So how do we manage that flux? Right. So that's why we need proper nutrition. And of course, I'm not even mentioning the obvious, which is looking at healthy detoxification of hormones, making sure that our toxin load is low before conceiving so that we don't impart a lot of those toxins over to the baby.

There is a lot to unpack here. Thank you so much for that explanation on fertility. I also wanted to ask you if we have the right kind of minerals or minerals in our water that will lower the count of heavy metals in our system. Right.

Yeah. There is that tension, that dynamic tension between essential minerals like zinc and calcium, magnesium, iron, those kinds of essential minerals that we need for, as cofactors for different metabolic cycles, they can compete with things like toxic metals, sometimes we call them heavy metals or toxic elements. So things like arsenic, cadmium, lead, mercury. So ensuring that we have proper levels of minerals can help us to offset or at least reduce the, I would say, the impact of things like toxic elements in the body.

Can you also walk me through the color orange and ovaries?

Yes. You know, when I talk about nutrition for, I would say hormone health and especially women's health. I do think about the different aspects within plants and what makes plants pigmented. Orange is a very special color for hormone health because orange connects to plant carotenoids. So within the plant carotenoid family, you have about 700 different compounds. They all look a little bit different, but they tend to track with orange foods, sometimes red foods, sometimes yellow foods, and sometimes even a little bit greenish. But when I think of orange, I'm thinking of things like beta carotene, alpha carotene, and beta cryptoxanthin. And there have been studies, there are very interesting studies looking at how women who are less prone or who have decreased risk for certain women's health conditions. So let's just say things like endometriosis, that when they have things that contain some of these different carotenoids, that they have decreased risk. And in fact, there was even another study that looked at how having more of one of those carotenoids, it's called beta cryptoxanthin, that it can help to reduce or slow ovarian decline. And what's really interesting is that if you look at the ovaries inside the ovaries, there are something in the neighborhood of 13 to 14 different carotenoids. So for some reason, our bodies know to localize the carotenoids that we're eating in the diet, because our bodies don't make them, we need to get them from plants. So our bodies know to localize certain of those carotenoids in the ovary. And what we know is that some of those carotenoids do convert to vitamin A and are used for ovulation. So if you think of the corpus luteum, you know, as we think of the maturation of the follicle going to make a mature egg, it kind of goes through a different series of stages. So it can go from this yellow colored body called the corpus luteum, into the corpus albicans into the white body. So there's something about the using up of that yellow orange compound in the genomic process of ovulation, which is really amazing if you think about it. So carotenoids also go into different parts of the body, not just the ovaries, like the adipose tissue, which is why sometimes if we eat too many carrots or orange colored food, sometimes our skin can take on an orange hue. Now, that's not necessarily a bad thing, but yes, too much can start to pigment the skin. So wherever there is fat, fat tissue, adipose tissue, like even the brain concentrates some of these carotenoids so they can be very protective. But we're starting to see that they are used in a variety of ways within women's health. And there are some animal studies. I just have to mention this, there are a few animal studies, and this is more looking at cows or goats, where they would feed them beta carotene in the diet and they would see changes in progesterone levels in the blood. And much of human nutrition actually comes from animal nutrition. And for people that are trying to help animals to be more productive or live longer lives, many times they give them different nutrients, and one of them has been the carotenes, the beta carotenes, and seeing that it helps them with their reproductive health. So we would think, you know, just based on what we know also from some human studies, that there could be an impact here of orange colored foods. So just to give you a list, I'm thinking the oranges themselves, when they're in season, tangerines, persimmons, mangoes, also papaya, but then also, of course, carrots and pumpkin and butternut squash. If you think about it, many of these fruits and foods tend to be circular and orange. Kind of like the ovary scuffle. Yes. And you're even wearing orange, so there you go.

Well, I feel like that's such a good segue into my next question, because talking about these orange foods and how they have some phytoprogestins, we've also heard of phytoestrogens. So walk us through why yams or these orange yellow foods are so important when we get into perimenopause.

