The #1 Nutrient Menopausal Women Are Missing

Counting your protein as if your life depends on it. You actually learned how to count a gram, which is not something we actually use in the United States to actually track food content, but you're getting it right. You're lifting your weights 3 times a week. You've cut the refined carbohydrates and ultra-processed foods. Yet when you look in the mirror, you're like, hey, this isn't exactly what I signed on for. And you notice that maybe the the number on the scale hasn't budged, and maybe you are not sleeping so well and you still have fragmented sleep, even maybe after hormone replacement therapy. And you notice that when you turn to the side and look in the mirror, that svelte weight waistline that you used to have isn't there in the same way anymore. And that is a sign of visceral fat that was never there before. And that's the fat that's underneath the muscle in and around the organs that's highly active, very inflammatory, and drives metabolic syndrome, and insulin resistance. Now, you're frustrated because all the nutrition and influencers online are telling you eat protein like your life depends on it, and that carbohydrate restriction is the ultimate key to really getting that midlife body. And you might even have gone so far to go carnivore. But here's the missing piece of your physiology that no one's talking about enough. And I can tell you this because only 9%, 9% of women in the United States especially midlife women, even get to the daily required recommendations. And what that nutrient is, is fiber. And so the average woman today consumes only 10 to 15 grams of fiber today, and we should be getting at least 25 to 35 grams of fiber a day. By the end of this episode, you're gonna understand why this deficit in your diet is a metabolic crisis in menopause., and we're gonna reframe how you look at carbohydrates entirely, not as a source of sugar or glucose spikes, but as the critical food source for your cellular health, your estrogen recycling and detoxification, your defense against insulin resistance, and to feed your microbes that are so important to your health and your immune system in your gut. And they really hold the key, truly, to probably our long-term health from all chronic diseases. All right, so let's get into this and really talk about it. We have 3 core beliefs that we must shift. The first common misconception is that carbohydrates are the enemy to women's health, but particularly in midlife focus, and that we have to hyperfocus on protein and low-carb tracking, and that's the only way to lose weight. And what often happens here is you get your protein in, but the rest of the plate's kind of suspect or a little bit sketchy. Let's be real. That Protein goal is a goal, but not at the expense of the other nutrients that are so very important to you. Now, there's an invisible problem. This is the under-eating of fermentable fibers that shift your microbiome, and it actually shifts them from a fermentation of burning fiber to what we call proteolytic fermentation, which is actually breaking down and putrefying meat fibers and fermentation and burning of proteins. This actually happens, and actually over time, it produces toxic metabolites in the gut that damage the gut lining. It induces systemic inflammation and impairs the clearance of metabolized estrogen. Yes, you effin' heard that right. We're gonna get into the effin' fiber secret today. Now, let's— we're gonna reframe this whole thing, and we're gonna target fibers as a non-negotiable, and fiber-rich foods as part of your hormone regulation. Your liver detoxification, your visceral and abdominal fat reduction, and the fiber as an active biological modifier and not just some bulk to help you take a crap. All right, we have to be really honest. All right, I know I'm being crass, but it's so, so important. All right, so let's talk about number 1, the crisis. Why are we here? So here's the thing is if we look at the statistics from the American Society for Nutrition, like the minimum target is 25 to 30 grams of fiber a day. And in truth, our evolutionary diet— so man as a caveman all the way through agrarian societies and up until really since the '80s— actually got more than 30 grams of fiber a day. And it is estimated that our ancestral caveman sort of ancestors got closer to anywhere from 50 to 200 grams of fiber a day from their diet. The idea that we were a carnivore-ish human is so absolutely wrong. We were opportunistic hunters. We have always been omnivores as we have been something that looks like man. And we came from apes to begin with who were actually at the time not carnivorous at all, but we were opportunistic hunters. So we ate a lot of plant sources, pulses, which are your grasses and things like that, and seeds along with whatever we could chase down and kill. So the reality is we have a historical context that we— our body has established over time that we are actually designed to get fiber in our diet. Now, the midlife connection here is so huge because during menopause, dropping estrogen levels in that inherently happen, they alter gut motility and the mucosal integrity of the intestinal wall in the gut. So what that means is the fence that is your gut wall gets broken down. And your ability for your gut to move on a regular basis appropriately gets damaged. And a fiber deficit at this exact life stage acts as a compounding damaging stressor that happens here. And on top of it, it kills off a whole bunch of really good facultative microbes that are important