Christiane Northrup: If you refuse to look at the things that your body is forcing you to look at, then you will in fact begin the downhill slide to the chronic degenerative disease that I was taught in medical school and residency is inevitable. It isn't.
Kate Northrup: Welcome. Today's episode is really special because it's with my mom, Christiane Northrup, MD. So not only did she do the incredibly important job of birthing yours truly, my mom is a true pioneer of holistic women's health, and she has been talking about the power of our emotions to impact our bodies since the eighties. She's a multiple New York Times bestselling author. She's been on Oprah 10 times.
And today, we are breaking down some of the most common myths around women, perimenopause, hormones, longevity, and vitality. Always when I see people talking about that no one's ever talked about menopause, and this is such an important topic, I'm like, well, actually my mom's been talking about this for decades. And so I thought, why not bring the OG menopause doctor and talk to us all about our hormones, our bodies, and loving ourselves and living with the most energy and vitality we possibly can at any age? So enjoy this episode with Christiane Northrup, MD. Welcome to Plenty, a weekly recalibration of power, money, and safety for high capacity humans.
I'm Kate Northrup, best selling author and creator of Relaxed Money, and this is where neuroscience meets ancient wisdom meets real wealth strategy. This is the sacred conversation at the intersection of money, the body, and the life you're truly here to live. If you're ready to reimagine what's possible for yourself and for the world, you're in the right place. Let's go. Hi, mom.
Christiane Northrup: Hi, Kate.
Kate Northrup: Thanks for being here.
Christiane Northrup: Isn't it fun? I love your little studio and being here and all of that stuff.
Kate Northrup: Thank you. So in the last year, I would say, there are so many books, new books out on perimenopause and menopause. And it is obviously, women have been experiencing this change of life since women have existed, and so there's nothing new here. Although, because my generation is now going through perimenopause and, you know, to some degree, menopause. Right?
I'm in my early forties, although my biological age is 28. Noted. I do have to I do have to say that. If anybody listening wants to get their biological age, you can join Function, and the the link for that is in the show notes. But, anyway, it's interesting because so often I see people posting about this conversation Right.
About hormonal shifts, about the you know, it really is a rite of passage. And they say, no one has ever talked about this or no one is talking about it. And, of course, that's true depending on what segment of the world you've been living in. So everything is true, and nothing is true. And it just depends on where your attention has been and what communities you have been in.
My experience is that you have been talking about this for decades, because the wisdom of menopause came out
Christiane Northrup: in what year? That came out in 2021.
Kate Northrup: That can't be true.
Christiane Northrup: Not 2021. Sorry. That came out in 2001.
Kate Northrup: Thank you. That makes much more sense. So 2001 was the year I graduated from high school. Yes. So that was a while ago.
I'm about to go to my twenty fifth high school reunion, which means this year is the twenty fifth anniversary of the wisdom of menopause. Wow. What an incredible celebration. It really is.
Christiane Northrup: And you know, that one really took off when I got a personal phone call in my home office from Oprah Winfrey. And she said, I just read the story about whoever who had heart palpitations. The book fell off the shelf and this is what I'm having and I want you to come and be on the Oprah Winfrey show for The Wisdom of Menopause. And so and we talked then about bio identical hormones, natural progesterone, phytoestrogens, all that stuff. And at that time, it was really new because the only hormones that women had access to were Premarin made from the urine of pregnant mares, still is.
Premarin, pregnant mares urine. And then Provera which was a synthetic progestin completely different from natural progesterone. And I had met Joel Hargrove, the head of the Vanderbilt Menopause Center back then.
Kate Northrup: Right here in Nashville.
Christiane Northrup: Right here in Nashville. And Joel said, Premarin is a natural hormone if your native food is hay. I'll never forget it. And I had him come up to Maine Medical Center to teach our doctors about bio identical hormones. What does bio identical mean?
It means it matches exactly what your own body makes. And at the time, formulary pharmacies were completely new. Some of the pharmacies Compounding pharmacies. That's the
Kate Northrup: same thing.
Christiane Northrup: That's the compounding pharmacy. So there was all this mishigoss about, oh my god. You know, this hormone from the pharmacy is not natural, but this one from the compounding pharmacy is natural. I was on Oprah with Suzanne Somers, and remember that. And then there was the head of OB GYN at Northwestern.
And Oprah had it set up that I was the referee between Suzanne Somers and this head of OB GYN at Northwestern because I wanted everyone to know, no no. There's a middle ground and these hormones which you can get at a pharmacy are bio identical. The key is this, you cannot patent a naturally occurring substance. This is interesting. You are not allowed to patent God's creation.
