Jennifer Gunter

And women evolved very differently.

And if you look at the history of our evolution as a species,

Women had 20 years post-menopause where they were contributing to society.

I mean, if you look at the wise woman hypothesis, which is the idea that women in menopause basically helped drive evolution because they were there to care for, provide assistance to their own children and their grandchildren.

And that being healthy and being active, doing all that actually was what drove our longevity as a species.

So yeah, I think when people talk about ovarian failure, to me, that means that they have a very poor understanding of kind of the biology of ovulation and the biology of a menstrual cycle versus estrus.

And yeah, we're not mice.

Mice can tell us a lot of stuff, but it's all preclinical work and we have to then apply that to humans.

And this idea that

that ovaries are like die and they're deficient and they stop working is also not true.

So the postmenopausal ovary is still contributing to the pool of testosterone, for example.

So I think that we should be careful how we're talking about things.

Yeah.

I mean, I think that, you know, none of these people ever talk about the negatives, which I always like to say.

So, for example, when women sort of approach their late 30s, early 40s, their incidence of two conditions, adenomyosis and fibroids, starts to increase dramatically.

Right.

And, you know, that is probably related in part to lifetime exposure to estrogens.

And so what is going to happen to those uteruses if they're keeping getting exposed to sort of estrogen in their 50s and 60s and 70s, like from ovulation, not from menopausal hormone therapy, which is a lower amount, right?

And so...

you know, I think that we have to be super careful about the assumptions that we make and about the cherry picking and this idea that longevity is going to be expanded by expanding ovulation.