to our health. And all of this is a metabolic mess for our gastrointestinal tract., and it actually impacts your metabolic rate, and it just doesn't get the attention enough. So, let's start now with visceral fat. So, visceral fat, like I said, is that fat that shows up underneath the muscle in the abdominal cavity, and it makes our svelte waistline start to expand, right? And this happens, this happens as part of the menopause transition, particularly if hormones are not replaced. We see an increase in visceral fat. And here's where that calories in, calories out narrative shits the bed, right? Here's the reality. Calories in, calories out count when you're a kilometer, but the reality is, is our hormones are messengers from our brain and our hormones like GLP-1, PYY, and our sex hormones all have metabolic effects. And a caloric deficit is necessary for weight loss, but you can create a caloric deficit and still not lose weight depending on what the hormones are doing. And our current research shows that fiber has a direct effect on loss of visceral fat and fat loss in menopausal women, independent of caloric restriction and independent of the exercise being performed. So the truth is that whole story of calories in, calories out falls out when we start seeing the massive shift in hormones for women, and particularly when there's disruption to the fiber count. Now, fiber does several things. So first off, let's talk about mechanistically what it does. Fiber we do not digest. Both soluble and non-soluble fibers are not digestible by humans. The soluble fiber becomes this viscous gel in the small intestine, and this gel actually slows down gastric emptying. Now, what makes GLP-1 helpful with weight loss? Oh yeah, gastric emptying, right? So fiber in your diet actually, to some degree, can mimic some of the effects of the drugs like GLPs and GIPs because it actually slows gastric emptying and it blunts the rate of glucose absorption from the intestines to the bloodstream. So getting fiber with your meals slows gastric emptying and slows glucose spiking after meals. And then this also prevents the downstream hepatic lipogenesis, which is a liver basically turning excess rapid glucose into fat. Yes, your liver turns excess glucose into fat because it doesn't know what to do with it because it's got to get it out of the bloodstream, right? Insulin's job is to help with that, but it can only do so much, right? So mechanistically, fiber is really important because it can blunt that glucose rise and reduce your liver's ability to make fat out of it, and also helps slow gastric emptying. Now, the other thing that fiber does is it becomes a food source for your microbes and your microbes make these things called short-chain fatty acids. Specifically, butyrate is the one that is most valuable when it— we look at kind of cellular signaling and metabolism because that is produced when microbes produce and ferment this fiber. So basically we don't break it down. They do. And then butyrate travels via the portal vein coming off the liver and communicates directly with your fat tissue. So your microbes need to make butyrate. Butyrate goes out into the bloodstream and talks to your fat, and it suppresses fat storage and reduces visceral fat accumulation. So without fiber, your microbes will not do this. I— coconut oil is not gonna do that. Butter is not gonna do that, and animal protein is not going to do that. And large-scale diets that have removed fiber from your diet will kill off the good microbes that produce butyrate over time. And I'm gonna talk a little bit more about that in a minute. Now, clinical data. You're probably sitting here going, "Well, how do we know this?" Actually, we have lots of studies, but I wanna talk specifically about the FEARCE trial, which looked at 213 postmenopausal women. And this study looked at fiber intake and they found that the higher the fiber intake in these women was directly correlated with a superior metabolic profile, lower markers of systemic inflammation, and significantly reduced likelihood of developing metabolic syndrome independent of calorie intake alone. Right? So the women who had more fiber, regardless of controlling for exercise and everything else, actually had a re— reduced risk for fat weight gain, metabolic syndrome, and diabetes, and systemic inflammation, right? Which didn't really matter how many calories they had. The fiber was independent of that. So that's huge right now that granted, that's not a big study, but we have lots of other studies looking at dietary fiber showing a positive effect metabolically and systemically. Now here's the thing that a lot of people don't recognize, right? We actually have GLP-acting activities based on the fiber that you get in your diet. So fiber increases insulin sensitivity and it is a GLP-1 blueprint, right? So here's the, the example that you wanna think about, right? Our gut produces endogenous levels, so that's inside the gut, levels of GLP-1 and PYY. Both of those hormones affect satiety, digestion, gastric emptying, and satisfaction. And this is naturally produced in your gut when you have short-chain fatty acids, butyrate in particular, that bind to a G-protein-coupled receptor. And the two receptors are GPR-41 and GPR-43 in the colon, right? Bacteria produce the short-chain fatty acids that help the receptors. So they attach to the G-coupled protein receptor that turns on the natural production of these two very important certain hormones. And guess what? You have the same mechanism that we inject every day when