Dr. Sarah Berry
speaker
566 appearances
3 recordings
3 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard 18 Dec
Dr. Sarah Berry’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Dec 2025 with 1.
Appearances
So there's two core areas we've been looking at at ZOE. One is we've been looking at the relationship between menopause and health, so disease. So we've been doing some deep dives into looking at how menopause is related to disease risk factors like blood pressure, like post-meal glucose responses, etc., And that's a study we published a couple of years ago.
And I'd love if we've got chance at some point to pick up on that, because I think it's great that we're talking about menopause more internationally. It's great that we're talking about symptoms. But what we mustn't forget is the impact that menopause also has on are disease risk related to metabolic diseases like cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes. But we can pick up on that later.
The main research that we published recently over the last few weeks is some research that we have been collecting data on for about three years, where we've been asking women at a given point in time, What are your menopause symptoms? And then taking lots and lots of other measures. This is part of our Zoe Predict study, and this is a huge cohort of individuals.
We have 200,000 individuals in total, some of whom we're following over a period of time. It's the largest in-depth nutrition and health study internationally. 70,000 of these individuals are perimenopausal women. We have about 30,000 that are perimenopausal and 40,000 that are postmenopausal.
And this is really important because a lot of research looking at menopause and looking at diet or looking at other health kind of related factors or symptoms actually just look at postmenopausal, like how does this diet affect postmenopausal women? What we've done is we've got this huge 30,000 individual perimenopausal cohort and these 40,000 postmenopausal cohort.
And this is important because we know that the menopause transition period, i.e. when you're going from pre to postmenopausal is a really important time, particularly in terms of symptoms. And I'd love to just quickly pick up on that just in case anyone's not so familiar with these different terms.
You don't go to bed one night and you're premenopausal and you wake up the next day and it's like, hey, I'm postmenopausal, great, it's all done. There's a transition period. And this transition period can last anywhere from two years to eight years for different individuals. On average, it probably lasts about three to four years, although it varies across different populations.
And during this transition period, this is when your oestrogen and other hormones start changing. But your oestrogen doesn't, again, just slowly decline in this lovely kind of linear way so that your body sort of gets used to it. It's like a hormonal roller coaster. It's like this chaotic time where your oestrogen is going up and down. It's fluctuating day to day.
Then what happens is, is eventually the estrogen kind of settles off at a low level. And that's the stage at which typically your periods will stop and then We classify women as being postmenopausal when they're one year past their last menstrual cycle. So one year past their last period. But that kind of five years before them becoming postmenopausal is this stage of hormonal chaos.
When you have these changes, these fluxes, et cetera, in oestrogen. So it's really important we look at symptoms in that perimenopausal phase, but really important we look at symptoms also postmenopausally. Because again, just because your oestrogen is no longer bouncing around, you do have very low oestrogen and it takes a while for your body to adjust to that.
So symptoms still occur during the postmenopausal phase. So what we did is we collected data on these 70,000 individuals related to menopause and different exposures. So by exposures, what we mean is different factors that might be related to how people experience these different symptoms.
And then we looked at how diet was related to it, how physical activity, how lots of different exposures, smoking, obesity, etc. And then in a subgroup of individuals of around 4,000 individuals, we followed them up over a period of time.
and we followed them up after they started to make changes to their diet they actually went on our zoe program which is a personalized nutrition program and we looked at how their symptoms changed over time and looked at how that related to the changes that they were making in their diet is it possible to extrapolate for our audience here what were some of the
So we haven't done that specific analysis yet. We're sitting on this goldmine of data and we're only just starting to churn out some of the results. What we're doing is we're looking at each of the different exposures separately, looking at how they impact them. But the next stage is to look at that relative kind of weighting, what's most important, what's least important.
What we know is that diet's playing a really big role. So when we look at the association between overall healthy dietary patterns, And symptoms, we see that that has a large role. We see that physical activity has some role, not as big as I thought it would have. We see that living with obesity has a role. We see that smoking has a role as well.
But out of those, our current analysis, although we're still kind of crunching some of the numbers, we showed that having a healthier diet is the single biggest change outside of taking HRT that you can do to reduce your symptoms. But we do need to point out that this is data from what we call longitudinal data, where we follow people up over a period of time. We don't have a control group.
It's not a kind of randomized control trial. So we can't say that this is conclusively causal evidence that changing your diet absolutely causes this amount of change.
So we looked at diet in a number of ways. We first calculated an overall diet score. And this is what we often do as nutritional scientists just to see, is there something going on? And there's different diet scores out there. There's scores like the Mediterranean diet score. There's scores like the PDI, which is the plant dietary index score.
And there's a score called the HEI, the healthy eating index, which is basically a measure of how well we're adhering to kind of dietary guidelines, for example, in the US. So we looked at a few different scores.
They're all kind of the same in terms of that they are roughly encouraging, you know, very much high fiber, plant based, whole foods, low in ultra processed foods, low in refined carbohydrates in general. And what we found was that for every few point increase in these diet scores, you were seeing a reduction in symptoms.
Showing 421–440 of 566 · page 22 of 29
← Previous
Next →