Recap: Davina McCall's menopause experience

0:00Davina McCall:Hello, and welcome to ZOE Recap, where each week we find the best bits from one of our podcast episodes to help you improve your health. Today we're talking about menopause. For Davina McCall, menopause wasn't just a transition. It was a quiet crisis. She felt like a stranger in her own body, overwhelmed by symptoms she wasn't prepared for and didn't fully understand. But Davina didn't stay silent. Her book, Menopausing, has helped millions of women feel supported and seen during this transformative stage of life. In this episode, Davina joins us to share her personal journey. And we shared Zoe research that shows how diet can be a powerful tool for reducing menopause symptoms.

0:48Davina McCall:Well, I think the first symptom that I had that really hit me was a night sweat. and I would have been about 43 years old. I was on a job in Prague and I stayed the night in a hotel and I woke up in the middle of the night and I was drenched. My hair was wet. It wasn't like just you're a little bit hot in bed and you think, oh, I must throw the blankets off. It was bottom sheet soaked right through, had to go and get a towel, duvet soaked right through, had to turn duvet over. And I thought, my God, I'm ill. I'm really ill. And I woke up the next morning, I looked at myself, I thought, God, you really are ill.

1:26Davina McCall:I felt pale. I felt like my skin was kind of dry. And I thought, God, I'm so dehydrated after sweating that much all night. And I thought, well, hopefully it'll pass in a couple of days. It happened again the next night. And then it didn't happen for a while. And I thought, I'm better. so what I've now realized is actually I had little non-physical symptoms so psychological symptoms a little bit before that so things like I'm a very gung-ho person anybody that knows me as a television host in in the UK would know I've chucked myself out of a helicopter on a bungee rope on a TV show. I see myself as a brave and kind of gregarious, outgoing, robust woman.

2:11Davina McCall:And my life felt a bit overwhelming. And I thought, how come I can't get my kids ready in the morning? How come I'm crying quite a lot, not just through PMT, which was kind of normal, you know, for a couple of days, but this felt I didn't know when it was coming or why it was coming. How come I didn't feel any joy anymore? How come I was kind of flatlining through life? I'd look at my daughters who would be having hysterics, crying with laughter about something. And I think I can't remember the last time I did that. I'd lost the joy. And now I hear women saying, I just lost myself. I didn't know myself anymore.

2:51Davina McCall:And that was such a brilliant way of describing it. I thought that was exactly how I felt. But also this low level anxiety of I didn't want to drive to the supermarket if it meant that when I came out of the supermarket, it was dusk. I didn't want to drive in the dusk. I went to the opticians. Is there something wrong with my eyes? Should I get long sighted lenses? No, your eyesight's fine. It was such a weird fear for me. Mrs. Chuck yourself out of a helicopter. I also started forgetting things, which we, lots and lots of women can relate to at this age. And I went to my doctor. My dad had been recently diagnosed with Alzheimer's.

3:29Davina McCall:And for me, I thought my dad was actually quite young. He was 68 when he was diagnosed. And I thought, my God, have I got early onset Alzheimer's? And I became very paranoid about that. I went to the doctor. She asked me a bit about my life. I had three young children. I had a very, very busy career, but I was also a very hands-on mother because I felt guilty all the time. I was trying to be a wife to my husband, you know, running a home, put food on the table. You know, she said, you've got what we would call cognitive overload. And I thought, oh, well, that's it. So then I went back and I told her about feeling like I've had a couple of bouts of illness.

4:07Davina McCall:Does that mean I've got Alzheimer's? Is that another sign of it? No, no, no, no. It's just this cognitive overload. Your body's struggling to cope. So I just thought I've got to start trying to relax. But the problem was all these symptoms and all of these things that were starting to happen, my joints started aching. I was tired. I didn't want to exercise so much. I was exercise lady. Why didn't I want to exercise? Why was I tired all the time? Then I thought, oh, is this just getting old? Is this just something? I had no one to talk to. So my mother, my real mother had had a full hysterectomy at 28 because she had ovarian cancer.

