"3 to 75% of women do not get the treatment for pmenopause and menopause that they deserve. And women are asking why is it that I can't manage stress the way I once did? Why do I have this belly fat th..."

"do for people? I'm a physician, so I work in academic medicine. I do research for people. I teach and I take care of patients. So that's the official BBC answer. And the unofficial answer is I'm a hea..."

"me through your sort of academic journey? Sure. So my training is as a bioengineer. I did the Harvard MIT program which is designed to train physician scientists. So the um ethos of this particular pr..."

"How many people do you think you've treated or seen or worked with directly in your career? Probably about 40,000. And and if you had to try and summarize maybe the top three or five things that you'r..."

"experience as a doctor/healer. feels like you've really had a lot of sort of reference points in your career that you've drawn upon and ultimately you became the director of precision medicine at the ..."

"is the study, they are the experiment. That's correct. You're not looking at broad sample sizes. What is wrong with conventional medicine? You use the term that it's broken. What is wrong about that a..."

"you choose this career? What What is it about you, your childhood, your life that sent you down this road? I would say it was growing up with a fair amount of trauma. And you know the what I've learne..."

"How important is it for us to understand our early upbringing and our trauma if we are to heal as adults? Because you said there that if you score high on this ACE score, this trauma score, this child..."

"How did that manifest in your physical health? So, I didn't start to detect this until my 30s. But what I found was that I had depression. I had premenstrual syndrome. I had my first baby when I was 3..."

"crazy that you're a doctor, but you don't know this part of health. I mean, how are you going to help anybody if you don't fully understand health from a more sort of holistic perspective? That's a cr..."

"and then measuring. That's right. When we think of cortisol, which was the first sort of marker that you saw was elevated, we think of stress. So, we think we get cortisol if we're stressed. So, my br..."

"link between cortisol and uh trauma? Oh yes. What is that link? So for people who experience toxic stress or trauma, what typically happens is cortisol goes up. That's part of the alarm. Yeah. The bod..."

"What are the things in in the world at the moment that are messing up our hormones? because the subject matter of hormones has become increasingly popular and I know that there's hormones like cortiso..."

"So, if you had to come into my life and you had to optimize my life to make sure that all my hormones were in check, you would get rid of plastics and and toxins from my everyday life, my bathroom, um..."

"anybody that doesn't know, it's the little patch you put on your arm and it tells you your blood sugar levels in real time straight to your phone. Sugar, is sugar the enemy? I don't think sugar is the..."

"supplements that I should be taking if I'm trying to optimize my hormonal balance? Well, I'd have to look at your total picture, but most of us inherit somewhere around 5 to seven genomic um vulnerabi..."

"When you look at people's biomarkers and their blood samples, what are the things that you like typically always see that are deficient? Because I'm sure there's things from a social level that we're ..."

"really want to um close off on this subject of cortisol because I know that that's such a important hormone. I've heard you say before that you believe that uh cortisol is the most critical hormone to..."

"people to change in this regard to get them to make a set of different decisions? I think we're at a time of year where a lot of people are thinking about changes and a lot of people are failing repet..."

"But does doesn't that mean that in order to change, some people just need a bit more pain? I would say people have a different level of pain that motivates change. Have you ever seen a situation? We w..."

"consider your job to be if you are a friend or a family member? Your job is to determine what your boundaries are, what you're willing to tolerate to stay in relationship. And that's, you know, that's..."

"about the executive that you checked um recently. You said his testosterone levels were intact. Yes. At what age should I be thinking about my testosterone levels or should I be thinking about them al..."

"testosterone, too, but you said, I think earlier, that men just have 10 times more testosterone. Men have more, but it's the most abundant hormone in the female body. Women are exquisitly sensitive to..."

"a sign that I had low testosterone if I'm a man? Belly fat. Gynecomastia. What's that? That's when you have breast development. Okay. mood changes, mood swings, uh irritability uh depression, cardiova..."

"What about in a woman? So, if a woman has low testosterone, what are the symptoms we see in a woman? They're similar. So, um both sexes have fatigue. That's very common. Decreased libido. They might b..."

"less confident, have less motivation less agency, less willing to take risks less sex drive. What if she has high tes testosterone levels? Too high. So high testosterone tends to track with polycystic..."

"woman and I want to get my testosterone levels in order and I don't want to inject myself with testosterone, are there natural ways, easy ways for me to get my testosterone balanced? It depends on how..."

"Let's talk about estrogen then because I I was under the impression that um only women had estrogen, but you're telling me that it's an important hormone for men as well. It is. Why is it so important..."

"of this? Because a lot of people are talking about fiber at the moment and saying that we're fiber deficient. Oh we are for sure. I mean, the average American gets somewhere around 14 grams of fiber a..."

"in my hormone function? It's playing a huge role. So your microbiome is one of the control functions for estrogen levels and maybe testosterone levels. So there's a birectional relationship Steve wher..."

