Ep. 573 “Aging Well Is a Strategy” – The Brain, Hormone & Fitness Markers Women Must Build Now with Dr. Lindsey Berkson

Welcome to Everyday Wellness Podcast. I'm your host, Nurse Practitioner, Cynthia Thurlow. This podcast is designed to educate, empower, and inspire you to achieve your health and wellness goals. My goal and intent is to provide you with the best content and conversations from leaders in the health and wellness industry each week and impact over a million lives. Today, I had the honor of connecting with friend and colleague, Dr. Lindsay Berkson, who is called Odeicious and Tenacious for Good Reason. She's a distinguished hormone scholar from the Highly Praised Center for Bioenvironmental Research, at Tulane, and she's been working with pioneering scientists, is a author of 21 books, and her impact on medical literature continues to grow. She is someone that makes the most of the world. She is someone that makes me think in such a thoughtful manner, and she just has an infectious enthusiasm for learning and helping educate women about not only their bodies, but their health. Today, we spoke about the seventh decade and how important it is to support the hippocampus, as well as do targeted cardiovascular exercise, as well as supporting the 3M's. The influence of hormone replacement therapy and the WHI, as well as timing hypothesis, why oxytocin is more than just a bonding hormone. The role of endocrine disrupting chemicals and supporting detoxification. The role of gut health, inflammation, and immunity. How oxytocin influences digestion, gut motility, and the gut brain access, as well as protects our gut from trauma after colonoscopies. Boy, I wish I had had this conversation before my last colonoscopy. Protect stem cells, heals the gut from inflammation, and supports healthy transit time. Her new book, The Oxytocin Medicine, is a book that I will reference often. It's really interesting, both as a licensed medical provider and just a middle-aged woman. It's one of these books that's going to make you rethink a lot of things. I am actually gifting a copy to my internal medicine doc because I think it's one of these incredible resources. As always, this is a podcast we want to listen to more than once. Dr. Berkson, it's such an honor to be reconnected with you. I've been so looking forward to this conversation. And before we started recording, you were giving me some incredible insights into what do you think are the key components to aging well into your 70s? And I want to make sure my listening community hears these nuggets of wisdom because it's really going to impact decisions that my husband and I are making in our 50s. And I think this is really critically important because a lot of what you were alluding to was saying, I feel like 50s, 60s, it was a whole lot easier. There's something about that next decade in your 70s where you're starting to see friends who lifestyle-wise are doing pretty well, but they're not doing as well. They're starting to get a bit more frail. They're starting to maybe have a little bit of that slippery slope cognitively. It happens very rapidly if you don't have a number of things in place, I think. But most of my friends are people who've eaten really well, lived meditative, purposeful lives, have eaten or have been on hormones. And in their 70s, they are struggling and they do not feel like they're not a version of their younger self at all. So I've been pondering this a lot because I only have one other friend. I just turned 77. So I'm three years away from 80. Amazing. And I have one friend that's six months younger than me and she's doing like I am. Real resilient, real strong. And I've noticed that she and I both have had much more exercise where we've pushed our cardio respiratory fitness. She's been a dancer. I turned around to kayaking. I kayak four to 10 miles a week all year long, except not this week in Austin with the fill. But usually when it's down to 30, I'll go out there and kayak four to five miles. But if it's real windy, I won't. But the wind really, you're getting huge cardio respiratory fitness. So she's taken up kayaking and she's been doing that now for the last five, six years. She's been a dance, a studio dance teacher. So she has not eaten perfectly at all. She did not go on hormones till she just had her second bout with breast cancer and I convinced her to finally go on hormones to hopefully not get a third bout. So she has eaten not the same as my other friends and she also hasn't been on hormones, but she has been a phenomenal exercise person and she has very strong muscles. So she even smoked for a number of years in her life. She was not a health food person and she's kept up her stamina. So I am a big fan of cardio respiratory fitness where once or twice a week you push yourself to your limit that you don't even know if you could go further or do this again. That's how I always feel at the end of the kayaking session. It's almost too much, but it makes me so strong. And then I think people have been too low on their replacement of hormones. I think we put all this emphasis on food. I've always eaten well, but I'm not so sure that food is the end all be all. We have all these food trends and food, food snobs. They get into a path and they think their way is the only way. I think it's more than that. So I've been pondering this a lot because people I love are really, it's a rapid decline and I hate to see it. Yeah, I think this is really significant and really valuable. So you mentioned that we need a certain amount of hormones to be able to replenish the hippocampus. So let's talk about the role of the hippocampus. This very important aspect of our brain that impacts our physiology and our hormones as well. So that listeners have a better understanding of what that speaks to. Would love to. That's a great question. So your hippocampus is equivalent to the physiologic analogy of your soul. It's where you live. It's your memory bank. It's your motivation and it's your sense of self, your meanest. So I call it the three M&Ms, meanest memory and motivation, not meanest, but me. How do I identify with me? Because as you get older and fragile is that shrinks, you have, you feel fragile, you lose your motivation, you lose the sense of who you are and you don't remember very well. But it's like the liver. God is generous. It can reboot if it hasn't gone to do much of a pathological shrinkage, which of course is cognitive decline, a lot of the neurodegenerative diseases. And we learned about this from the wonderful neurologist from UCLA, Dale Bredesen, where he has a protocol where you can reboot a brain that's going to cognitive decline if you get them early or moderate in that state. And the first thing he does is give hormones because hormones can, if you are not to the end stage, hormones can actually revolumize the hippocampus. But there's only been one study at McGill University and they did functional MRIs and they looked for what dose of estradiol equivalence would actually take a shrunken hippocampus where you feel fragile, you don't feel like yourself. When you walk downstairs, you're going really carefully. You are not yourself. That's what happening to a lot of my friends now in their 70s, sadly. And they took people like that and gave women estrogen and gave them different dosages and tracked the volume of the hippocampus that had been already smaller than a healthy younger person. We know you lose about a percentage of volume a year as you just tend to age. That's the hippocampus starts to normally shrink, but in neurodegenerative diseases, it shrinks way too much and you lose yourself. And they were able to re-volumize the hippocampus back to youthful levels within six, seven weeks. It was fast, but it was with two milligrams of estradiol equivalence. It was a fairly hefty dose and we know that the average woman takes somewhere between four tenths of a milligram to two and a half to three milligrams and there's outliers. Some people who only can take less and some people who need a lot more because they have Alzheimer's that runs in their family and they really want to keep that volume up. I can't take four milligrams, two milligrams. It makes my breast to tender, but I take as much as I can without getting the symptoms of excessive replacement. And that's the way what you want to do with hormone replacement is take as much as you can without taking more than your body can handle. And I think we've been so frightened of hormones historically. It's a crazy land, the land of hormones. So women have been