Can I Have a Healthy Menopause Without Hormone Replacements?

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Can I have a Healthy Menopause Without Hormone Replacement? This is JJ Virgin, four time New York Times bestselling author, celebrity nutrition expert, and Fitness hall of Famer. I've been on a lifelong quest for answers to the toughest health questions, and now I'm sharing what I found with you. Welcome to Ask the Health Expert. Michelle from Facebook asks, can I have a healthy menopause without hormone replacement? I thought they were dangerous. I've got Dr. Kieran Dunstan with me to answer this question. She's the perfect person to do it. She's an OBGYN and functional medicine expert and she used her expertise to lose £100 and heal herself from chronic disease. Now she helps tens of thousands of women lose weight, regain their energy, and master midlife through her Stop the Menopause Madness Summit and her brilliant Health revolution podcast and YouTube channel. When she's not out helping women take control of their health, she's out singing. She's a singer with the Savannah Philharmonic Chorus. She'll be right back to answer the questions. Stay with us.

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That's a great question and one that I get very frequently. Michelle. So after the Women's Health Initiative study was closed early in 2002 because they found increased risk of breast cancer, heart disease, strokes, blood clots and other health problems in the women in the study, the general thought was that all hormone replacement therapy is bad. And I remember that day because I was traditionally practicing obgyn. So I had lots of women on synthetic hormones like they were testing in the study, which included equiline, which comes from estrogen from pregnant horses, and medroxyprogesterone acetate, which is a synthetic form of progestin. So neither one of these hormones is like your body's natural sex hormones, estrogen and progesterone. And I remember that day because the phone was ringing off the hook, women even stopped by the office to say, oh my gosh, I heard that these hormones increase my risk of breast cancer, which is every woman's greatest fear. I'm not taking them. What should I do? And then of course, they came off them universally. Thousands of women in our country. And then they started having symptom of withdrawal from these hormones, hot flashes, difficulty sleeping, and just myriad complaints. And it was really a difficult time for everyone regarding hormones. And the issue really came down to the fact that they were testing certain foreign hormones, hormones foreign to our body, right? So if you think about hormones like fruit and these hormones were apples, they were looking at the effect of plastic apples that you might get from Michaels to decorate a wreath with on our health. And I think if you ask most people, they would say, well, that might not be a good idea and the effects might, and the effects might be less than optimal. But they're then, but then they took the approach that all hormones were bad when this really didn't include looking at hormones that are biologically identical to what you naturally have. Your body's natural estrogens, progesterone and testosterone. And those are really like your healthy ripe peaches off a Georgia tree that don't have the same adverse effects and have actually been used globally for over 50 years with great success and little side effects. Think about it. If these sex hormones caused breast cancer, you would think that people with the highest levels of these hormones would have the highest rates of breast cancer. And that's 20 year old women. But they don't have high rates of breast cancer, they actually have the lowest rates. So it's not these healthy hormones that are the same as your body naturally has that causes breast cancer. It's these synthetic hormones that are chemically foreign to what your body naturally has. So the governing bodies came out and said that all hormone therapies are bad and that you should use them in the least dose possible for the shortest amount of time, for symptom management only, which really has left a lot of women high and dry and miserable at midlife and in menopause. And in my book, that's not okay. We deserve to have excellent quality of life at every age. And we wouldn't deny people the opportunity to have their calcium replaced if they were calcium deficient and say that if they reacted negatively to some type of synthetic calcium that caused them a problem, that all calcium was bad. No, we would then find healthy calcium the same as their body naturally needed and give them that calcium so that they could feel as good as possible at that age in life and that stage in life, and also be preventing other diseases. And that's what bioidentical hormones do. So your next part of your question, can I have optimal health in menopause without hormones? Is a wonderful question again that I get asked all the time. And the answer really goes to the fact that you have these sex hormone receptors all over your body. You have the highest concentration in your central nervous system, in your brain. So what does that tell you? That your brain needs these hormones in order to be healthy and function optimally. And in fact, rates of Alzheimer's and dementia are higher in people who don't have sex hormones replaced at menopause. And replacing these hormones is a key component of protocols to reverse disease in older age, like Alzheimer's. So if you want to maintain optimal health in your 50s and beyond, really replacing these hormones is essential. There are herbs and botanicals that can stimulate these receptors and give you some benefit from, but none of them really has been shown to have the beneficial healing effects and nourishing effects that the sex hormones that are bioidentical do. So that's a great question. Really. It's hard to have optimal health at menopause without them, and there really is nothing to be afraid of.

This is JJ with Asking Health Expert. I do this five times a week, so make sure you never miss a show by going to subscribetoj.com.

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