Considering HRT? A Natural, Informed & Safe Approach with Dr. Nasha Winters

Dr. Nasha Winters, ND, FABNO, an integrative oncologist and metabolic health expert, was inspired by her own battle with terminal cancer at 19. For over three decades, she has pioneered terrain-based healthcare, integrating science, nature, and personalized medicine. Author of The Metabolic Approach to Cancer and Mistletoe and the Future of Integrative Oncology, and host of the Metabolic Matters Podcast, Dr. Winters bridges research with actionable care. She co-founded the Metabolic Terrain Institute of Health and is Medical Director of Terrain Holding Company. A global educator and visionary, Dr. Winters empowers practitioners and patients worldwide. To view full show notes, more information on our guests, resources mentioned in the episode, discount codes, transcripts, and more, visit https://drmindypelz.com/ep303 Check out our fasting membership at https://esetacademy.drmindypelz.com https://resetacademy.drmindypelz.com/. Please note our medical disclaimer https://drmindypelz.com/medical-disclaimer/.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Mindy Pelz?

  On this episode of the Resetter Podcast, I bring you Dr. Nasha Winters. Now, Nisha's been here before. She was actually probably either the number, the first guest or the second guest I ever had on the Resetter Podcast because she wrote an incredible book that everybody should have in their health book library, and it's called "The Metabolic Approach to Cancer." And she was one of the very first doctors that were, was out there saying, "Hey, in order to clean up cancer, you need to clean up your metabolic health." Now, over the years, I have brought her back over and over again to offer us a different

• 0:47Mindy Pelz?

  look at some of the more traditional diagnoses that we have in healthcare, the prognoses that we give women specifically. And today, I have brought her back to really talk about hormone replacement therapy. What do we need to think this about with this? What do we need to dive into a little deeper? Are we missing parts of the conversation? Now, the thing to know about Dr. Nisha is that she is an integrative oncology expert. So, her background is as a naturopath. And as you'll hear in this discussion, she not

• 1:26Mindy Pelz?

  only had ovarian cancer at 20 herself, but she created a whole practice around helping women with hormonal imbalances. So, in my opinion, that makes her a great person to talk about what do we need to know about hormone replacement therapy through the lens of who should do it and who shouldn't do it? So, in this conversation, I'm hoping you will hear that there are some steps before we take hormone replacement therapy that we might want to entertain. So, she talks a lot about genetic testing. She talked about some functional health testing. Don't, don't-

• 2:10Mindy Pelz?

  Don't get lost at that part of the conversation because we will have at the end of, once you listen all the way through, in the notes, I have asked her to create a list of these tests for us. So you can take them to your doctor. She also trains doctors, so you can find one of her trained doctors. But she will ramble off a bunch of tests. Don't get lost. Hang there with me. This is important stuff that we need to be talking about. So I've asked her to give you all a list of it. So that's in the show notes. The second thing we talk about is what aspects of life, our lifestyle, throw our hormones

• 2:51Mindy Pelz?

  off. And if this part of our lifestyle is not cleaned up, then can it make hormone replacement therapy dangerous? So a lot of you are still unsure. A lot of your doctors are still unsure. So this is going to be a really important part of the conversation. We talk about emotional trauma. We talk about environmental toxicity. We talk about diet and how all of that can actually play into whether you will be successful with hormone replacement therapy or not. So that's the second part of the conversation. And then the last part of the conversation, and what really is near and dear to my heart, is that

• 3:35Mindy Pelz?

  how do we redefine menopause as a transformational moment for women? And what is it that holds us back from transforming into the best version, the most authentic version, the happiest version, the healthiest version of ourselves? Because as you follow me more and listen to me more, I think you will hear that I am such a believer that this process is working for us, not against us. But we need to know our health state when we go into the perimenopausal journey. We need to know certain factors before we jump on HRT. And Dr. Nasha is

• 4:17Mindy Pelz?

  here to educate us all. So as always, I hope this helps. Welcome to the Resetter Podcast. This podcast is all about empowering you to believe in yourself again. If you have a passion for learning, if you're looking to be in control of your health and take your power back, this is the podcast for you.

• 4:47Mindy Pelz?

  Okay, well, Dr. Nasha Winters, welcome back to the Resetter Podcast. I'm super excited to have this conversation with you.

• 4:56Speaker 01

  So much fun. I'm very, very excited to be here today. So thanks for having me back.

• 5:00Mindy Pelz?

  So here's where I want to start this conversation, and my audience knows how much I like to teach them to think for themselves. And you know, we're going to have a conversation about hormone replacement and where it may not be appropriate, because right now, the zeitgeist is telling every woman on the planet to get on to hormone replacement therapy. And there are some dangers still that need to be addressed. So we're going to talk about that. But I think before we do that, one thing we've never done with you, and really would be a good preface to this conversation, is talk a little bit about your clinical

• 5:40Mindy Pelz?

  experience and what you saw in practice, because I think that ties so well into where you're coming from when we look at bioidenticals.

• 5:52Speaker 01

  First, I so appreciate that, because I'm such a context is everything. And what most of us see in the social media world is just a little clip, which is just enough to create a hook, which is just enough to create some polarity, which is just enough to just piss off a lot of people and really get us nowhere in dialogue. And so I'm hoping that people will get curious and want to lean into the whole conversation and not just some little clip around this. But my experience with hormones actually started with myself. And I should start with that. I was nine years old when I started menstruating, terrorizing, and traumatizing the entire third grade.

• 6:28Mindy Pelz?

  Nine.

• 6:29Speaker 01

  Right.

• 6:29Mindy Pelz?

  Just stop for there. Nine is, nine's early, right?

• 6:33Speaker 01

  Yes, it is.

• 6:34Mindy Pelz?

  Can we just point that out?

• 6:35Speaker 01

  Okay. And especially back in 1980.

• 6:38Mindy Pelz?

  Right.

• 6:39Speaker 01

  So.

• 6:40Mindy Pelz?

  Right.

• 6:40Speaker 01

  Not normal and not common, still not normal, unfortunately more common. And so that, you know, a lot has changed in the last 30, 40, 50 years. But for me back then, it was definitely traumatizing. Thank God for Mrs. Richardson, my third grade teacher, who, you know, helped me put on one of those pads that you could probably float down the Nile on and like a belt around it and showing me how to do it. And just the terror of that and the young girls in my class. I learned later, they actually had a whole like extra class just to help de-traumatize all of the other girls. I didn't know that until last year at a medical conference where I ran into one of my classmates from third grade that I had not seen since then, because I moved away shortly thereafter.

• 7:25Speaker 01

  And she, because I sort of wondered if I just was making up those stories in my own head. And she's the one, she's now actually a doctor, a medical doctor, who still talks about and still keeps in touch with some of those people from that class that were still traumatized by that. So just a funny little.

• 7:40Mindy Pelz?

  They were traumatized by you getting your period?

• 7:43Speaker 01

  Because at nine years old, no one was getting a period. Right?

• 7:49Mindy Pelz?

  That's crazy.

• 7:50Speaker 01

  And nobody knew what to do with that information.

• 7:52Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah.

• 7:52Speaker 01

  By the time I was 11, I was put on birth control pills for my endometriosis and my polycystic ovarian syndrome. Right? And then that was, they were increased in dosage and potency over the next several years because I had so much symptoms around extreme pain and growth of endometrial tissue everywhere. I mean, everyone's like, what the hell is this lady talking about right now? But it's a hot mess. But no one treated it like it was a problem. It was completely normalized because there was just a quick script and a pill for that. And I can still remember my mom as, I'm third grade. My mom has this moment with me where she's like, this is what's happening. Gives me a mirror.

• 8:36Speaker 01

  Gives me all my stuff, shows me the drunk and the drunk.

• 8:39Mindy Pelz?

  Oh, but that's good.

• 8:40Speaker 01

  I know.

• 8:41Mindy Pelz?

  No, but that's good.

• 8:42Speaker 01

  It was amazing. My mom is kind of a badass. She was definitely ahead in those, in those places. And so it was very helpful for me to understand, start to understand my body, even though it was still being highly medicalized at that time. So fast forward, many people know my story as well. By the time I was 19, just shy of my 20th birthday, I was also diagnosed with terminal ovarian cancer. So these stories that we've all been told and still are being told that birth control protects you from ovarian cancer, hmm, maybe not everybody. Let's just start with that. Um, and, and that it was still, it was still two years beyond that diagnosis before anybody, it occurred to anybody, I should probably stop them. So that's where I had my own experience to go. Someone was going off my hormones.

• 9:27Speaker 01

  No one's asking questions. They just layer caked everything else and normalized everything. And so I didn't even know these were issues, right? It would take me into medical school into the mid nineties to start to learn, maybe there was a different way. So let's put that one on. Yeah.

• 9:42Mindy Pelz?

  So well, I, at my own toxicity curiosity is, do you feel like there was an endocrine disruptor that caused you to have an early, an early cycle that led to an early, what would, I would consider an early ovarian cancer diagnosis? Not that we should ever get one, but that seems correlated to me.

• 10:05Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, there's a few things. Now hindsight's 2020, right? So I would, I would still and continue to 34 years later of my cancer diagnosis, but all those years later, I started learning things that, oh, look, we lived on, in or around four superfund sites and lots of military bases around us in Wichita, Kansas. At the time I was in third grade in Evergreen, Colorado, my, my stuff was more likely exposure from when I was growing up in Kansas before I was there for a couple of years. So I was only in Colorado for a few years at that time. The other piece that was, no one was asking questions about was the, and this, maybe we're hitting this really heavy coming right out of the rans here, but.