scared to death of them. And when Marty McCary, I think he's our 20th FDA head, just came on about a month and a half ago. You can look at it for free on YouTube FDA estrogen experts. He said it was a travesty because hormone replacement is one of the healthiest things a woman can do to fight a whole slew of aging issues. And the reason I think he tackled that so strongly and so early on in his position with the FDA is that in his book Blind Spots in the second chapter, he said Jacques Rousseau on June 28th, 2002, got all the co-authors of the Women's Health Initiative together. That study that was so misinterpreted and made everybody frightened. Jacques Rousseau was the primary investigator. And Marty McCary was one of the co-authors. And they all got together in a room and Jacques looked at them all and he said, we're putting out a press release that estrogen causes breast cancer. And all of the authors looked at each other, the co-authors, and they said, but we haven't reached statistical significance. You can't do that. And he said, Marty McCary writes this in his book, our FDA head, dissension will not be tolerated. You're ruined. We are putting out this press release. And it went around the world. It made everybody frightened thinking that the WHO, the Women's Health Initiative, the acronym is WHO, proved that estrogen causes breast cancer when it was the exact opposite. Even a week later, the Journal of the American Medical Association came out with a paper saying the WHO did not reach statistical significance. And at first it was a trend and then all of the reanalyses and the final reanalysis in 2019 showed that estrogen was the most breast protective tool we possibly can have the exact opposite of the lie of Jacques Rousseau. And I think that Marty McCary has been feeling guilty all these years and he wanted to rectify that and I appreciate that. Yeah, it's interesting. He was supposed to have been a guest on the podcast right before he was nominated. And so his team had reached out and had wanted to have him be a guest. And when I read that chapter in the book, I did feel and I agree with you that he felt like in some ways it's a mea culpa. Like I'm trying to rectify a decision that was made that has had such a large impact on women and certainly women on this podcast are well aware of the WHO. I mean, I was a baby nurse practitioner. I remember I was neatly tucked away in cardiology, but my mother's entire generation, my aunts, my mom, all being taken off their hormone replacement therapy and just essentially told, take these, take Vioxx to deal with your arthritic symptoms, just grin and bear it. And so is it any wonder that we are trying so hard to help explain that hormones, replenishing hormones is so critically important to augment how we navigate and see the world in our middle ages and beyond. Why do you think that there's still so much pushback about replenishing hormones to levels that you're talking about, replenishing the volume of the hippocampus and conferring all these additional benefits? I think we're still playing pretty safe. When I say safe, they're really conservative, giving women a 0.025 milligram patch and hoping that that's going to give them enough hormones to starve off osteoporosis, cardiovascular disease, genitourinary syndrome of menopause. Do you think it's still that underlying fear or do we just not know any better as clinicians? I have thought about this a lot because there's a movement now in the last four or five months that started with a paper with Dr. Lu and then it went with a number of other papers, a paper by Kim and Munster called Estrogens and Breast Cancer. And they go, oh, well, now that we know that estrogen is not the culprit, what went on? It's progesterone. And it's not just synthetic progestin. No, no, no. It's our woman-made, naturally made progesterone. And all that estrogen did was upregulate it and it's progesterone. I think it all comes back to follow the money because synthetic progestins, here, old or women are said with the timing hypothesis that's absolutely ridiculous. And in fact, David Rosensweet, David Brownstein and Dr. Holly Papineck and myself this Thursday night are going to give a free discussion on the fragile nonsense of the timing hypothesis. Older women are told you can't have hormones. Everybody else now can have hormones, but you can't have hormones. But what do we make available over the counter and any drugstore for a young woman to walk in and purchase, birth control? And those are the proven causation of the increased incidence of earlier breast cancer in younger women, which has been starting since 2016. And it means women under 50 have a higher incidence now of getting breast cancer in one of the driving factors. There's a number, but one of the driving factors is the synthetic hormones in birth control, but they're available over the counter. So the whole thing is rigged. It's rigged. David Brownstein and I, we talk to ourselves, we go, why is this like this? It's got to be BS. It's BS. It's total ES. Now they're going to vilify progesterone as they've vindicated estrogen and another thing, when I wrote safe hormones, smart women, at that time, there were about 100 articles that showed that the level of progesterone in your blood, before you went into any breast surgery, breast cancer surgery, like a mastectomy, a lumpectomy, a lymph adnectomy where they take your lymph nodes out, a sentinel node biopsy. If your progesterone is at least at a high luteal phase, the highest phase that a woman normally makes or higher, when they track those women for years after the surgery, the women with a higher level of progesterone had less recurrence, had better survival, fared better. If they did have a recurrence, they had a less aggressive recurrence. They tended to die from it less. So that came, all those articles, I published that book in 2010. And then when I started looking for those articles over the last few years, they were gone out of PubMed. They're gone. PubMed is usurped. They're gone. I could only find one or two. And it all started, I look in 2011, a year after I published my book. So I started sleuthing. I sleuth on PubMed. I'm so glad you're coming out with a new version of PubMed because they're so upset with how our PubMed has been bought and sold now by Big Pharma and money interests. So it turns out that there was a paper that said, we know that progesterone protects against cancers, not just breast cancer, but multiple cancers. I mean, if you look up progesterone, and I don't know if they're still there, but there were a number of articles showing how it can protect against multiple cell lines of multiple cancers. And they said, so what you ought to do is take a depoprovera shot before a surgery. And now we know that causes megioma, it causes bone loss that can't totally be retrieved. It's a horrific, horrific, but convenient form of contraception. And ever since that 2011 article that came out saying, progesterone's good, use our pharmacology baster, you know, we'll make money with our shareholders if you buy this form of synthetic progestin. And then all the other articles started to disappear. It's follow the money. And who misses out but women? And I'm tired of women missing out. I had breast cancer 30 plus years ago, 33 years ago. I love that I can't even remember exactly how long ago it's been because I'm a DES daughter. And at the age I got it is when multiple DES daughters got it. And I helped that lawsuit, the class action suit be able to be made, although I had already written off because I couldn't have children from being exposed to DES in the womb. So I'd already written off on that class action suit. But then I got together with Sybil Shane Wilder, a lawyer in New York. And now if a DES daughter does get breast cancer, we know about this link. But I have been on hormones. I waited two, three years and then I couldn't wait any longer because I had so much many hot flashes and so many issues. And everybody told me I was going to die. Even the functional friends that I have, they all said you're nuts. You're totally nuts. But when I read the science, the science didn't show that. It showed protection. And in fact, I'm actually putting on with David Brownstein the third weekend in April. God, this is such a huge undertaking. I need to get my head examined. All my friends that are still ambulatory are sipping my ties by a potion somewhere. And I'm putting on this 20 hour CME category one for MDs and nurse practitioners called everything breast cancer. And we are going to show