you're on a GLP-1, right? So the meta-analysis show that higher dietary fiber intake simultaneously reduces 4 primary markers of metabolic dysfunction, right? So the things that drive not only diabetes risk but weight gain, plasma glucose, right? So fiber directly reduces fasting plasma glucose. It directly induces a lowering of fasting insulin because of its mechanisms I discussed before. It also reduces the HOMA-IR, which is the homeostatic model assessment for insulin resistance. This is a calculated model to assess the level of insulin resistance. So the more fiber you have in your diet, the less likely you are to have a high HOMA-IR. And it also directly affects hemoglobin A1C, which is your average glucose over the course of about 3 months. And hemoglobin A1C, anywhere from like a 4.6 up to a 5.5 is considered in regular range. I would call an optimal range under 5.2, and then a 6.0 and above is diabetic and pre-diabetic, and a 6.5 is full-on diabetic, right? So fiber directly affects all 4 of those. Now, and there's lots of, lots of, lots of studies looking at specifically resistant starches in women. So resistant starches are starches that once they are cooked and cooled and, or just naturally exist in foods that we cannot digest, things like in legumes or cooked and cooled potatoes, rice. They're also found in your root vegetables and, and fruits. Those resistant starches actually rapidly restore peripheral insulin sensitivity, even in a low estrogen environment. So what does that mean to a perimenopausal, menopausal woman? Maybe you're not on hormones yet. Maybe you're having a hard time finding somebody, or, or you're still fact-finding, but you want your body to become more metabolically sound. Get your fiber up, get your fiber up, and especially getting resistant starches like the ones that I mentioned before. They can help lower your peripheral insulin activity and improve insulin sensitivity. Now I wanna talk about my actual dissertation. So I spent a good part of 3 years studying the microbiome and its impact on hormone metabolism, which is how you take your estrogen to the liver to package it for the trash and the interaction with the microbiome. And that was actually my entire dissertation, which started out at 350 pages and I got it down to about 185., right? So there's a lot going on here. Now, what we need to understand is we have a thing called the estrobolome, and the estrobolome are a set of microbes, enteric bacteria, that are capable of modulating and metabolizing your, your body's estrogen and estrogen-like compounds that are slated to be excreted in the stool coming from the liver gallbladder. That get wrapped up and should get kept in the stool and go out with the stool. So essentially imagine the estrobolone microbes. So, you know, lots of different types of bacteria that make this enzyme called beta-glucuronidase can influence whether the stuff that's supposed to go to the dumpster actually makes it to the dumpster. Now, first off, what does that mean? So whether it's the estrogen your body makes, the estrogen you take, or the estrogen-like compounds your body comes in contact with, like pesticides, herbicides, plasticizers, fragrances, phthalates, all of those things, right? All of those things are endocrine disrupting because they look like estrogen to the body. Now, when your body takes those in, some of them get used and some of them actually hang on receptors, but a lot of it will go to the liver and go through your complex detoxification process to get rid of. And I've talked about that at length. So I highly recommend going back and looking at estrogen detox. If you wanna go back to one of my podcasts where I talk about that, because, because it's highly helpful to understand, it's a lot about how your body processes estrogen at the liver. But once your body gets that stuff to the very end process in the liver, some of it goes out through the urine, mostly through the sulfation and methylation pathway, and then the rest goes to the stool through the beta-glucuronidase pathway. And this is actually the preferred pathway for estradiol, which is what your ovaries make. If I have a lot of bacteria producing beta-glucuronidase, I am going to have a situation where the things that are supposed to go to the dumpster get pulled out of the dumpster and put back into the bloodstream to go act on tissues, right? To go hit receptors. So it's a way for our body to work with our microbiome to recirculate estrogen into the bloodstream in a low estrogen environment. Right? So this is a symbiotic relationship. When we're young, we have lower levels of beta-glucuronidase-producing bactivity— activity. Now, when we get older, perimenopause and menopause and postmenopause, the bacteria that produce beta-glucuronidase naturally go up, especially if we do not take hormone replacement therapy. And it's because they recognize that our body benefits from that estrogen. And that is a known mechanism. And we actually think under normal circumstances, if we didn't have all those environmental toxins that look like estrogen, that, that this is part of our agreement with our microbes. We're actually helping each other out. However, we have over 50,000, 80,000, 100,000 different chemicals that have been added to our environment, most of which have never been tested and definitely not tested on top of each other in a human body. That many of them look like these estrogen compounds. And so all of a sudden we have a lot more going through here than we did before. Our microbes haven't changed. They