• 10:45Speaker 01

  Sexual abuse happening in my household and in my family of origin that was completely even. I can still remember Mrs. Richardson asking me questions and no one in my family of origin wanted to address them. It would actually be a taboo topic with my mother up until just a few years ago. We couldn't really talk about what was going on. Don't, I mean, it's to who I am today, but it's like those were things that were changing in my hormones. So it would, it would probably have been helpful for the doctors to have asked those questions when I was diagnosed with cervical dysplasia at 14 and again at 16. Nobody knew about HPD or those things at that time. So this, I'm just planting those seeds that there were contributing factors that were

• 11:25Speaker 01

  on the psychological, that were on the toxological, but also we were very poor. We lived on very processed food, very, you know, kind of latchkey kid type of stuff, that it was very processed, highly ultra-processed foods, lots and lots of sugar. I did not like meat as a kid. I only wanted veggies and by 16, I made myself a vegetarian, but it really wasn't. It was a carbatarian with like

• 11:50Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah, yeah. I was one of those. Yeah. I was one of those in my, in my early twenties. I was a carbatarian.

• 11:55Speaker 01

  Right. And being a carbatarian, what that did was that it would take years before I understood that I have certain single nucleotide polymorphisms that mean that I needed animal protein to get certain cofactors to help me methylate and detoxify. I also learned years later that I'm missing major SNPs, single nucleotide polymorphisms of glutathione. So my body doesn't know how to take out the garbage. So all the things I was being exposed to. And then because of my diagnosis, I was one of the early tests done on the BRCA mutation and learned I had BRCA mutation as well, not until 1996. And so now you look, and I guess the point of telling the story is there's never one reason, right?

• 12:36Mindy Pelz?

  Yes. And I was going to say, what a perfect storm in the wrong direction. Like, wow.

• 12:41Speaker 01

  Right. And then when you look at my SNPs, every single sort of bastardized process in how we metabolize our hormones, I have lots of those. So three triple, so triple homozygous comt SNPs. Mutations in my CYP 1B1, my mutations in CYP 1A1, several other SNPs in SHBG. So no wonder I had polycystic ovarian, like just all the patterns. I had the storm to not be able to even metabolize my own hormones well. But any exogenous disruptors, I also grew up in farmland in Kansas at the time when they started to spray more systemically. So likely endocrine disruptors from the pesticides and glyphosate, eating a very highly processed

• 13:26Speaker 01

  diet loaded with those things would still be years if I learned I had celiac disease, like all the layers. So I say that because this is also part of our discussion today is there's not ever one cause or one treatment. And there's not one size fits all in how we look at this or discuss this. But for me, I had an in of one experience that said probably some problems with hormones. My mom also, as she had a hysterectomy at 20, right after I was born, shortly after my brother was born, actually, later to find out like ovarian cancer like process, PCOS, endometriosis as well. She also got toxic shock syndrome. That's what led to her hysterectomy.

• 14:05Speaker 01

  But when they put her on it 27, back in that day, they put her on HRT because they did a medical, a surgical menopause for her.

• 14:16Mindy Pelz?

  How old?

• 14:16Speaker 01

  She was 27.

• 14:17Mindy Pelz?

  How old was she?

• 14:18Speaker 01

  And this would have been, let's see, I mean, I was, I would, let's see, she was 24 when I was born, so she's 78 now. So just think about the timeframe. She ended up with a stroke, she ended up with blood clots and a stroke and blood clots in both lungs in the hospital. And we would learn that we had the Leiden five factor and other things that the doctor told my mom at that moment, never, ever again, do you do birth control pills or anything else? He did also tell her that I should probably be screened for similar things. You know, that we'd all learn later.

• 14:49Mindy Pelz?

  How would people know? Like, I just want to like say, people listening to this who maybe don't know what SNPs are, or what these genes are. The way my brain translates what you're saying is we had, you were marinated in a toxic culture, environment, physical, a physical, emotional, chemical, toxic environment that matched to your genetic profile. And those two came together to create cancerous situations.

• 15:23Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 15:23Mindy Pelz?

  Which I think is important, because where we're going to go with this conversation is, how do we know when hormone replacement therapy is right for us and not? And we do need to point out that some bodies, some human bodies have these genetic SNPs. They have these situations. They have this toxic overload, but we do not, you don't know going into HRT.

• 15:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:47Mindy Pelz?

  Was there any sign through all of that, that you knew? Like, could you now look back and be like, oh, gosh. I mean, we know early period is not great, but you know, acne, or

• 16:00Speaker 01

  Big time.

• 16:01Mindy Pelz?

  Mental, and yeah, so were the, and then can we use that as a litmus for women to know, wait, I also had that in my younger years. Maybe I need to ask more questions when it comes to hormone replacement.

• 16:16Speaker 01

  Absolutely. And that's just it, is things like PCOS and endometriosis already elicit a red flag. In fact, both of those are precursors to both breast and ovarian cancer.

• 16:26Mindy Pelz?

  Hmm.

• 16:27Speaker 01

  Right? No one's asking those questions. There's a dis, there's a problem with how the body is metabolizing their hormones. You know, the cystic acne that went with that PCOS, well, no one questioned that. They just put me on antibiotics and on, you know, a round of Accutane and all the things that also very known carcinogen, very known iatrogen, you know, that's known to actually cause like damage, damage to your eggs, right? Which then means damage to your offspring. And so, these are the crazy things that we didn't know, we didn't know until we knew. And what's so weird to me is we actually have a lot of data. That we know, and yet it's almost like we're rewriting history or rewriting our internal data systems despite the fact that we actually have a lot of signs and symptoms as well as a

• 17:11Speaker 01

  lot of labs and a lot of single nucleotide polymorphism tests and a lot of hormone metabolite tests to know what's working and not working for you. And maybe there's different ways to change that expression that's not causing you harm, that may not be just quickly, blatantly reach for a script pad and call it good.

• 17:32Mindy Pelz?

  Right.

• 17:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:33Mindy Pelz?

  So, so I just want to, like, I'm making a little checkbox here for people, like, so, and I'm, those nucleotide tests are not my specialty. So is that something that every woman could do before hormone replacement? And maybe every teenager before birth control?

• 17:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:52Mindy Pelz?

  Like, are there a set of tests that we might want to do before we go into what, what Nisha and I are talking about is exogenous hormones and exogenous, meaning they're from the outside. And every time they're from the outside, you, you can change that internal environment sometimes for the negative. So what are those tests that you would think we would need to do? If you could get every OB, every doctor to do it, what would those tests be?

• 18:22Speaker 01

  Well, I, I would love to see every baby being born to have their mouth swabbed, but everyone gets all freaked out about their DNA being, you know, order, you know, collected. I don't, I look at it as data, like your single nucleotide polymorphisms are not set in stone. So just because you're born with that blueprint, doesn't mean that's how it's going to play out. You, your diet and your lifestyle choices are what helps it play out. And so an example of this is that BRCA mutation we just talked about. Everyone looks at that and thinks that's the cancer gene. No, it's a methylation gene. It's a DNA repair gene. And if it's not working well, you can do things to make it work better. You can do things to help your body.

• 19:04Mindy Pelz?

  And methylation.

• 19:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:05Mindy Pelz?

  And just to reiterate, I always tell people methylation is like your, your cells' ability to detox.

• 19:11Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 19:12Mindy Pelz?

  So if you have MTHFR, or we see some of these SNPs and like you, the BRCA gene, you want to go and try to figure out how to get your body to detox, especially if you're going to put in these synthetic hormones.

• 19:24Speaker 01

  Exactly, exactly. And so we really could get that information right from the get go and say, you're, you have got some work to do to make sure your endogenous, your inside hormones

• 19:35Mindy Pelz?

  Yes.

• 19:35Speaker 01

  are doing their job properly so that you never need to consider the outside possibilities. So that would be step one. Wouldn't that have been cool had I started with that role as a kid versus the way it went?

• 19:47Mindy Pelz?

  Birth control. I think we're thinking birth control too.

• 19:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:51Mindy Pelz?

  You know, and I can tell you as the mom of a teenager, well, she's not a teenager anymore, but woo, did I wrestle with the birth control

• 19:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:59Mindy Pelz?

  decision. And it was really a tough one because it was like, okay, do I want to risk her getting pregnant? Or do I want to put this toxic whatever in her?

• 20:08Speaker 01

  Right.

• 20:08Mindy Pelz?

  And, and so if there had been like a genetic thing that was like, here, test these things and you'll know if it fits for you.

• 20:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:15Mindy Pelz?

  That would have been really, really nice.

• 20:17Speaker 01

  Yeah. And it's, you know, there's certain, like there are certain folks, like people with Leyden five syndrome, which is a blood clotting disorder, should not take exogenous hormones. You have much higher risk of, of, you know, clotting, of like throwing a blood clot. And so, I mean, I have a story of a young woman by the name of Erica Langhart. Her story made international news was I babysat her as a little girl and later she was under my care as a patient. And she was so like wanting the easy pill of take the pill for her PCOS and yet lived, you know, a grown up woman made her own choices. And when her parents were called to come out on Thanksgiving Day to Washington DC where she was working as, you know, working as a lobbyist, like working in the, in the political system,

• 21:01Speaker 01

  like her lifelong dream, her parents had to go out and unplug her life support on Thanksgiving Day. And they ended up winning a hundred million dollar settlement from Merck.

• 21:13Speaker 01

  And they refused it because they said, we don't want your F and money. We want you to change this. This Erica died from the NuvaRing and there are thousands and thousands of young women who've died from this. And yet, had they done some simple testing, in fact, women with polycystic ovarian syndrome already have problems with their clotting cascade. And so they aren't good candidates. And what's the first thing we do for PCOS is we put those women on birth control, whether it's through the NuvaRing, whether it's

• 21:42Mindy Pelz?

  Right, yeah, to manage their symptoms.