how hormones can be used in breast cancer patients. How estrogen is not the culprit. And what else you can do. We've got Dr. Seyfried who came up with the metabolic. We've got Rebecca Glasser who's done all of the pivotal 20 year research of using testosterone. Why should any triple negative breast cancer patient ever be denied it if you're worried that ER positive, PR positive, it means that they're fueled by those hormones. So we're putting on that conference. And in doing the deep dive in the science for all of that, besides living it myself, is that estrogen really helps keep tumor growth down. And when estrogen becomes dysfunctional, that's when tumor growth can occur. And most of that occurs because of chronic inflammation. There's triggers. And you know about all these because you were the metabolic queen before the intermittent fasting queen and now you're the duck queen. So you know about all these, but there's triggers that make estrogen dysfunctional. And then they just came out with papers. Even the menopause society has backed this in the last month and a half. That the women who have the most susceptibility to breast cancer in the whole world, as well as other cancers, the Brock gene carrier. This Brock BRCA, did I get that spelling right? One and two are tumor suppressor genes. We want them functional because they help us, if we get a tumor cell, get rid of it. But if they get dysfunctional, we have a weakened system to clear out cancer cells. So they're born with a genetic glitch in one of their sets of tumor suppressor genes because there's other tumor suppressor genes. But they have the highest incidence. They have 45 to 85% increased incidence of breast cancer over any other woman at all. And they've just come out with literature that if they go on estrogen, usually though it's even better after they get their ovaries removed. But even without their ovaries removed, they have better survival and less chance of getting estrogen. And I wrote about this in Safe Hormones, Smart Women. I have a chapter on this because the science was available 25 years ago. But because hormones are back because of Marty McCary, now that science could come forward. Thank you so much. I'm only going to be so pissed off at you that you waited this many years. He waited to get into a pivotal position, I think is really the deal. I have a lot of admiration for him. And they were really told they'd lose their careers if they opened their mouths. So it's changing. But it's such a mess. Everybody's so frightened. Most of the doctors in practice have had no training at all in hormones. We're so reactive. Med school stopped teaching hormones after the women's health initiative. Posteropathic schools, nature-pathic schools, most nature paths, not all, are anti-hormones. And it's human to be down on what you're not up on. So if you have no training and someone asks to, hey, doc, I heard all this good stuff of hormones and I was wondering if they're OK for me. You're usually going to hear, you know, I don't think, if you were my wife, I really wouldn't do it because they don't know anything about it. You can't ask someone who's not trained in this and you can't ask them to test your hormones because they're a whole nother terrain of complications and nuances. So you have to go to someone who's well trained in hormones so you can both be giving yourself the best chance to be the best version of you. If you're in your 40s and 50s and feel like your body suddenly stopped responding the way that it used to, you're not imagining it. Reloading, waking, sleep disruptions, food sensitivities and unpredictable energy are incredibly common in perimenopause and menopause. But here's what most people aren't told. Your gut microbiome is changing right alongside your hormones. And those changes can influence everything from how you store fat to how well you sleep to how your body processes estrogen. That's exactly why I wrote my new book, The Menopause Gut. In this book, I walk you through the science of how the microbiome, metabolism, immune system and hormones are all connected during midlife. But most importantly, I give you practical, realistic strategies you can start using right away without extreme diets or complicated protocols. You'll learn why the same diet that worked in your 30s may not work now, how your gut influences hot flashes, mood and weight, the truth about fiber, protein and blood sugar in midlife and the daily habits that help your body feel safe, stable and resilient again. If you're tired of blaming yourself for changes that are actually biological, this book will help you understand what's really happening and what to do about it. You can pre-order The Menopause Gut wherever books are sold and when you do, be sure to check out the special pre-order bonuses I've put together for you. Again, you can go to www.CynthiaTherlo.com. You'll click on the banner. It'll take you to multiple options for where you can order The Menopause Gut in pre-sale. If you're a woman in midlife or beyond, you'll probably notice those changes in energy, strength and recovery just don't feel like they used to. And what's frustrating is that for many women, this happens even when you're eating well, lifting weights, prioritizing protein and doing all the right things. You're not lazy, you're not unmotivated and you're not doing anything wrong. A big part of what's changing actually starts inside your cells. As we age or mitochondria, the energy-producing structures inside our cells become less efficient and when mitochondrial function declines, it can show up as lower energy, slower recovery, reduced muscle strength and feeling less resilient overall. This is a normal part of aging physiology and it's one of the reasons midlife can feel so different. And that's why I've added Mytopure gummies from timeline nutrition into my daily routine. Mytopure is the only clinically proven form of urolithin A, a compound shown in human clinical trials to support mitochondrial renewal. In simple terms, it helps your cells do a better job of making energy and when your cells have more energy, your body is able to support strength, endurance and recovery as you age. What I appreciate most about Mytopure is that it's foundational, not flashy. This isn't a stimulant or a quick fix, it's a daily habit that supports how your body actually works at the cellular level. And the gummies make it easy. They're just two sugar-free gummies per day. They're vegan and cleanly formulated. They're independently tested and certified for quality. And if supporting your energy, muscle health and overall resilience as you move through perimenopause and menopause is important to you, Mytopure is worth considering. You want to go to timelinenutrition.com slash Cynthia and use code CynthiaTHERLO for 20% off your order. Again, that's timeline.com slash Cynthia and use code CynthiaTHERLO for 20% off your Mytopure gummies. Well, I feel so fortunate. Number one, I've been following your work for many years, but I always feel like you're way ahead of the curve. You're always making me think and I'm so grateful for that and I hope my community members, when they're listening to this podcast, are going to understand that the tides are changing in our, to our advantage, but it also means there's still a lot of work that needs to be done. And to your point about this fear around prescribing hormones, getting hormones to be at adequate amount of levels to be able to protect our bodies is so important. And when I was reading your new book, that's all about oxytocin, I learned so much about oxytocin. In fact, I jokingly say like the way that you know that I've really enjoyed a book, I fold pages over and there's a lot of, there's a lot of color. I used to do my ovaries, dance around with joy. Yes. Yeah. So I was actually screenshotting it. I had a conversation yesterday with my own integrative medicine physician and I said, you know, I want to show you this one section that I think is really important, not just for me, but also for other patients that are at the stage of life that I'm at. So he went and bought it and everyone I've been, I taught a class last night and I said, for anyone that's interested in what I'm reading, I said, this book needs to be available for every woman listening. I think it is so critically important. I think that oxytocin is thought of solely in the philosophy around like it's a bonding hormone. It's excreted when we are, when we have an orgasm, it's so important for, you know, hugging and caring for others and breastfeeding. Let's talk