Yeah. And as we get into perimenopause, we start to see shifts in estrogen and progesterone. Right. So instead of estrogen and progesterone, we're kind of working in a dance throughout the course of the month. Now we start to have this kind of, you know, pulling back and, you know, different levels, and it can create a lot of symptoms. There was a study that was done, and I believe, if I have it correct, it was with Japanese women where they had them substitute, I believe it was 2/3 of their meals with yam in place, and to replace the white rice in their diet with yam. And what they were able to show within just a short time frame was that they could change some levels of their hormones. Now, is what is that from? Is that from the carotenoids that are in the yam, or is it because yam contains progesterone, like compounds that may act as weak binding agonists in the body. And so when we think of, let's just break this down for a second. Phytoestrogens, many people know about them. Phytophyto means plant. And plants have a lookalike estrogen to the estrogen that's in our bodies. So when we eat phytoestrogens in food from plant foods, whether it's flaxseed, soy, especially if we're thinking of good quality soy, organic soy, but even things like, I mean, so many different legumes and plants contain phytoestrogens, it would be hard to avoid them because they are ubiquitous. It's just that some plants have more than others. And so what these can do is they can weakly bind to the receptor on our cells that would normally take up our biological estrogen. And, and it would have kind of a weak binding effect and potentially some activity in the body to offset some perimenopausal complaints. Now, not every woman gets relief from phytoestrogens, but I would say they're, they're not something, you know, they can be helpful. They can be helpful because they contain other plant compounds. Many times phytoestrogenic foods contain fiber and other vitamins and minerals and then separate from the phytoestrogens. What you're asking about is a more, I would say this is not talked about as much, but phytoprogestins. And so we think of, and there was a paper that came out, I don't know, a handful of years ago, basically showing how within plants there are progesterone like compounds as well. And some of these compounds are found, like you said, in yam. They can also be found in different herbs and spices. Now, the amounts of those are not going to be high. They're not going to be appreciable like the levels in our bodies. And we have different amounts of progesterone circulating through us throughout the month. And so how reliable is it to get phytoprogestins from plants on a consistent basis and to mimic what happens in our bodies? Typically that's not going to be as easy to do. That said, it's still important to be getting plants in the diet in appropriate ways and we can talk about cooking and, you know, what are some best practices there. But I do think plants supply us with vitamins, minerals, fiber and phytochemicals to help us with hormone health.

Yes. And I think maybe one of the ones you didn't mention, although it's in capsule form, which we already mentioned, for fertility is maca for perimenopause. Because I really want to dive in on this, Deanna, because I know that I could go to my health food store and buy maca today, but the maca that you offer at feminescence is different. Why is that?

Yes, absolutely. So if you just go to the grocery store and you're thinking, oh, I heard that maca is a superfood and I want to go and buy a big bag of the powder and then I can add it to my smoothie. Many times when you go to the store and just do something like that, just buy a bag of maca powder, you don't really know what you're getting. The maca plant. Let's just back up a second, because the maca plant is actually more complex than we realize. Maca has 17 different phenotypes, and there are six dominant colors. They are black, yellow, red, white, gray, and purple. And they have each been shown to have different phytochemical composition, different DNA and different function. And some of these maca phenotypes have gender specific effects. So for some of the phenotypes, they're going to be better for men and not for women, and vice versa. So if there are 17 different Maca phenotypes and six major categories of maca, you don't really know what you're getting in a maca powder, right? It may say, you know, red maca, or it may be labeled as black maca, but you don't actually know what you're getting in the way of standardization. Because maca as a tuber. First of all, many people don't know this, but maca is a cousin, a botanical cousin of the brassica vegetables, meaning that broccoli, cauliflower, kale, those types of vegetables called brassica, are related to maca. So they both share one of the phytochemical classes called glucosinolates. And glucosinolates are a very active component of maca and of broccoli. But maca has some different glucosinolates, not exactly the same as broccoli. So you can't get the same benefit from maca just from eating broccoli. So if you're buying maca powder at the store, you don't know how much of those glucosinolates you're getting or some of the other phytochemicals. You don't know how the maca was grown, whether the location, the soil, the elevation. We know that maca is native to Peru. And in order to produce some of those phytochemicals for women's health and also for men's health, they need to be grown at certain altitudes, under certain environments. You know, plants respond to stress, stress in a healthy way, whether it's rain or wind or the altitude and ultraviolet light. And so maca, being that it grows at high altitude in the Peruvian mountains, essentially, it's producing a lot of these different phytochemicals. So at Symphony Natural Health, where we have women's health products and men's health products, we actually grow the maca in different places of Peru in order to get different phytochemical signatures for the functions that we need for the women's products and for the men's products. So when we think about perimenopause, we think about a different product, feminescence maca life. So for. For premenopausal fertility, menstrual health issues, we think of feminescence maca harmony. So that has different maca phenotypes than the feminescence maca life, which is designed, it's formulated specifically for perimenopausal women. And there's been a clinical trial on it in which we see that 84% of women have a success rate in reducing their menopausal symptoms. So we start to see that things like hot flashes and night sweats and joint issues, they start to go down. And it can be anywhere between two days to eight weeks. But I would say that the average time frame is probably about 21 days. But you can start to see a lessening as you go. And the beauty of how these maca phenotypes work is again, at the level of the brain. So there's something that is happening between the hypothalamus, the pituitary, signaling the ovaries. Because as we go into perimenopause, the reason that we're doing that is because the. The ovaries are declining in function. So we start to have reduced ovary output. We start to have disturbed communication between the brain and the ovaries, so that the signal may be coming from the brain, but may not be received by the ovaries or that the ovaries aren't properly signaling the brain. So what feminescence does is it comes in and it smooths out the communication between the brain and the ovaries to signal the ovaries, to optimize the. The endogenous production of hormones. So what we see in this case is that we See, a rebalancing and an increase in endogenous production of things like estrogen, which we know as estradiol in the body, and progesterone. And so women start to feel better as a result.