• 21:45Speaker 01

  And that's what was crazy, crazy is while she was still in high school and living at home, her symptoms were perfection. But when she moved off out of the home, was in DC, working late nights, drinking, eating differently, you know, to do the job that she was passionate about, you know, she got away from the diet and the lifestyle and the environment that she needed to take care of her body. And so when her symptoms started flaring, she defaulted to the script pad. She stopped asking the questions of the why. And it devastated an entire family. Her mother would take her life a few years after her, after that lawsuit, and her father just died this past Christmas, uncompletely unknown, just quietly. And it's

• 22:26Speaker 01

  affected all of us, the people who grew up in our small town around them, the massive news that it made. And it's like, they wanted to leave a legacy to say never again to anybody else's daughter, or sister, or, you know, best friend. And yet, in our culture, we're so quick to write these scripts that I'm, I'm a little taken back by how, when I started in medical school, in naturopathic school, mind you, we were some of the early adopters being taught by identical hormones. The standard of care world was absolutely no, you people are crazy, you're quacks. And we were all learning it, being trained, being, you know, courted by the compounding pharmacies, the big, big, big name ones that are out there.

• 23:09Speaker 01

  And we all learned it, but in my training in naturopathic school in the early 90s, we were still coming from what I call like the OG naturopathy, where we were still being taught terrain forward first. And to ask the questions of, do we need this to replace a function? Or should we look under deeper to restore a function? And my ethos, my philosophy, my training and my mentorships all taught me about restoration of function. It also happened when I went into private practice. I was in an unlicensed state of Colorado at that time, in a small town, under the scrutiny of my local medical community. There was no way I was ever going to write a script for anything,

• 23:51Speaker 01

  for anything, even though I had the legal right to do so. And so as such, I had to learn how to restore function and not replace it. And in the 17 years I had my private practice, 80% of that practice being women, and 80% of those women coming into me for some sort of hormonal or endocrine dysfunction at the root of their concerns. I didn't have the luxury of a script pad. And what was the best gift for me is I learned how to restore the function and correct those imbalances without the need for exogenous support. And got women pregnant, got women's endometriosis and PCOS under control,

• 24:36Speaker 01

  got women through, you know, menopause beautifully. Their osteoporosis, their osteopenia, their heart issues, their brain fog, their libido problems, their vaginal dryness, their UTIs. I didn't have to use the script pad for that.

• 24:51Mindy Pelz?

  So, okay, now you've got me thinking about something I just, that I hadn't even really wrapped my head around, which is when we go into those perimenopausal years, when you say restore function, you're saying bring back age appropriate hormones. So a 48-year-old has a different hormonal profile than a 38-year-old.

• 25:16Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 25:16Mindy Pelz?

  And so every woman coming in To those perimenopausal years, we, we tend to be like, oh, you're low in these hormones. You need a patch. But what I hear you saying is, well, let's restore normal function first and see what's there. And if you restore normal function first, like what your normal body can, your body can normally make estrogen, your body can normally make progesterone, even at 48, it can do that.

• 25:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:45Mindy Pelz?

  And then let's see if those symptoms go away as opposed to just assuming menopause is the problem and let's put a patch on it. What you're saying is let's restore normal function, age appropriate function, and then let's look what's there, which one more thought, because now my mind is completely blown because I'm thinking, so hot flashes, irritability, trouble sleeping, we have normalized these as menopause symptoms. But if we do your restore function idea, maybe we're not supposed to have those symptoms. Maybe if we just restore normal function, we're not talking about restoring normal ovary function. We're saying backfill in with what needs to be backfilled in,

• 26:30Mindy Pelz?

  and then let's see if those symptoms are there. Am I thinking this through right?

• 26:34Speaker 01

  You're thinking it through perfectly, because I think that's it is what we've done today is we've medicalized something that's never been medicalized. We didn't even have a word for menopause until 1821.

• 26:46Mindy Pelz?

  Oh, wow.

• 26:46Speaker 01

  Right? Meno from Greek, pause, stop, you know, like that concept here. And that even as far back as, you know, a couple hundred years B.C., we would talk about just this natural pause for women. And it was not medicalized.

• 27:04Mindy Pelz?

  Should be.

• 27:04Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 27:05Mindy Pelz?

  Should be a pause. We should be pausing.

• 27:07Speaker 01

  Exactly. Here's what's weird to me, Mindy, what I was learning in, because I've never really gone down the rabbit hole of the historical, global, you know, story of menopause. I had no idea, and I'm looking forward to this, because it's probably going to be in your book, the average age of women going into menopause up until just about 150 years ago was between the age of 40 and 45.

• 27:35Mindy Pelz?

  Okay, wait, but I know, but isn't that, but it we're living. Okay, wait, explain that one to me because the average is 52 right now.

• 27:43Speaker 01

  Today it's 52. And so I had I would it caught me off guard. It made me do a little bit of mental gymnastics. And the difference since the 18, since 1826 is when we started to see a shift in that mid, you know, early to mid 1800s. Well, what also shifted in that time was the industrial food revolution, industrialization, the industrial complex began. This was also leading into, you know, civil wars later to be world wars, you know, different kind of stressors of modern times. We started getting access to things we normally didn't have access to. We started having a lot of metalloestrogens being dumped into our environment via coal

• 28:25Speaker 01

  burning plants, which dump an enormous amount of mercury and mercury is a well-known metalloestrogen. So I started thinking about this, like, really, we started shifting our neuroendocrine systems with the post industrial revolution movement, which means we started being exposed to hormones endogenously and exogenously, or things that were impacting our hormones exogenously, in modern times that we'd never been exposed to before.

• 28:53Mindy Pelz?

  Right, yeah.

• 28:53Speaker 01

  And so now, basically, we have more hormone, like, today, we swim in a hormonal soup of exogenous, you know, from plastics to pesticides to, you know, all the things that we have now never been exposed to in human history until the last 150 years or so. And even more so, like, what, plastics didn't even come around to the 1960s. So suddenly, you're like, we're extending. And we've seen in the literature for hundreds of years and many medical texts that the longer women are exposed to hormones are highest, higher their risk of cancer. That's why we were all taught that in medical school, you know, the generations before me were all taught that in medical school. And now we're seeing that women are menstruating

• 29:38Speaker 01

  later and later, in just a shorter, you know, short window of time. And so I thought, that's really interesting. And so To your point of normalization, I'm not sure if it's been normal in the past 100, 150 years because of how quickly we've been exposed exactly to new things and our bodies are struggling to adapt. So the issue is that some of us adapt much better than others.

• 30:03Mindy Pelz?

  Right.

• 30:05Speaker 01

  And that's where like the snips and the diet and the lifestyle choices come into play is how well do you adapt or not adapt? And how, how might you evaluate for that? And how might you approach it with that information?

• 30:21Mindy Pelz?

  Have you seen women under your care when you were in clinical practice that if they went in at 40 and they changed their diet and they did the herbs you recommended and, and lifestyle changes that you recommended, did you see them go through menopause with very few symptoms?

• 30:41Speaker 01

  Well, it's crazy because a few things, what I would start to teach women well before they got to perimenopause and what I used to teach at a women's health course up at the college. So I had like 20 somethings, you know, teens and 20 something young women in my class. Thank you, Dr. Marcy Young. If you're listening to this later, she would allow me to come up and speak in that class. A lot of those young women, by the way, have gone off to become naturopaths and other medical practitioners, which was really cool. But I've explained to them is that how your periods are, your experience of your periods and your fertility years is, is a, is a magic crystal ball of what your menopause will be like.

• 31:17Mindy Pelz?

  Ooh, ooh, that's good.

• 31:20Speaker 01

  So if you had issues in those little windows, you got some shit to clean up before you get to the bridge, right?

• 31:26Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah.

• 31:27Speaker 01

  And so that is, we start to get clues. The moment we start to express our cycles, the moment monarchy starts, the moment our fertility years start, we start to get clues of how bumpy is this ride and how bumpy is it going to be? And so the women who tell me, oh, never had PMS, you know, got pregnant without even thinking about it, no problem with labor and delivery, lactation, no, you know, all the thing, you know, didn't have like a flare of Hashimoto's after my babies were born, everything was good. They're like, I, I, I never had to work with them through the perimenopause, menopause window. Like, it was like a nothing burger. Right?

• 32:05Mindy Pelz?

  Yep.

• 32:06Speaker 01

  But those, if I was lucky enough to see someone who had a history of some bumpy roads, like, boy, Addie, that's what was good for me. I knew, because while I was still in private practice, I was still menstruating. Right?

• 32:19Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah, right.

• 32:20Speaker 01

  And so I knew, like, by the time I was in my mid twenties, from the things I'd learned, I no longer had PCOS or endometriosis. I had corrected that and cycled like a mofo 28 day, like, just like clockwork, right? Until the last two or three years where it was a little bumpy, but that bumpy, I knew what was contributing to it. But it was so smooth compared to all my other friends who didn't pay attention to, ooh, it was really bumpy for me through my, my menopause, you know, my menarche years, my menstruating years, my fertility years. But to your point, when women would come to me at the bumpy start of perimenopause, and we just started to look under the hood and correct those

• 33:00Speaker 01

  imbalances, it was smooth sailing. Right? And we would do the testing of all the things that everyone says you have to get on HRT to correct, like the cardiovascular issues, the dementias, the bone health, all those things. I, I've never seen those issues in my practice. They just didn't, we, they would come in with them in some situations, but we'd correct them. We would reverse osteopenia and osteoporosis, not with hormones, ever. Right?

• 33:27Mindy Pelz?

  It's funny.

• 33:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, go ahead.

• 33:28Mindy Pelz?

  It's, it's interesting because I, you know, look to my big sister, I look to my, I, I have a lot of my friends that are five and 10 years older than me. And when I, when things started getting bumpy for me in my late 40s, I went to all of them. And I, and none of them were on hormone replacement. Most of them were like, it was a no brainer. It was easy. And and I kept trying to figure out what my outlier was. What was it that was making it difficult for me? And I will tell you that I have finally decided after taking a year of just by myself and resting and really rehabbing my parasympathetic nervous system that it was

• 34:11Mindy Pelz?

  my stress that was the outlier that the other women did not have. That my stress load, my I was on planes, I was writing books, I was career in this career driven path. And this year, taking six months to be by myself, be at the beach, write this book, slow my life down, rehab my parasympathetic, I feel like my hormones all of a sudden balanced. And it has left me wondering if stress is the outlier. Is that the thing that sends all the symptoms into this accelerated place?