Right? This is important. But the drug companies got around it. So for instance, with the seventeen beta estradiol, the five L dot, the Climera, all this. They patented the delivery system.
The patch system. So you can indeed get a bio identical hormone from a pharmacy. But Joel Hargrove with his old college roommate Joe Delk of the Delk Pharmacy here in Tennessee was compounding individualized prescriptions of estrogen, progesterone plus or minus testosterone and it was costing women like maybe $60 total and they just call, my patients would call Joe Delk. He'd answer the phone. He'd send out the stuff.
Oh don't worry you know, I'll bill you later. It was a very different world. Now you have all these, doctors and health coaches doing individualized hormones. But at the time that I wrote the first edition of Women's Bodies, Women's Wisdom
Kate Northrup: Which came out in 1994.
Christiane Northrup: 1994, first edition. I said, the Women's Health Initiative, there's this huge Women's Health Initiative study that was done to show that if you were on hormones, it raised your HDL cholesterol, the good cholesterol, it raised that one so that it would lower your risk of heart disease, the number one killer of women. And in the original edition of Women's Bodies Women's Wisdom, it's now in its fifth edition, but at that time I said, they are using the wrong hormone at the wrong dose and they will never find what they're looking for. Sure enough, 2002 I'm on a whale watch in Cape Cod Bay and the Wall Street Journal calls me. And I'm there with the boat and people are watching the whales and I'm talking to them about the fact that this is not surprising and the dose needs to be individualized and they need to use hormones that are biologically identical to what God makes in our bodies.
And so since then, the whole field has changed. But what they have now, because they've taken that database, this Women's Health Initiative, huge database. They stopped the whole study abruptly because women were they were having increasing strokes, a gallbladder disease. It was good for the bones, that was fine. But they just stopped it abruptly which I think was unfortunate because women went cold turkey and they got terrified.
And that's never a good thing. Yeah. And so since that time now, the pendulum keeps swinging. Now everybody, Kate's dad is an orthopedic surgeon, so there were years where the two of us would lecture together on bone density because you do need some estrogen or testosterone or progesterone to keep bones strong and healthy. There's some reasons to have some hormones in your body, but what I want women to know is your ovaries are always producing hormones your whole life.
Uh-huh.
Kate Northrup: So let's talk people through some foundational basics first. I continue to be shocked at how really smart women don't know about their bodies. Me too. So let's just start with some some basics. You know, we have our period.
Right? And there's about 260 opportunities to have a cycle in your life, give or take, I think, is is roughly the roughly the math. Maybe two eighty. I don't know the exact number. And so that happens from adolescence through when you have your last one, and that is menopause.
But you don't know you've gone through menopause until a year after your last period. Now perimenopause, how would you define perimenopause?
Christiane Northrup: Perimenopause are the years leading up to and slightly after the final period, and it can last from six to twelve years.
Kate Northrup: And what are the signs that you are in perimenopause?
Christiane Northrup: Could be increased irritability because you're skipping ovulations many times so that the progesterone that your ovary would normally make from a little cyst called a corpus luteum, which is nice and yellow, That isn't happening. Or you're ovulating twice, in a cycle which is why believe it or not, twins are more common in your forties because in your brain, FSH and LH, follicle stimulating hormone, luteinizing hormone from the pituitary gland, shoot down to the ovaries to initiate ovulation. But if you're skipping ovulations, then your pituitary increases the FSHLH. That's one of the tests they use to determine if you are in menopause. But in menopause means you're somewhere in the six to twelve year unless you have a hysterectomy and your ovary is removed and then it's instant.
And that is a real hormonal shock.
Kate Northrup: Yeah. Yeah. I've had friends go through that and it's it's I had a friend go through it at 18.
Christiane Northrup: Oh yeah. And it doesn't need to be that way generally speaking. So that's why we want you to know about this stuff. Now, what the common thing is about this FSHLH thing is, well, you know, your your brain is desperately trying to get you to ovulate. Well, that's only one part of it because the FSHLH spike is exactly the height that it was at ovulation.
When you were maximally receptive to getting pregnant or cross pollination of ideas. And when women are ovulating, men will say they are electric. Women's libido rises because there's a testosterone spike and the cervical fluid becomes a superhighway for sperm and it also ferns beautifully. You can even with saliva, you can test your saliva, let it it dry, and it's this beautiful ferning pattern just like structured water. When structured water freezes, it's the same beautiful structured ferning pattern.