Thank you. You're. You're an excellent communicator, just like plants seem to be an excellent communicator in our bodies.

I love plants. I mean, they're the ultimate communicator, right? They are nature's communicators. So that's what I love about them. One of the things I wanted to say, some women may actually get a worsening of their symptoms if they do try out maca just from, you know, the store that's not standardized to any active. What you can see is sometimes you can start to upregulate certain endocrine aspects, like the androgens, like the adrenals. And so for some women, they can actually get a worsening of their symptoms, especially if we look at things like PMS or if she has pcos, she might have a worsening of acne or just a worsening of, like, cortisol and that feeling of stress. Some women listening might be thinking, oh, my goodness, I tried maca and it did not work for me. It actually made things worse. And that would completely make sense because if you don't know what you're taking and the maca phenotypes, you know, all these different types of maca, if it wasn't tailored for what you needed physiologically, it can backfire. So then we have more of an androgen adrenal effect, which may not be the right kind of maca for what you need to balance your cycle.

This is so important, and it's one of the reasons I wanted to have you on, because I'm such a stickler for ingredients. I should get paid for reading ingredients because it's all I do all day long. But your maca is the cleanest product that I found, which made it a game changer for me when I started taking it, because I'm in perimenopause. But what I really wanted to ask Deanna was, what can we do about hot flashes?