don't know that we don't want that stuff. So when our liver packages these estrogen compounds and sends it to the bowel, when the microbes are starved of fiber, right? When our good bacteria, our probiotics are not getting fed, which means they're not getting soluble and non-soluble fiber. A specific group of what we call dysbiotic bacteria are the Astrobolome, right? We should have some, but the bacteria you don't want, right? So I like to call 'em the cockroaches and the snakes of the gut. We need some of those, but we don't want them overrunning the gut. They overgrow. So when you're over there going, hey man, I'm knocking out my protein, but I forgot to have any fruit at breakfast. I didn't have anything that had fiber in it at lunch, but I got in a piece of chicken breast and an egg. And a piece of cheese on a cheese stick, right? When all of a sudden you start to recognize that all of your foods are animal or animal-derived and you're not getting fiber, you're starving the good guys and these other bacteria grow rapidly and they— and basically when they produce this beta-glucuronidase, it unbinds the estrogen toxin and allows it to get reabsorbed back into the circulation through enterohepatic recirculation from the liver. So basically taking it from the liver through the portal vein, back into the bloodstream. And like I said, this was, this was a, this was my study. I literally know every single microbe that produces beta-glucuronidase and how you test for it in every animal urine and blood and the impact on it, including in IBS. Cause what I found in my research when I did my dissertation was that women who had higher levels of beta-glucuronidase were more likely to have IBS constipation. And then the following one was IBS mixed rather than being, I would call normal, no IBS or IBS with diarrhea. And it stands to hold true. And, and so we're starting to see that what we're experiencing maybe is IBS, may not be an intolerance to food, may not be a problem with enzymes. It may actually very well be that you're starving and feeding the wrong bacteria at the same time. And ultimately it's not what they're able to digest anymore because you don't have the right bacteria in your gut, or they're actually fermenting stuff that they're not supposed to, like meat tissue from proteins. And we call that putrid factor short-chain fatty acids. So when we have too much animal protein, we putrify the stuff in our gut because our microbes are actually degrading and fermenting it. So it putrifies. All right. Now, the, one of the ways we can tell when this sort of detox pathways are not working is we can look at tests like the urine tests, like a 24-hour urine or a spot test like Dutch. We're actually coming out with a new test that I'm actually helping design as an advisor to a lab. But we also wanna see the microbiome cuz we wanna see the beta-glucuronidase in stool cuz that can tell us whether it's really messed up or not. So when we see elevated estrogens or estrogen-like compounds and we have potentially digestive imbalance and excess estrobolone and excess beta-glucuronidase, we know we're gonna have issues with estrogen detoxification, right? And, and that may mess with your symptoms. So again, maybe you tried hormone replacement therapy or you were on birth control at one point and you didn't do very well. Is it really the hormone that you make or take, or is it what your body does with it and whether your microbes are interfering with it? Right. There's a lot of research pointing to that area. And I would beg to offer as a hypothesis is the detoxification process in the liver and the fermentation process and the wrapping of those toxins in the gut to get them out with the stool. When that is impaired, that is actually the mechanistic issue that we need to be looking at for cancer risk, not so much hormones and hormone replacement, because those cancer risks go up regardless of hormone replacement. We don't actually have any science that say hormone replacement therapy in menopause increases that risk of breast cancer. Cuz you remember the Women's Health Initiative was actually not statistically significant, and the women that were on estrogen alone had a reduced risk compared to the women that had nothing at all. So if I can't excrete my toxins, Or I go to excrete them and because my microbiome has been starved, I get it circulated back into the blood. I might be putting stuff in there that I don't really want circulating anymore because it's basically recycling old funky unfueled estrobolome and old hormones and toxins that need to go out. All right. So I mentioned this, but I wanna talk about this. So liver detoxification, right? Fiber. Helps bind all the toxins coming out of the liver in the bile that hangs out in the, in the holding tank called your gallbladder. And that bile ends up excreting all the way into the gut. Butyrate in particular out of the short-chain fatty acids is a signaling molecule that upregulates the expression of an enzyme called glutathione S-transferase. All right. That helps you make and recycle with several other genes like GSTP1 and GSTM1 and GST. All of those help us make, produce, and recycle glutathione and fiber-derived butyrate from your microbiome actually upregulates that signaling. And that's critical for phase 2 detoxification. Now, when I have low fiber in my diet, guess what happens? In most cases, we have more constipation, right? Low fiber means stool sits in the colon. We have less fluid being held and retained in the colon, and fiber also makes the stool