"fiber. What What kind of foods have high fiber? Is it like broccoli and stuff? Yes. So broccoli, Brussels sprouts cauliflower cabbage kabi."

"What do you eat and like how do you live? So I'm a sensualist. So I love food. I love the taste of food. I love the smell of food. I love the look of food. I had a history of disordered eating. I had ..."

"think of the keto diet? I'm a fan of the ketogenic diet because in your book there's this chapter called the keto paradox. Yes. What are your thoughts on keto? Well what I find with keto is that men t..."

"effects? The main ones that I see are the thyroid dysfunction. Yeah. Uh sometimes there's a a rise in cortisol in people who are really limiting their carbohydrates. And then it can also affect seroto..."

"that the keto ketogenic diet might be doing to my hormones, like my testosterone or my other hormones that is worth noting? Because I'm super, you know, I'm wondering whether to stay on the ketogenic ..."

"If I'm trying to lose weight, is there an optimal approach to take? Because the ketogenic diet has been the fastest way I've I've ever discovered of losing weight quickly. But if you're a man or woman..."

"can eat. Mhm. And what about fasting? You know, there's been a lot of talk about autophagy and doing these kind of long fasts to heal the body. What's your perspective on that? I think there's a time ..."

"come to you and they're asking questions about hormones these days, you must have seen in your career a shift in interest um on the subject of hormones, but but also a certain a certain area of hormon..."

"many of the symptoms of menopause are avoidable? Yes. Yes. And by that I mean using hormone therapy and using lifestyle medicine as early as possible to manage that transition. Because when a woman go..."

"What do you think of birth control pills? I think if they help you avoid surgery, they can be beneficial, but I think they're way overused in our culture. And most people who agree to a birth control ..."

"But who is the birth control pill for then? You know, I used to think that it was a feminist invention, that it was a way of putting your fertility in your hands. And I went on the birth control pill ..."

"How are you doing? Oh, quite good. Quite good. I love that question. I went through a divorce two years ago. And I feel like, you know, I my I have two daughters. They both went off to college and wer..."

"with that and um and really getting clear about okay for the second half of my life, what is it that I want? What is my mission? How do I support that? How do I only give a whole body yes to um the th..."

"mean? Whole body. Yes. So, this is something I learned from one of my mentors, Diana Chapman. Um, she learned it from, I believe Katie Hendricks, who's a therapist. The idea is that instead of saying ..."

"anymore after 20 odd years? Well, I would love to riff on this with you. Okay. So I can tell you that part of the challenge in my marriage was that um we had difficulty talking about difficult topics...."

"When you look back, is there something that could have been done further upstream to prevent you getting to this place in your view? Yeah, it's such a it's a great question. You know, one of the thing..."

"menopause experts that you mentioned earlier, Lisa, was that when women get to menopausal a menopausal age, when they're in menopause, they often have greater clarity in what they want in their life. ..."

"What about your happiness levels? Does it increase your happiness levels? I think it does. There's this really interesting study that um is called the UBend, and it looks at psychological well-being f..."

"I know that there's so many women that listen to this show. Um, and I get so many messages when we have conversations about women's health, hormonal issues menopause, because women for a long period o..."

"Okay. So, tell me about that then. What is it about the socially constructed narrative of what it is to be a man and a woman that is causing unfavorable outcomes for women? There's a lot of things. So..."

"Why is that just because they're more likely to report it or is there a biological or evolutionary reason why they're more stressed? I don't think it's biological. I think it's related to power imbala..."

"sensitive? So if you put a man and a woman or a boy and a girl in the same stressful environment, would they have different biological markers like biomarkers? Would you see higher levels of cortisol ..."

"of autoimmune diseases in women or men? Women. Forex. Forex. Yes. 400% more autoimmune diseases and women. Yes. And what are these autoimmune diseases? What's an example of one? So, there's about 100 ..."

"was the rise in all cancers amongst women versus men. And the men graph was pretty flat, but there was this significant rise in women getting more and more forms of cancer. And I was looking through s..."

"And polarity exists in all kinds of relationships as well, doesn't it? To some degree, it does, but sometimes you have to work at it. Sometimes you have to create the polarity. When you say polarity, ..."

"People can relate. I know this because I see much of the feedback I get on the episodes where we talk about sex. People often are struggling with a dying, whimpering sex life. Again, I ask you, is the..."

"Quality time. Deep questions. Yes. Um, the conversation cards. Oh, yes. Tell me about that. Well, we sell these conversation cards on this show. You can check in the uh description below if you want t..."

"thing we haven't talked about that we should have talked about? Is there anything else? Sleep is something we didn't talk about when we think about the impact sleep has on our hormonal balance. Is it ..."

"On my ketogenic diet, I noticed that my heart rate variability seems to go lower, which is scary. Do you see that a lot when people do kind of these kind of more restrictive diets and they're in ketos..."

"What are the things that you aim at when someone comes to you with low HIV? A lot of people want to improve their HIV. We kind of see it as this holy metric now. Sure. Well, I start with alcohol. So, ..."