Let's just look at our diet first. Like, let's look at our lifestyle and our diet, and then we'll think about feminescence, too, because they all work together when it comes to hot flashes. And, you know, I am now postmenopausal, but I remember those hot flashes, definitely experiencing them and how debilitating they were. And they can sometimes occur at Night, when you're sleeping and then wake you up and then they can get in the way of your workday and your concentration, just everything goes awry. So some of the things that can trigger hot flashes, we have to look at that first and foremost, right? So caffeine, spicy food, you know, maybe we are just more temperature sensitive. So if we're in the sauna, that might trigger a hot flash, or if it's warmer outside, that might trigger it. Stress could trigger hot flashes. So I think as much as possible to be thinking about not revving the nervous system too much, trying to stay really level as much as you can during this time, which is very tumultuous for some women. And so thinking about just keeping your routine, adhering to your ritual of making sure that you are eating at regular times of the day, not eating too late at night, because that's going to disrupt your sleep. And for some women, they tell me that, I mean, I don't drink alcohol, but at night, when people sometimes do drink a glass of red wine, you know, there's kind of like that heat. You can start to get a hot flash even from alcohol, and especially at night when it can throw off your sleep. So just trying to be really cognizant of what you're doing, I would say, through the day and start to adhere to a meaningful ritual. So starting the day, you know, I'm all about circadian rhythm, too, which is why I want to bring in melatonin to this conversation. So if you start your day as a perimenopausal woman, you know, waking with the light or waking at about the same time every day, eating within an hour after rising. This is kind of the general guideline based on circadian rhythm research from Dr. Satchin Panda. And within that first hour, when you're not eating, making sure that you're hydrating. So one of the things that you can do, and this is especially important if you are very stressed, is making sure that you have water, purified water, with a little bit of a supersaturated salt solution in it to help with the uptake and to help with replenishing what the body needs with respect to minerals. Because cortisol is at its highest in the morning. That's when we want it to be higher, when we're getting out of bed and getting ready for the day. So soleil therapy, I don't know if you know about that, Ashley, but it is a wonderful practice of having. You can take salt stones, so I use Himalayan crystal salt. I put it In a glass jar, I add in purified water and then I take a spoonful of that and then put that into purified water, about 8 to 12 ounces of water. And then you just sip that. In that first hour after rising, get hydrated and make sure that you're exposing your eyes to full spectrum light. Go outside for a couple of minutes, start to reduce your melatonin and get your, your body ready with cortisol and testosterone. Then you have your breakfast where you have protein plants and some kind of healthy fat. And then kind of working through your day and not over caffeinating, especially if you're caffeine sensitive, because you're asking about hot flashes. Now, bringing in feminescence. And if we're thinking of the feminescence product for perimenopause, we would need to do the capsules first thing in the morning with the water. So the way that we use the feminescence products, all three of them, regardless of life stage, the way that they work best is if you have them with water before you have eaten. So, so having them that first hour of the day with your water on that empty stomach, and then having them again two capsules in the afternoon, and I would say before 2 or 3pm, before you kind of get an energy dip, but again, away from the meal with some water, that is best practice for the feminescence products. And when you do that, this is how they were clinically tested. So then you set the stage for the best efficacy and, and function of the maca phenotypes. And it's more cyclic and rhythmic and it enables the body to be within that rhythm of setting the stage for healthy hormones. And then as you move your way through the day, trying not to eat so close to bedtime, as I just mentioned, and what might also help for hot flashes is to ensure that you're bringing in some erbatonin. So what is erbatonin? It is plant melatonin. We're talking all plants here today in the way of therapeutic actives. So erbatonin is a combination of alfalfa, rice and chlorella, and it is a plant cell matrix. And that plant cell matrix has been standardized to melatonin. So you're getting a known amount of melatonin and that is the same melatonin that is in our bodies. It's identical. But you're getting some amplification there of activity through the plant compounds that it contains. And as women go through perimenopause, or levels of Melatonin are starting to dip just like everything else. Andropause, menopause, melatona, pause, they're all coming down. And what melatonin is really good for is it helps to get the body ready for sleep at night by setting the circadian tone. So melatonin opens the sleep gate. It doesn't necessarily keep you asleep, but it opens the gate to sleep. So that's really important. And it's also what makes it important for perimenopausal women is that it's an anti inflammatory agent. And we know that as we move into perimenopause we can become more inflamed without the protection of estradiol. So we're getting anti inflammatory activity, we're getting a boost in antioxidant function and mitochondrial health. And in fact the Erbatonin which is from Symphony Natural Health, which by the way, I am chief science officer at, so I love the company. I've almost been there for three years. So I do know a lot about the products and the science because we've been publishing research and in one of the studies that I was not a part of, but it is one of the publications in our archive we saw that there was a 646% greater anti inflammatory activity with erbatonin versus synthetic melatonin. So many people when they go to buy melatonin or they hear about it for sleep, you know, when you buy products at the store that haven't been adequately tested, my only thinking here is that, you know, there could be contaminants because to make synthetic melatonin it goes through a step by step chemical process, so making sure that the melatonin is pure. And what I love about the Erbatonin is that because you have other plant actives that you're getting a boosted activity in the ways that you'd want it to work. So having that Erbatonin about an hour before bedtime would be great for a perimenopausal woman because now you're patching the gap of any melatonin that you might not be producing in the nighttime hours. So you're taking care of estradiol and progesterone through the day with feminescence and then you're moving her through the clock into taking the erbatonin at night to now set the stage for good sound sleep and also brain detoxification which occurs at night.

Yes. There are so many questions that I want to ask you about melatonin. I love Russell Rider I have a burning question about melatonin. Deanna, please. If you start taking it, will you stop making it?

