Exclusive Dr. Hyman+ Ask Mark Anything: Heavy Or Irregular Periods, Reverse Aging, And More

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Hi everyone, welcome to another episode of Ask Mark Anything. My name is Harshil Parikh. I'm the Dr. Hyman Plus Community Manager and I'm joined by Darcy Gross, who is one of the producers of the Longevity Roadmap docuseries.

Hi, Darcy. Hi.

And of course, we're here with our expert, Dr. Mark Hyman. Hi, Dr. Hyman. Hi, everybody. So thanks for being with us here today, and we are here to answer the Ask Mark Anything questions submitted by our Dr. Hyman Plus Me. So let's go ahead and get started. So one of our Community members has a daughter that has heavy or irregular periods, and she's wondering, what do you suggest that she could help her daughter with?

I mean, these are really common problems that women have. Heavy periods, irregular periods, painful periods, premenstrual syndrome. It's kind of difficult out there for women today because of our lifestyle, because of our diet, because of environmental toxins. It's really caused huge amounts of hormonal chaos. And these are not normal things that women should experience. I mean, women should not be like you're sort of like your digestion. You shouldn't be aware that it's doing its job, right? If you're having a, if you're having bloating and pain and and constipation diarrhea, something's wrong. If you're having your period and you're bleeding and you bleed and you're fine, okay, great, no problem. But if you're suffering with all these weird symptoms that I just went over, whether it's irregular periods, heavy periods, cramping, PMS, and all the associated symptoms of food retention and migraines and just nausea, diarrhea, mood changes, all these things are really not normal. 75% of women have, for example, PMS, which just doesn't make any sense to me as a doctor. And there are really ways to fix this. And I've seen many, many patients with these problems. So the question is, what do you do about it? And the first thing is to sort of get your hormones in balance. And this is really key. And the things that create imbalance are processed food diet, high sugar, starch foods, processed chemicals, all those things. Caffeine, alcohol, nicotine also are not so great for hormones. and lack of exercise, another big factor. Stress, another big factor. Lack of sleep, another big factor. So those are all the foundational lifestyle things that people can really make a big difference in. Dairy is probably the number one, two, and three thing that causes hormonal problems for women. There's over 60 different hormones in dairy products. This normally occurring because it's a cow and it's a hormonally driven product that actually is designed to create a big cow. So you do not probably want to do that if you're really struggling with these hormonal symptoms. people can also use certain foods like flax seeds and other seeds, soy foods, non-GMO soy. There's actually a product out there called BAYA, which is, does something called seed cycling, which uses a lot of these powerful phytochemicals and seeds to help regulate hormonal balance. Flax seeds is, for example, one of them. So I think there's, there's a lot to do. Often I address gut issues with women who have a lot of problems or maybe a lot of imbalances that come from a gut issues, 'cause a lot of hormones are regulated through the gut. I'll often recommend things to help with detoxification of hormones, the broccoli family products, dandelion, methane, primrose oil, many, many herbs. There's a lot of great herbs out there for PMS that we use. So I find there's various herbs that help for painful periods and cramps in regular periods. So we really try to kind of individualize the treatment, but focusing on the fenugreek, put them in a lifestyle stuff on the dietary things like soy foods and flax seeds and cruciferous vegetables. All those really help balance hormones, cutting out the processed food, the sugar, the starch, the alcohol, caffeine. Those are really, really important. And then obviously exercising, getting up sleep, stress reduction, all these things help regulate hormonal function. And then lastly, we know you add in some supplements. I like one called Xeno Protect from Zymogen, which has a lot of things that help balance hormones out. I use, like I said, even primrose oil, the methylating B vitamins, B6, B12, and a number of other sort of specialized things depending on what's going on with the individual, but that's basically the approach.

Great, that's super helpful. Thank you for that. And we'll put a link to the B12 cycling one that you put in our show notes. So thank you so much for mentioning that. And Darcy, over to you.

Awesome. So the next question is, I'm just gonna read it off here. So you have a wealth of information that you share with your community overall, but sometimes it can feel really overwhelming to know where to start. So our community wants to know, what are the top five actions someone can take to reduce their biological age today?