about, there's so much more to oxytocin than this overly simplistic perspective that I think so many of us have had for such a long period of time because you really make the argument that oxytocin medically and physiologically is so important, not just for where we are at this stage of life, but throughout our lifetimes and how it is diffusely excreted throughout the body, even in the gut microbiome. And there's so much beauty and symphony to the body. Let's unpack oxytocin because I think everyone that's listening is going to come away from this conversation with a really newfound appreciation and understanding of this incredibly important and sometimes, you know, malign kind of minor hormone, but I would make the argument that it's a major hormone. It's a hormone where we need to be much more vested and enthusiastic about supporting. I love that. So oxytocin is the hormone of community, humanity, and it welcomes the new baby to planet Earth. So not only is it an orgasm hormone, but it's the hormone of birth. It has many job descriptions, but one of them is it's a contractile hormone. It helps things contract. So at birth, it helps the uterus contract so the baby can be pushed out and then it helps the breast contract for the milk to come down. But because of that, the baby is a wash in oxytocin if the mother can make it and if the mother can make it right. And who knew that oxytocin was the most vulnerable to pollution and chemicals and pesticides and heavy metals of any other hormone? You know, one of my major books was one of the very first books on endocrine disruption, which is how I got invited to be a distinguished hormone scholar at that, I call it a think tank. I don't know if my mentors there would call it a think tank, but they were the scientists who came up with the field of endocrine disruption. And we worked a lot with the scientists that discovered how hormones first work, Elwood Jensen and Yanaki Gustafson. They discovered the first receptors and so forth. So it was a real hotbed of hormone academics. But oxytocin drenches the brand new baby. It's supposed to tell the baby, welcome to a friendly planet earth that wants you to be born and wants you to be friendly and connected and be part of your community, of which we're seeing the exact opposite now. We're seeing people that are just velcroed to their screens. They don't really want to talk. They only want to text. And we have lots of anger and polarization. And I make the case that oxytocin is secreted in our bodies all throughout our lives. It's supposed to be pulsed out every three minutes. And it's not because it's under attack. And you also need a lot of vitamin C. You need a lot of magnesium. You need a number of other hormones to be working optimally because it's a team hormone player and a high maintenance hormone player. And also oxytocin lines the entire gut. It helps along with thyroid and fiber to help food go through you. In fact, it's one of the ways I started using it for the gut because after you eat a meal, a healthy gut will make a rise in oxytocin to help the stomach squeeze food through. And there's a condition that there's no treatment for. And it's very prominent in diabetes called gastroparesis. So I started thinking, well, why can't I just give oxytocin to these people? There's no treatment. They're just miserable. They're tired of eating just mushy food. And it helps in quite a bit of people which got me to converse with some Netherland scientists because they were doing the studies on intractable constipation and gastroparesis. And then that got me to start using it for esophageal disorders, which it's incredibly good to get you off of the antacids and not be on them for life and to heal disrupted Z-lines. And a lot of it's just incredible. You can use it in a lot of ways. In fact, the last chapter of this book is how providers can write prescriptions for many multiple conditions. But it's one of the main hormones that protects blood sugar. So the islet cells, the alpha and the beta, the alpha cells are covered 100% with receptors for oxytocin. The beta cells are covered 96%. So if you've got a brittle diabetic and you give them oxytocin, you won't get rid of the diabetes. But you'll make the quality of their life and their immune system a lot better because your immune cells all have receptors for oxytocin. So I got introduced to oxytocin about 17 years ago now, I guess, is I'm not very good with years. And I've been using it in practice for quite a long time. I even opened an oxytocin company because it's available OTC over the counter up to 15 international units. It comes in international units. And young people get very much smaller international units and older people or very larger people get larger international units. But three months after we opened the company, the FDA came out with a new law that you could I did it with a compounding pharmacy in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, because I was working there at the time and Tulsa. And three months after we opened the business, which was gangbusters, the first few months, it just took off like crazy. The FDA came out and said, you can't ship to other states from a compounding pharmacy unless you also have a license that you have to renew every single year in all of those states. So they really, it's the way of putting compounding pharmacists down because they're competition with big pharma. So that was really sad. And it's always been very inexpensive. And just recently, the price of skyrocketed only because of the demand of skyrocketed. It's really sad. But I was a keynote speaker at a pharmacology symposium in Calgary, Canada about two years ago, three years ago now. And they said that during COVID, they couldn't get a hold of pitocin for their mothers that couldn't contract their uteruses, which that's a whole nother discussion. So they ordered it from Walmart. Oh, geez. And Walmart had 12 international units and it worked so well that they stopped and it was so much cheaper, like $26, $30 a bottle, which it's not anymore. They continued to use Walmart's oxytocin well after they still could get access to pitocin because pitocin has a lot more issues because one of the characteristics that makes oxytocin work well is when it's pulsed. It's a pulsatile peptide hormone and it pulses. If it's not pulsed, the receptors that receive its signal like little satellite dishes, they wither and become dysfunctional. So there are some papers from some forward thinking OBGYNs who took a look at the number of ADHD and autistic kids that came from moms that were given pitocin during the birth process. And there was an increased incidence in some of the studies. I discussed this in the book. But because the baby's body is drenching it, and oxytocin protects all these cells before the first feeding because birth is a very pro-oxidative event. The baby is just filled with pro-oxidation. It's just like a big inflammation and oxytocin just cools everything down and makes all the cells ready and waiting and healthy for that very first milk, ideally from the mom. But it's not working that way anymore. And we have countries fighting each other and we have Americans fighting each other and we've got kids going into schools shooting each other. And I think, of course, it's multifactorial. But I do think that one of the issues is that our oxytocin, our hormone of human connection, isn't working that well anymore. And that's why I think detox has to move mainstream prior to getting pregnant if you really want healthy children. I can't wait. I've been calling for green pregnancies or insurance reimbursed detox centers for women to enter if you want to have a child because chemicals give you a risk of a much more unhealthy child. And your hormones work better that run the whole show of all the genes getting set up to form that child and form their future. So there's ways you could do it without going to a detox center. And I did make a detox product for this very point, especially since I worked with a scientist who discovered the first receptors. And their lectures began sounding naturopathic because hormones need nutrients and good gut health to function optimally. It's not as simple as throwing a hormone at a system. And they also talked about if the satellite dish, the receptor, and now we know hormones also signal to membranes if cell membranes. Because pollutants love fat. Cell membranes are great if fat. Receptors are made of fat. And they're binding pockets. They're pockets. So if chemicals sit in those pockets, you don't get a healthy