• 34:48Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, for my own issues, what I was noticing in those last bump years was precisely that. And maybe what how I learned about you and fell in love with you was in reading your before it got like republished as menopause reset, like your your OG, like pretty much like written on the back of a napkin book.

• 35:06Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah, it's totally that. And it's, you know, I said the other day to my husband, I'm like, this book actually could stand the test of time in in the culture because it's so simple. Here are the five things you do. And I did those. The one that I I struggled with was the rushing woman and it's number five. Yeah. And that was the one I couldn't figure out how to unwind myself. So but yeah, you're you're absolutely right.

• 35:31Speaker 01

  Well, and it's funny because I I have had a lot of people come to me and say, will you read my book and endorse my book? And, you know, I'll get into a few chapters like this is really good. And then I get to the chapter like, and then you just write a script pad and replace it all. And I'm like, close the book, put it into a burn pile and move on, which because it bums me out because I was waiting for you. Right? I guess is what I have to say. So when your book came out, and I started like shouting this from the rooftops before I ever even met you and then to meet you and then I'd get to know you further, I would say that I have had this mantra my entire practice. So from and or a concern for early on, I'm probably like, well, you don't understand because you're pre, you know, you're way out. I was in my, you know, 30s when I started practicing. And so I would have that except for when.

• 36:15Speaker 01

  They started improving and then they're like, this kid knows something, right? But those were, I talked about the three S's all the time, sugar, stress and sex. And specifically, and to when I read your book, I was like, this is freaky. Sugar being insulin. You will never correct women's hormones if insulin is not brought under control. Period.

• 36:35Mindy Pelz?

  Bingo.

• 36:35Speaker 01

  Bingo.

• 36:36Mindy Pelz?

  But I, on that, I just want to say, do you know that thousands of comments we've gotten from Fast Like a Girl of women that were like, my hormones balance, my hormones balance just by following the fasting cycle. Like thousands.

• 36:49Speaker 01

  Exactly. And it's so because you can't separate out those three S's. And so the, the next one's stress. There's the cortisol. Guess what? When cortisol's high, insulin is high. Yeah. So even if you nail your diet, but you don't nail your stress response, you're going to still be in that dance. And then when I say hormones, everyone thinks I'm going to say, oh, you need progesterone or testosterone or something. No, folks, that's oxytocin.

• 37:17Mindy Pelz?

  And so we all need, oxytocin could help us all.

• 37:20Speaker 01

  It sure can. And guess what? When oxytocin, so as much as he is controversial, you know, the men are from Mars, he actually says, throw that book away. But, but he, Dr. You know, Dr. Gray says, read the women on, or what Mars on Ice and Venus on Fire book, because he actually does get the physiology correct in that book. And he speaks to the fact that when in women, think about this now, we're telling all women that your lack of libido is simply a lack of testosterone. So we put all these women on testosterone. In women, in our physiology, when testosterone is high, oxytocin is low.

• 37:57Mindy Pelz?

  Oh, in women?

• 37:59Speaker 01

  In women. Actually, and, and men to some degree, but not to the level it is in women. And so when we're in the impet, like drive, like you said, rushing woman syndrome, we tend to be in like our dominance of, you know, all the things, oxytocin's out the window.

• 38:16Mindy Pelz?

  It's interesting. I'd be, I'm like a human guinea pig. If I learn anything, I'm like, let me try it on myself. Always. So I've played, I've played with the exogenous hormones and I played with testosterone. I had to get off of it because the rage that came out of me, I was like, there, so there was no oxytocin. There was just anger and I, and I might've had the wrong dosage and things like that, but I, but that maps to what you're saying right there. I just want to.

• 38:42Speaker 01

  And that was just that moment to realize like, gosh, in the rushing woman syndrome, we're not kumbayaing with our sisters often, right? But how many times when you see like, just most of us women can look around and like, think about what it's like when you go with your girlfriends away for a weekend, or you go have dinner with, like, just those moments when we get together, it's so nurturing, so healing. And the funniest thing is, I will ask it, like, I, I can remember, like, we used to joke in my little town. So if any of my girlfriends from this town are listening, we would laugh that our husbands were ultimately going to get laid every time we had a girls' night out.

• 39:16Mindy Pelz?

  Oh, yeah. Oh, we did the same thing. That's like a thing. Yeah.

• 39:20Speaker 01

  So the guys are like, yes, go. Yes, absolutely. Because first of all, we can discharge.

• 39:25Mindy Pelz?

  It was, it's a strategy. It was, it was definitely a strategy. Yeah.

• 39:28Speaker 01

  Right. It's a discharge of your frustrations and resentments in the relationship. It's the, the solitude, you know, the women's circle, but the oxytocin coming up makes you want to connect. And so one of the things you and I talked about that we're so rushing, like, one of the biggest complaints I had in my practice was not women, like, weirdly, not many women were worried about their cardiovascular health and whatnot, because we could see that easily in labs and their, you know, their other imaging and testing. But the big one was around libido. And so everyone's quick to be like, oh, you know, you're no longer a sexual sensual diva. When you move into the perimenopause menopausal window. And I'm like, I don't know who you're hanging out with, but it's opposite in my circle.

• 40:10Speaker 01

  Like, that's actually where women are stepping into their, their power in that place. But that's where my first question was not about, are you hormone deficient? It's like, where are you frustrated in your relationships?

• 40:21Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah, yep. You know, it's, it's so interesting you say that because last July, I went into a real depression. And like the whole month, and I was like, and I was burnt out. I was just completely exhausted, but I also was in this transformative place where I was starting to say what works for me and what doesn't work for me in my life. My kids are, you know, 23 and 26, like, you know, I have a lot more, I don't have my clinical practice anymore, like I had a lot more time. And one of the things that I realized is that I am depressed every time I am doing something I don't want to be doing. Every time I say yes, when I mean to say no.

• 41:06Mindy Pelz?

  And the reason it was leading to depression is because it was making me resentful.

• 41:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:12Mindy Pelz?

  And so I started to think, well, gosh, we could look at low estrogen and say, yes, estrogen stimulates dopamine and serotonin, but maybe, just maybe, you're supposed to have estrogen go down so you could sort of wipe the crud off your glasses and you could look at your life and you could become this censor of like, ooh, I don't like this part of my life. Let me come over here and clean this up. I don't know about this part of my life. I think I need to let go of this part. Like, the depression that happens could be a catalyst for a new you that wants to emerge. And if we're medicating all of that and you miss the depression, you might miss the moment

• 41:57Mindy Pelz?

  to let go of something that you no longer can hold on to in your life. And that is, I don't think people want to hear that, but that's what I, I really think of that moment.

• 42:08Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, I got chills because I think when, you know, those are big truth, truth chills, truth bumps on that level. But, you know, that's what would happen in these conversations I would have with women in my practice. It ended up being almost like a counseling session. It ended up being more about that versus what supplements do you need or dietary lifestyle changes need to happen here? It was more of like, you know, do we need to, is there, is there something you're not asking for in your life? Is there something you're not voicing? Do you need a husbandectomy or a spouseectomy or a partnerectomy? Do you need a jobectomy? Like, are there things that say?

• 42:43Mindy Pelz?

  You need a purpose. A lot of women need, we need purposes.

• 42:47Speaker 01

  Exactly. You know, I don't know, this sounds so esoteric and woo woo, but it's, it, there's something to it. All right. Which is this idea, there's this concept of Saturn return. You heard about this?

• 42:58Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 42:59Speaker 01

  Western astrology, even in Chinese medicine and Ayurveda, they use astrology in part of their medical diagnoses and medical pattern recognition. So you learn Jotish with Ayurveda, you learn Eastern astrology with Chinese medicine. And it's not like telling you if you're going to find your love, you know, next month. It's about understanding patterns and like patterns, but also transitions in your life. Like where are you in how this aligns? And so these concepts of Saturn return, it happens in both men and women's lives around the first one is somewhere in our mid to late twenties.

• 43:36Mindy Pelz?

  That tracks.

• 43:37Speaker 01

  Mm hmm. So think about where you were in that time in your life. Like, we're just like, who am I? We are self-actualizing. Many times we're stepping into merging with other through relationship, maybe through childbearing, you know, and it's, and it suddenly transforms the next few years of your, or decades of your life. The second Saturn return is in our mid to late 50s.

• 44:01Mindy Pelz?

  I'm, I'm right on time.

• 44:03Speaker 01

  Right, exactly. And that is the other opportunity, as my grandma would say, to shit or get off the pot. And so what was working before may not work for you any longer. What you didn't speak up for, it may now, you don't have a choice to speak up. And what's very, very interesting in my world, as well as the world of literature, there's two, the cool study that came out recently that shows there's two times when we age the fastest, around age 44 and around age 60.

• 44:32Mindy Pelz?

  Wow.

• 44:32Speaker 01

  These are both times in our lives when we're like, what is my, what's the next phase of my life going to be like, right? And how have I cared for myself to this point and what needs to change so I can make sure this meat suit is optimal for the next part of the, of the race, right? So I think that's really interesting, but it's also such an interesting time and that that mid 50s is also the highest rate of cancer diagnoses.

• 45:01Mindy Pelz?

  Oh. How come? You think it's incongruence?

• 45:04Speaker 01

  That, well, that's what I believe. And that's what many of the vitalistic practices believe and many of the, like the anthroposophical medicine, those realms believe is that, that, you know, we talk about cancer as the ultimate disconnect. So that incongruence, that loss of coherence is real. And it comes to that point in your life when you may be through your childbirth or maybe you're coming into your retirement years. You said it perfectly a moment ago, which is what made me think about this. What is your purpose?

• 45:34Mindy Pelz?

  Right.

• 45:34Speaker 01

  So it's like your first Saturn return is like, what is the purpose in this window? Your second Saturn return is what is the purpose from here on out?

• 45:43Mindy Pelz?