4:45Davina McCall:So she was plunged straight into menopause. I had a very difficult relationship with my mother she was an alcoholic and um addict and i have had such enormous sympathy towards her she she's dead unfortunately but i've worked with my mother in heaven um on trying to forgive myself and her for our relationship because if i'd have known or if i'd known all of this when she was alive i would have been a lot more understanding when she was 28 and Sarah, you know what that's like for a young woman to be plunged into menopause. Anyway, I didn't have her to talk to. My stepmother also had a full hysterectomy, but she'd been put on HRT, but nobody talked about it.

5:25Davina McCall:It was embarrassing. And I thought, I'm too young. I don't really want to talk about it because I feel like it's going to age me. And aging in my business wasn't good. Aging in terms of feeling like a sexy lady wasn't good. Just aging in general. I don't want to get older. And so, Davina, does that mean that you didn't even want to sort of think about it for yourself? Nevermind not telling other people that you didn't want to consider this could be happening to you because it's like this happens to women when they get really old and that by definition, it's taboo. I don't want to think about it.

5:58Davina McCall:And I think another thing that I have really embraced once I learned that it was perimenopause was grieving not having any more children. I didn't want any more children, but I hated the fact that my body was telling me that I couldn't. And there is a thing you've got to go through. And when you step through the door to the other side and you've learned all of the things that hopefully we will be able to help you with today, some of them, a lot of them, that the other side is great. But it's a journey to get there. but the journey is what makes it worthwhile. Nothing brilliant is easy. You know, you've got to put the work in.

6:42Davina McCall:I'd really like to talk about sort of diet and other lifestyle changes and whether these can impact symptoms, whether or not you're on hormone therapy. I have to say that five years ago, so we were already into Zoe, I would have thought that reducing menopause symptoms with diet and what we're doing at Zoe sounded like crazy. But Sarah, this is an area that's been a really big focus in interest of you. So we've ended up doing all of this study and you've just released this big new study. Can you tell us what you found and maybe explain what it is? Yeah, well, I would say, start by saying I would have agreed with you based on what little evidence there is about diet and menopause that diet can't do anything, particularly because of all these crazy claims out there about supplements, about, you know, there's silver bullets, whatever, that it will cure all of this.

7:32But we looked at this, we put it to the test in our ZOE Predict cohort. And so we followed 5 ,000 women over a period of up to about 20 weeks. And these were perimenopausal women who had signed up to take part in the ZOE membership program. so these are women who we did various tests to look at their metabolic health their microbiome and then deliver personalized advice to them based on some of these tests but also based on you know their health history where they are now with their diet their lifestyle etc and we asked them loads of questions about their health the baseline and their symptoms and then we followed them up over this period of um you know it was between about 18 to and beyond 20 weeks and then we asked them at end about their symptoms, about how many symptoms they had, about the severity of the symptoms.

8:23Davina McCall:So Sarah, just to make sure this is really clear, because we talk a lot often about different sorts of studies on this podcast. Is this a randomized control trial that you're talking about here? No. So this is what we call longitudinal data in the science world. And longitudinal data means that we collect data at various time points. So everyone was following the ZORI program. So everyone was changing their diet and we collected data at the beginning and at the end. And so we looked at how it changed over time. The gold standard of scientific research is to do a randomized control trial where we'd have had another group of people who would not be changing their diet so that we can check that it really is the diet that's changing.

9:06I wasn't really expecting to see much in this, if I'm honest. But actually, I was surprised, to the extent that I asked the researcher to go back and redo the steps. No, seriously, that's so funny. And we've got a fantastic researcher, George, that's been doing all of this research for us. And this is the research also, it's funded independently by the British Menopause Society. And I think it's always important to state that it is independent funding for this. And what we found was around a 34 % reduction in overall menopause symptom burdens. This is taking into account the number of symptoms and also the severity of the symptoms by following a healthier diet.