So what I say is, and this is the sort of the psychological aspects, that nature doesn't waste anything. So when the FSH and LH go high, they stay high the rest of your life.
Kate Northrup: Even after your last period?
Christiane Northrup: Yes. So you are at ovulatory levels of FSH, LH for the rest of your life. So so your connectivity increases. It's the beauty of, as Mario Martinez, who lives in Franklin, says, aging is optional. Getting older is inevitable.
And this hormonal shift in your brain is a way of wiring in wisdom. Yeah. So you connect things that weren't connected before. So indeed, even though the number of brain cells might decrease, the number of connections increases till the day you die, and the number of cells in the hippocampus, the memory area, those keep increasing as you learn more, and it continues. So what I want women to know, yes, you want your hormones.
The big monster in the room is not falling levels of estrogen, progesterone, testosterone, though that contributes. It is unrelenting cortisol from adrenal fatigue, tired, wired. Fight, flight, freeze versus rest and digest. And everything that is leading you up to perimenopause that you have not resolved will come up and hit you between the eyes during perimenopause and then you go, oh, is it me or is it my hormones? Okay.
I'll tell you what it is. It's the same stuff that came up premenstrually, PMS. Everything that's bothering you premenstrually is something in your life that needs to be attended to. In the first half of your cycle, you have the coating on the nerves, you know, it's like you can tolerate it. But the second half of the cycle, you wanna throw things at people, you get angry, and and it's because things need to be attended to.
So as you said, you get about 290 opportunities to address what isn't working in your nervous system in your life. And if you don't address those things, then your brain catches fire at perimenopause because the combination of stress, which is epinephrine and cortisol plus usually excess blood sugar from wanting to eat sweets because those are opiates. Sugar makes you feel better. And alcohol. And alcohol.
Kate Northrup: We can't not mention the impact alcohol has.
Christiane Northrup: And by the way, so what does alcohol do? I will tell you what it does. It competes in your liver, in the metabolites for alcohol and estrogen and your hormones and cortisol. And so if you drink alcohol, it raises your estrogen levels to dangerous levels which is why women who drink a lot of wine are at higher risk for breast cancer.
Kate Northrup: Okay. That's so interesting. Okay. So to recap here, when you're in perimenopause, it's a six to twelve year window. Is that what you said?
Yeah. Before your final period as indicated by shifts in your cycle. For me, I'm still have am ovulating every month, but my cycle is getting irregular. So sometimes it's twenty four days. Sometimes it's thirty one days.
Sometimes it's you know, so it's a little bit all over the place. So that that was my first sign, and I started having troubles a little bit with sleeping.
Christiane Northrup: That's right. Because it's in in your brain.
Kate Northrup: Now when you went through perimenopause, I'm curious, did you take bioidentical hormones?
Christiane Northrup: I tried. You tried? Nothing happened. I didn't notice anything.
Kate Northrup: What did you start with?
Christiane Northrup: I started with some transdermal Yeah. Seventeen beta, estradiol, Progest Cream. By the way, for premenstrual migraines which happen to a lot of women, that's from a lowered progesterone. And Progest which you can get on Amazon, 2% progesterone cream, one quarter to one half teaspoon on the soles of your feet before you go to bed will often remove those. It is like the best kept secret ever.
So I want you to know about it. There are two brands, Progest and Emerita, e m e r I t a. So sometimes that's all you need if you're having this
Kate Northrup: And if people are wondering, we will put that link in the show notes just if you're driving and listening to this, you can come back to it later.
Christiane Northrup: Right. And also, by the way, I can talk you through it because I personally recorded the audios to The Wisdom of Menopause, where we cover all this stuff.
Kate Northrup: Yeah. That's an important thing to know, because we're only gonna be able to cover so much today. My mom's books, The Wisdom of Menopause, I mean, she has a million of them, but the two big giant ones are the wisdom of menopause and women's bodies, women's wisdom. And they're really incredible reference books, and they've they're updated. You've updated them like a million times.
And so they are quite current. So you wanna make sure if you have those, you can use that. You need to get them and then use them, the index, to ask any health question you might be having. You can go find it there. Please do not chat GPT your medical questions.
It will not be the best place.
Christiane Northrup: Oh, it's it's true. We don't the AI hasn't caught up with what we would call holistic medicine. It's kind of conventionally pharma driven at this point.
Kate Northrup: And even then, it's not always accurate. So even if you were like, I wanna go a 100% the conventional route, it's not even a 100% accurate for that. And then let's talk. So you tried some hormone replacement. You didn't notice any difference.