The short answer is no. There is no research to suggest that taking exogenous or supplemental melatonin will stop your body's own production of melatonin. This is something that has been circulating. People have a fear of it. And I'll tell you why they have a fear of it. Because for most hormones, if we take them, like, let's just say that we decide to take testosterone if. Now, testosterone is a classical hormone in the way of if you start taking it, then the body kind of moves back and says, okay, I don't need to produce as much. Melatonin is not a classic hormone in the way of negative feedback loops. So what that means is that it has other functions. It's what I call a circadian nutrient. And in fact, I actually had this conversation with Dr. Russel reiteration, and I asked him the same question you're asking me, and he said the same thing, that there's been no evidence of any kind of reduced output of melatonin from the pineal gland because of taking melatonin. In fact, now listen to this. Because not many people are aware. A person, a researcher, Dr. Tan, who actually worked with Dr. Reiteration, had told me in a conversation about how when we take melatonin, we may actually be potentiating our mitochondria to make more. When I asked him about some of the research on that, he said, you know, it's still kind of early. A lot of cell studies that he's been looking at, or, you know, that he had basically taken the information from some of the work that was out there. But it's still kind of emerging. But we may actually be doing the opposite. We may be helping our mitochondria to make melatonin more efficiently. So just for clarification, for everybody to know this, when we think of melatonin, the kind of melatonin that we're talking about with sleep and hot flashes, that would be the pineal melatonin. So that is the kind of melatonin from the pineal gland that gets released in response to darkness and sets the circadian rhythm throughout the body. But then you have the autocrine paracrine effect of melatonin, which is at the level of the cell. And we see that in the skin, where people use things like infrared light or other light sources in order to generate melatonin at the cellular level in the skin, we also see that just within the cells, within the mitochondria. So when we have a lot of stress in life, oxidative stress, whether we are malnourished, we are doing too much physical activity where we're producing a lot of free radicals, or maybe we're overnourished, where we are revving a lot of our metabolic cycles and spewing out a lot of free radicals, we're going to need more melatonin. Any kind of disease state, symptoms, the underlying root causes are inflammation and oxidative stress. Those are the two mechanisms that melatonin works on through the mitochondria. Even if you don't have sleep issues, if you are older, you're a perimenopausal woman, you're in your 40s now, you're in your 50s, your endogenous levels of melatonin from the pineal gland are getting lower and lower as you get older. And what we see from even the research that's out there is that having impaired sleep, reduced brain detoxification, more oxidative stress and inflammation, especially at the level of the neurons, sets the stage for increased risk for neurodegenerative diseases. Dr. Reiter talks about that, you know, looking at a possible role of things like melatonin in Alzheimer's disease and helping to reduce the risk. So I think it's just something that we need to be thinking about as part of a preventative strategy, not just mitigating something like hot flashes. Because what are hot flashes anyway? To me, they tell us that there's something off in the body's inflammatory cascade. And what we now know from newer research is that there might also be a cardiovascular risk component. So when we see more hot flashes, we have to think about overregulation of the sympathetic nervous system, which could also be connected to changes in the heart function, cardiovascular tone. So we need to be looking at more things with hot flashes. But I do think that we can use our diet, our lifestyle, we can be using feminescence, maca life to help with reducing those symptoms. We can be using Erbatonin before we go to bed in order to smooth that gap and get us sleeping better, and detoxifying the brain potentially better at night. So we do what we can to help to reduce the risk. And I think that also working with a qualified healthcare practitioner, like an integrative, functional, naturopathic doctor, to really help with looking at all angles of a woman's life and what she can be doing with laboratory markers and improving her function.

Thank you. Definitely. I really like that answer. And diving into the science behind it. I want to go back to where you had mentioned. One of the best things we can do is to wake up, get outside, or at least do some sun gazing. I think there's one portion of your story or that piece of advice that you're missing, which is, are you wearing sunglasses, Deanna?

