Dr. Sarah Berry

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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.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Dec 2025 with 1.

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Dhru Purohit Show · Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry · 6 Nov 2024 podcast

There's also a consent box to tick when they do it to say that if they're happy to, they can share the data back with scientists, i.e. me and my team. So there's a kind of double benefit that they also become a community scientist because they share their data back with us, which enables us

I'd like to caveat with I'm not an expert in lean muscle mass area. I'm very quick to point out what I'm not an expert in rather than what I am an expert in. From what we have researched and what I know, I would totally agree with you that it's such an important age as you enter perimenopause and postmenopause. It's such an important age to maintain muscle mass.

It's such an important age to be doing weight-bearing exercises to maintain bone mineral density because we know that also reduces during the menopause. And maintaining muscle mass is important, in my opinion, for peri- and post-menopausal women for a number of reasons, some of those that you've mentioned. but also to maintain insulin sensitivity.

And what we've seen very clearly with a paper that we published back in 2022, that people's insulin sensitivity, if you're peri or postmenopausal, is different if you're premenopausal. And so the more you can maintain your muscle mass, the more insulin sensitive you might be able to maintain. And we looked at people's post-meal sugar responses.

So we looked at their, what I call the postprandial glycemic response. So this is the circulating level of glucose after having a meal in that kind of two to three hours after you have a meal. And we looked at this in both pre-peri and post-menopausal women. We gave, it was about 700 individuals were given a standardized meal. that contained a really high carbohydrate load.

So it had about 80 grams of carbohydrate. And then we measured over the next four hours how their blood glucose changed in response to that meal. And what we found is the peri and the postmenopausal women had a lot higher blood glucose response to that standardized meal compared to the premenopausal women. Now, we do expect insulin sensitivity and muscle mass to change anyway as part of aging.

And because we know that menopause is an age-related event, what we wanted to do is think, okay, is there a way that we can see, is this due to age or is it due to oestrogen? Is it due to the menopause? So because we had quite a large cohort, we were able to take a subgroup of individuals and we were able to age match them.

So what we did is we took people who were aged the same, but half of who were peri or post and half of who were pre-menopausal.

And what we found is even when we age match these individuals, that postprandial glucose response, so that increase in circulating glucose from the carbohydrate in the meal was still significantly higher in the peri- and postmenopausal women compared to the premenopausal women, showing that you're having this change in your insulin sensitivity in the way that your body is processing the glucose.

So this also ties back to what we talked about right at the beginning to do with metabolism. as well as how this might be related to changes also potentially in lean muscle mass.

I don't know how it would necessarily relate to the symptoms if we think about things like kind of brain fog, etc. We know that if you have very exaggerated, repeated, excessive

excursions so i mean increases and decreases in blood glucose that's related to all various kind of health outcomes so we know that if your blood glucose is elevated consistently and also you know you have these huge peaks and troughs we know that that is related over a long period of time to increased risk of type 2 diabetes obesity and cardiovascular disease we also know if you have big dips

in your blood glucose. And we've looked at this in peri and postmenopausal women. And we see that about 25% of them have these dips two to four hours after consuming carbohydrate rich meal. We know that if you have a dip or what we call a dipper, that that drives greater hunger, greater energy intake.

So people who are dippers tend to eat about two to 300 more calories over a day than people who aren't dippers. So that just shows how your blood glucose is controlling things like your hunger levels. We see that dippers have less energy. They feel less alert, etc.

So it's impacting kind of how they're feeling at a given point in time, but we know it also might increase your long-term disease risk. Whether it's worse post-menopausally versus pre-menopausal, we don't know yet. But what we do know is that these excursions, these peaks and troughs are more exaggerated in peri- and post-menopausal women compared to pre-menopausal.

And you know, this is something we've looked at quite a lot in Zoe is at the dips because people think about it as kind of these hills and they don't think about it as the roller coasters. The roller coasters includes not just the peaks, but the dips.

And we've done quite a lot of work looking at who has dips, how big are the dips, how do they relate to how we're feeling, our hunger, our energy, our mood, and also does it vary day to day? And so we've got some really interesting data that we've just recently published showing that if you have a breakfast, for example, it causes you to have a dip that day.

So you have your breakfast, it causes a dip about two hours after the breakfast. you will go on to eat about 100 to 200 more calories that day than if the next day you select a breakfast that doesn't cause a dip. So in simple terms, going back to what you said, if you can prevent the roller coaster, so you can just go on a nice...

car ride along some undulating hills rather than having this roller coaster then you can reduce your energy intake um potentially as well as hopefully you know impact other health aspects the only thing i would say drew is i think that there's a lot of attention at the moment on post-prandial glycaemia on blood sugar. And I think we need to be really careful when we talk about it.

And I always want to emphasize this, that it's a normal physiological response to have an increase in circulating blood glucose after a meal. We don't want to flatline. We don't need to be hyper-focused on it. It's one piece of a huge, huge puzzle. But I think the data that I've talked about today is just a nice way of demonstrating that we are seeing differences in how we metabolize food

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