softer. So that often helps keeping us from being constipated. So if I have delayed transit time because I'm constipated, I get more exposure to stuff that's in the gut that should be in the dumpster because it's sitting in the trash bag, i.e., your colon for a really long time. Here's the way to think about it. If I took a bag of trash full of organic trash, right? So imagine you had salads for a whole week and you drug it out into your living room and left the bag closed, but turned it up to 98 degrees and left for a week of vacation— to a vacation. How funky would that be when you get back? It's a plastic bag, but even that becomes permeable. So the reality is if you're constipated, you're reabsorbing the stuff that was supposed to go to the dumpster. And fiber helps change that. Now, when we look at hormone panels, when I was seeing people in office and then our clinicians at my clinic and the, and clinicians at Minerva, we always look about, look at abnormal hormone panels, right? So whether it's the hormone urinary tests like Dutch and things like that, or the blood, the question we always ask ourselves too is, is this abnormal because the dosing isn't right or the mechanism that we're using to deliver, Or is it really the gut is all jacked up and we've starved our friends in the gut and the bowel might be the issue? You know, so your detox— if you're, if you're constipated, your detoxification is impaired, just full stop, right? Just think of it. It's like leaving the trash bag in your house at 98 degrees for a week. All right. Now, cholesterol and the bile acids, right? So bile acids are made by the liver. They carry a bunch of toxins, but they also help us emulsify fats. Soluble fiber acts like a sponge for bile acids. So soluble fiber is the stuff that if you were to mix it in water, you really can't see it. It might make it a little bit thicker, but there's no floaters. Non-soluble fiber is the floaters. That's your whisk broom. But soluble fibers acts like a sponge for bile acids in the intestinal lumen or the wall of the intestines. And bile acids are made of cholesterol and it binds them and forces the liver to pull circulating LDL cholesterol out of the blood bloodstream to synthesize new bile acids. So let me say that again. Fiber binds to the bile acids and allows it to be carried out in the stool, which then requires the liver to grab onto more LDL cholesterol and bring it into the liver to manufacture bile acids. So fiber directly lowers cholesterol levels through two major mechanisms, helping the liver basically require more from the bloodstream to actually manufacture bile in the first place. And then fiber actually binds to the bile acids and binds to cholesterol in the gut, allowing it to be pooped out, right? So soluble fiber is so important. And when we look at a targeted supplementation of soluble fiber around 8.28 milligrams per deciliter, what we see is that when we supplement soluble fiber, i.e., getting enough, so you get that 25, you know, 30 grams of fiber, What happens is we start to see almost a 9 milligram per deciliter drop in LDL cholesterol to, you know, depending on the study, some of them are up to almost 11 total drop in cholesterol of about 11 and then about 9 of LDL just by getting fiber, right? Just by getting fiber. And it's an incremental benefit for every additional 5 grams, right? So that study, if I remember correctly, was actually at 25 grams., right? So, if we are getting 35, 40, 45, 50, we're actually gonna see an overall reduction in cholesterol through multiple mechanisms and LDL. Now, here's the protein-fiber problem, right? So, here's the thing, the current dietary trend and the research that supports it, believe me, I've been talking protein too, right? High protein diets, 120 grams or more per day are highly beneficial for skeletal muscle. Especially in midlife, but they frequently cause women to focus exclusively on that because we tend to get kind of myopic and it's like, okay, I can only handle one thing. So I'm just going to pound out my protein, but I literally get nothing else. Or I get like one meal that has something as a side on it. And we forget to understand that you're not getting these complex prebiotic plant matter that you really, really need.. And again, as this occurs, what happens is all your good micro— microbiome, your lactobacillus, your bifido, and hundreds of other, other bacteria starve, starve to death, and they die off. And then what happens is you get proteolytic fermentation. This is when protein enters the colon without the fermentable carbohydrates. So you can't— you will not break down all that protein. Some of the meat tissue fibers actually end up all the way in the colon. Right? And they, and they get fermented by the microbes, but it's not the good microbes. These are funky microbes. These are, these are potentially dysbiotic or bad bacteria when they overgrow and they ferment those amino acids and they create highly inflammatory toxic byproducts, ammonia, hydro, hydrogen sulfide. We need a little bit of that, not a lot. Phenolic compounds. And things like cadaverine. Okay. Listen to that. Cadaverine, which is a proteolytic byproduct of bacterial fermentation of animal tissue fiber, right? All of those things degrade your colon barrier, creating leaky gut and driving systemic metabolomic endotoxemia. Okay. That's a mouthful. All that gets nasty. And all of those nasty things like ammonia and hydrogen sulfide and cadaverine, they also circulate into the bloodstream. They cause insulin resistance and inflammation, which