  Right. So interesting, when I went to research Age Like a Girl, the third section is, or the third part is all about transforming ourselves and how do we use this as a moment to become the person we always wanted to be or shed identities that no longer served us. And so I dove into Joseph Campbell's Hero's Journey and I dove into Clarissa Pinkola Estes' life, death, life cycle.

• 46:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:09Mindy Pelz?

  And I, and I, I spent weeks studying both of those and then I mapped them to neuroscience.

• 46:15Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 46:15Mindy Pelz?

  And I discovered a part of the brain, and you might know this part of the brain called the anterior cingulate. And it lives in the prefrontal cortex and its job is to look outward and see if your external environment matches your internal environment. So if we talk about having a gut feeling or a hunch, like if we have a hunch, maybe we don't like the relationships we're in. Or maybe we don't like the town like my, one of my hunches was like, I don't want to live where I raised my kids. I'm like, peace out. I want out of here. If, if we don't, if we don't listen to that hunch.

• 46:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:55Mindy Pelz?

  Then your anterior sing- singulant is having to take this information in and you are living in incongruence. And I'm curious if we've ever done studies on cancer and people who are living incongruently. Cause basically then what the brain is saying to the body is stop sending me those signals. This is what's going on. And does the body become ill? I don't know if we'll ever know this, but I'm as a cancer expert, I'm curious what your opinion would be on that.

• 47:25Speaker 01

  Well, I'm not certain if there's explicit data out there. There's definitely anecdotal. There's definitely people as far back as the 1950s, like Robert Ader with the psychoneuroimmunology world. And Candace Pert and Bruce Lipton. I mean, Bruce Lipton's work was integral in saving my life. 20 years before his book Biology of Belief ever hit the, the airwaves, right? Like that was huge. We, yeah, it's pretty wild. But we also started looking at some of these, these kind of neural pathways and these developmental stages of where we are.

• 48:03Speaker 01

  I think we have some evidence that of course our, in that incongruence or that inco, you know, lack of coherence. Leads to stress response and that is easy to test with, you know, salivary IGA, certain cytokine profiles, natural killer cells, T cell, T cells, dendritic T cells. We can actually measure those. We can quantify those. We can also quantify today, things like HRV, heart rate variability.

• 48:31Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah. I was gonna say, can you put in like an HRV and look at, and see if you can, yeah.

• 48:35Speaker 01

  And we definitely see, and that's where, you know, there's some really cool studies I'm looking forward to them being published from Joe Dispenza and his massive group.

• 48:44Mindy Pelz?

  I was just there.

• 48:45Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. And he's doing a major, I mean, you probably, you probably spoke about, but he's like, he's doing major research, capturing as many biometric. As possible.

• 48:53Mindy Pelz?

  I was just with him and actually had the pleasure of sitting across from him at a table at dinner. And we got talking about his research and he has so much information, they just haven't gone through it all. He said, we literally have trillions of pieces of data.

• 49:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:10Mindy Pelz?

  Proving that meditation can, that you can turn your physiology around using meditation. Now, his path, he's focused on chronic disease and cancer. And, but he, but you sit in this seven day retreat and there's no, they just show you study after study after study. All of it is, you know, it takes, obviously you know this, but I don't think our audience does that it takes seven some years for these research studies to come, go into publication. But what he's discovered about the power of the mind on the, the state of the body. He said to me, it's going to change the way we look at healthcare.

• 49:52Speaker 01

  I'm so, I'm so all for it, like, because I see it.

• 49:56Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah, it's really interesting. Yeah.

• 49:59Speaker 01

  Well, and even down to like the work of Dr. Kelly Turner, who's become a good friend and wrote the intro to my book, Metabolic Approach to Cancer. You know, she went out in her data to look for those who spontaneously healed from the, like the terminal conditions, cancer being included in that. She wanted to understand what were their common denominators. No one else was looking at it. So she took 10 years to evaluate 10,000 cases of spontaneous remissions. And actually the title of her first book, Radical Remission, because there's nothing spontaneous about it. As well as her follow-up book Radical Hope, what she elicited were these 10 major factors. The first book has nine, the second goes into 10th because they've added exercise in, because that changes, that also changes the expression

• 50:41Speaker 01

  in the body, which I think is also another piece that can help with the hormonal transition is the movement of the body in different ways. But what she found is basically there's three tangibles and the rest are non-tangibles that impact this spontaneity of remission and improvement. And so of course, supplements, diet and movement are the tangibles, but the rest are the intangibles. And her data is there, even if it's somewhat anecdotal of thousands and thousands of. Of intake, you know, of evaluating this data, it's there. And in our world, we were the beta, my community, my oncology community, our advocates and our patients and our allied health professionals and clinicians, we were the beta for an organization called Liberate,

• 51:23Speaker 01

  L I B E R and the number eight. And Rajshana, the co-founder of this, he and I got to know each other and we're like, we, can we measure the impact of our thoughts, our emotions, all these things? And yes, we can. In fact, we've gone through, and we've got some studies we're about to publish as well. But what we were able to do is map people's stories for simplicity and elucidate common patterns that led to certain, this specifically led to certain cancer diagnoses. And it was-

• 51:57Mindy Pelz?

  What were they?

• 51:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, the two biggest findings of patients with cancer, it hit over 70% of patients with cancer, and we had thousands go through this, so it's not like 10, was not being seen and not being heard.

• 52:12Mindy Pelz?

  Wow. Yeah. Wow. Wow. You know, I was thinking about-

• 52:16Speaker 01

  Are we not dealing with the same thing with menopause?

• 52:18Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah. Yeah. And I was, you know, it's interesting, I was thinking earlier in the conversation, when you talked about your ovarian cancer diagnosis and you referred to, I think, did you have some cervical, had it spread to the cervix as well?

• 52:31Speaker 01

  Prior to that, I had cervical, yeah, yeah.

• 52:33Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah. So one of the thing I learned from, you know, Leanne Rimes is a dear friend of mine. And when I first started working with her and her health, we, I started geeking out on vocal cords. Like she would go to the vocal, she would go to the vocal doctor and she'd be like, do you want to see my vocal cords? I'm like, yeah, I want to see her vocal cords. And then we would end up in this, she, she said to me, do you know that the vocal cords and the cervix were the same tissue in utero?

• 53:01Mindy Pelz?

  And I'm like, what? And so then I had to research that. And I realized that she's absolutely accurate that in the embryo, the cervix and the vocal cords are literally the same tissue. And then they obviously go to opposite sides of the body. But does that mean when a woman can't speak her voice, her cervix starts to have challenges or can build disease? And does it also mean that if we are raped or, or have some sexual trauma, which I'm starting to learn more and more women have?

• 53:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:32Mindy Pelz?

  Is that maybe we aren't able to fully speak our voice?

• 53:36Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 53:36Mindy Pelz?

  And so the, you know, I think in context to everything we've been talking about, there's so much more to the human health picture.

• 53:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:46Mindy Pelz?

  Then you went into a phase of life with low hormones. Now you need to supplement in with them.

• 53:52Speaker 01

  Right.

• 53:52Mindy Pelz?

  We're missing the opportunity to look at these snips. We're look, we're missing the opportunity to see what's not working in our life and fix that.

• 54:01Speaker 01

  Right.

• 54:01Mindy Pelz?

  If the conversation is only around hormone replacement.

• 54:05Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 54:06Mindy Pelz?

  Would you, would you, I know that you have been an advocate of women not doing hormone replacement. And I know you are a lone soldier out there.

• 54:14Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 54:15Mindy Pelz?

  Fighting the fight.

• 54:16Speaker 01

  Lots of errands. Do you see them?

• 54:18Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah. And so would you say that the biggest thing is because we're missing opportunities?

• 54:24Speaker 01

  A hundred percent.

• 54:25Mindy Pelz?

  To approach this from a more foundational level? Is that the biggest challenge you have with hormone replacement?

• 54:32Speaker 01

  It, it is. And that's the place, you know, as I was even being educated on them in school, I was asking the questions like, why are we not understanding why they're exhibiting these, these symptoms? Like?

• 54:43Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah.

• 54:44Speaker 01

  It was just so immediate when all of our professors in this field all worked for the compounding companies. So I started questioning, I mean, you guys, you've got to remember, like, I had to always look up this guy. So in 1960s, Robert, Dr. Robert Wilson, the gynecologist, started shouting from the rooftops that there's this tragedy of menopause and that we need to be feminine forever. If you go and follow the money, this is the dude that had all of the money and all the attachments to Premarin. So that's where this began was one man. Completely changing the narrative on women's health and basically, you know, saying that we've,

• 55:24Speaker 01

  you know, he said it coincides with his discovery of cheap estrogen and that pharma started training the next future generations that menopause is a disease. This is where it began. So it drives me effing crazy that at the time we were also creating like women's lib and all these other things, we were actually putting ourselves back into other prisons. We were actually not asking the right questions. And when we look at generations of the women throughout the 40s and 50s who were put on DES, we realized that was a big problem a generation later when we started seeing vaginal cancers and then their children, breast cancers and prostate cancers and on and on and on. We're not doing the same with us. It takes generations for it to fully show up.

• 56:04Speaker 01

  And so I was sitting in class as someone who'd had lots of problems with hormones and my mom, lots of problems with hormones and lots of other people that I was being exposed to at that time, plus knowing my grandmothers and my great grandmothers, never had any menopause symptoms, you know, and asking those questions. I just started asking and I was like the lone star in the room asking those questions. And then when I moved, as I said, to an unlicensed state where we couldn't even write scripts for that, I had to lean on my, my, my brains, right? I had to use critical thinking and I had to help women know their bodies and I had to help women know their biography that led to that biology and help them write a different story. And that's what I got to do for 17 years.

