PROF. SARAH BERRY: How is Menopause REALLY Affecting Us? | GREAT MOMENTS

How much do you know about menopause? Because, I’ll be honest, before speaking to Professor Sarah Berry, I didn’t really know much… Menopause affects over half the population, yet 90% of women in the UK weren’t taught about it at school. So many women enter this stage of life without really knowing what’s happening to their bodies… or what to expect. In this Great Moment, Professor Sarah Berry, Chief Scientist at ZOE and a leading voice on menopause research, breaks down everything we need to know. From what it is and the symptoms we hear about all the time, to the symptoms we rarely hear about, Professor Berry explains how it can affect day to day life. Listen to the full episode HERE https://open.spotify.com/episode/5N9pvRsnlBFUhgxh2NpHSv?si=BUNJ4U86QW-TZ5VHwBQObA! If you enjoyed the show, you can also follow us: Instagram-@greatcompanypodcast https://www.instagram.com/greatcompanypodcast/# TikTok -@greatcompanypodcast https://open.acast.com/networks/611e511b4ec6dc00134bced2/shows/65d737dfdc02e00016c413b2/episodes/www.tiktok.com/@greatcompanypodcast And if you've got thoughts, questions and comments, you can email us at: [email protected] THE CREDITS Producer: Helen Burke Assistant Producer: Issy Weeks-Hankins Video: Josh Bennett Social Media: Laura Coughlan Exec Producer: Ewan Newbigging-Lister & Jemima Rathbone Great Company is an original podcast from JamPot Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 1:05Jamie Laing?

  Hello, everyone. I'm Jamie Lang and this is Great Moments.

• 1:11Jamie Laing?

  Hi, guys, and welcome back. I hope you're having a great day. Now, today's Great Moments is with the incredible Professor Sarah Berry. Sarah is Chief Scientist at Zoe and one of the leading voices on menopause research. Now, listen, I'm going to be totally honest, okay? Before she came on the show, I didn't really know anything about menopause. She broke it all down to me, what it actually is, the symptoms to look out for, and trust me, this is one you shouldn't miss. If you like her and you want to hear it, you can check out the full episode. All you've got to do is check out the link in the show notes, click on it and it'll take you to the episode. So here it is, Great Moments with Professor Sarah Berry.

• 1:51Jamie Laing?

  I don't even know where to begin on this subject because I don't even know what menopause is. I know it's something that happens to women. I know it happens to women at a sudden time in their life. I don't know what it affects, what happens. I hear this word and I feel slightly ashamed. I don't really know what it is. So can you explain to me what menopause is?

• 2:12Speaker 02

  I can, but I think, Jamie, the first thing says you're not alone, even as a woman, until I started the perimenopause transition, which I'll explain what that is, I didn't really know what it was, or until I started researching it, because we don't talk about it. We're starting to talk about it. We certainly didn't talk about it. Like, I vaguely recall my mum being a bit hot and sweaty in the night, but God forbid, you know, you didn't say the word menopause. It just wasn't said.

• 2:37Jamie Laing?

  Why?

• 2:38Speaker 02

  I don't know. It's like, growing up, you know, I was a child growing up in the 80s, you didn't talk about sex, you don't talk about menopause, you don't talk about menstruation. That's a, it's changing. And that's the good thing. And so, for those that don't know what menopause is, menopause, simply put, is the point at which is a year after you've had your last period. So you've last menstruated. So it's menopause, the pausing or cessation of menstruation. The thing is, you don't go to bed one night, you know, pre-menopausal, having periods, and then wake up the next day and, hey, I'm post-menopausal.

• 3:18Speaker 02

  It's not like that. There's a menopause transition and we call that the perimenopause. And this is the point at which your estrogen starts to decline, because what stops you having periods and why you go into menopause is because your estrogen's declined and your estrogen is at a point at which therefore you're not menstruating. But you don't have, like, suddenly loads of estrogen, next day, that's it. You don't even have this nice, slow, gradual decline in estrogen. You go on a roller coaster. So you literally, you know, you might be plodding along in your 40s, okay, and then suddenly it's like, it goes down, it goes up, it goes down, and so on. And this is what's so confusing for women, because I think, again, until I started researching, I didn't know that. I just thought, oh, I

• 4:02Speaker 02

  might reduce a bit and I might get a little bit of a hot flush or might get a bit of brain fog. But it sets your body into this kind of roller coaster of craziness. And the reason is, is because you have estrogen receptors all over your body, in your brain, you know, in your bones, everywhere. And this is why menopausal symptoms are so widespread, because the reduction in estrogen, the fluctuations in estrogen, impacts nearly every cell in your body.

• 4:32Jamie Laing?