9:46And actually, when we looked into the details of the dietary changes, we weren't actually looking at seeing huge, huge changes in people's diet quality. And I think that to me, Jonathan, is what's most important. We are actually seeing relatively small shifts, but very meaningful shifts. And even just when people are having small shifts, we still saw a huge impact. And we saw across so many different symptoms. there are other people doing research in this area it's not only us you know i'm very proud of what we're doing because we have the resources to do it at a scale that allows us to look at an individual level what's going on but there's many other studies that are also being run now and you know although it you know it's slower than it should have been and collectively what this research is showing is that following an overall healthier dietary pattern a mediterranean style pattern as we often call it can improve reduce your symptoms as well as it will help improve some of these risk factors you know that we talked about social disease your blood lipids your blood pressure etc so the kind of fundamental principles are here are reducing your heavily processed unhealthy foods these ultra processed style of foods so your very heavily processed red meats for example reducing refined carbohydrates you know your pasta your rice your white bread but as though we were always about what can you add in rather than what you have to take away and so the great news is is that what where we see the biggest benefit is actually by what you're adding in so adding in unprocessed plant-based foods so fruits vegetable pulses whole grains oily fish if you're not vegetarian having a decent amount of healthy oils because we know that will help with many of these disease risk factors but also you know could help with the symptoms as part of this overall healthier diet.

11:31I do think Jonathan it's important just to mention that there is a place for some people for a particular supplement. Now it's always important to say look I can only what I'm saying now is based on the evidence we have who knows you know the evidence is evolving week on week so it might be in years time that actually I'm wrong and I'm always happy to say when I'm wrong. One area where I think there is good evidence is around soy isoflavones. So soy isoflavones have a particular property, which is what we call a phytoestrogen. So it behaves a little bit like estrogen and actually can stick to the estrogen receptors and therefore mimic the effect of estrogen.

12:12Now in countries that have a high level of soy isoflavones, so this is particularly in East Asia, so Japan, China, et cetera, they have about 70 times the amount of soy isoflavone intake compared to the UK. they have actually significantly lower menopausal symptoms which is really interesting because we see a population that has lower symptoms who have a higher intake of this particular nutrient or chemical found in foods and we also know there's this very plausible mechanism so what we do know if you look at all of the control trials that have been run on this if you take a supplement that contains a particular amount and it's above about 15 milligrams of a particular soy isoflavone called genocine, that that has a significant impact on reducing symptoms.

13:01I'm really sticking my neck out here because I am quite sceptical often about supplements, but I have to lead with the evidence and the evidence is supportive of this particular supplement.

13:11Davina McCall:Davina, it's incredibly rare to ever say anything positive about a supplement, so I agree that is really interesting and I'm sure we will be doing some studies around this in the future, am I right? We are, because even more interesting is your response to soy isoflavones is determined by your microbiome. And this is fascinating. And this is a really interesting area of research that we're also looking at. So we looked at people's microbiome pre, peri and post-menopause. So we looked at the composition of all of these trillions of bugs that are in our gut that we know are linked with health. And what we found was that the composition of the microbiome peri and postmenopause was actually quite different to premenopausal.

13:52And another researcher has also found this. But when we looked at how the composition was different, what was really interesting is we could build on previous research that we published. And we found that there was a greater amount of bugs, species, that are associated with higher inflammation, higher fat around the belly, and some other unfavorable health effects. And if you were peri or postmenopausal, you had higher levels of these particular species associated with these unfavorable health effects. And this is really exciting because if we can target that, it might be that we can partially reduce some of those unfavorable side effects.

14:31Davina McCall:When you think of a gut supplement, what comes to mind? Something you swallow and grimace at. I think the aftertaste is so horrible, it must be good for me. Or something you sprinkle, crunch and actually enjoy. Daily 30 is Zoe's gut supplement. Years of scientific research have gone into creating the crunchy and delicious blend that we sell today. Developed by Zoe's gut health scientists, Daily 30 is a gut supplement that's rewriting the rules on supplements by rejecting synthetic chemicals. It's packed with over 30 carefully selected plants and features ingredients that support gut health, digestion, and energy.

15:10Davina McCall:And because we're Zoe, we lead with the evidence. When we first developed Daily30, we ran our own randomized controlled trial to check if it worked. The results blew us away and helped us create the formulation that we sell today. By the way, whenever we talk about Daily30 as a good source of fiber, we're required to say that it contains four grams of total fat per serving. Obviously, that's all amazing healthy fats from plants. To get your pouch of Zoe's delicious gut supplement, visit zoe.com slash daily30. Thanks for listening and see you next time.