In today’s episode of “Healing From Within” your host Sheryl Glick
author of The Living Spirit Answers for Healing and Infinite Love
welcomes Sally J. Duffell author of Grow Your Own HRT who suggests if
you are a woman of a certain age and feeling menopausal you might want
to forget expensive hormone replacement therapy and consider growing
your own HRT.
Sally joins us today to discuss remedies for a natural transition from
childbearing years to menopause which can be more symptom and anxiety
free if thought of with right thinking and understanding the natural
process.
Listeners of “Healing From Within” are well aware that Sheryl and her
guests share intimate experiences and new insights into moving past
duality or separation to know our combined spiritual and physical life
issues so we may improve the quality of health prosperity and life in
general, utilizing inner wisdom.
In today’s episode of “Healing From Within” we will receive excellent
simplified instructions on how to grow hormone rich plants in just
minutes a day and learn more about the many plant foods that heal and
sustain our well being. Duffell also explains how to self diagnose, how
much to take and which sprouts to grow for the symptoms you may or may
not have, as a result of the changing hormonal structure of your body.
Plus the book also contains studies on how sprouted foods can help with
menopause symptoms cancer heart disease osteoporosis diabetes and
autism.
Sally responds to Sheryl’s question which asks her to think back to her
childhood and remember a person place or event that may have made an
impression on them and may have guided them to find their life work or
adult interests. Sally shares how as a sensitive and somewhat lonely
child she had an imaginary friend in Spirit and like all sensitive
soulful children have a hard time understanding the harshness of a
physical world with so much suffering pain and less compassion and love
than perhaps they may intuitively remember from their time before being
born.
Sally tells us why would we should choose to grow our own HRT and why
Western Women seem to have a bad time during menopause more so than
women from Eastern cultures . What we should know is that we all evolved
eating plant hormones and lots of illnesses have only become common
since we stopped. Instead of buying supplements and taking drugs we can
all grow them again ourselves. We can all harvest the benefits. No one
has a financial interest in getting women to grow their own plant
hormones—not the HRT industry not the supplement makers, not the soya
marketers. It is simple to grow your own HRT even in a small space and
you don’t need a garden.
Many books say that menopause happens when the number of eggs we have is
so love that the ovaries can’t respond when our brain hormones what’s
known as the hypothalamus, pituitary axis or HPA tell them it’s time to
hatch. Jenni Murray in her book Is it Me of Is it Hot in Here says, “As
the supply of eggs in the ovaries dwindles the pituitary gland
recognizes what’s happening and frantically increases the production of
FSH in an attempt to kick-start the reproductive system as normal. As
things progress other symptoms such as flushes and sweats begin.
What gynecologist John Lee MD says in his book What Your Doctor May Not
Tell You about Menopause is even more dramatic. It’s not just hot
flushes and night sweats but perhaps mood swings fatigue feelings of
being cold and inappropriate responses to other stressors. When our
period stops altogether we can have dry skin sagging libido and are more
prone to osteoporosis cancer heart problems and dementia. Now this
doesn’t happen to all women. There are lots of women who don’t get
menopausal symptoms and Chinese women who don’t even have a word for
menopause. We need to find out what is happening in the body of women
like Eskimo women and Native American women and many Asian who menopause
without symptoms.
There are two ways to menopause and almost nobody mentions the second
one. In 1996 Robert Wilson published his book Feminine Forever and
stated that all menopausal women needed to take Hormone Replacement
Therapy (HRT) but even so not everyone believed him. However Wilson was
focused on the women who came to him because they were feeling ill. He
failed to notice all the women who were going through this natural
transformation and were doing fine. Where the HPA axis in some women
stopped producing hormones before the ovaries slow down production of
estrogen side effects were minimal. Menopausal symptoms only happen when
the ovaries fail before the hormones produced in the brain have decided
it’s time to stop. The only true menopause symptom is erratic periods as
hormones slowly rebalance themselves.
So given the right circumstances it seems that ovaries can go on for as
long as we need them and even after menopause we so still need them. A
healthy postmenopausal ovary still creates lots of hormones for us.
Studies show that removal of ovaries with hysterectomies is associated
with higher risks of coronary artery disease stroke hip fractures
Parkinson’s dementia cognitive impairment depression and anxiety.
Robert Wilson thought estrogen replacement was a cure to what he
considered the disease of menopause and it took a while to establish the
link between the estrogen therapy and cancer, but by then menopause was
seen by doctors as a disease and HRT was touted as the cure. Meanwhile
the backlash led by the feminist movement went to the other extreme.
They pronounced menopausal symptoms to be a natural phenomenon and
Germaine Greer in her book The Change said that many women don’t go to
the doctor for their menopause symptoms because of “their attitude to
doctors and their coping style rather than to the extent to which they
experience symptoms.