• 56:46Speaker 01

  And then as I got deeper into the oncology world and started learning about single nucleotide polymorphisms and saw like one of the examples, even though everyone's dismantling the, the Inhane study at this time, we did still see a big change that happened. We had the highest rates of breast cancer in the world was in Marin County, which coincided with the highest intake of hormones, of hormone replacement. They normalized to the rest of the population after that study came off and those women got off the hormones. And we're seeing the uptick of it as they're all hopping back on. It's just through a different form now, but it's like seeing that again. It's like, I don't

• 57:27Speaker 01

  care that everyone's like cherry picking the data and saying that study was, you know, a problem. We have some really big, long-term studies that show massive changes in these pieces. The other side of it is that We don't need, like, we don't need that tool. That would be a tool to me reserved for absolute last case scenario, worst case scenario. Why do we start with that?

• 57:54Mindy Pelz?

  You know? Yeah, we don't start with lifestyle. We're starting, that's what you, so where would you start?

• 57:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 58:00Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah, what would you?

• 58:01Speaker 01

  I want to understand. I want to understand what was your, what was your hormonal history? What was your menstrual history? What was your fertility history? What was your, depending where they're coming to me, your perimenopause, your postmenopause? Like, I want that story. I want to know when, you know, where they lived, what their zip codes were, what types of chemicals were they exposed to? I want to know what industries they were in. I wanted to know if they ever took, you know, any form of like birth control pills or IUDs or any of those things along the ride. Then I want to look at their single nucleotide polymorphisms and see how they endogenously process the world in on and around them to then decide how can we clean up your terrain to help your body do its job of bringing in the information, translating the information,

• 58:45Speaker 01

  sending out different signals, I mean, hormones are signals, right? To the body to do its job better and more efficiently. Then and only then, if we got, if we come to a crossroad and all the things aren't working that we've addressed, including the, what's going on in your relationship, you know? And are you cleaning up? Are you dealing with those traumas of your, of your past that might have shut you down for protection?

• 59:08Mindy Pelz?

  Yep.

• 59:08Speaker 01

  When we've reached that, then we might consider exogenous support. But Dr. Mindy, knock on wood, I have not had to ever lean on the exogenous support. We've never needed to do that. In 17 years of a private practice that saw thousands of women? I, I, that's not just anecdotal, folks. And then

• 59:29Mindy Pelz?

  Right.

• 59:30Speaker 01

  Those that I now train, these clinicians across the globe, many of which come to me that had their bread and butter from script writing hormone replacement practices.

• 59:40Speaker 01

  The feedback I'm getting from these clinicians is, oh, that that definitely hit me in the bottom line in the beginning. But now the women are coming into them and the men are coming into them to say, I'm ready to correct my terrain, not replace the function of my terrain. And now they're drawing in a different clientele and they're inspiring the clientele that they had put on those to do something different. And so it might have been a lull in the beginning and very terrifying. And now they're like, because they see it that the clinicians see it themselves be like, oh, my God, it does matter if you deal with insulin cortisol oxytocin.

• 1:00:15Mindy Pelz?

  You know, I'm, I'm thinking about like, don't we before we put your put your kid in like the beginning of the school year, you have to have like a PE to get into PE, you have to have like a physical health exam. We used to do that. Yeah, why we should do that in your early 40s. Okay, let's see where you're at. Let's get an assessment so you can make the changes now. And of course, that, you know, having a doctor oversee that could be helpful. I want to talk about your doctors here in a moment. And that like, that seems actually really simple. I know these talks of SNPs and stuff might be complicated to the brain, to the people listening. But if

• 1:00:54Mindy Pelz?

  you went to a doctor and you said, I'm 40, and I need to clean the terrain, I need to get normal function back, and so that I can take this next journey of my reproductive system with with more ease. Yeah, that seems like why don't why aren't we doing that?

• 1:01:12Speaker 01

  I love it. Well, you know, there's an entire field out there that's that's opening up as preconception counseling and preconception preparation.

• 1:01:20Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah, as it should.

• 1:01:22Speaker 01

  As it should, especially because fertility, you're at a all time low. And so it's not because you're deficient in, you know, I don't know, Clomid, you know, that's not why you're pregnant. It's like, let's clean up the terrain to get you preggers. You know, I used to joke with my families. I'm like, we're going to get this cleaned up. And if you really aren't ready to have a baby, you guys need to be careful because it's gonna happen. And then it did, right?

• 1:01:42Mindy Pelz?

  So, oh, yeah, we used to do, we detoxed so many people in my clinic. And then the next thing, you know, they'd come in, they'd be like, oops, I'm like, oh, sorry, God, I should have told you. Yeah, like 50 year old women that would get pregnant. I'm like, oh, yeah, I started telling everybody, we're about to detox you, we're going to clean all this up. And you know, just be aware, you could get pregnant.

• 1:02:05Speaker 01

  And even that example, like, the average age of the women in my practice that I help with fertility was 47.

• 1:02:10Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:10Speaker 01

  Right?

• 1:02:11Mindy Pelz?

  Perfect.

• 1:02:11Speaker 01

  And, and the amount of women who were in menopause or very close to it, you know, very like sporadic, would suddenly normalize their cycles for another few years with the type of care we were doing and be like, whoa, you know, what, where did that happen? I thought I was done.

• 1:02:24Mindy Pelz?

  Amazing.

• 1:02:24Speaker 01

  But still, yeah.

• 1:02:26Mindy Pelz?

  You know, that was one thing Joe said. Joe said that they see women who do the, his seven day retreat and they've been in menopause for like 10 years and then they get a cycle.

• 1:02:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:02:36Mindy Pelz?

  We've seen the same thing with fasting.

• 1:02:38Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 1:02:39Mindy Pelz?

  A woman who hasn't had a cycle for 10 years, she starts fasting, all of a sudden she gets one or two more cycles. So it's, it's a really, those are really interesting examples.

• 1:02:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:02:49Mindy Pelz?

  What, what, just like, I've heard from a lot of women that are still scared. And I hope this conversation is helping them understand that there's some more cleanup you could do to figure out if you're a candidate or not. But what's your biggest complaint of, of hormone replacement? Like what do we, let's just go to what do we need to be worried about? And instead of just blindly taking it?

• 1:03:13Speaker 01

  Well, what's freaking me out now is how many influencers and even colleagues that I call friends and, you know, really respect are out there telling women that it's absolutely safe to use this and in fact, encouraged to use this with cancer.

• 1:03:24Mindy Pelz?

  Oh.

• 1:03:25Speaker 01

  I just like, that one is like, I, I, I, I feel like my head's going to explode. I mean, I, let's just, let's just get very common sense here.

• 1:03:37Mindy Pelz?

  Yep.

• 1:03:38Speaker 01

  Let's be clear, I don't believe, I never say hormones cause cancer, meaning your endogenous hormones. Now, miss, you know, like misuse or misfiring or missignaling of your endogenous hormones can make you more vulnerable to the accumulation of exogenous, you know, endocrine disrupting things you're being exposed to and more vulnerable to exogenous hormones replacement. So let me be clear with that. There's a difference here. It's not like, because whenever I fucking get crazy when they say, well, if that's the case, then every menstruating girl would have cancer. Well, guess what, folks? That is happening today. Like every young girl.

• 1:04:14Mindy Pelz?

  Well, Caneli, do you know Dr. Caneli?

• 1:04:17Speaker 01

  I do, absolutely know.

• 1:04:18Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah. Couple of years. As I inter- ago, I interviewed her here and she's like integrative cancer doctor and she was like the the the fastest growing age group for cancer.

• 1:04:28Speaker 01

  Under thirty.

• 1:04:29Mindy Pelz?

  The twenties.

• 1:04:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:04:30Mindy Pelz?

  Under thirty.

• 1:04:31Speaker 01

  And so it's not even that their own hormon, it's like the soup that we're in. And so like, God, guys, wake up because now let's just get out of, let's say we're we're cancering now. Or we're on on the edge or we're curious or we have a strong family history. We have a lot of risk factors. Do you want to put

• 1:04:50Speaker 01

  growth factors into the system, exogenous growth factors into the system? Estrogen's job is to grow things.

• 1:05:00Mindy Pelz?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:05:00Speaker 01

  Okay, so yeah, maybe it can grow new neural pathways, maybe it can grow new cardiovascular, you know, bundle, you know, different things. But if you've got a cancering process going, it absolutely will make that worse. And I will tell you that this isn't conjecture. This isn't the idea of, this is what I see in testing. I'm a very avid tester. Every patient gets tested every single month for months on end. Imaging, we can even look at single nucleotide polymorphins. We can look at blood and tissue biopsies and we can see this is an actual cancer that is very, very sensitive to these particular growth factors. No, it is not okay. And and and it's also okay that we can support women

• 1:05:45Speaker 01

  to still be thriving without taking those things because I'm also not a fan of blocking women's hormones in the oncology space with drugs like Tamoxifen and aromatase inhibitors because that's also overly simplistic of just turn off the lights. Just block the garage. This is the thing that like standard of care is saying, just turn off the switch. Alternative care is saying, turn it on. And I'm in this, let's modulate world. And the modulation is about the terrain, the environment in which those hormones are communicating in. Not about the hormones themselves. We're asking the wrong questions and we're approaching the wrong things, both from standard of care's approach, as well as the, you know,

• 1:06:27Speaker 01

  functional health's approach. It's, they're both, they're both wrong. And I don't mean that rudely. I just think you're missing the bigger picture and they're not day to day in it for the past 30 years to see that people think they're not, they think they're doing their patients a favor. They're not.

• 1:06:45Mindy Pelz?

  Yep. Then one of the questions that I have had that I, I don't think anybody has the answer to, is we have this study that, that said, don't take hormone replacement or you're going to get cancer. And then we all of a sudden said, oh, wait, we misread the study, which always cracks me up because I'm like, okay, wait, people, can you read the study right? Just read the study right. And then now it were on the wild, wild west that everybody take hormone replacement.

• 1:07:14Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:07:14Mindy Pelz?

  My, my stance has been, it's a personal, it's a personal decision between you and your doctor. You need to ask about it. But what I'm not able to rectify in my brain is we don't, what we don't have is long-term studies of what happens when somebody hits 70 or 80 years old and they've been on for, for 40 years on hormone replacement therapy. I, I'd like somebody to answer that question for me. Do we have that information?

