The Female Factor: Making women’s health count – and what it means for you (The Food Medic)

Product Information

That’s why it’s so important to get to know our bodies, the conditions that can affect women and how to spot and manage them.

Need sometimes to think really carefully about how you can do these measurements. Because you know, often people are doing, you're doing an at-home test, you're doing that at a point of time. Or even if you're doing something measuring blood sugar over a week or two, that's not the whole cycle. Yeah. So it's clear a lot to do and I think we're, we are really interested so we should follow up after this and see whether we can do something that could shed I think some light, cuz I think we generally see these things are very interlinked. Hazel Wallace: No, but I think it highlights how severe and debilitating this condition can be for women.This bold, comprehensive guide to understanding women's health shakes up the narrative for women of all ages. The Female Factor provides methods to protect and maximise your health in positive, affirming steps. So people might have heard about, you know, REM sleep and non REM sleep, and we'll go through cycles of this threat. The night and old stages of sleep are important, whether it's light sleep or deep sleep or REM sleep, but they all offer different. Benefits to us and when we go into that luteal phase, there's some evidence to say there's less REM sleep, which is that dream sleep. As a kind of a general statistic as well, women typically sleep more than men, but have. Worst quality sleep, and that's for multiple reasons. So if there are any researchers listening to this podcast, please do a trial on that because I think it would be absolutely fantastic to help support women during that phase and, and kind of find out how we can offset some of those gut symptoms.

For years and years, we've excluded women and assume that we are exactly the same in terms of physiology, how we present with conditions, how we respond to treatments, and it's very much a different story.

Hazel Wallace: Yeah, hormones play a role, but they're not the only thing. Women tend to ruminate a bit more at night, so they'll stay awake thinking about things they have to do. Hazel Wallace: Yeah, absolutely. So if we kind of look at menstruation, that days of bleeding, as we mentioned, an anti-inflammatory diet's, really important from reducing that inflammation, which will help reduce symptoms, but also support your immune system during that time because your bleeding and because iron deficiency anemia is so prevalent in premenopausal women.

Jonathan Wolf: Amazing. Now, you mentioned a number of other things I do, I don't wanna miss out on, about the way that the menstrual cycle is affecting your, your health, and I think you talked about sleep, you talked about stress. Could you just tell us what else is actually changing through this cycle?

Hazel Wallace: It tends to be for more, high energy food, so high fat and high carbohydrate, and. That is likely because you have that increase in metabolic rate. Your body's just searching for the most energy dense type of food, and the most kind of reported craving will be chocolate. Hazel Wallace: Yeah, absolutely. So again, like you said, this will vary from person to person, and there will be some people who almost float through their menstrual cycle and don't get much in the way of symptoms, or they're not really aware of what's happening. And then some people will be really tuned into their body and some people experience really debilitating symptoms. And the reason I think that it's so poorly diagnosed is there's not a huge amount of information out there available. I don't think medical professionals are fully aware of the symptom spectrum and what it might look like. And like I said, I think we normalize a lot of these symptoms as a society that is just part and parcel of being a woman.