There couldn’t have been a bigger contrast in the way people approach menopause than what happened this week.
Over in the US, on The Drew Barrymore Show, the actress we grew up with had a hot flash in the middle of interviewing Jennifer Aniston and Adam Sandler for their film Murder Mystery 2. Rather than stop the taping she kept rolling, taking off her jacket and seeming genuinely astonished as she said: “I’m so glad we are documenting this – I think I’m having my first perimenopausal hot flash.”
Aniston, 54, said “I’m so honored” as she helped her reattach her mic, and Sandler joked that a “wave of rage” might be next.
Of course it’s generalizing, but the tone is quite different over in the UK, where calls for more government intervention led to the appointment of a new “HRT Czar” complete with an dramatic headline in the Times announcing her.
Helen Tomlinson is a British recruitment expert and the article raises hopes very high for things I’m not sure she can accomplish, including stopping “women over 50 quitting work”. (Millenials are also quitting work, and doing it live on TikTok – that’s why there is a hashtag, #quittok; and no one ever seems to mention that at least a portion of women our age who are quitting might just be tired of toxic workplace bulls** or waking up deciding to do what they really want before it’s too late).
Anyway, with the ongoing HRT shortages in the UK, and the bumpy rollout of a new scheme for cheaper hormone therapy, there has been a lot of whinging and yelling and blaming over there about what the government isn’t doing.
To me it stood in stark contrast to what we saw in the Barrymore clip: a woman who has told us she has been struggling through perimenopause getting on in a weird public moment with total grace, dealing with it and experiencing immediate support by those around her, and raising awareness – the moment made national news – in the process.
MenoClarity hits the big time
Also in the UK, just eight weeks after forming, the group MenoClarity (of which I am a founding members) got a national mention on BBC Breakfast. Magnificent Midlife’s Rachel Lankester was featured, and it was great to see this being discussed from a lifestyle perspective. HRT gets all the attention in most of the press coverage, and is often treated as some sort of magic bullet, with a lot of overpromising and irresponsible, unproven claims. We believe it should get some of the attention so that the importance of nutrition, movement, sleep, reducing stress and addressing the spiritual aspects that prop up at this time are not ignored, and that also some of the myths of menopause that are lazily repeated and perpetuate narratives, should be clarified.
Sciencey-science stuff
• In the “everything is connected” category, we have a new prospective population-based cohort out of 3,651 participants involved in The Rotterdam Study, with findings published in the journal Neurology that show people with low bone mineral density and bone scores – particularly at the neck – were much likely to go on to develop dementia.
• I sometimes wonder what Vitamin D doesn’t do, and how and why we all got so scared of the sun. In a large prospective cohort study published online in Alzheimer's and Dementia: Diagnosis, Assessment and Disease Monitoring, people who took vitamin D were 40 percent less likely to develop dementia over those who did not. The data was pulled from the US National Alzheimer's Coordinating Center database, involving 12,388 adults with an average age of 71. The study adjusted for a number of factors including Vitamin D exposure, age, sex, race, depression, and accounted for three varieties of supplementation. Among the drawbacks, researchers had no way of measuring pre-supplementation baseline levels, or much information about the dose or duration.
• Just tuck this one into your back pocket for now: some hip and bone replacements are still in circulation that can give people Alzheimer-like symptoms (it’s the cobalt) Epoch Times
• A Health Digest article, Natural Ways to Beat Back Vaginal Dryness, talks about a small but interesting 2016 study published in the Iranian Journal of Nursing and Midwifery Research, that showed Vitamin E suppositories almost kept up with vaginal estrogen.
• When it comes to why more women get dementia than men, the reduction in estrogen that happens in menopause gets all the attention and other things are overlooked. One of those things, as this 2022 study (and naturopathic doctor Lara Briden on Twitter recently) points out, appears to be choline. When you dive into all the things in our environment that diminish choline (including antihistamines, and other common anticholinergic drugs), then consider how little of it we get in our food, it’s concerning.