I am doing some progesterone troches and just a small amount, and it makes a huge difference for me.
Christiane Northrup: Because what it does is it binds to the GABA receptors in your brain, gamma aminobutyric acid, which is the same place as valium. So it's very calming. And when you are pregnant, when your body's awash in progesterone, you know people always talk about, oh my god, you're pregnant, you're glowing, you know, all of that kind of thing. So progesterone is the first hormone to fall if you're not ovulating. Mhmm.
And so that's the main thing that people need. Estrogen can actually rise. Later on. Yeah.
Kate Northrup: And I just had all my levels checked, and I was thrilled to find out that all of my levels of everything are great. I was thinking, oh, do I need to start a little nothing. Nope. And my lady, you met her on Sunday, Britt Anderson. She's absolutely incredible.
But if someone is wondering how early could they should they start some bioidentical hormones, and how would someone know if they're a good candidate? Well, the
Christiane Northrup: first place I would go is with more natural, like, herbal stuff because women have used those things for years. And we'll
Kate Northrup: get to at the end where they can find the best.
Christiane Northrup: What I suggest to women, do some simple things. You will find that just getting the high glycemic foods out of your diet so that you don't have spikes in insulin, that will work wonders. We know women will have hot flashes from one glass of red wine or one piece of chocolate. So a lot of my patients would say, alright, this chocolate was worth it. I know I'm gonna have like two to three hours of hot flashes, but it's worth it.
So make sure it's worth it. And hot flashes, we still don't know what they are. And they're related not to the absolute levels of hormones, but to the delta. The changes, like the ups and downs. By the way, Herbert Benson down at Harvard, the Integration Medicine Center from way way back with Joan Borsenko, they found a 90% decrease in hot flashes with two periods of meditation a day.
And it was Herbert's relaxation response, which was kind of a takeoff on transcendental meditation. Because Maharishi gave us mantras, Herb Benson gave us, you just pick a word, like rose or peace. Okay. So here's how you do it. And so this is really technical.
Okay. You close your eyes, and then you sit there, and then you just say the word rose. Rose, peace. And then when your mind wanders, which it will, you just keep coming back to the word peace, peace. Or if you wanna do a mantra, you know, whatever you wanna do.
And twenty minutes, twice a day, 90% reduction in hot flashes.
Kate Northrup: So they're obviously related to stress, obviously related to cortisol. And I do want to give, something I've been I've learned about and have been sharing about, which I think is important regarding stress. I don't know how anyone living right now could not have moderate to high levels of stress. And so this is not I I wanna say for so many super highly capable, you know, responsible women, When you're asked by your doctor, like, what's your level of stress? Oh, well, you need to reduce your stress.
It's like, good luck with that. So here's what I wanna say about stress. Our body and then I'd love kind of the more medical take on this if you have anything to add. Our body keeps the stress. Right?
So the stressor comes the email that pisses us off, the conflict with our partner in the morning before school drop off, the annoying thing your neighbor did, the whatever. Right? Like, the the the financial pressure you feel. So whatever the stressor is, then the stressor, you know, is resolved or moves on or, you know, the fight is resolved. You're not talking to the neighbor anymore.
You've walked down whatever. What's really important to know about our bodies is if we don't actually do something to metabolize that stress, the stress stays in our body. Our body has not gotten the signal yet that the stressor has passed. It's still holding the stress, because then we go back to doing emails. We go back to making dinner.
We go back to pulling it all together for work or pulling it all together for our kids or pulling it all together for our families. And then we just are loading and layering stress and stress and stress. And so our stress and threat bucket gets so overloaded. But the good news is when you build in throughout your day and in your weekly schedule, actively dumping your stress and threat bucket by metabolizing it, then, of course, you're still gonna have stressors in your life, but your body won't be holding the stress in the same way. So, obviously, that two times a day meditation is a wonderful way to metabolize the stress.
Other great ones that, you know, you always taught were breath, sound, tears, and movement. Laughter is a great one. Any kind of moving your body is fantastic. Actually connecting one on one with a safe person, and it doesn't even have to really be somebody you know. It could be a quick conversation with your barista at the coffee shop in the morning significantly lowers the stress in our body.
It's a wonderful way to metabolize stress.
Christiane Northrup: When women are under stress, we tend to do this thing called tend and befriend which increases oxytocin which directly interrupts stress. The other thing that happens is if you do a fifteen minute walk, see the rise in cortisol is a kind of an ancient thing in the body. And the cortisol rises and then the blood sugar rises. And the blood sugar rises so that you have enough energy to run away from whatever it is, but we're not running from a saber toothed tiger. So what you do is you take a quick walk.