No. Our eyes are part of the brain, and our eyes are very closely connected to the suprachiasmatic nucleus, which is sending that signal to the pineal gland. Morning light, first morning light is really important to setting the circadian rhythm. It's not just getting the darkness at night. And I see that you have your blue light blocking glasses on. So that's great. I make it a morning practice. I go outside in my bathrobe. Even, even if it's cloudy, it's still light. And it's light enough where now the body gets the signal to reduce that melatonin and again to increase the cortisol. One of the most susceptible societally accepted endocrine disruptors is artificial light at night. We call this, Alan, artificial light at night, which is the blue enriched light that we would see on computer screens, on phones, overhead lights, like at a gym or a grocery store. I mean, all television, all of this is disrupting our endocrine system. Not just our pineal gland and our melatonin, but the entire circuit is off. If one of the parts of the endocrine circuit back to the pnei, if we're throwing something off in the endocrine circuit, then something else will be thrown off. So maybe thyroid hormone now gets thrown off, maybe our estradiol progesterone, and now our menstrual cycles are off, all because of having this distorted blue light at night. So I really do think, I love your point about focusing in on light because it's. It's like a lifestyle practice. To your point about wearing sunglasses and, you know, we could even go further into sunscreen. We do know many of the important rays the infrared light does penetrate, even clothing, which can be a good thing because we want more of the infrared and less of the uv. You know, our eyes, again, are an extension of the brain. When we sleep at night, our brain has now the time and the ability to release toxic metabolites into the glymphatic fluid. So there is lymphatic fluid around glial cells. And when we are sleeping, our brain cells, our neurons can shrink a bit so that we create space for the excretion of these toxic metabolites. So our brain is actually Removing a lot of this at night, which is why I believe now this is not scientifically shown, but this is my idea. I believe because we have all of that activity at night, that when somebody wakes up, let's just say that they're waking up at 2am, they're waking up at 3am this is the peak of melatonin production. And we know that melatonin is implicated in glymphatic fluid flux. So let me ask the question. Could an early morning wake up like that be connected to potentially increased toxin load in the brain and more activity which is kind of distorting and changing our peaceful sleep? People with more neuro inflammation, is that creating an issue with their sleep? We also know that melatonin does change the REM cycle which is responsible for the dreaming part of sleep. And I think to me, I call melatonin the mother molecule. I feel like it's always taking care of us. And so even, you know, some people report vivid dreams and even uncomfortable dreams when they take melatonin. But I think that sleep is a form of detoxification, it's a form of clearance. So not only are we expunging the brain of a lot of those metabolites, but I think that back to your initial question, psychology, what are we releasing through sleep, through that dream state? And how is melatonin actually facilitating that? By enabling us to be more fully engaged in that REM state of sleep. So that's just some theories there, but just based on kind of connecting the dots, I could kind of see that there would be good reason to do that.

I like that. And I like that you call it the mother molecule. I came across a study years ago and it was a very old study, I think it was 1940s or 50s. And a scientist had given melatonin to twins, but only one twin got it, the other one got a placebo. So they never got it. And the aging differences between them were astronomical. So can you walk me through some of these longevity features of melatonin?

Yes, I love that you mentioned that. In fact, Dr. Reiter in his book Melatonin, which came out in 1995 is still a very current, popular, wonderful book to get in your library. It's just called Melatonin. And he talks about, in the book, he talks about a study with animals. I can't remember if it was mice or rats. I think it was mice. But essentially they fed the animals with melatonin in the drinking water. And then another set of the same age appropriate mice with no melatonin and they showed a difference in aging. I think it was like a 20% reduction in aging in the animals that receive melatonin in their water. Why are so many biohackers and longevity seekers looking at melatonin? Well, if you think about it from a mechanistic standpoint, melatonin is addressing many of the pathways that relate to aging. The mitochondria is seen as the hub of so much of where aging occurs. You know, our bodies essentially can go rancid in a colloquial way of thinking about it. We start to oxidize, we start to have fats that become damaged, proteins that become damaged. We eat foods that are grilled, broiled or burnt. And we're taking in this damaged inflammatory food. And it just perpetuates the aging process. It accelerates aging, actually. So melatonin is unique in that it's actually hitting on so many different mechanisms that would relate to aging. I've already talked about the anti inflammatory effects and that's a big one. And again, the erbatonin being six times greater in anti inflammatory activity relative to synthetic melatonin, then you have the antioxidant capacity. And let me just mention this because I didn't mention it already, but one molecule of melatonin can quench up to 10 free radicals. Now, is that a big deal? Well, if you look at vitamin C, vitamin C can quench on the order of one to two free radicals. Now that doesn't mean that we should never have vitamin C. And in fact, vitamin C and melatonin can actually work quite well together. But melatonin and its metabolites act as antioxidants. So one molecule of melatonin, 10 free radicals. And what makes melatonin unique as an antioxidant is that it can go into fat tissues like the brain, but it can also be in watery tissues like the blood. So it can get to a lot of places. Because in order to get into the mitochondria or for the mitochondria to make it, it at least has to be fat soluble. It has to have some very interesting properties chemically. And melatonin just happens to have those. So it can get to a lot of places. Vitamin C is water soluble, so it's only going to go in certain parts of the body. So from that perspective, it also regulates the mitochondria, which I talked about. It is connected to our chrono rhythm. We know that circadian rhythm and circadian, what is being called circadian syndrome, which is kind of looking at like a metabolic syndrome with sleep disorders, mood disorders, this sets the stage for increased aging. And so when we have something that's going to set our circadian rhythm in a way that is conducive for health, like melatonin, that is also going to help to promote healthy aging. And also, you know, if you think about when people, you know, just over the past years now, when we think about the immune system, the immune system is like our first defense against the environment. Right. And most of our immune system is in the gut. And a lot of melatonin is made in the gut. Actually it's used more locally is what we think. But potentially to help to offset invaders or stress from oxidative stress or inflammation from things that are coming into the gut may also have a role in gut motility. So I think that melatonin is, yes, it's the mother molecule because it's taking care of us. And it's also primarily made in the mitochondria, which comes from the maternal DNA. 90%. When we think of the mitochondria, we think of the mother line. And then I think, you know, also Dr. Reiter calls it the multitasking molecule. He published an article in 2010 where he talks about all these, all these different functions. So that's why melatonin is unique and that's why taking it is not the same as another kind of hormone where if you take it, you can reduce the body's production. Melatonin is beyond a hormone. It is circadian. It is, you know, I, I've got everybody I know taking Erbatonin because it's like, I feel like I'm taking care of them when I tell them about the product.