  So, explain to me what happens when you, as a woman, when you're going through menopause? What happens to your mind, your body? What goes on?

• 4:40Speaker 02

  So, when you're going through menopause, when you're in that menopause transition, that's the period that most people have symptoms of menopause. So by this, these are the kind of symptoms that we are talking about more, like brain fog, anxiety, palpitations in the morning, aching bones, loss of libido, poor sleep, change in body fat distribution. There's about 50 different symptoms. There's 20 that are very common. You have your symptoms, which we can pick up on in more detail if you want to, that are particularly bad during that perimenopausal phase, during that transition phase. They still continue after the menopause. They still continue after, you know, that menopause transition phase. But what also

• 5:24Speaker 02

  happens at the same time, and I don't think we're talking about this enough, really, we're, we're starting to talk about symptoms, but your change in risk of disease also changes.

• 5:35Jamie Laing?

  What do you mean by that?

• 5:35Speaker 02

  Estrogen impacts a lot of the way that our blood vessels work, our body metabolizes food, because like I said, it affects every cell in our body. And so, the way that our body has functioned from a kind of disease perspective also changes. So, I can outline some results from some of our research to illustrate this. So, if we look in our Zoe Pridic cohort, so this is in a couple of thousand people, and we look at key risk factors for disease. So, these are chronic diseases such as cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes. So, blood pressure, cholesterol, inflammation, body fat around the belly, for example. So if we look at those in our individuals and we look across different

• 6:19Speaker 02

  ages, what you see is that these risk factors increase as you age. So your blood pressure, so natural part of aging, goes up. Now, we can go on to talk about how we can minimize that through diet and lifestyle, but generally it will go up as you age. Your cholesterol goes up, particularly your bad cholesterol, which we call the LDL cholesterol. Levels of inflammation go up and you tend to start putting a little bit of weight around the belly. That starts to go up. Now, what happens is, is that up until the menopause, men are on a different trajectory than women. Women are doing quite well. So, men have, at any given age, on average, slightly high blood pressure, slightly higher cholesterol, slightly higher inflammation, et cetera. And women, for once, are kind of smiling. We're a bit

• 7:03Speaker 02

  smug at this point, because we're doing a bit better. What happens is, you hit the late 40s, so the average age of menopause is 51, the average age of perimenopause is about 47. You hit your late 40s, suddenly, women who've been having this nice, like, slower trajectory, suddenly, wham, it goes up. Suddenly, their blood pressure, their cholesterol, their inflammation, their fat tissue around their tummy, suddenly goes up to the level of men. And this is because they're losing estrogen and the estrogen is involved in many of the processes that help maintain a healthy blood pressure, help maintain a healthy cholesterol, help maintain appropriate inflammatory responses. And so, suddenly,

• 7:46Speaker 02

  therefore, your disease risk increases the same level as men, in some cases might go above it. And so, I think it's important we talk about symptoms, but I think it's also important for women to recognize that this is also a point in time to really take stock of how diet and lifestyle can help reduce your risk of some of these chronic diseases like cardiovascular disease, like type 2 diabetes, like obesity as well, because you're fighting a bit of a tidal wave as well.

• 8:18Jamie Laing?

  It must be so scary that if you're suddenly just experiencing these things and you don't really know what's going on. Why do I feel anxious? You know, why are my hormones all over the place? What is going on? And if we don't talk about it?

• 8:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 8:29Jamie Laing?

  Dare I say, I feel like relationships must break down during this period, because why would people understand if something is going on within someone's body?

• 8:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, and I think it's so hidden. So, the disease risk factors that we talked about are hidden, unless you're going to the doctor and, you know, having, you know, blood samples or having your blood pressure measured. The symptoms are also something you're suffering. And many women who are now in that perimenopausal phase, like I am, are of a generation where we didn't talk about it.

• 8:58Jamie Laing?

  Yeah.

• 8:58Speaker 02

  Our parents, my mum, never talked about it. You know, you suck it up and you get on with it. I'm really lucky that it's changing, that I feel I can talk about it. And for my daughter, I think it will be even better, because I think she's been brought up in an environment where, yes, you do talk about it. But it does, it impacts all aspects of your life. You know, I can be bloody grumpy and irritable. I ask my husband and he'll, honestly, like, the amount of times he's like, Sarah, I told you this. And it almost feels like a cop out for me to say, oh, yeah, but it's because I'm perimenopausal, I've got brain fog, that's why. That's actually what's going on with me. But I, even I, even though I research it, feel like, oh, I can't really say that.

