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

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It's really helpful for you to be informed as to what's your normal, because we've discussed multiple times on this episode that there is variation in terms of what is the normal. So you know, you might be someone who's not a 28 day cycle. You actually are. 30 days or 31 days. But that's your normal and it happens every month and that is healthy for you and that's fine, but it's also really helpful to inform conversations with health practitioners Should something go wrong. So you miss a period, three cycles in a row, at least you can have all that data to go, this is my usual, this is what usually happens for me. This is not normal. I need support. Dr Hazel Wallace founded her platform The Food Medic, an educational blog and podcast about diet and health. Pregnancy. The risk of harming pregnancies has caused ethical issues for using fertile women in clinical trials. 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. Jonathan Wolf: that's really interesting and showing it tied to, not just generically that this is good for you. Cause it seems like the evidence for exercise in general is really compelling, but particularly towards these symptoms you might have in this first week.

Hazel Wallace: Yeah, absolutely. Cycle syncing has become quite, big in the last couple of years. Essentially, it's just about syncing your lifestyle to the faces of your menstrual cycle because as we mentioned, those different hormonal phases cause our body to have different needs be that sleep needs, nutritional needs. There's a lot of theories why some women experience it and some women don't. When we compare, women who do and women who don't, their hormone levels actually tend to be the same. So it doesn't seem to be that, but the hypothesis is that women who experience it are more sensitive to that drop in hormones that we talked about just before the next period, that they fall off that cliff and feel a bit more sensitive to it. The male body has always been the default body in clinical medicine, making the assumption that women are just smaller versions of men. This could not be more wrong,’ Dr Wallace says.In a bid to change the conversation, female reproductive health content creators are not letting Meta’s restrictions silence their voices. Hazel Wallace: Yes. Yeah. There's not really much information or support out there for women. I think it's considered part and parcel of being a woman, and as someone who's gone through medical training and written a book on female health. I absolutely do not think, while it's common, I don't think we should normalize it. And I think there are lots of things we can do to support women there. The policy says that reproductive health is allowed, but in practice their technology is still rejecting it,” Rotman said, explaining that images of uteruses are often mistakenly flagged as nudity, and words like period, menopause, endometriosis and vagina also commonly triggering sexually inappropriate warnings. Gut issues are quite common, so thinking about potentially how you might need to adjust what you eat. And then I think at the end, we talked about intermittent fasting where you're quite cautious and it sounds like you're mainly cautious about people eating enough calories, enough food, so it can potentially work, but don't just assume that this is this wonder solution actually, it sounds like you, you're concerned there might even be some issues here. Jonathan Wolf: Okay. And finally, you're, you're allowed to more than a yes or no. Now, what's the most unexpected thing you discovered about the menstrual cycle through your research?

How the menstrual cycle affects what you eat. We'll even find out if there's scientific evidence behind cycle syncing. I learned a lot and I believe you will too. 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.Endometriosis affects one in ten women in the UK and it takes on average eight years to get diagnosed. It’s absurd, right? Hazel Wallace: No, but I think it highlights how severe and debilitating this condition can be for women. Hazel Wallace: Yeah, absolutely. And I think your experience is 100% universal, even for a lot of girls and women because when you have even a conversation around puberty, you learn more about the belief. Eating phase of the menstrual cycle, but it's a typical 28 day to 35 day cycle of hormones in fluctuation. And all of those hormones change how we feel across that month, not just those five days. Jonathan Wolf: That certainly sounds like it makes a lot of sense. And in terms of other things that you can do during this period, you mentioned a little bit already on what you should eat. Is there anything else that people should be thinking about throughout the period? I know that you haven't, for example, mentioned anything about iron, which I know is something people talk about. 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.