You just do whatever it takes to change your state. Now, a lot of times what comes up midlife is rage. It's rage or of needs you have pushed down very often since childhood. Like if you grew up in a family where you weren't allowed to have a feeling. You know, I've had friends who were told by their parents, no one wants to see you cry.
Go upstairs, stuff your face into a pillow. So the three big primal wounds that come up at perimenopause are betrayal, abandonment, and shame. And so that's what you're healing. And the reason in medicine why they tell you, okay, you're 50, now you need a mammogram, and now you need a colonoscopy, and why and it's the beginning of the end, it is because all these things came up for a rebirth and you were told they were medical and you needed an antidepressant or whatever instead of oh thank you. This is as you said, this is the stress bucket that needs to be composted.
So things like when you said movement, sound, and tears, that's how we digest what gets stuck in the fascia. And the fascia is the crystalline system in the body that encases every single organ and every single muscle that is semi solid and is literally where emotions that have not been processed are stored. And that's why so many people go in for a yoga class and begin weeping, or a massage and they begin weeping because you're finally releasing that.
Kate Northrup: Do you know what or in what way our fascia is connected to our nervous system?
Christiane Northrup: It coats every nerve in the body. Yeah. It coats every single nerve.
Kate Northrup: So is the myelin that coats the nerves part of is it is that the same thing as fascia?
Christiane Northrup: It's it's encased by by fascia. The myelin is. Yeah. Got it. Really kind of everything is.
If you go online and look at a YouTube of, doctor Gimberto out of France, a hand surgeon, they put in a little, microscope so you could see the fascial networks, and they're they're literally it's like water in the body. So remember, we are biophotonic light, and the water is what carries the messages into the body and keeps them there. So if you think about water, we know from, the work of Misuri Imoto that water contains messages, water holds emotion. So when you bless the water that goes into your body or you bless your body which is 90% water and you know and it exists as gel water, the fourth state of water, it's literally containing your emotions. And tears by the way contain toxins.
They are completely different from the other fluid in your body. So perimenopause is this beautiful time of rebirth. It really is. So if you just approach it as I am giving birth to something from deep within myself that chances are I deep sixed when I was 11 or 12 or 13 when I got my period. And when you get your period, generally, this shuts down.
She's motioning to her neck and her voice
Kate Northrup: for those who are on audio only. Yeah.
Christiane Northrup: So this is the fifth chakra. The tonsils are like ovaries in the throat. So this voice shuts down as the second chakra opens up. And then at perimenopause, you can't shut up anymore about things that have probably been bothering you for years. So I had a a guy come in with his wife, you know, and he's wearing a he's a coverall mechanic.
He brings his wife in and he says to me, and I'm serious, he says, listen. She is a great wife first half of her cycle. She folds the towels, she makes the meals, she's fantastic. Second half of her cycle after ovulation, she starts talking about wanting to go back to college and she gets irritable. Now fix her.
And I had a good time with them because what I told him is the first half of the cycle is when the estrogen is highest and you are perfectly willing to live for your family and others in your life. Second half of the cycle, if you don't get pregnant, you're preparing to give birth to something from in yourself. And traditionally, up until very recently, I would say your generation, that has not been okay.
Kate Northrup: Yeah. Things are changing. I mean, they changed in in incredible ways in your generation.
Christiane Northrup: Yeah. They did, but we overshot.
Kate Northrup: Yeah. Well, now we're carrying it forward. So something I've heard you say many, many times that I wanna make sure people hear is that perimenopause is like adolescence in reverse, and that it's like your luteal phase of your cycle on steroids. Right? So it's a long luteal cycle before you go into whatever you would wanna call it, your wisdom years, your peak FSLH, you know, FSH, LH years.
So this piece on stress and cortisol is so important in metabolizing the stress. Start with the natural ways that you can support your hormones first. And then you were telling us about lowering your glycemic load, the relaxation technique, the meditation two times a day, movement, Those are all fantastic ways. What else? What point, like, would someone know, okay.
I've maxed out all those possibilities, and I'm doing because I'm somebody who does all the things. Mhmm. I don't drink. I drink very little caffeine. I eat really well.
I move my body. I go out in the morning. I get my sunshine. I put my feet on the ground. I get really good sleep.
Mhmm. All of those things. So for me, I just kinda figured it was time when I was really having trouble falling asleep and staying asleep.