Well, I just wrote a book about it. So this is a great question. Obviously, the top things are things that are accessible to all of us. What we eat, how much we exercise and how we exercise, how much we sleep, how we handle stress, and basic cocktail of supplements. So those are, those are the five foundational principles in terms of how and what and when we eat. That's a huge thing. So let's just start there. The, the thing that I think drives most aging is sugar and starch. You're probably sick to hear me say this, you're here on the podcast, but the science is the science. I didn't invent the body. It's just how it works. I'm sorry. I like sugar like everybody else, but it's, it's really the thing that's driving the aging process. So the more you can reduce your carbohydrate starchy diet and sugar in your diet, the better off you're going to be. So that's really number one and probably two and three. And the second is really jack up all the phytochemicals in your diet from a rich array of colorful plant foods. These are super important and there are many of them that regulate key pathways that have to do with longevity, whether it's the phytochemicals in strawberries or the resveratrol in red grapes or whether it's the quercetin in onions or whether it's, you know, green tea, the catechins and green tea. I mean, all of them have amazing different properties. And, and I read a lot about these in my book young forever, which is coming out in February 23. So stay tuned. And so that's really, really important. And then the question is protein. Protein is really important in terms of diet. I think, particularly as you get older, you need to make sure you have high quality protein. This can be plant protein, but it probably should be supplement with amino acids to increase leucine content, which is low in, in typical plant proteins and is needed for building muscle. which is the currency of age and healthy aging. The next thing you should be focused on is when you eat. You want to give yourself a 12-hour break between dinner and breakfast, ideally, and maybe even 14 to 16 hours, depending on how your body is and how you feel on it. But giving your body a break to clean up things at night is really key. So those are the dietary things. In terms of exercise, strength training, 20 minutes, three times a week. I use bands. I do three, four times a week of bands for half an hour. change my life. It's really a powerful system for really keeping yourself fit and healthy. Uh, and it doesn't take a lot of time. If you don't have an hour and a half to do that, then something's wrong with your life. So a week, a week, what is there, 168 hours a week or something. So I think you can probably find an hour and a half to do that. Uh, the, the other thing is interval training cardio, which is high intensity interval, which is sprinting that really powerful. Uh, and then, and obviously sleep and, and, and stress reduction won't go into too much about that, but then the certain supplements, I think vitamin D is key. fish oil is key. I think quercetin is really important. I take a cocktail of mitochondrial supplements. I just keep my mitochondria healthy, CoQ10 and carnitine and lipoic acid and also takes things to help with detoxification and acetyl cysteine. All these help with various pathways that have to do with longevity. If you want to skip all that and go for the one supplement that probably has the most promise, it's NMN or NAD products or derived products, which is helpful in boosting energy production cell, but also helps regulate sirtuins, which are sort of master longevity switches and in fact DNA repair and many other things. So those are, those are the things that I think of as sort of my go-to things. And then of course, I'm just gonna add a little extra for bonuses, hormesis. This is a really simple thing that you can do exercise, the form of hormesis. It basically means whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger. So my favorite is hot and cold therapies sauna, hot bath, cold bath, cold shower. I mean, if you have a bathtub and a shower, you can kind of do a lot of it. I put in a steam shower in my house. I love that. I put a bathtub full of cold water, and that's my hot and cold therapy. It's great. You know, I don't know what it cost me, but I put it in 15 years ago, and it still works. So it's pretty, pretty amazing simple therapy. And I think that that's another way.

To really boost your longevity pathways. Yeah, that's amazing. Thank you for all those tips. I feel like they're all super accessible, like something that we can all just do starting today.

Yeah.

So that's great. Thanks, Dr. Hyman. And over to you, Virchel.

Yeah.

So our next question is about electrolytes. So we've heard you mention that you were, you know, when you exercise and all that stuff and you're doing it quite often and consistently. So that's wonderful. But we have some of our community members that are also wondering, do you use electrolytes every time, every day? How often should you use them? And, you know, is there anything to consider when using them?

Yes, I think electrolytes are super important. You know, most of us drink water, like plain water. and that's fine. But you know, what goes on is that, you know, like for example, magnesium, 99% of magnesium is inside your cells. Potassium is inside your cells. Sodium is mostly in your blood, but you need to have the right electrolytes in order to run your cells and to hydrate your cells. 'Cause you can hydrate your body. For example, if you drink a single liter of water, you can actually die. And then this has happened many times in marathons, for example, where runners who are sweating, will drink tons of water and they dilute their blood literally and their sodium goes way down. So they basically, it's like thinking about putting salt, you know, in a glass of water or salt in a, you know, in a, in a bathtub, you know, it's the same amount of salt. It dilutes it out. And so you, you can end up with seizures and you can die. So in order to get the minerals in the cell and to get the fluid in the cell, you need to electrolytes and that can revive you dramatically. So I'm a big fan of electrolytes. I know Tom Brady, for example, he doesn't actually ever, ever use any water, I think, without electrolytes. So he's always using electrolytes to drink and, and to have the input of, of these important minerals inside the cell. So it helps you get and create what we call intracellular hydration. The intracellular hydration is what makes you feel better and do better. So I know if I'm out playing tennis in the hot weather, like, if I drink, I feel pooped out, and if I kind of you know, kind of just basically feel like I'm sort of washed out and tired and burnt out and I can't play anymore. I'll drink a glass of electrolyte water and boom. It's like, it's like the sort of reviving of the, what was that? The Tin Man maybe in the Wizard of Oz or something. I don't know what those things are. So I think it's really possible to kind of get yourself super hydrated with electrolytes in a way that actually makes you feel better and perform better and, and do better.