Absolutely. And I love it. And the reason I love it so much is because it's in that burst pack. Because I learned from you that light and what else oxygen can ruin melatonin. Is that the. Yes.

So here's an example. Like I even have it on my desk. So it's in a blister pack. This just happens to be my feminescence. But the Erbatonin looks exactly the same. So it's in a blister pack. So the formulators and the people developing the product were very astute in thinking because we know that many of the plant actives can degrade in heat, light and oxygen. This single blister pack capsule delivery system is a way to encourage the integrity of the product. You know, when you think of melatonin gummies like interacting with a sugar water and Then it's just in an open container. I mean, how much of an active are you actually getting? By the. By the bottom, we have to think about not just the active, but how it's packaged.

Deanna, I feel like I could talk to you for hours. I'm having such a great time. But as we wrap up this podcast, I ask all my guests the same closing question, which is, what haven't I asked you that you'd like my listeners to know? Well.

I would say, you know, the only other thing I would mention, I think we covered a lot of ground, actually. We talked about feminescence, we talked about herbatonin, we talked about diet, lifestyle. I mean, this is power packed. You didn't ask me about the efficacy of blue light blocking glasses. Actually, as I look at you.

Okay, let's hear about the efficacy.

Actually, I think that there is something to them. They're not all created equal and, you know, some of them are not actually removing the blue light. So you need to be attentive to that. But for people wearing blue light blocking glasses into the night, what we see is that there can be improvements in, yes, circadian rhythm, just alignment, but then also blood sugar, which is kind of an interesting aspect. We didn't talk about blood sugar and insulin, but they definitely tie into cortisol and melatonin. And so people wearing blue light blocking glasses at night saw improvements in things like plasma glucose levels. And there was a study that was looking specifically at that. So I like the idea of wearing blue light blocking glasses.

Okay, thank you. Well, I really appreciate it. Tell my listeners where they can go to find out more about you and your product.

Sure. So for me personally, DeannaMinnik.com is my website, but if you want to learn more about Symphony Natural Health, Ashley, I believe you have a link that you can post, but essentially there's so much information. Symphony is like one of those best kept secrets. It's been around for over 20 years and I feel like they haven't got the word out on these amazing products. And because I have a love of plants and a love of hormones and using plants to prime our own innate intelligence, their products are very specific to that. So check out symphonynaturalhealth.com and if you're a health practitioner, you're going to want to go to symphonynaturalhealthpro.com, check them out on Instagram, Facebook, all of that stuff, and check with Ashley about how to get products if you're interested.

Amazing. Yes, we'll put it in the show. Notes I have a discount code. Deanna thank you so much for your time today.

Thank you Ashley. It's been a pleasure.

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