Christiane Northrup: One of the big ones is lack of sleep. That's one of the first things. In the, Amazon jungle, they've found tribes where the women are just up at night for a while. You know, and they're all whispering in their hammocks. It's not a problem if you don't have to get up in the morning.
It's only a problem in a western culture where you gotta get up and get the kids to school or get to work. But what I found is there is a very specific herb that I discovered during the perimenopausal period called prairie marifica.
Kate Northrup: You were in perimenopause when you discovered this herb? Yeah. That's cool. Did you know this seems like a macro example of that. Did you know that often an herb will begin to grow around someone's house when they need that herb for their healing, or people will move in specifically to an area that has the very herb that that person needs to heal.
Anyway, this feels like that.
Christiane Northrup: Yeah. And we're connected to the earth. Well, what happened was I was at a divine feminine awakened masculine retreat in Hawaii and someone had a gel, a vaginal gel made from prairie marifica connected with oak gall and I tried it and I said, oh, this is something. Because very often, one of the first signs of perimenopause in addition to the, sleep thing is dryness. Like a sense women have that I don't have the moisture that I had.
And so I set out to figure out how could I create a moisturizer that would bring in this herb. And I found someone who brought the herb in to a company called Biobotanica out of Long Island where they have patented the active ingredient. And then I went to Thailand and I visited the big tubers where this stuff is wild crafted. And it's You gotta get exactly the right stuff and all of that. And it's been used for seven hundred years by men and women.
And then we painstakingly put together the ingredients. And there were some fun things like I found out that the FDA said, you know, anything that goes in the vagina is considered a medical device. So then it was like, oh, no, please. So I would go to lectures and I'd say, I say, all you men, line up. You got a medical device over there.
Anyway, we finally got it through and we created this device that does exactly the same thing as seventeen beta estradiol. It thickens the vaginal mucosa. One of my friends was in perimenopause, could not have sex, things were just too dry, and then she got on it and she said, Oh my God, you know, my husband is my boyfriend now. And you know, she said she needs it regularly, so you know, that's this, Amada Life. And then I found out that if you take it orally for some women, it restores moisture.
Why? Because it lands on the beta estrogen receptor. There's an alpha and there's a beta. Mammalian estrogens like your estradiol, estrone, estriol, that lands on the alpha receptor. And it acts as a growth hormone which is why it has been associated with overgrowth of the uterine lining and so on and why you've needed to use a progesterone as the sort of, you know, to remove the waxy buildup as it were.
This stuff doesn't do that. It's like a naturally selective estrogen receptor modulator, like tamoxifen. So it's actually protective in the body against overstimulation because there's this thing called estrogen dominance. Yeah. Where you have too much estrogen, not enough progesterone.
Kate Northrup: And that can lead to PCOS. Yeah.
Christiane Northrup: So, actually, the prarium arifica works great for PMS. It works great for perimenopause. So in a way, why wait till you're suffering?
Kate Northrup: Right. So that would sort of be maybe start in your mid thirties?
Christiane Northrup: You could if you have PMS. Absolutely.
Kate Northrup: If you have PMS.
Christiane Northrup: I've had
Kate Northrup: Why not?
Christiane Northrup: I've had 14 and 15 year olds.
Kate Northrup: Love it. So really anytime? Yeah. Anytime if you're having PMS, could it support someone if they were having painful periods?
Christiane Northrup: Yes. Yeah. And I've I've seen that happen. Absolutely. And what my profession does, anytime a woman is having any kind of problem at any time, the answer is always put her on birth control pills.
And the problem with birth control pills is they take you out of your rhythm with nature and the moon, and then you're kind of cycling. You're no longer cycling. You're at a steady state in tune with the pharmaceutical company with hormones that are not native to your human body. And then the problem with the birth control pill is it blunts the ovulatory FSHLH surge. It can change what's called the hormone binding globulin so that your own hormones don't work as well.
There's all and and it also decreases your you've probably seen heard about these studies where women chew the mate by his smell. Like, you know, how good the t shirt smells and that's a genetic thing, and birth control pills remove that olfactory signal. So women wake up after, let's say, ten years of marriage, get off the pill and go, wait a minute, how did this happen? So that doesn't happen if you're on a natural thing. So we created, the prairie marifica plus which contains iodine and methylated b twelve and folate so that it could be metabolized properly.
And then for those women who are already on that stuff, we have the prairie marifica pure that's just
Kate Northrup: Oh, if you already have those other things in your other supplements? In your other supplements. Great. What I noticed when I started taking this was that, it lengthened my cycle, which was great because it was getting really short. Like, down to twenty one days, and, you know, I don't wanna be having a period every twenty one days.