Okay, great. And I think that you've mentioned this before, but the brand that you've been using is that Light Show electrolyte?

Yeah, I like Light Show, LYTE Show. That's good. I don't like the sweet and kinds with all the weird stuff in it.

I just don't like that. Okay, great.

Thanks for sharing that. Darcy, over to you. Yeah, I have a quick follow-up question. I've been looking at a lot of different electrolytes, and I just noticed that usually they consist of the same type of minerals, but it's usually in really, really different concentrations. Is there like a recommended way of telling like, oh, should you be getting one with higher sodium or less sodium or higher potassium?

I mean, there usually is like magnesium, sodium, potassium, and the most abundant is usually sodium and then magnesium. Some of them have calcium, but you know, you want a good balance and most of them are pretty well regulated in terms of their amount of the right amount of electrolytes.

Okay. All right. That's helpful. Thank you. All right. And over to the next question, which is, are there any tests that you recommend for measuring inflammation in your body?

You know, it's a great question. I think, you know, we're learning more and more and more about the, the actual role of inflammation, longevity and aging and chronic disease. And what's really fascinating is that, is that the testing is really changing. So, you know, for gosh, for the last 25 years, I've been looking at C-reactive protein well before any other doctors were looking at it, because I learned about it in, in the course of studying functional medicine. And it's a marker of inflammation. We know that high CRP is just a, is a non-specific marker of inflammation. It can be what we call sterile inflammation or systemic chronic inflammation. It's not like an acute inflammation you get from a sore throat, but it's just a chronic, invisible hidden inflammation. And that's linked to heart disease, cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer's, and, and most chronic diseases. So that's one easy test that any doctor can do. Sed rate is a little bit less sensitive than that. That's another test that people can do. There's all these tests, for example, of cytokines. We can look at cytokine panels now. And I, for example, saw someone who had chronic fatigue, and she had high levels of various kinds of interleukins. And these are cytokines you've heard about with the cytokine storm, tumor necrosis factor alpha, interleukin six and other, other interleukins. There's also a test that's going to be available. We should link to it's called the I age test or immune age. And essentially it's looking at this research that was done by David Furman at Stanford, where he looked at, you know, over 50 different molecules. He calls it the immunome, all the molecules of our immune system and how they correlate with various chronic diseases. And they found that, that they were, they were surprisingly high correlations with about four of these biomarkers. And there are things you've never heard of that I never learned about that are these kind of obscure immune molecules, but they seem to highly correlated with age-related diseases. So you can measure your mean age, you can change your habits and lifestyle. And the key is, you know, inflammation is not just a random thing. It's caused by something. It's caused by our diet, by, you know, obviously our processed sugary, starchy diet, lack of certain nutrients and nutritional deficiencies like vitamin D, Omega-3 and zinc, for example, vitamin C, vitamin A, all regulate immunity. and then it can also be caused by environmental toxins, by your gut microbiome and problems in your gut, by chronic stress, by allergens from foods or food sensitivities. All these things can drive inflammation. So as a functional medicine doctor, my job is to be a detective and to figure out what's caused the inflammation. So it's one thing to just check and say, oh, you've got inflammation, but then what? Then what does it come from? And that's where you go deep is it an immunotoxin like mercury? Is it a light analogy or something like a food sensitivity to dairy? Is it a tick infection? Is it the microbiome problems with actual overgrowth or fungal overgrowth? Is it chronic psychological stress? Is it, you know, what is it? So I think that's my job. And then we design a protocol to deal with different causes and to create an anti-inflammatory lifestyle with the anti-inflammatory diet. the most effective one that I've created is called the 10-day detox diet. And essentially it's just a 10-day reset. And anybody can do it. It can be done, obviously, for longer. I remember at Cleveland Clinic, I had this guy come up to me, and he's like, Dr. Hyman, I I just did the 10-day detox, and I have rheumatoid arthritis. And in 10 days, it went away. Is that possible?

I'm like, well, yeah, if it was something you were eating for sure, like gluten, definitely could get better that that fast. well, I hope you enjoyed that teaser of exclusive content that you get every single month with Dr. Hyman Plus. If you want to listen to the full episode and get access to ad free podcast episodes, plus Ask Mark anything episodes, plus monthly functional Deep dive episodes, I guess that's why we call it Dr. Hyman Plus. Then head on over to the doctor's Pharmacy on Apple podcast and sign for your seven day free trial.

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