Meanwhile both sides were correct. There were some symptoms and some
women have a natural menopause during which their ovaries keep working
until the end with no symptoms. There is yet to be a specific study
comparing the two models of menopause: the gentle wind-down versus the
premature ovarian failure…Getting the ovaries working as long as
possible is what women in traditional societies seem able to do.
It also seems the Western Diet is very different from Eastern Health
directives and that may be a reason for many reactions in the body.
It was found by researcher Margaret Lock who studied Japanese women who
lacked a specific word for menopause and the symptoms to go with it, as
well as traditional Thai and Chinese women who enjoyed trouble free
menopause, and speculated that the Asian diet of vegetables seaweed fish
and soya was giving them a rich mix of vitamins minerals trace elements
and plant estrogen. She also learned that these women lived in
multi-dimensional households where the elderly are highly respected and
wondered if this was not also a factor for aging gracefully. The women
also took regular weight bearing exercise and there was a tradition of
herbalism. Soya soon became the Eastern Wonder Food and the soya
revolution in the WEST was underway
How we are slowly learning what plant hormones and other phyto-chemicals
can do for us. We know that cress and mustard contain lignans for plant
estrogen as well as being rich in plant progesterone and cancer fighting
compounds. Cress is not the only place we used to get plant hormones
from. Western women get plant estrogen from lignans found in whole
grains beans berries nuts and seeds and especially flaxseed known as
linseed. Women who ate a lot of lignans had reduced risks of all kinds
of postmenopausal breast cancer. Asian cultures were sprinkling plant
hormones in the form of alfalfa sprouts while those in Britain were
getting the same from mustard and cress Western folk medicine uses red
clover as herbal medicine for menopause symptoms packed with plant
hormones…We found in a study by Dr. Andrew F. Currier in 1897 that
peasants in Scandinavia Germany and Russia did not complain of symptoms
from menopause When the Japanese started living off processed foods,
pizza pasta they would have developed menopause symptoms and diseases of
aging.
The most obvious thing that can go wrong if we don’t ovulate is
progesterone level will be low and without progesterone there is nothing
to clear out estrogen from our systems or tell our womb lining when to
shed so it just keeps building up. If we consistently fail to ovulate we
will become estrogen dominate and too much estrogen can lead to cell
growth in our reproductive areas and endometriosis build up of womb
tissue, fibroids lumpy tissue attached to the womb fibrocystic breasts
of course infertility. In the long term lack of ovulation is also
associated with osteoporosis heart disease and several cancers breast
endometrial and thyroid.
There are three main kinds of estrogen: estriol estradiol and estrione.
Estradiol is produced by women in their fertile years and is the
strongest. Estrone is in the middle coming in at a third to two thirds
as strong. Estriol is the weakest at about an eight as strong. Estriol
is the predominant estrogen is older women. It is gentle and less likely
to cause cancer. However the good news is that the body has a natural
ability to convert all the different estrogens to each other. This is a
marvelous tool for hormonal balance
So what is it about the Western World and lifestyle that is upsetting
hormonal balance that a 2015 Norwegian research project reported that a
third of women were not ovulating.
Stress is one factor that affects ovulation by depleting the adrenal
glands. Blood sugar becomes unstable. Digestion goes awry so nutrients
aren’t being absorbed and progesterone production drops. This leads to
estrogen dominance which is unhealthy. The World Health Organization and
those employed by the industrial and chemical industries which add to
the problem for women are at odds and their agendas foster making money
not health. Clearly women who don’t have symptoms should not be put on
HRT as they are creating hormones on their own. If you do go on HRT you
will be advised to come off it before age 60 because risk factors
increase sharply after that. Some doctors unofficially and officially
recommend plant hormones after that if women still have symptoms of
discomfort.
Sally tells us something of bean and seed sprouting and how to begin. So
plants have hormones When we eat certain plants and beans our body
creates plant estrogen and progesterone Your own gut bacteria use the
isoflavones and lignans and coumestrol and convert them into hormones.
Plant estrogen is much weaker than that created by our ovaries. The
Greek name for plant estrogenes is phytoestrogens and they fight off
those industrial and chemical estrogens and keep our body healthy
Sprouts that contain kaempferol as well as red clover are alfalfa
mustard c ress and broccoli. As they have some plant estrogens they
really ae your complete hormonal package.Fenugreek not only has
kaempferol but it’s high in apigenin. Apigenin is getting a lot of
attention from scientists as it has been shown to stop cancer cells from
spreading and in fact tells them to die.