• 1:07:44Speaker 01

  Well, as the, so in my data platform that we're building out, we hope to be able to publish on this information because I have personally seen hundreds of patients exactly what you just described.

• 1:07:54Mindy Pelz?

  Okay. Yeah. Cause you're dealing with cancer.

• 1:07:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:07:57Mindy Pelz?

  You're dealing with cancer.

• 1:07:57Speaker 01

  Right. So it's like, we used to think of cancer as a cancer, as a disease of the aged. So the standard of care won't look at these women because they're like, They're, you know, this is an age appropriate time to be getting cancer. But what they're not looking at is that these women were still bleeding into their 60s, or that they still have breast tenderness in their 70s. And fibrocystic breasts and all these things are also precursors to breast cancers. And that they have lots and lots of insulin growth factor because of their exogenous hormones. And that their cholesterol levels are off the charts because your mother hormone is cholesterol and then progesterone and then the other hormones come down from that. So now all of it's just backing up and everything's just like klugey in there.

• 1:08:42Speaker 01

  And so I'm looking at all these women who are, and I'm looking at their hormone tests. I'm looking at their duches. I'm looking at their, because I don't look at, you should not be seeing hormones in the serum, folks, like they should be in or receptor or out of the body. If you're seeing them in the serum, you're in trouble. Like that's pathologic when you're seeing it in the serum. So, but if you're looking at the metabolites and like urine tests and whatnot, and you're starting to go, oh, my word, those two 16 hydroxyestrogens,

• 1:09:12Speaker 01

  or the four hydroxyestrogens, these are super scary. Those patients, now theoretically, a 70 year old woman should not have any estrogen in her, like it should be, we still make, people don't understand that we have all these other tissues of the body and other cells in the body that will still produce estrogen once the ovaries stop. It's not just the ovaries that are in charge. But when I'm starting to look at labs of women in their 70s who look like they've got estrogen levels of women in their 20s, that's not right. Like that's really, and you're seeing extreme discrepancies of the two 16 hydroxyestrogens and the four hydroxyestrogens. And you're like, now we're in toxic estrogen metabolites. That this is absolute known carcinogens, like the data is very clear.

• 1:09:57Speaker 01

  That's not okay. And the fact that they put these women on thinking they're not at risk, we won't test. When I think about like Suzanne Summers, a lot of people bring her up to me, you know, 20 some years was staged for breast cancer, always on hormones, but I knew her medical team and her medical team, she basically tested her hormones every single month and she titrated it extremely carefully. Who has the resources to do that? Cause we're talking somewhere between 500 and a grand a pop for the types of testing she was doing. Most of us don't have those resources, right? And so what it would have put, if she had put the energy into cleaning up her diet and lifestyle to the level that she did in titrating her hormones, maybe we'd have had a different outcome.

• 1:10:40Speaker 01

  She's still rocked it, you know, for a long time, she is an in of one there. But it's like, this is where I just continue to come back to many, we're asking her own questions, we're not doing the right testing and you're right, we don't have the long-term data. And to me, that example of the Marin County is so classic and that highest in the world. Indian study comes out, everyone in that area jumps off the bio, you know, jumps off the hormone train, levels drop, normalize, but now they're eking back up as everyone's out there saying, oh, just kidding, that study lied. I'm like, you're not seeing the trend?

• 1:11:14Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah. And the everyday woman, that's so confusing. It's like, you know, I still see the fear in our community and which is why I wanted to bring you on and really try to answer some of these. What would you tell a woman who says, okay, I have, I have hormonal cancers in my genetics. I've never had it, but I want to make sure if that hormone replacement would be right for me or not. What would, what would you advise that person to do?

• 1:11:46Speaker 01

  Well, I'd get their SNPs to know for sure. Like you just mentioned, maybe they already have them and that's why they know that about themselves. I would do a hormone metabolite test and I would look at their, and I would definitely take a full look at their terrain, especially things like vitamin D levels, which map manage your hormones, manage your insulin, manage all the things. I would optimize that. I would optimize insulin and I would optimize cortisol and I would optimize oxytocin. Then we create a really safety place here. But what's so funny is those same women who came to me saying, I really want to take the hormones and we optimize those things, they don't need the hormones.

• 1:12:20Mindy Pelz?

  Right, then they don't need them. Yeah. But I'd rather have that option. I mean, that's a better like-

• 1:12:25Speaker 01

  Like knowing it's in the background, like, okay, it's here, we need it. But they don't, they don't need it. Right, right.

• 1:12:31Mindy Pelz?

  Exactly.

• 1:12:32Speaker 01

  And so that's where I think, that's where I'd like to see us go is instead of just promoting and saying, these are safe and great for everybody and you're going to be a former shell of yourself if you don't take them and you're going to have higher all mortality, that's just not right. That's not true. And so my ask of the hormone community is that let's, just like in the GLP conversations and other things, we are correcting the problem with those. Right? And so when people are like, oh, we get on hormones to protect our brain. Well, guess what? Type 3 diabetes, folks. Insulin.

• 1:13:07Mindy Pelz?

  That's what, right. Well, we know, we know what, we know what causes Alzheimer's. It's not a mystery. It is diabetes type 3. It's diabetes of the brain.

• 1:13:16Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:13:17Mindy Pelz?

  So get your hemoglobin A1C down.

• 1:13:19Speaker 01

  Exactly. Your insulin, your A1C, your C peptide, your insulin growth factor. Then they're like, oh, my bones. Well, guess what? We get you into some weight training. Right? Some sunshine. Get your vitamin D optimized, your K2 optimized. Guess what? Bones happy reversed. I was osteopenic at 22 years old from years of being a vegan and vegetarian. I'm 53 years old, almost 54. My bones are like better than they were. You know, like way better. I mean, I reversed all of that, you know? So it's like, never once taken anything. So we can do so much, like the power plates and all those things, like so much to like create some strength in our bones. And then when they talk about libido, well, we talked about that. Let's first talk about your relationships.

• 1:14:02Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah, right. Yeah.

• 1:14:03Speaker 01

  Right? Stress. When women, like, my husband could like run over a cat and come in the house and be ready to go at it, right? I like have to be like, every, like, all, I, things have to be like organized in my life and brain for me to like be able to let go and relax. Like, know that about yourself. Create the rituals that put your brain and your body in the mood in those places to connect, you know? If there's pain or dryness, there are so many safe things we can start. I literally had a- Waiter come up to me or the chef of a really well-known farm-to-table restaurant, Durango, come up to me telling me that I brought, you know, his wife and he backed together again. Like, all the people around us are like, "I'll have what she's having." But she was having severe, severe, severe painful, like, vaginitis and painful intercourse.

• 1:14:47Speaker 01

  And they were young. She wasn't even menopausal yet. And I talked to them about Faria Pleasure, which was a THCCBD, kind of vaginal lubricant for vaginal pain, changed all their lives. And what really came up for her is she started realizing she was dealing with some unprocessed trauma at the same time. You know, so it was like this opportunity to heal some things there. But there's so much, like, vitamin E suppositories. There's so many safe lubricants out there. Gosh, I can't think of the one, like, these great hyaluronic acid suppositories to bring back the juiciness, the plumpness, even, you know, just, there's just a lot. There's, there's a lot of really safe ones that are out there. Yeah.

• 1:15:29Mindy Pelz?

  Do you think, I, I think if I, you know, I try to put myself in the shoes of somebody who's having to make this decision. And when you hear a conversation like this, I even thought about it when I wrote Age Like a Girl, is, it does require, if you're not gonna go on hormone replacement therapy, it, it is probably gonna require a lifestyle change.

• 1:15:52Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 1:15:53Mindy Pelz?

  And you need to change your lifestyle to match the new hormonal moment. And what I think we're really seeing in this uptick of people taking hormone replacement is also underneath that is, is women saying, "I don't have time to change my lifestyle. I don't know what to do to change my lifestyle." And, and there's no criticism on that.

• 1:16:14Speaker 01

  No, just it's life.

• 1:16:15Mindy Pelz?

  I, I think that's part of the modern world, is that when we go and we look at Japan, only 4% of women get on HRT. And, you know, then you look at, oh, they've got the highest amount of, of people hitting 100, and seniors, and the way the seniors are treated, and the amount of soy, and, and they walk everywhere. It's like, I think that's such a key part of the- Conversations not being discussed.

• 1:16:41Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:16:42Mindy Pelz?

  Is we are dishing this out like candy because we aren't stopping and saying, holy shit, the modern world is not working for the menopausal woman. And you're gonna need to slow down and change your life and lift some weights and get some better, get some better relationships. That's a lot of work.

• 1:17:02Speaker 01

  It is.

• 1:17:02Mindy Pelz?

  That's a lot to do.

• 1:17:04Speaker 01

  It is. It is. And I really appreciate you saying because I can't, I can't, you know, like again, through human history, we, we moved through menopause with no dramatic suffering and yet today's menopause crisis is, you know, predictable of,

• 1:17:19Mindy Pelz?

  Right.

• 1:17:19Speaker 01

  Like predictable symptoms of decades of metabolic damage mismatched to our environment.

• 1:17:24Mindy Pelz?

  Right.

• 1:17:24Speaker 01

  Matched to our lifestyles, endocrine disruption, socio-cultural conditioning, not a deficiency of estrogen patches and progesterone creams. And yet,

• 1:17:32Mindy Pelz?

  Right.

• 1:17:33Speaker 01

  In a lot of the places where they're having least amounts of menopausal symptoms, is in the environments where they're still in multi-generational homes and tribal communities that are supporting when you need that, pause, that spaciousness in your life, you know, to do these things. So I think that is a conversation. When we look at what has changed in the last 50 to 70 years, nutrition definitely has changed, way more refined sugar, processed foods, omega six heavy oils, more stress than ever, chronic sympathetic activation, activation in cortisol dysregulation. Big one on that one. Endocrine disruptors, sleep and circadian disruption. So thank you, artificial life, screen, time shift work.