Menopause news
• It used to be rare, but in 2023 it’s hard to keep up with all the groups going into parliaments to talk about menopause: from Australia to Germany (I can’t find any links and the Instagram post I saw about it recently has vanished into the ether, but I swear to you it happened; also one headline I translated this week from WELT read: "Many doctors don't know their way around - and the women think they're crazy") to the UK.
• Mona Eltahawy, the Egyptian-American author who is editing the anthology Bloody Hell! And Other Stories, for which I just sent in my contribution, is writing a memoir about how her menopause journey was inspired by the ancient Egyptian woman king Hatshepsut. The title? The King Herself: How Hatshepsut Helped Me Unbecome.
• First the Super Bowl, now this: Oprah and friends (Drew Barrymore, Maria Shriver, a couple of Doctor Menopause Gurus), talking about menopause and kicking off some sort of menopause guide (the shape and form of which is unclear) on April 5 Oprah Daily
• Be careful out there: in a 2021 study published in Menopause, the journal of the North American Menopause Society, 16 percent of Instagram posts with #menopause were advertising services or products. That’s just one of the nuggets in a piece on menopause and social media by Menopause Cafe founder Rachel Weiss published in the peer-reviewed journal Maturitas
Click, read, listen, watch + follow
• Nothing to see here: Just two 40-something American celebrities (comic Whitney Cummings and actress Rachel Bilson) talking about how they got more orgasmic when they went off the pill Good for You podcast
• Four dementia risk factors that directly impact women MindBodyGreen
• My friend just got back from the US and she said it seems like everyone is taking it: What happens when patients stop Ozempic? (I hope they all know they are in for the long haul) Medscape
• What is tocotrienol, you ask? Andrea Donsky, my partner in the Menopause Shift Summit and founder of Naturally Savvy and Morphus, interviews leading Vitamin E Dr Barrie Tan to find out why this might be the perimenopause supplement you are missing (think hair growth, inflammation reduction, bone density, metabolic syndrome, insulin resistance fighting, heart-health boosting and more) Menopause Reimagined
• Perimenopausal writer Anna Holmes goes inside Stripes’ recent US$200-a-head The New Pause event in Los Angeles: What do Menopausal Women Want? Slate
• Because why not be proactive? How to kick-start start an upward spiral Goop
• This essay by poet Maggie Smith in The Cut is one side of what happens sometimes when women outshine a man in a relationship; and this Twitter thread, started by author Isabel Kaplan about men who have stood up for women, is a beautiful counterpoint.
• If not now, when? You must trust yourself Mark Groves Podcast
Editor’s note
Wow, what a week. Hotflash inc is still growing fast after that progesterone article and I’m pleasantly flummoxed. Welcome to everyone and thank you for being here. I’m off to apply some progesterone cream to my forearms and CBD oil to my feet, a combination I’m testing for a third night to see if the last two uninterrupted like-I-was-25 eight-hour stretches were just some sort of a double anomaly or an indication this might be a combo I can count on. The only problem is, I wish I tested the cream on its own and the CBD oil on its own, because if tonight is a winner too, I’m not going to want to risk any further experiments.
That 2021 about 16 percent of Instagram posts advertising a product or a service really resonates. Not everyone labels things #ad and not everyone is transparent. I have no way of knowing how many financially-based partnerships there are out there that aren’t declared. There are a lot of people with sliding scales of integrity in this world. I do know that I hear some pretty identical messaging coming from big influencers, and several of them are doctors. Conflict of interest is real or even perceived. It’s got no place in medicine, but it’s also everywhere on social media. Be careful out there.
Hope you'll check out Men On Pause. Not as many facts on MOP, but a generous dose of humor. https://www.menonpause.info/
Also on Substack.
Keep us posted re the progesterone\CBD combo. Hope more wonderful sleep is on its way.