We need to eat brassicas which contain a whole host of the most
wonderful vitamins minerals and antioixidants including cancer fighting
chemicals. Brassica vegetables are often called cruciferous vegetables
and include bok choy, Brussels sprouts, mustard greens, cresses
cauliflower kale cabbage Chinese cabbage collard greens horseradish
cohlrabi radish rutabaga turnip and watercress. Sadly not all brassicas
lend themselves to being sprouted. If you are wondering why sprouts are
amazing it’s because they are baby plant and are at the peak of
nutrition. Another food that sprouting can rapidly turn into a
powerhouse of nutrients is legumes or pluses consisting of beans peas
and lentils. We need to get these pulses back into our diets. We can
also add Asian sprout mung beans. Its plant cousin good old alfalfa sold
in health stores has some very interesting beneficial phytochemicals.
Don’t forget mustard and cress. And finally there’s fenugreek to boost
testosterone.. also necessary for women.
The bottom line is we are trying to keep our ovaries working Eating
sprouted foods can help us transition through menopause without
symptoms.
Menopause symptoms are not the first health problems to be exacerbated
by bad diet. One of the most famous is scurvy . It was so rampant during
the eighteenth century it causes more deaths at sea than other diseases
storms shipwrecks and even war. We now know that scurvy was caused by
lack of fresh fruit and greens which contain vitamin C. Some maritime
surgeons and herbalists did use berries vegetables and cresses as a cure
but had to do it under the radar orthodox physicians had different
ideas. They concluded scurvy was caused by laziness foul vapors and
dampness to blocked perspiration and divine disfavor. They concluded
sailors needed flogging or bleeding…none of which worked. Similarly
menopausal women used to be accused of being depressed of being afraid
of aging or so spoilt that they had nothing better to do than make up
symptoms. Once HRT was invented and big money was involved menopause
officially became a disease. Sally and Sheryl are amazed at how the
medical professional in the past and even now look past simple
explanations such as diet exercise the body’s need for relaxation and
reducing stress to improve most health situations and often allow the
body to self-heal or by preventive methods decrease illness greatly.
Sally mentions plant hormones in relation to prevention of other
diseases such as cancer osteoporosis dementia and heart disease? We can
assume the medical practitioners are not offering these suggestions and
probably do not know enough about supplements other than traditional
Western medical treatments..medication and surgery.
Sheryl says…You can go back to a misunderstanding by physicians in
regard to scurvy and other illnesses when not enough is known about the
pre-existing life style, diet, exercise practices or lack of exercise,
along with the stress factors and genetic predispositions of a patient,
we cannot conclude it is simply emotional.
Sally tells the story of her friend who had a successful response to the
use of HRT practices. Kate Tyms a forty eight year old mother of three
teenage girls generally fit and healthy suffered period wise from PMT
which worsened as she got older and she experienced a great deal of
sweating. Her periods were heavy on day 1-2 and then petered out. The
routine she followed that seemed to help 1. Ground up some flaxseed and
sprinkle on muesli every morning. 2. Sprout things..red clover mung
beans and broccoli and sprinkle on whatever I am eating. 3 Avocados 4 No
parabens 5 Banana bread to keep off processed sugars. 6 Using Aveeno
instead of Nivea body lotion. As diet included more muesli and flaxseed
and nuts symptoms improved
Sally J. Duffel an expert in an area that is attempting to offer natural
solutions to many of the complex health issues that modern society is
dealing with by offering changing thoughts on the issues surrounding
menopause and other conditions. .
In summarizing today’s episode of “Healing From Within” we have seen
that by understanding that the body is a complex mechanism of biologic
hormonal and energetic influences and by returning to the simple dietary
routines of the past or alternative methods known before Western
medicine concluded that disease can only be cured or managed by drugs or
surgery we might move past the debilitating symptoms of many illnesses
that have developed as a result of the Industrial Age. We might remember
how scurvy was handled by people like James Lind in 1753 when he
promoted his lemon cure. He also discussed at that time sprouting
mustard and cresses so that ships companies could grow their own salad
cress aboard ships and keep their sailors from developing scurvy.
Sprouting is a part of a long European food culture and it’s helped keep
us healthy for generations. But we must return to essential truths that
our fundamental needs as human beings involve good nutrition, plenty of
rest and basic hygiene.
Sally wrote, “ That is the story of menopause too. We industrialized. We
stopped eating whole foods. We processed and refined foods. We tried to
bring them back through artificial ways, through drugs and supplements.
And now we are faced with the fact that we need ways of getting whole
foods back into our diets. Human beings are so clever in what we can
achieve and so stupid in that we keep forgetting the fundamentals. It’s
not too late to go back to it all….We can borrow from all the different
traditions. We can copy the Chinese and sprout mung beans or alfalfa. We
can look to folk medicine and grow red clover mustards and cresses…We
need to make up for the deficiencies in our diets.”
Sally and I would have you remember that within a sense of ancient inner
wisdom and within our bodies we have the ability to self-heal: we must
allow ourselves to improve our thinking about how to care for ourselves
utilizing the best of herbal alternative and modern day western medicine
to find healthy simple ways to live well.
Today’s Guest