• 9:38Speaker 02

  We know from our own research that ninety nine point eight percent of people, women of that age in our cohort, have at least one menopausal symptom. Sixty six percent of people, women, in the perimenopausal stage, have twelve or more symptoms. Eighty percent of women who are perimenopausal, so around my age, have sleep disturbances. Eighty five percent have anxiety, palpitations when they wake up, brain fog, mood swings, all of these things going on that we're contending with. Now, the good news, there were some things you can do about it. But the bad news is, until now, we weren't talking about it and we weren't helping solve it. Ten percent of women leave their jobs because of menopause.

• 10:21Speaker 02

  There was this YouGov survey that was done and asked people and they specified that the reason they left it was because they could not cope in a working environment with the symptoms. They felt embarrassed because they were forgetting things. They weren't sleeping, so they couldn't cope the next day. Their anxiety of going out into, you know, a normal workforce. And thirty percent of women say their symptoms are so debilitating, it's having a significant impact on their quality of life. And to think that for generations, we've not recognised this and talked about this. And, you know, my mother's no longer alive and I feel sad that I wasn't appreciative of actually, probably she was having a difficult time.

• 11:02Jamie Laing?

  That's really sad. And thank you for explaining that. If you were going to go into the symptoms, you mentioned there were fifty different types of symptoms. But you said some people experienced twelve. What would those twelve symptoms be if someone was experiencing that?

• 11:17Speaker 02

  So the most common symptoms we find in our research is sleep disturbances, change in energy, like how energetic they feel, change in how they feel their metabolism is working, change in lots of cognitive aspects, so the brain fog, the memory loss. I mean, honestly.

• 11:39Jamie Laing?

  Why does memory loss happen?

• 11:41Speaker 02

  Because you've got oestrogen receptors in your brain. You've got oestrogen receptors everywhere, irritability.

• 11:47Jamie Laing?

  So you become forgetful or you just literally have memory loss?

• 11:50Speaker 02

  So things like, you introduced me to your wonderful team earlier and I'm not going to remember anyone's name. If you'd have asked me five years ago, I'd have remembered everyone's name. It's that kind of thing. I mean, when I go into, one of the things I'm filled with fear about, I love socialising, I'm very chatty, as you can tell, but when I go to parties and I might have to introduce my husband to work people who I might have worked with for ages and, you know, have an incredibly close relationship with, I get this like, oh my god, I can't remember their name. You know, it's awful, I can't remember their name. That didn't happen five years ago. But I can still be high functioning as a scientist, but then you have that kind of momentary memory loss.

• 12:33Speaker 02

  So these are the kind of common symptoms, so irritability, mood swings, change in your body composition. So oestrogen changes where you distribute your body fat. So men typically have what we call an apple shape, i.e. you have fat around the abdomen, around your tummy. And women tend to, up to the menopause, have what we call pear shape. So, you know, nice little bottom and hips, so the fat is distributed there. That's because in very simple terms, your oestrogen is kind of directing the fat to be distributed there. Once you lose oestrogen, it's no longer directed to your hips and your thighs, and so it's then directed more to your tummy.

• 13:16Speaker 02

  So this is a really common symptom that women have, that suddenly their fat where their tummy is suddenly increases. Apart from the aesthetics, is also the fact that we know that fat around the belly is really bad for us. It's metabolically really active compared to fat anywhere else in our body. So it produces more inflammatory chemicals. It is more involved in mechanisms that we know are unfavorable for cardiovascular disease, for example. And so suddenly, as well as, oh shit, you know, I don't look quite so good in my bikini, also increasing your risk of chronic disease as well.

• 13:51Jamie Laing?

  So is this sort of scientific suggestion or a personal suggestion to start thinking about menopause before it's even happened? So perhaps changing diet or perhaps taking HRT before that's even happened?

• 14:05Speaker 02

  I think that I would caution about anyone taking HRT before they need to take HRT. I would suggest it's the discussion you should have with a medical practitioner, I'm not a medical practitioner. I think that we should be having a healthy diet, healthy lifestyle all our life. The reality is we don't. Now, a lot of the time, people have a wake-up call, whether it was Covid or whether it's that you're going through the menopause. A lot of the time, this is a wake-up call for many women, that, you know, I'm not feeling the same, I've got to do something about it. You know, the stronger and healthier we are going into the menopause, the better. So for example, we have some interesting data showing that people who are overweight

• 14:49Speaker 02

  or living with obesity, they have a lot higher rates of symptoms. If you're entering the menopause physically inactive, you're also more likely to have symptoms. So if you can enter the menopause transition in your early forties, our bodies are changing anyway because we're aging, but if you can enter that, that your kind of forties and start your forties, thinking about making sure you're getting yourself in good shape for it, great, because we know it will help reduce some of your symptoms, so you're not getting in that vicious kind of circle.