response. They call it competitive inhibition. And Lynn Goldman and Linda Birnbaum and I worked for Physicians for Social Responsibility and wrote a paper in the late 1990s on all the etiologies, demigrop diabetes. And we said endocrine disruption was a big part of it. It's not just eating sugary foods. If you're insulin, which is a hormone, if that receptor is filled with pesticides and herbicides and weed and glyphosate and heavy metals, your blood sugar is going to be a problem for you. And then everything's going to be a problem for you. That really disarms estrogen and makes you more at risk of cancer. So we wrote a paper early on about how the outside toxic environment makes hormones dysfunctional. And of course, the biggest hormone is the hormone of evolution. And of community. We are meant to be communal. And we're not now. We're fighting each other in families, in cities, in cultures. And I think that part of that is oxytocin. But then I also go into the book how it can be used for weight loss or weight gain. It's an appetite adaptogen. It could be used for pain, et cetera. So I just had a patient who had intractable bone cancer pain. And there's a study where they gave it as an epidural to a bone, intractable pain cancer patient with bone cancer. And it was able to make their life have a higher quality of life, even though they were on hospice. So it's a very versatile hormone because the baby is meant to be drenched in it. All the cells are prepared to just slurp it all up. But it's being disarmed and assaulted. Today's world is kryptonite to our healthy hormones, which is at Tulane at the Center for Bioenvironmental Research where I worked. We were all asking ourselves, is gender bending coming down the road? Because our hormones are so assaulted by all these chemicals. But nobody, I haven't heard anybody talk about that. And that's because Tyrone Hayes, the integrative biologist at Berkeley, who was the first scientist to note this because he would expose pregnant frogs to Atrazine, which we use Atrazine more than any other country in the world, many other countries have banned it. He could make them hermaphroditic. He could change their sex. They were all, they were gender bending. And then he got assaulted. His two daughters got threatened. He was given a lawsuit. Everyone saw with somebody who stood up against the chemical companies what they faced with the assault. And I think people got really frightened by all that. But if you want a healthy child, if you want a healthy body, you need your hormones to be healthy. And it's multifactorial, but detox is a big important part as well as gut, biome and nutrient status. Everything is like a big tapestry. I love that you have such a expansive perspective on these issues. When we talk about detoxification, obviously there are, there are items in place, whether it's breathing, urination, defecation, elimination, all of these processes that are complicated by our toxic modern day lifestyles. And so most of our listeners are north of 35, so they may or may not be outside that preconception stage or age. But if you were speaking to not only women thinking about pregnancy, but also women in middle age, who I feel like that toxin bucket, if you will, that exposure probably is hitting a threshold in middle age when perimenopause happens. I don't want to say hits because it sounds pejorative, but when perimenopause starts for a lot of women, maybe that's the first time in their lives that they're starting to think more thoughtfully about things that they're exposed to in their environment, their personal care products, their food, because it just becomes a time in our lives. I always say the word pause is designed to make us pause and reflect on our choices and our experiences. But maybe that might be the first time that a woman's really thinking about what shampoo am I using, what types of food am I purchasing, just thinking more thoughtfully. When we talk about detoxification, let's give some perspective how this accumulates over time and how this can negatively impact our hormones. And again, perimenopause, I think about as a fragile time, preconception, discussions are obviously a very fragile time. How would you counsel women or how would you make them gain some awareness around these kinds of concerns? Well, I think that's a great question. First of all, thank you for asking that. Many of us are now getting the memo that food makes a difference, exercise makes a difference, sleep makes a difference, people are tracking their sleep on their aurora rings. But your house would be a mess if you didn't have regular cleaning of your house and your body is your most critical and important house. And it has to be able to clean up on a regular basis and there's autophilogic processes and that's why you love the diva of intermittent fasting because it boosts cleansing is one of the big things that it does. But the problem is, is a lot of these chemicals just adore fat and they store in fat and now we have so much non-g... So hormones now can signal all cell membranes and that's called non-genomic signaling because they're not looking for the binding pocket, they just signal the membrane and that initiates the cascade. But if you have chemicals in the fat, oxytocin signals there, parathyroid, insulin, estrogen, they all signal in fat now. They're all... We know every single hormone can signal membranes, which every cell in your body has a cell membrane. So hormones aren't just relegated to a lock and a key theory where a hormone is seeking out the center of the cell, the cytoplasm of the cell, the receptor. At the same time, these hormone signals are so important, the ones that hit receptors, which are genomic signaling, which directly signal the genes to tell your local tissues what to do, that they're in the shape of a pocket, like a Italian purse made of fine squishy, just delicious, soft leather. So they can be jammed with stuff like you can jam in your wallet and your iPad and you can fill things up in a pocket. Well, if chemicals go into those pockets, your hormones can't go into those pockets. So it doesn't matter if your hormone levels look great in your saliva, your blood, or your urine, they have to be functional. Cell medicine is about cellular functions being functional and hormones need to be functional and receptors need to be functional. So we live in a dirty world and if your membranes and your pockets are filled up with part of the dirtiness that we all inhale 24-7 in our air, food, water, amniotic fluid, breast milk, it's everywhere. They say that we now take in, I don't know if this is accurate or not, like a credit card worth a plastic in our body a month. Plastics fill up the binding pockets and they can make the cell membranes rigid so that the hormones can't float on through the three layers of lipid in the cell membranes and allow those enzyme cascades to occur. So hormones run the Wi-Fi of your body. That's a great way of thinking of them. They deliver the emails that tells cells what to do to keep you the best version of you. But this Wi-Fi freezes up if your cell membranes are filled with gunk and your binding pockets, which literally look like a big purse to let all those signals come in because nature didn't want you to miss out on these signals of life, then if your binding pockets are filled with chemicals that are not healthy for you and your cell membranes are rigidified by trans fatty acids, ultra processed foods and chemicals that aren't healthy for you, your hormones don't work and then you are very vulnerable to illness, to weight gain, everything from weight gain and dysfunctional cognition to cancer and earlier aging and premature mortality. The Wi-Fi of your system freezes up and when your Wi-Fi freezes it sets you up for disease, pathology or it sets you up for aging. A big part of aging is having less and less hormone signals. That's why you're at the campus where we started this conversation, shrinks. Now some women say, in fact a lot of women who are still really frightened of hormones, like I belong now to a Mahjong group and nobody's my age anymore doing my stuff so they're all like 10, 15 years younger than me but they're wonderful people and none of them, they all go, so how do you do this? How do you, I had a birthday party when I turned 77 and I had all these friends at this wonderful restaurant and Terry says to me, so how do you accomplish this? How do you look like this and act like this and how do you have that energy? And I said, well a big part of it is hormones at the right dosage