It's just no. Thank you. So that was that was the result that I saw. Okay. So anyone who wants to get Amata Life, will you say the link out loud and then just we'll know that it's also in the show notes for those who are driving?
Christiane Northrup: Amata means ageless in Thai, a m a t a, Amata Life, l a life.com. Amatolife.com. Correct. So you can
Kate Northrup: get all of those there. And these can be taken even if you are on bioidentical hormones. Absolutely. They would they would all work together beautifully.
Christiane Northrup: But what often happens is this. Women will be on the bioidenticals. They're sick of the cost and the prescription and they don't need it. So what you do, you get on the prairie marifica first.
Kate Northrup: Yep.
Christiane Northrup: And as those levels are going up over a month's time, you just start with this twice a day. Then you gradually over one month decrease your bioidenticals. And then at the end Because you do not wanna shock your system. It always has to be a gentle slow thing. But remember, the dictates of your soul have to be attended to at midlife if you want to live the second half of your life with full access to health and wisdom.
If you refuse to look at the things that your body is forcing you to look at, then you will in fact begin the downhill slide to the chronic degenerative disease that I was taught in medical school and residency is inevitable, it isn't. So I want everyone to know that.
Kate Northrup: What, if anything, do you think the predominant zeitgeist right now is getting wrong about perimenopause?
Christiane Northrup: Is that it's a medical condition that requires drugs. Okay. So that continues to be the same thing as before. We haven't had a paradigm shift because starting with pregnancy, everything is so medicalized that you're kind of encouraged to worship the God of medicine or pharmakia instead of the God that created your body in the first place and somehow knew how to make an eyeball, how to make ears, how to make a uterus. God knew how to do that And science can't do that.
It can do some cool things. But I wanted to talk, it increases tears. Many women just have dry eyes. It removes that. You know, it makes the eyes moist again because that's a big deal.
And then vaginal moisturizer, I had one health coach I ran into and she goes, oh my god. My clients, you know, they within four days, they're sleeping and they're saying, I have moisture again. So it's a way to support that without a prescription.
Kate Northrup: That's great. And I will just say, you know, we have a lot of people who are in our community who are health coaches, who are holistic health practitioners, who support their clients and their patients through, you know, through the second half of life. And so if you are one of those people, this is also important to know about as well because if it can help support folks with stuff that you know, it's pretty easy to to take, and it's pretty straightforward. So Very. You know, it doesn't have to be like a 35 step protocol to overhaul.
And, I mean, all right. You talked about all of it counts. Everything everything works altogether. Okay. So that's what people are getting wrong is just, you know, continued overmedicalization of the body.
Christiane Northrup: Yeah. And over testing, like, oh my god. You go in and you get all these tests, and invariably, if you get all these blood tests, one or two are always off, then you think, oh my god. And I
Kate Northrup: bought Let's this for talk about this because there is such a rise, which I think is a great thing of individualized medicine. Yeah. So great. Yeah. However, we can take anything too far.
And if you're testing yourself constantly and you're testing everything, then you're chasing that marker, and you're chasing this marker, and you're chasing that. So talk to us about the the shadow side of biohacking and testing everything.
Christiane Northrup: Okay. So I just experienced it myself. So I went on a sardine challenge to get my ketones up and da da da da da.
Kate Northrup: That'll that'll pop you into ketosis.
Christiane Northrup: Yeah. It did. But then, you know, I'm trying to live, like, in ketosis. Like, let's burn ketones for, you know, our daily needs. And so let's get the carbs under 20 a day.
So I began to do that, and then every morning when I got up to test my blood sugar, it started to rise up and up and up and up because my perfectionism was coming into the body. I'd never had high blood sugar in my life and suddenly I would wake up and my fasting blood sugar, I mean not having eaten for eighteen hours would be a 115. Woah. It was crazy. And it was it was it's like God was saying, sweetheart, you've been doing great with your diet.
You're like you. I'm not overeating, you know, none of this. So here I am. And and by the way, I went on my first diet when I was 12, and then we had a little war going on with the body for my whole life up until the last five years. I'm not kidding.
Here's why I have this incredibly high muscle mass, which I never knew, and you do too, which we are very lucky. But I didn't know it until way later. So on those charts of what you're supposed to weigh
Kate Northrup: Oh, no. The BMI is such bullshit. According to the BMI, I am obese.
Christiane Northrup: We're obese. Right. Exactly. So I found out from coach Colin Watson that I was so lucky to have the amount of muscle mass that
Kate Northrup: I have. So longevity, it's incredible.
