Hazda women are supercool with menopause

Maybe we just need to forage all day then?

Feb 24, 2023

British biological anthropologist Dr Katherine Fitzpatrick spent several years studying the menstrual life cycles of the Hadza women for her doctoral thesis at the University of Cambridge.

The Hazda live near Lake Eyasi in northern Tanzania and represent one of the world’s last remaining hunter-gatherer populations.

Dr Fitzpatrick spent more than 1,300 hours watching women across 10 camps between 2004 and 2006, and learned a lot about their menopause experience in the process. I came across her work while prepping a recent presentation, and found it so fascinating.

Here are some highlights:

They don’t even have a name for menopause – they just call it “no more bleeding”.
They are killing it on the job: “Post-menopausal women eat less relative to what they forage, rest less and forage more kilocalories overall compared to pre-menopausal women.”
The data was supportive of the Grandmother Hypothesis, which is the evolutionary theory that menopause evolved because women are more valuable to the survival of the rest of their family when they are freed up from raising their own children. “One possible explanation for the difference is the lack of energetic costs from pregnancy, lactation and menstruation that reproductive-aged women face. Though post-menopausal women may still be encumbered by young and adult offspring, they are unencumbered by the direct physiological costs of child-bearing.”
The Hadza women reported no hot flashes, no depression, no sleep problems or sore joints.
The only menopause symptoms several women described were vaginal dryness and pain during sex.
Contrary to what you might think: “The stages of breastfeeding and post-menopause are not generally perceived as difficult periods for digging and picking.”
“When asked how they felt about menopause, all post-menopausal women reported they were happy. All said that women talk about menstruation and about ceasing menstruation. As one post-menopausal woman explained, ‘they say ‘we are done with menstruation’. They are happy; they are old’.”

On that note, I was dining at a hotel restaurant in Sharjah recently (on a review of a wellness weekend there). Seated across from a table of six, all women, probably mother, adult daughters and their children, I looked on as the silver-haired grandma, dressed in a trendy apple-green tracksuit and trainers, brought back a large plate of fruit from the buffet and set it in the middle of the table, gesturing for everyone to dive in.

I smiled to myself, thinking “2023; Grandmother Hypothesis”.

Chat GPT: Is menopause a deficiency?

I’ve been having fun with ChatGPT in recent months, using it to help with research, asking it various questions, trying to see how it morphs and changes and look for ways I can incorporate it to help me do more at Hotflash inc.

It’s wrong a lot, to the point of making things up (including a statistic and a clinical study about frozen shoulder).

It’s also very stubborn. But on this question, I think, it’s on the right track.

Testosterone won’t save your marriage, k?

The number of testosterone prescriptions given to women in the UK has risen 10x since 2015, according to a freedom of information request obtained by The Pharmaceutical Journal.

The largest increases were observed starting in 2021, getting steeper in 2022, coinciding with the release of the two heavily HRT-focused Davina McCall documentaries, promoting media to label it the “Davina Effect”.

British Menopause Society chair Paula Briggs, a consultant in sexual and reproductive health at Liverpool Women’s NHS Foundation Trust, told the journal there was a lot of “misinformation” about the benefits of testosterone. She also expressed concern that women were being prescribed testosterone without a proper risk assessment, and that many aren’t being managed and monitored properly while on it.

“Women are being led to believe that it’s the missing piece of the jigsaw, that it’s going to be the solution to their relationship problems, and I think we have to be much more scientific about how that information is provided for women,” she said.

“It’s coming from celebrities and politicians, and that’s not necessarily appropriate.”

Stay tuned: I have interviewed Dr Angela DeRosa, who worked on the US firm Procter & Gamble’s failed bid for a testosterone patch in the early 2000s, and she is VERY bullish on testosterone. This will be coming up on the podcast, and I’ll be giving a sneak peak with highlights for paid subscribers.

Integrative dietitian and See Ya Later, Ovulater author Esther Blum (who is, I think, the only person in the world to have been interviewed both by me and Gwyneth Paltrow) is having a Mastering Menopause Virtual Live Event TOMORROW (Saturday, February 25) and you are invited. Interested? Use this link to sign up and learn how to:

Become an empowered to advocate for what’s best for your body and health
Get to the root cause of your menopause issues and how to fix them
Fall and stay asleep so you feel rested and ready to go each morning
Clear your brain fog so your mind and decision-making power is revved up
Lose the menopot and feel confident again
Decrease depression and anxiety
Get your libido and groove back so you can enjoy intimacy with your partner again
Feel your energy and workouts soar

My guest on the podcast this week is Dr Maria Luque, an Austin, Texas-based, United States Air Force veteran (she was a fitness program manager there) and health science professor who studied fitness in menopause for her doctorate.

She is also bothered by the reams of health, fitness and nutrition information on social media, never mind when it comes to what we are supposed to be doing in peri/menopause. Her approach is careful, measured, and science-based, and at 47, she's really frank about her own challenges at this stage of life with brain fog, body image and more. She's also a huge fan of putting on muscle and all that can do for us, both now and down the road.

I found this talk really refreshing, reassuring and inspiring. I hope you will too.

Listen here.

Click, read, watch, follow, listen…

• “HT can be safely administered depending on the method used and the patient’s age, time since menopause, and risk of cardiovascular disease”, according to Rethinking Menopausal Hormone Therapy: For Whom, What, When and How Long?, a new review of literature published in the journal Circulation led by Kathryn Lindley, MD, director of the Women’s Heart Center at Vanderbilt University Medical Center (I’ve asked for access + an interview: to be continued) VUMD

• “The menopausal turn”: Deborah Jermyn, a reader in film studies at the University of Roehampton specializing in women, feminism and aging in the media, analyzes the rise of menopause awareness in the UK Journal of Aging Studies

• Selene Yeager interviews Dr Nerina Ramlakhan, a British physiology, sleep and energy expert, who has a new book coming out in April that I need to read immediately called Finding Inner Safety: The key to healing, thriving and preventing burnout. She also cuts to the heart of my theory that menopause is the ultimate hero’s journey: “It takes you to a very internal space… Don’t be afraid to go there. Because you don’t only meet a few demons but there’s gems in there. And then you can come out and share those gems.” Hit Play Not Pause podcast

• A very rare article addressing HRT side effects: “it can be a bit of a minefield for women starting to go through the menopause journey, especially if you’re suffering side effects, such as headaches with HRT” Press and Journal

• “Sorry to break it to you but nowhere in history or in the world does good, long-lasting health come from a pharmaceutical product” The Wiser Woman

Editor’s note

I was blissfully writing this in a cafe when a loudmouth dude got on a work call beside me and created such a cacophony I could literally not hear anything else. It didn’t help that he was clearly a big jerk.

I know I don’t own the cafe and if I want optimal conditions I can work at home. I also know that the level of irritation I felt about this man was not appropriate.

If you are feeling inappropriate levels of irritation too, my thoughts are with you.