but you could see the look in their eye. They kind of step back because they're frightened to death and they don't believe it. So they think, as many think, I will age gracefully if mother nature meant for me to have hormones at this age, she would have given them to me and I'm going to eat good food and I'm going to join Arthur Murray dance class and move. So Yale was wondering this because it's all about, it starts with your hippocampus because that's your seat of who you are. So they created a study called the Med-X study. Med stood for meditation and ex ex stood for exercise because people think well if I'm more centered and I live a conscious life, a mindful life and I exercise, I'm going to slow down the Mack truck of aging because aging picks up speed, each decade picks up speed. So they ran the study and they took a large number of people, I can't remember exactly the number of people in the study, but they had them exercise about 150 minutes a week with some high interval burst and they also had them meditate like an average of three or four hours a week and they measured their hippocampus every single month. The normal hippocampus after the age of 40 starts to shrink a percent a year because hormones maintain the volume of the hippocampus and digestible minerals like magnesium. So they had this large group of people that they had a lot of control over to make sure that they were exercising and make sure that they were meditating. Like my friends at dinner at my birthday would lean back because they're exercising and they're good people so they're going to age as best as they can. They don't need hormones. Hormones are just way too confusing and scary. Nobody had any improvement in hippocampal volume. The meditators and the exercisers lost a percent per period of time that they assessed by functional MRI. You can be mindful and you can exercise, which is all good. You should it's not like these things are bad, but if you want to really slow down aging, you got to keep your hippocampal volume and you got to keep your hormones on board. Otherwise you'll age at the way most people age, which they really accelerate when they hit their 70s. And if that's okay with you, there's nothing wrong with that. You get to choose how you want to be and if it's way too scary, you don't need to do it, but it's sad because you can live longer, younger, better when you know how to use these tools that are available if you go to the right educated providers. Well, and I think that's really key is that as I kind of look at the landscape as someone who has the ability to prescribe and see patients and I've been in this space for a long on time, I still think there's a degree of conservativeness with regard to replacing hormones. I think that things are improving in terms of greater awareness. I think women that listen to this podcast take good information and find good providers that can provide them with the level of care that they're looking for. But I think the bigger picture is it's very hard for people in their 40s or 50s to imagine what life is like as they're getting older. I'm always thinking of it from the context of what were some of my patients like that were doing really, really well in their 70s and 80s and there were consistent things that I saw in both clinic and the hospital. What were the consistent things of the people who were achieving it? Yes. Well, it was they had real hobbies. They were still, you know, I had this one patient, she was 87 years old and she would take her iPad tablet with her to office visits and we would record and talk about things and she would explain to me what she did when she went home. She would record our conversation with permission, of course. She would take notes. She would then discuss it with her family. She would come back with more questions. I think people are afraid of technology and there's so many benefits to technology, but she was doing mahjong. She was dancing. She was still taking art classes. She was doing yoga. Even though she was in this retirement period, she said, I'm still learning. I'm still taking classes. I think there's this intellectual piece that we have to continue to facilitate irrespective of what life stage we are. So being this lifelong learner, she was like, I'm always learning and I'm always finding people interesting and I want to go to dinner and I want to go to plays and I still like to travel. On the other side of that, I would see people sometimes younger than me, Lindsay, that were in the hospital, had a catastrophic issue, couldn't get off a bedside toilet because they had no muscle mass. I used to explain, we recognize that muscle is this organ of longevity and how important it is, but the research is starting to come out that the more muscle mass you have, the better longevity markers, the more neurocognitive quality of life. Exactly. I think that we think of it as this physicality piece. Yet I would explain to patients, yes, people think about muscle and how beautiful muscle is, but what muscle is helping you afford for yourself long term is that you don't become frail because frailty leads to falls and falls leads to a lack of independence. So those are the things that I'm thinking of now with greater urgency at 54 than I ever did before. Oh, you're just a guppy. You're just a little guppy and you've done so much and it's amazing. You've done incredible work, but you're so young. I think of fifties as just the beginning of it all. And it's funny, I was getting my nails done somewhere and the woman next to me was really bemoaning and very ... Then she told everybody, my birthdays today, I turned 40, my life is over. Oh my goodness. And I saw the old way we looked at it. We used to give black party favors and this neck as your life was down. Well, and that's when your hormones really go downhill as 40 and after. That's why that demarcation. But if you know all these different things to do, you can slow down the MAC truck of time. But if you say, I'm going to age gracefully and you don't use some of the tools that we know like building up muscle mass and hormone health and cardiorespiratory fitness, which isn't just walking. He's good, but it's not enough to really push that needle. Then you really can. Just when you're starting to have a little money in the bank, I know inflation is harsh. We're having a lot of money in the bank, but you're 60s and 70s where you just start having more money in the bank. You look at having more time and more life and it's a terrible thing to fall apart just at that time when aging is a sweet spot. I see aging portrayed in movies and TV as doddering old fools and everybody's got erectile dysfunction and they just don't know what's going ... And that's not aging at all in my world. These are incredible sacred crones that are just aging this phenomenal. This is this decade, this seventh decade is the best sex I've ever had in my entire life and the best connection, the best workouts, the best dancing, the best community and my book Oxy-Tosin Medicine has come out and I'm working on three, four other books and it's an absolutely extraordinary time that I get to be all that I can be without joining the army but with having these foundational things underneath but you just have to ... It's a strategy. You have to decide to be strategic and then decide what are those strategies make sense to you and are doable for you because you don't want to do something you hate to do. But my boyfriend from high school just died two weeks ago and my dance partner in Santa Fe just died the week before that and you start getting into this era where people who have lived differently age more rapidly and go on to the next in the sky. I prefer to still be living out loud enjoying life to the fullest but I need to be strategic to pull that off. Same with you. Are you feeling off at night waking up more tired than when you went to bed? It's not just stress. It's our bodies navigating the hormonal changes that occur in the perimenopause to menopause transition. Years ago I used to lie awake worrying, tossing and turning only to wake up feeling super exhausted and poor sleep made everything else from focus to mood and digestion even harder the next day. Ever since I started using bi-optimizer's magnesium breakthrough to my nightly routine I feel more settled and ready for rest. For me it helps provide relaxation and calm at bedtime without any groggyness the next morning. And what I love is that it's a blend of seven forms of magnesium designed to support relaxation and overall sleep quality. And unlike other