And sometimes it can impact all of the things at once, your energy, your cycles, your sleep, all of it.

Yeah, absolutely.

Absolutely.

So I have like a simple equation when I look at how is energy produced in your system.

Obviously you need a fuel source, which is basically food.

Primarily with human beings, our primary fuel sources are carbohydrates or fat.

And then we also need lots of nutrients, right? Within the cell, you need tons of different nutrients to convert that fuel source into energy.

How do I improve my overall cellular health? to see an improvement and all of the things that we're talking about today, what would you say are some key actions that they could take?

What did we actually learn? Um, and equally important, what did we not learn and what do we still need to understand? Maybe this is a good one for Kate.

Um, well, we did learn things.

Um, w- there were two arms of the, the WHI, and there was basically, um, they were either doing, um, uh, conjugated equine estrogen, which we basically don't use anymore, which is Premarin, and then we had an arm that used that and a progestin.

And so th- the, the question they were trying to answer with the WHI was, are hormones protective for cardiovascular benefit? 'Cause we had tons of observational trials before that that were showing that they were, that women who were taking hormones had less heart attacks and so forth.

So they were doing a randomized control trial, which means that they were randomly putting people into groups so we don't have a healthy user bias.

And what they found, certainly in the, uh, estrogen/progestin group, that, that after five years there was increased chance in breast cancer, stroke, um, cardiovascular issues.

Um, and so they stopped it and then they continued with the estrogen arm only, and that was done with women who did not have a uterus.

Can you just talk about that paper?

Mm-hmm.

So can estrogen also have that same effect? It's, it is possible.

But again, I think we have to kind of look out a little bit because, again, we need to take into consideration the healthy user bias.

Also, the fact that, I'm gonna go on another tangent here, is estrogen alone will reduce hot flashes.

So it definitely does that.

We know it does that.

And for some women, if a hot flash is keeping you up all night long or is completely disturbing your life and all of a sudden that symptom is suppressed, you're gonna have a better quality of life and now you're gonna sleep better.

... maybe this is too many questions in one question, but the risk of just taking the estrogen but not doing the other things to improve sleep.

So Kate, can you kind of give your view and the bioenergetic Dr. Ray Peat pro-metabolic view on estrogen and what's happening in menopause?

Mm-hmm.

So- We, we have to understand that, you know, estrogen is certainly higher in women than it is men, but men also have it.

Um, women have a higher production because our ovaries produce more, and we need it to basically make a baby, right? It's very important to have estrogen in, in the production of the endometrial lining, and then it's also used at higher rates like progesterone in production of a human.

Um, and obviously, that is kind of a, a woman's job.

And when we, women no longer are gonna produce a child, then ovarian production isn't as necessary.

So obviously, levels within the blood are going to drop in women.

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