then drives more of that. And we get endotoxemia. So basically a toxin overload circulating in the body, and then it creates leaky gut. So if I'm doing a carnivore diet and I don't even look at fiber, I'm gonna have some of this. I don't care how strong your digestion is because you You basically took all the animals that exist in your Amazon and you killed all of them but the snakes and the spiders. Just because you can survive on it doesn't mean it's the greatest for you. Now, a lot of people, a lot of people have used carnivore diet and had improvement in digestive symptoms and a bunch of other things. In the short term, those kind of diets can be used to shift microbial balance and things like that. However, long-term, you will kill off those microbes. We have research that already shows that. And in the long-term, it will make you less capable of handling a varied diet. And it is not associated with improved metabolic activity, reduced disease state, or anything else. Just gonna be honest, we don't have the data to support that. And most of the data would resoundingly look at the other direction. I'm not saying don't eat your protein, but I'm just saying the fads that are popular today don't have long-term clinical studies or even, even epidemiological studies where we can follow people for, you know, 30 years, 40 years to see what the real outcome is. We've never eaten like that in human history, just like we've never had an entirely vegan population either. There's always some level of nutrient deficiency that occurs with these extreme versions of diets. So all this to say, here's the solution. You don't have to give up your protein. Right? I don't want you to give up protein because God knows we need that for muscle mass too, but you must match it with diverse, colorful, fermentable— not fermented necessarily, but you could do fermented— fermentable plant carbohydrates. So that's things like things that grow above ground, leafy stuff, fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds, legumes, whole grains in their natural form, root vegetables. All of them contain fibers. And even things like chia seeds, avocado, artichoke, cooked and cooled tubers, things like, you know, sweet potatoes and things like that. All of those foods help feed your good microbiome and you don't have to do a crazy amount of them to help, but you need some. And it's more so important to count your fiber. I don't care so much about the food itself, but the fiber. Here's the other thing that I want you to know. We've actually done studies because I know what you're thinking. You're like, uh, Betty, bite me. I'm just going to take a bunch of fiber pills. Well, we've done studies, and we've done studies looking at dietary fiber intake in that 25 to 30 gram range where it came from the diet and compared it to somebody doing mostly supplementation with fiber supplementation. We did not see the same favorable metabolic outcome with the supplementation. Now, let me clarify this too. Let's say you're eating and you're getting to 20 to 25, and maybe you wanna get to 30 or more. And let's say you're getting 20 to 25 in your dietary intake every day. Could you add a little bit of supplemental sunfiber, psyllium husk, larch arabinoxylan? There's all kinds of dietary fiber, chia seeds. You can do that, right? I'm not saying don't supplement, but what I am telling you is you can't down a bunch of fiber pills and get the same effect because there's all other nutrients, phenols and other things, um, and compounds in these fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds, whole grains, legumes that feed your microbes, right? So it's important. And you know, when we look at the research and the integrity side of this, we know that the microbes producing short-chain fatty acids and the metabolic signaling on those two receptors I was talking about actually change with beta-glucuronidase levels and the liver recirculation and the use of this, you know, that viscous, viscous kind of fiber, that soluble fiber. Actually reduces the post-eating blood sugar in conjunction with your estrobolone levels and your metabolic signaling, right? So if we look at your beta-glucuronidase in your stool and the amount of fiber in your diet, they're gonna correlate directly to your actual glucose levels, right? So this is super important because it's— everybody's always worried about their glucose and, and I, I'm carb sensitive. You're not carb sensitive, you're fiber deficient. That's what's really happening. All right. Now, early fiber and cardiovascular health trials, like when we look at cardiovascular disease trials, predominantly featured men. Shit. Really? Is that, are you surprised by that? I'm not, which means they're ignoring the specific interplay between our cycling or changing ovarian hormones and the microbial carbohydrate fermentation. I can tell you. I was in the research. I have read probably 90% of any, any of the, of the literary works that talked about the estrobolome and the microbiome. I did read all of them up until 2024. And so here's what I can tell you. It does— we don't need a female-only study to know that fiber is going to highly impact our estrogen and our microbes and vice versa. Our microbes are going to impact our hormones and especially when we look at like bile acids, cardiovascular disease, cholesterol levels. We know that our, our cholesterol levels decline directly in relationship to fiber intake and the binding of fiber, uh, fi— uh, bile acids. And so when we look at the therapeutic manipulation of the