supplements it uses multiple forms of magnesium to support your body more broadly and it comes with a 365 day money back guaranteed. If you want to feel more rested head to bi-optimizer's and use code synthia15 to get 15% off of any order. Again that's bi-optimizer's b-i-o-p-t-i-m-i-z-e-r-s dot com slash synthia and use code synthia15 to get 15% off of any order. And if you subscribe not only will you get amazing discounts and free gifts you will make sure your monthly supply is always guaranteed. Absolutely. I'd love to touch on the role of oxytocin and gut health. Obviously a lot of my work now is very focused on the gut microbiome and the changes that happen in perimenopause and menopause. How does oxytocin actually influence like digestion and you touched on gut motility and the gut brain access. Things that I think are really important to kind of reinforce as we're talking about your incredible book oxytocin medicine but bring it back to that gut health piece which I think is in many instances kind of neglected in the menopause and perimenopause space. Well said and good luck with you with that book. I'm sure it's going to be well received because you're so brilliant and you do such great work and so I'd love that we all support each other in our work because we know how hard it is and how solo writing a book is and God bless you for doing that work. So we know that there are triggers that take the way our body works and subtly make it go the wrong direction not the right direction. My grandmother used to say there's a right way and a wrong way. She was from Russian. She'd say it with a really thick Russian accent and our body the cells can work in a right way or a wrong way and there are triggers that influence cells to go down the wrong way and that occurs greatly in the gut and one of the triggers is inflammation. In fact in my new up and coming everything breast cancer which I would really recommend that you recommend your providers to take because everybody's scared to death of hormones but certainly scared to death of them with hormonally driven illnesses and women also with genetic cardiovascular issues like factor five liden. So we're going to be covering all high risk patients and how you can use hormones in those patients but one of the ways your hormones work best is when they're not inflamed and if you have excessive inflammation the hormones that should protect you start to be the hormones that could make you more vulnerable to disease. So decreasing excessive inflammation along the lining of the gut is really important and oxytocin is an antioxidant anti-inflammatory hormone in the gut which then allows your biome to not get so disrupted. It also works best friends with thyroid and estrogen. Those are the three hormone musketeers and together they oversee the health of the lining of the gut. We think of the thyroid as overseeing transit time well so does oxytocin and so does estrogen and we know that women when they have less estrogen or they're replaced with estrogen they have less colorectal cancer and colorectal cancer starts to occur when you have more inflammation in the gut and if you go and get your colonoscopy and you're somebody that has a lot of polyps that are forming you have excessive inflammation in your gut and you also are insufficient in folate and estrogen receptor beta signals. The second estrogen receptor the one discovered by Yanake Gustafson that I got to work with a lot of Tulane and he comes from Sweden's version of Harvard the Karelinska Institute. He discovered ER beta and they call it beta because it's alpha is the first in the Greek alphabet and then beta is the second. But now we know that there's like 10, 12 new estrogen receptors. It's a happening new field but most people don't realize all that. So he discovered the second estrogen receptor and he said when estrogen receptor beta the second estrogen receptor is signaled it decreases inflammation and it decreases cancer events that you know lead to and he said on the 20th anniversary because he discovered it in 1995 I think was when he discovered it on the 20th anniversary of it he wrote a paper saying why isn't this being used for cancer? It's an anti-cancer estrogen. It should be used in breast cancer should be used in glioblastoma that's why when a woman gets hormone replacement therapy you want to see if estriol should be added to the estrodol because that mostly signals ER beta and if you're a candidate because not everybody is for testosterone. I mean testosterone is now being used by Rebecca Glasser to treat and her partner Demetricacus in Greece and I've recently sent quite a number of patients to them and I'm kind of learning how they practice and they use testosterone but it's because it's metabolites DHT and 3 beta adiol they signal estrogen receptor beta. So oxytocin helps estrogen receptor beta work better in the gut and you don't get polyps if you have enough estrogen receptor beta in the gut. You don't get colorectal cancer. One of the first steps in colorectal cancer is the loss of all estrogen receptor beta signals to the colon wall. Oh my goodness this is like amazing. This is amazing to learn. This gives us a lot of tools as a provider to work with to keep somebody safer and to know what to do but most providers aren't aware of all of this. In fact there's a number of gynecologists on Instagram who are saying that Estriol shouldn't be used. It's dangerous and it's immunosuppressive so actually David Rosensweet and I he was actually one of my doctors when I had breast cancer 33 years ago and now he's in the hormone space and he started the International Institute of Bioidentical Hormones and there's quite a number of us in it and I'm in it so he was helped me out when I had breast cancer and now we're in the hormone space together. We've been lifelong dear friends now so we did a debate on a podcast on Karen Martell's podcast with a surgeon Janet Yamaguchi I think was her name and also this other gynecologist that I'm not going to mention because we kept saying where is the paper that you could show us that Estriol has issues in its tissues. No paper. No paper at all but huge following online saying Estriol is dangerous where Estriol helps us fight cancer helps us fight inflammation and we can promote Estriol signaling is especially important in the gut. ER beta signaling controls the health of the lining of the gut. Oxytocin works with ER beta in the lining of the gut to make the gut stay healthy. Wow, wow, wow. That's incredible knowledge to know and knowledge is power. Yeah and it's so interesting because as I was reading the book you talk about how oxytocin protects the gut from trauma after colonoscopy so as someone that gets colonoscopies every five years because I have a bad family history of precancerous polyps I've never had a polyp. You mentioned it protects stem cells, healthy transit time and I kept thinking I just got my every five year colonoscopy in December and we understand the disruption in the microbiome that happens after colonoscopy prep and it's transitory but still I was like oh my gosh had I known six weeks ago, eight weeks ago this could have been part of my post colonoscopy way of getting my microbiome optimized a little faster than with my kind of traditional stuff that I typically will do. I love hearing that you know my dad had colorectal cancer and I was exposed heavily to DES my first trimester so I have a body that's set up to be a problem. My body's on a razor's edge so I had breast cancer and then I had a kidney tumor and had to have a nephrectomy and I have many many polyps and every one of my family has a lot of polyps so I get colonoscopies every three years which I have to have because every time they go in there I've got a lot of polyps so I take a lot of methylfolate and B vitamins and I take a lot of oxytocin and I take liquid oxytocin so it'll go down my whole gut I mix it with mucolox the recipe or really you know the prescription is in the book and I use that quite a bit for patients with esophageal issues but also for myself after colonoscopy it's so soothing to take in mucolox and oxytocin now we have mucosal which is a little bit less expensive but we've been able to really reverse people who are told they have to be on antacids for life with giving these things because oxytocin does decrease the inflammation it does help estrogen protect the gut and at the bottom of your crypts so your gut renews itself faster than any other tissue in your body and right at the bottom of all these fingers villi and micro villi are these