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
06 Nov 2024
This episode is brought to you by Bioptimizers, Bon Charge, and Lumebox. We know that perimenopause brings a host of symptoms for women entering this stage of life. These symptoms can disrupt sleep, affect mental health, and cause weight gain, often leading to a decreased quality of life. Today’s guest shares insights from her nutritional research to help women reduce these symptoms' impact and feel empowered through this transition. Today on The Dhru Purohit Show, Dhru sits down with Dr. Sarah Berry to discuss a recent study led by her team on the impact of diet in reducing common symptoms for perimenopausal and postmenopausal women. Dr. Berry shares the most commonly reported symptoms and the lifestyle factors contributing to them. She also explains the research behind why muscle mass serves as a protective barrier during this stage of life and discusses the role of blood sugar and a healthy gut microbiome in managing symptoms. Dr. Sarah Berry is a Professor at King’s College London and has run more than 35 human nutrition studies. Notably, she is the Chief Scientist at ZOE, the science and nutrition company. She’s the lead nutritional scientist for the ZOE PREDICT study — the world’s largest in-depth nutritional research program and leads research across menopause, microbiome, and sleep. She's often featured as a guest on ZOE's own podcast, ZOE Science and Nutrition. In this episode, Dhru and Dr. Berry dive into: Weight gain and slow metabolism are the top concerns in perimenopause (1:00) BMI the correlation between more severe symptoms (6:00) Dr. Berry’s study (12:26) The worst drivers of symptoms in women (17:09) What is a MenoScale (24:49) Muscle mass as a protective measure (30:07) Why do blood sugar and insulin sensitivity matter (34:12) Breakfast that can cause huge dips in blood sugar (38:37) How does gut microbiome change as we age (42:00) Doubling down on the basics (56:32) Being cautious about supplementation (01:05:22) Also mentioned in this episode: Zoe Nutrition Study For more on Dr. Sarah Berry, follow her on Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, or her Website. This episode is brought to you by Bioptimizers, Bon Charge, and Lumebox. BIOptimizers Black Friday sale on all their products lasts all November long. Just go to bioptimizers.com/dhru and use code DHRU to get your discount and $100 worth of free gifts today! Right now, BON CHARGE is offering my community 15% off; just go to boncharge.com/DHRU and use coupon code DHRU to save 15%. Starting November 8th, Lumebox is having their biggest sale of the year and is offering my community 50% off their FDA-registered portable Red Light device! Just go to thelumebox.com/dhru to get your device today! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Full Episode
Dr. Sarah Barry, welcome to the podcast. But I want to start off with something that I know is at the top of the minds of so many of our audience members, women, of course, in particular. And it's something that you guys noted inside of your study. So this is jumping ahead a little bit, but we're going to be zooming in and zooming out.
In your study, you reported that 66% of perimenopausal women reported experiencing more than 12 symptoms, 12 symptoms. And inside of that, the most bothersome symptom reported was weight gain and slowed metabolism 31 of the participants reported having that i know for my audience that this is one of the top concerns as many of them are going through this stage and period in life.
What are the top root drivers that are causing so many women to experience this symptom in particular of a change in metabolism?
Estrogen. Estrogen loss, estrogen decline, estrogen fluctuations. But not estrogen only affecting our body weight and our metabolism, but affecting so many other areas that then interlink with this. You know, our metabolism, our body weight isn't just about how we metabolize food or what we're eating. It's so multifactorial and it's so interrelated to the other pillars of health.
So our stress, our sleep, our physical activity, as well as what we eat. And we know that menopause impacts all of that. So we can deep dive a little bit into why. One thing just to pick up on, Drew, is actually it was over 80% of our women said that they were experiencing weight gain or slowed metabolism. Wow. That is huge.
And when we think about perimenopause, often people think about hot flashes, hot flushes, night sweats. That's the least common symptom. So as you said, one of our most common symptom was this weight gain and slowed metabolism. So there's different things going on here. We need to step back and firstly think, well, what is the role of oestrogen in our body?
The role of oestrogen is to impact a whole wide range of different processes, different physiological processes, different neurological processes in our body. We actually have oestrogen receptors over nearly every single cell in our body nearly. So oestrogen impacts so many different processes in our body.
And this is why when you go through the menopause transition, which involves the loss of oestrogen, then you have such wide reaching impacts across your body. One of the things that oestrogen does, it has quite an important role in how and where we deposit fat. So where we deposit adipose tissue cells, these are fat tissue cells.
And really simply put, what happens is, is when you've got a good amount of oestrogen, so your premenopausal, the oestrogen kind of directs the fat around your hips. So we typically say, premenopause women have this pear shape look. So they have their fat around their bottom and their hips.
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