Astrobiome, like the different bacteria, the individual bacteria strains, and we look at it isolated with prebiotic matching. So we're matching the prebiotics to the astrobolome themselves. We're starting to see emerging but highly supported research showing that different astrobolome bacteria respond to different food intake. And our other microbes do too. Varying your, my, your fiber intake from different fruits and vegetables, nuts, seeds, legumes, whole grains, all will impact your combination, your micro and your microbiome. Differently because they have different desire for different food sources, just like we do. You know, some like french fries, some like rice, some like chia seeds, and some want raspberries, right? And it depends. And so we, we, instead of trying to figure out how to just eat a particular fiber, we need a variety, right? We need a variety of what, of what we're eating every single day to make this happen. All right. So now I want, I wanna walk you through how to do this 'cause people are like, "Damn, Betty, I'm just getting in my protein. How do I do this?" Right? So, here's what you wanna track for a week. I want you to track your fiber intake, right? I don't care about carbohydrate content, right? And just know that fiber is best served when it's coming from a food that has been unadulterated by man. Don't fall for the marketing on the box, right? The more whole the food is, the better. And one of the best ways to do this is to use a software called Cronometer, cronometer.com. Now, if you haven't used MyFitnessPal, it's good. It's not quite as good as Cronometer, but it's good. And what I want you to do is track everything that goes in your mouth, just everything, no judgment. I don't care. I don't care if it's an M&M. I really don't. But what I want you to do is just see, take 2 days and then 1 weekend day. So 2 weekdays, 1 weekend day, track your fiber. Just put all your food in because it's going to tell you how much fiber you got. And you could be one of those 9-10 percenters, right? I get about 30 to 35 every day. That's kind of my goal, right? So, and, but I didn't start there. I had to get there, right? So just track it, right? We want to understand that. And you can also see your protein intake because maybe you're getting more than what you really need. 'Cause again, protein is not gonna result in a change on the scale when we have this going on. And that's what I hear a lot from women is they're like, I'm getting my protein and I'm doing all this, I'm low carbon and nothing is moving. And maybe they're even on hormones, so we can't blame it on that. And then I even had some that are like, I'm on a GLP. And I'm like, yeah, but we got about 5 to 10 different mechanisms here that are getting starved out 'cause they're not getting fed in the microbes. They're starving, right? So track your fiber and you can look at your protein too, right? Now, when you look at your digestion, if you raised your protein, did you notice— I want you to kind of journal on this— did I notice my digestion changing a little bit over time? Did you get more bloating or did you get changes in bowel frequency and, and, and bowels? Because sometimes we get bile acid malabsorption and we get more diarrhea and urgency. Or we get really foul-smelling farts, or we might find that everything slows down because there's less fiber. That's more common, but I'm not saying that it doesn't go the other direction. So I want you to kind of think about and journal, has my digestion changed very much? Now, sometimes in the beginning, I have to say this because someone will say it, when you go from eating, let's say, kind of a standard American diet and you go on to much higher, much lower carbohydrates, we lose a bunch of fluid, right? Because reducing all those carbohydrates, the body expels a bunch of excess fluid. And so we often feel less fluffy in the beginning, but usually within a month or two that has calmed down. And that's what I want you to look back at is after you kind of went through that water fluid retention, what, what did it feel like now? So look at that. And then the next question is, is, is your healthcare provider team that you're working with, are they looking at your gut function? Are they helping you understand the importance of fiber? Are they helping you maximize your diet in this way? Because that has as much to do with your hormone replacement and your menopause journey as everything else, right? And you gotta figure that out for your own hormone kind of balance. And especially if you're looking at hormone metabolism in a urine test, we need to know those things. Those are really, really important. Now, the last one is how to get more fiber in your diet. And here's the thing, you can't go from 10 to 40 overnight. You can, but you will be mad at me. So you want to go slowly and add a little bit at a time. So one of the ways that you can do this is, um, I'm gonna talk a little bit about supplementation first, cuz this is always easy. You could add 5 grams of a targeted fiber, like a soluble fiber, like hydrolyzed guar gum or sun fiber. You could do ground chia seeds, which is a soluble fiber, or ground flax meal, or even psyllium. Get organic. And you could add that to your smoothie, your shake, your water in the morning. Heck, you could even add it to your coffee. Just get a ton of water afterwards because that helps the fiber do its job. So you could always add a little bit of supplemental fiber. I add a little bit all the time, just as an insurance policy. Now, the next thing you