• 1:18:15Speaker 01

  Movement, lack thereof. So sedentary lifestyles, social structures. So this is the big one. Loss of intergenerational community and shared roles and contributing to these mental emotional distresses. So, those are like the big ones that what has changed. And you're right, it's going to ask a lot of us to have to do a lot for ourselves, but wouldn't it be cool? If, and it's happening, Dr. Mindy, because it's you're doing it. What if we flipped the narrative and what if we leaned in and brought back that environment which allows us to thrive without depending on exogenous input? Because even those places where you're depending on the exogenous input,

• 1:18:57Speaker 01

  almost all of you will inevitably have to come off at some point in time.

• 1:19:03Mindy Pelz?

  Right. Yeah.

• 1:19:04Speaker 01

  And so it's like you're delaying the inevitable. What if you had a community that allowed you to lean in and smooth out the initial bumpy ride to go into a different phase of your life, thriving in all of your gorgeous juiciness? You know, something I thought I just feel like I should say, because I recognize that people are going to say, listen to judgy Mcjudgy Nisha on this, but let me just give some context. When you're 19, told you're not going to see the end of your 20th year on this planet, you don't give a shit about a wrinkle, a dimple, a gray hair. You wake up every day just so grateful to see another sunrise.

• 1:19:47Speaker 01

  And it hurts me so much to watch so much energy put into not just cherishing the amazingness of who you are in all facets of your life. And I love being, I got to be with my great grand godchild. I'm a godmother and a great godmother at this point. And to watch these kids, like I get to step into the role of the wise woman. I didn't even know if I could have stepped into the role of a fertile woman at the rate I was going. And so, you know, I don't want anyone else to have to have that slap in the face reality check, but you know, that does, you know, rose lens, you give me the rose lenses to

• 1:20:31Speaker 01

  look through of appreciating the depth and breadth of our lives and that each moment is welcome. And if you're unhappy with where you are, you can change it.

• 1:20:42Mindy Pelz?

  You can change, and menopause is a great time to change it. It's because you're neurochemically changing. So it's, that's, that's age like a girl. You're, you're doing a great job promoting my book. I really appreciate it.

• 1:20:53Speaker 01

  Well, I can't wait for it to come out. I'm like, yes, please hurry up, hurry up, hurry up.

• 1:20:56Mindy Pelz?

  Because, because that's what I, in all the research I did, I really was like, wow, we're at an evolutionary mismatch, which is why HRT has become necessary, I'm going to put it in quotes, is, and so, we don't want to lose the part of the conversation that we're at an evolutionary mismatch.

• 1:21:16Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:21:16Mindy Pelz?

  And, and we don't want to lose the part of the conversation that this is your opportunity to transform into another person, for you to stop giving away all of your time and effort to everybody else and to turn around and give it to yourself. So, I mean, that's really what Age Like a Girl is. But, but I, I really love this conversation because I feel like, I hope people are seeing, there's a bigger part of the conversation. So, even if you don't understand SNPs, and even if you're like, oh shit, I gotta do all those lifestyle changes, what I hope you're hearing is, let's pause for a moment and make sure that some parts of your

• 1:21:59Mindy Pelz?

  life are cleaned up before you rush to the HRT. And if you've already rushed there, don't, I, I even asked Mary Claire Haver this on this podcast. I said, does HRT give me a free pass from lifestyle? And she was like, nope, does not. And I think every, every hormone expert out there right now could, would agree on that particular, particular thing.

• 1:22:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:22:24Mindy Pelz?

  But what, what I hear from you, as somebody who's been through a cancer diagnosis, that we can't be cavalier about this. We need to be strategic. And what you offer with the testing and the lifestyle is, is that strategy. And it's led me to wonder, I know you train your doctors to treat cancer, can people go to your directory and find doctors that can help them with hormone replacement and approach it from this lens?

• 1:22:55Speaker 01

  Absolutely. And to be clear, they don't treat cancer. They treat the terrain.

• 1:22:59Mindy Pelz?

  Ah, sorry.

• 1:23:00Speaker 01

  And so, but, but, but that's just it is that

• 1:23:02Mindy Pelz?

  Well said, well said.

• 1:23:03Speaker 01

  Absolutely. They can come to them and help prepare their body. And like you said, as if they're going to take those hormones, but will quickly learn that the necessity for them quickly fades when you start to tend to the terrain in a meaningful way. And these folks can help you dive into your own assessment, understand what's making you tick. Like, you know, example of a hot flash, there's a million different reasons why you can have hot flash. It could be histamine. It could be an allergic reaction to something else beyond histamine. It could be cortisol, you know, it could be just like certain nutrient deficiencies. It could be oxalate, you know, excess. There's so many things that actually lead to the hot flashes.

• 1:23:43Speaker 01

  We could do a couple, you know, like troubleshooting and figure out what's driving yours and put it in its tracks. Like I know for me, as soon as I hit perimenopause, I can't drink red wine. Even the best dry farmed, cleanest possible just doesn't work. It sets histamine off in my body. So I've learned those little tricks for myself, right? But we all need to learn those little tricks for ourselves. And one thing I love, you know, like, you know, menopause did not just suddenly become dangerous. It didn't suddenly become like a medical

• 1:24:10Mindy Pelz?

  It just became a conversation. It became an open conversation. Well said.

• 1:24:15Speaker 01

  And so it's like, how, what if we've treated our bodies and like, what's dangerous to me? Is how we've treated our bodies and our environment for the last half a century? That's what's dangerous. And the solution is not necessarily overriding nature with more hormones. It's remembering how to live in harmony with those hormones. And so, you know, one of the things you said, and I want to just iterate this because it's so important to me. Like there are physical changes with every season, right? And instead of rushing to medicate it, what are you ready to release? You know, not just from your body, but from your mind, your calendar, your spirit. So menopause may be that body's invitation to just lighten the load, shed what no longer serves

• 1:24:58Speaker 01

  and to move into a freer, more authentic chapter of yourself. And that was the way we approached it in my practice. And then I've trained the clinicians to approach it in their practices. And man, we are creating a whole new revolution of really powerful and powerful empowered men and women who are really understanding this is pretty miraculous.

• 1:25:21Mindy Pelz?

  Amazing. Okay. Where do, how do people find these doctors that are out there?

• 1:25:25Speaker 01

  You guys can start with going to drnascha.com, D R N A S H A dot com. That'll take you off to all the millions of spirals of things I'm doing. My book, The Metabolic Approach to Cancer, almost just ignore that word because it's more like metabolic approach to life. There are actually a lot of things that will help you in your hormonal journey. And there, there's an entire chapter on hormones.

• 1:25:42Mindy Pelz?

  It's a go to. It's a bible, by the way. I any, ever, I refer it to everybody.

• 1:25:48Speaker 01

  Thank you. Yeah, I appreciate that. And then, but to learn more about their education, metabolicregion.com, if you are a clinician or an allied health professional, or even an advocate wanting to learn more and apply this out in the world, there also on that has our directory, which are those who've come through our graduate, graduated and are endorsed people that apply this methodology and apply this approach. So lots of places. And then at some point, you guys will come over and listen to Dr. Mindy and I talking on Metabolic Matters, which is my podcast. And I'm not sure when this is coming out, but we hope that this becomes an annual event. But Metabolic Health Day Conference happening in Tucson is bringing together, it's funny. So Mindy, I don't know if you know this,

• 1:26:29Speaker 01

  the same weekend of our Metabolic Health Day Conference that you are speaking at is also at the A4M's Women's Health Conference.

• 1:26:37Mindy Pelz?

  Oh, interesting. In the, in Scott's?

• 1:26:39Speaker 01

  Not in, I don't know if it's in the same, it's in the same town, I think, but not the same town, but the same time in the same region, which there'll be very different conversations happening.

• 1:26:48Mindy Pelz?

  Yes.

• 1:26:48Speaker 01

  In those places. And I'm super curious and super intrigued because what the, you know, Dr. Mindy and I aren't the only people having these conversations that are at our conference, but just up the road will be an entirely different one. And my hope is that somewhere down the road, along the way, we will find a common, a common meeting point so that we can better serve our, our patients. Yeah.

• 1:27:10Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah. And that's really it. You know, before, earlier today, I interviewed Tamzin Fidel, who wrote How to Menopause. And, you know, I, she, it was a beautiful conversation. And I really think what I am dreaming of, and I'm getting hints of, is that we are having a more collaborative discussion, all doctors coming together. And that's when women win, when we're like, hey, Dr. Nasha is a cancer expert. What do we need to know here? And you know, here's somebody who's a testosterone expert. What do we need to know here? Here's somebody who is saying doctors aren't educated on OBs, aren't educated on menopause. Okay, what do we need to know? Like, I feel like everybody needs to come into the conversation.

• 1:27:54Mindy Pelz?

  So, and, and respect each other's similarities and differences. And if we do that, then we're going to see things change. So, thank you so much. I mean, I, I love the way you think. I love what you're doing with cancer. I love the way you're training these doctors. So, just a big, huge thank you for taking the time to do that. I can't imagine training doctors is very easy. So, but I know some of them that have gone through your program and speak so highly. And wow, we need, we need an army of you all out there. So, just deeply appreciate you. And yes, everybody come hear me at the, at the metabolic event we're doing in Tucson. And we'll leave, we'll leave links for that. So, thank you, Nasha, so much for just being you.

• 1:28:39Speaker 01

  I love you, Mindy. I love the work you're doing in this world. My oxytocin is at an all time high after this conversation. And I hope that this brings a lot of curiosity and collaboration for future discussions to come.

• 1:28:53Mindy Pelz?

  Thank you so much for joining me in today's episode. I love bringing thoughtful discussions about all things health to you. If you enjoyed it, we'd love to know about it. So, please leave us a review, share it with your friends, and let me know what your biggest takeaway is.