Menopause and the Gut Biome…
There’s been a lot of talk lately about the gut biome, how it changes in menopause and how that might be related to some of our menopause symptoms. It’s not proven. It’s an emerging field. There’s still a lot to find out. But it’s really interesting.
A lot of the work comes from the Zoe project — a nutritional and gut biome study across a number of universities — and you can read more about it here.
To cut a long story short it turns out that our gut biome has a lot to do with our hormones. In women it changes during adolescence and again during perimenopause. And those perimenopausal changes can mean that there are less ‘good’ bacteria. Some of these changes might be related to weight gain and also to inflammation.
It’s also possible that a healthy gut biota can help with bone health and that it can even recycle some of our low levels of oestrogen. It might also be that HRT helps improve our gut biota.
You’ll notice I’m using words like ‘might’ and ‘possible’. This is all new, and some of it may turn out not to be the case as the research progresses.
But in the meantime it’s probably worth improving your gut biota — especially if you can do it without a risk to your health and without too much cost!
And in fact most of the things you can do are both cheap and healthy. Zoe has a few ideas here — but I’ve summarised them for you.
Eat more plants! Many plants are pre-biotic. They feed the good bacteria in our guts. Nuts, seeds and legumes are especially good — but the more variety the better. Coffee might also be good for our gut biota — it’s a plant after all!
Fermented foods are a bit fashionable right now, especially in certain parts of town where you can’t move for sourdough and kimchi. But they contain lots of lovely bacteria. And they’re yummy. I’m a particular fan of sauerkraut and that’s a picture of my water kefir granules you see at the top of this page!
It’s worth mentioning that if you are histamine intolerant you’ll probably want to skip fermented foods.
It’s probably also worth not overdoing the sugar and ultra-processed food. And good sleep, exercise and lower levels of stress also help.
So pretty much everything we already knew was good for us!
And if you’re interested here are the instructions for making water kefir from the website I got my starter granules from. I flavour mine by throwing in some frozen raspberries into the second fermentation. And it’s tasty and refreshing — and suitable for anyone avoiding dairy for any reason.
Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com.