can do is look at your meals. So if you're eating 3 meals a day, what you want to do is get about a half cup of some high fiber starchy food. Now it doesn't have to be high in carbohydrate, like high in blood sugar hitting sort of thing. It doesn't have to be potatoes because potatoes actually, unless you cook and cool them, aren't the best fiber sources, but it could be, it could be a half cup of strawberries in the morning with a half cup of, of your raspberries. Cause that's going to be about 14 to 20 grams of fiber alone. One cup, one little tiny quarter cup of raspberries can go as high as 7 grams of fiber. Right? So adding a little bit of fruit in the morning, also your microbes love fruit, love fruit, kiwi, grapes, you know, strawberries, blueberries, raspberries. They love the compounds in those, in those fruits and vegetables, the polyphenols and everything else. So add just a little bit of fruit. Could it be in a smoothie? Can it be when you just eat it? Certainly, just add that. When you're having lunch, many, many women are like, man, I pick up a salad, I make sure it has a gigantic plop of some sort of salmon, chicken, whatever. This is where you can have an additional legume, right? I cut to the chase and yes, it would be fabulous if I made my legumes at home, but you know what? A girl's gotta do what a girl's gotta do. So I often will rinse off and use a half cup of garbanzo beans, a half cup of white beans, a half cup of black beans, a half cup of pinto beans. I just rinse them off and throw them in my salad. That's gonna add a ton of soluble fiber, right? So now I've just gotten more fiber right now. Get to dinner. So dinner is often the only place that most people get fiber. But again, you can look at adding fiber to your meal by making sure you start with a salad. Because the other thing is, is we want a variety of colors, right? So I want a little bit of red, a little bit of blue, a little bit of purple, orange, yellow, because all of those different colors are different colors of antioxidants, because an antioxidant technically is a pigment, a color when you're looking at the fruit or vegetable, but they all have different mechanisms in your body. And all of those foods have different, you know, ideal microbes that like to eat them. So if I add a little bit of all those vegetables, whether it's a little side salad or other things, that's going to give me extra fiber. And then I can still have like a half cup, that's a serving size of something fibrous. One of my favorite things to recommend to do is if you're making something with ground beef. So I happen to be in Texas and ground beef is something that we eat quite a bit. A, we like steak and beef, but the other thing is we eat a lot of Mexican food. It's almost like a food source here. It's almost like a food group. Well, if you're making something like we make what we call plate tacos all the time. So we'll have like lettuce and stuff like that, pico de gallo and ground beef and you know, a little bit of refried vegetarian, you know, pinto beans or black beans. Well, the other thing you can do is if you're cooking ground beef, you can put like a half cup to a cup, cup of cooked red lentils in it, right? So cook the lentils, you just boil them, let them cool off, drain them, and put it in there. What it does is it adds a ton more protein, right? About 8 grams, 6 to 8 grams of protein, but adds 16 grams of fiber. Right. You're not going to taste it. If you've got a little bit of seasoning on it, or you're making like, let's say a marinara meat sauce, you can add that in there. You're not going to taste it. Your kids won't know it's in there. It has similar texture. That's a great way. The other thing is, is you can also, you can also blend and make other types of like blended bean paste, right? Hummus is just basically a blended bean paste with extra olive oil, a little bit of sesame paste. And garlic and lemon, right? But you can make black beans into a paste and eat them. You can even have them cold, right? And eat them just like you would a hummus, add a little bit of seasoning and things like that. I also do quite a bit of those things as well, because you just— you, what you want is the fiber content. So all you have to do is kind of look at your intake throughout the day and add just little bits to your meal. 'Cause again, when I eat it as a food with your meal, it lowers the, the blood sugar impact after that meal. And that's really, really important. So here's the thing, you gotta get your Fs right. And that F is fiber, right? Because that is going to change a lot of your metabolic health and it helps your microbiome, which helps your detoxification and helps keep our microbes happy, which probably helps our longevity across all markers of cardiovascular disease, dementia, Every autoimmune condition, you name it. Our microbes need to be happy. So our bodies are happy. And really, really take this to heart. Fiber is the one thing that I can tell you across the board is going to make a huge difference in your overall health over time. You just may need to go slow if you haven't been doing a lot of fiber before. All right. So I want to thank you for listening to Menopause Mastery and spending time with me today. I know that, you know, your time is valuable and it's very meaningful. And so if you've been struggling with all of these things and you can't figure out what's going on with your body, that's what we're here to help you with. I like sharing the science so you don't have to read it. And I will be back with you next week.