little crypts and these crypts of the production of the stem cells that make the brand new cells that go up like an elevator where they go up they're made at the bottom and then they travel all the way up to the top and they live for a few days and then they're shed so there's a lot of activity in your gut and it's a lot of if you're you there's a lot of potential for inflammation with how much activity there is and if you eat poor diet or you're under a lot of stress and you have a lot of cortisol just floating around you that that can damage it but oxytocin protects those stem cells that's what it does in the baby when it's drenched in oxytocin waiting for that first breastfeeding to be really you know recover from the pro oxidative event of birth and then be healthy till that first breastfeeding and then the breast milk is just filled with oxytocin to continue that protection so oxytocin is a major protector of the gut but nobody's been looking at it like that they look at it as a cuddle hormone a love hormone pregnancy hormone but it's so much more and that's why I decided I had to write this book I'm working on a number of other books and it's a little bit overwhelming because I'm putting on these conferences and I'm still seeing patients although in a diminished capacity but I spend two hours on my first intake with my patients and then I spend an hour writing up their notes I make them like a major paper to guide their I don't act as a primary care provider but I act as a consultant so a lot of times even the provider will come on the phone with me for the test results and this and that so there's a lot going on here and I still want time to dance and party and play mahjong and go kayaking so it's I try and be strategic so I could fit it in without feeling too stressed and most of the time I do well unless there's one of these big symposiums coming up and then that's challenging and I use a lot more oxytocin because it's antioxidant it's calm inflammation it tamps down cortisol cortisol is wonderful but in excess it's kryptonite so you don't want excess stress hormone and oxytocin helps keep cortisol at a wonderful stage versus a kryptonite stage so oxytocin is just hardly anybody really understands its value clinically and you know we never know when our expiration date is up but I knew I had to put out a book on oxytocin before my expiration date and I feel I have a number of other books left but you just never know so I'm glad I did get this one out and it is important and I appreciate really being able to have this intelligent very deep conversation with you about how we can better protect ourselves in a much more vulnerable toxic world well and I think this is one of these books like as a clinician as a middle-aged woman I found it fascinating as I mentioned you can always tell if I really enjoyed a book I'm you know earmarking pages and using my highlighter just like a good a good student a student of life please let listeners know how to connect with you outside of this podcast how to get access to your expansive breath of work learn more about you and work directly with you my website is drlindsayberkson.com drlindseyberkson if you want to be a patient you could sign up at the consult section and I have a very small patient practice right now and I basically work with people in the field of the symposiums I'm putting on and so forth and if you want to hear a lot of what's going on you can sign up for my sub-stack I write agile thinking about I do the last 50 years or so I've been in practice one way or another like 54 years and I wake up in the morning and I dive into the medical literature looking at nutrition and hormones in the environment and the gut and just keep so it's nice to have this lineage because when something comes up you can connect the dots back so many decades and kind of understand this bigger picture understanding the bigger picture is always so helpful and anything so if you want to be part of my community you can read some of them for free or you can enjoy it because there's a lot of work and it would be really nice to have people support me in that work and you could if you do become a subscriber then you could ask questions and we have a little bit of interaction and then I also have a newsletter if you go to my website you can sign up and we let you know when there's free evenings like this evening that's coming up I don't think this podcast will be aired before this Thursday night but we're this Thursday night we're giving a free evening of why can't old ladies get on hormones is the timing hypothesis real or not and then we give time for you to ask questions and we're going to give two or three more free of those over the next few months so we send out in our newsletter which is free things that are going on in updates about the sub stacks that have been written and then I have a wide number of books some of them are out of print some of them are in print I've really written I think coxytocin medicine is my 21st or 20 second book I think my first book was the foot book that was published by rodale and then I wrote healthy digestion the natural way that was published by Wiley that sold a million copies before they even started tracking books and I am working on a textbook called gut medicine I'm at page 800 but I put it on the shelf for a little bit it got so daunting but it's all about this love of this field and this exasperation that I was exposed to this terrible chemical in the womb that changed my entire course of my life I couldn't have children so my books are my children I invite you to meet them and I had multiple cancers a bath of blindness I had so many health issues I the healthiest person ever in between these horrible health issues because of the in-euro nasty imprinting that I got and medicine couldn't help me so I had to figure out how to help myself and I also became just a love of research and medicine and putting it all together it's truly been a love of mine and it's my mission you know you feel so good when you feel like you're living your purpose young people you know all going what's our purpose what am I doing in life I don't know young people today they don't say that as much as my peers did when I was young they go I want to make a cajillion dollars and hire by the time I'm 30 that is a recipe for early mortality man premature mortality I don't understand but I don't know if it's trends each generation has its trend but my generation beetles had just come back from the Maharishi and we thought was the dawning of the age of Aquarius we were all about consciousness and elevating the consciousness and drop out to drop in and you know we really were dedicated to trying to do things right and of course that didn't work out that well but I am of that era where my life is definitely this is my mission and it feels good to be on your mission it just makes all your cells have an isness that's more right than wrong and and we live in the duality world where there's dark and right and right and wrong so anything that can get you more on the side of right versus wrong from healthy gut biome to choices but it comes with knowledge and awareness because there's so many people out there saying that they have their finger on the pulse of accurate information and it's very difficult to figure out who's right and who's wrong and I've spent my life in research trying to help you make the decisions that are most right for you because I've had to do that for myself well I feel so honored to count you as a colleague and a friend and so grateful for the work that you do and I truly admire your expansive experiences work you challenge me and in wonderful ways intellectually and so thank you for everything that you do thank you for your time today and I look forward to seeing what you do next. What a lovely conversation plus by the way you have a really lovely voice. Oh thank you. Really you have a perfect podcast ambiance presence. Thank you. So thank you for having these conversations that people can get in on ways that they can then for themselves decide what's best versus what's not. Good luck everybody this life is a challenge on every level but let's meet it and let's be able to live it out loud so you have also a great experience of it not just being velcroed to fear. Let's really enjoy ourselves but the foundation is health and it's more challenging to accomplish but thank goodness for Cynthia that we get in on these conversations truly. Thank you. If you love this podcast episode please leave a rating and review subscribe and tell a friend.