Christiane Northrup: Yeah. But I had in my head, because of the women's magazines and 17 magazine and all that, that I was fat. And so I've been you know, in in the eighth grade, I was the heaviest person in my class. I weighed a hundred and twenty five.
Kate Northrup: There are so many problems with let's just start with the fact that you would even know that. Yeah. And that they would be ranking that. That's abusive. I know.
Number one. Yeah. And number two, obviously, it left a mark. We're back to testing.
Christiane Northrup: Yeah. So so here's the thing. The other test that is ridiculous is the lipid profile. Okay. Talk about that.
And I'll tell you why. Every five years or so, the American Heart Association decreases the number that they consider normal so that all these people so I'll give you an example. In 1940, a normal blood pressure was 140 over a 100. Okay. Now they would put you on an antihypertensive.
So that's blood pressure medication. So you could make a case with the kind of numbers. See because we're all going after numbers and the number can change in two seconds. I I had a patient in the hospital with Hodgkin's lymphoma and she was gonna need a blood transfusion. And she said, and I love this about her, she said, give me three hours.
And she meditated and when they came back to check her blood, her hematocrit had gone up like she'd just gotten a unit of blood. That's how connected we are Now to mind the cholesterol thing. For cholesterol, for a statin drug, there's two things you need to know. What is the number, it's called number needed to treat. N N T, number needed to treat.
It is a 100 people if they're on a statin, one person will get a benefit. That's the number needed to treat so that's a hundred. What is the number needed to harm? One in ten. One in ten people will be harmed by a statin so that one in a hundred can have a benefit.
So, and statins increase dementia, muscle tenderness that doesn't go away. And what are hormones made of? Cholesterol. Hormones, the basis for every hormone is cholesterol. So those people with the lowest cholesterol are getting memory loss, dementia, and what is the brain?
Mostly cholesterol. And so this has been an unfortunate set of circumstances where you go in oh, and then the American Heart Association every so often, I don't know if it's every five years, lowers the number for healthy cholesterol. So it used to be, you know, like two fifty, two seventy five, even 300 was okay. Now it's got to be under 200 or you're told your cholesterol is too high. Now what the statin does is it gobbles up coenzyme q 10, which is absolutely necessary for the mitochondria in every muscle including your heart to function and to make energy.
It blocks that. So there's an increased risk of breast cancer if you're on statins. So and that's the kind of thing that a conventional doctor is not likely to tell you.
Kate Northrup: Or no.
Christiane Northrup: And the other thing that we're told is your HDL cholesterol, the good cholesterol, is never changes. Well, I'm here to tell you my HDL cholesterol was 35 when I was 35 and now it's sixties and seventies. Fantastic. Yeah. So that's not true either.
Kate Northrup: Question everything folks.
Christiane Northrup: Yeah. The HDL is related to the number of carbs. We used to be macrobiotic, you know, and Kate knew that she needed animal protein. I was a little rigid. You know, we were splurging at Christmas and she tucks into this Cornish game hen and says, I love this codfish.
You know, she didn't even know. So we were vegan for a long time and then I realized that's not working. Certainly not for us. You know, don't just follow conventional wisdom because it's important to know the well, you know, it's follow the money. It always is.
Money. It always Well,
Kate Northrup: mom, I just wanna really honor you for decades of life changing work, and the women who are pioneering around perimenopause and menopause and hormones now stand on your shoulders, and I really appreciate you sharing your wisdom today. So, of course, we have amatalife.com. But if anybody wants to come, where can they find you on your substack? Doctornorthrup.com has the links to my Substack, which
Christiane Northrup: is truenorth@ substack.com. And, I'm active there, but I'm on, you know, I'm on Twitter and Facebook and all the things. But I'd love to have you sign up for my e news, and you just go to doctornorthrup.com. Amazing.
Kate Northrup: Thank you.
Christiane Northrup: Thank you.
Kate Northrup: A couple of years ago, my monthly cycle started getting shorter and shorter. And I knew a shorter cycle was showing early signs of perimenopause. But in my early forties, I did not want shorter cycles. I want always to extend vitality, extend longevity. And so I started taking Amada Life, which has an incredible ingredient called prairie marifica, which is an herb that helps women with perimenopausal and menopausal symptoms, such as hot flashes, dryness, mood swings, etcetera.
And within one cycle of beginning to take the product, my cycle was back to being its normal length twenty six to twenty eight days, and it has stuck ever since, which is why I take AmataLife every single day. And I cannot recommend it enough for you preventatively or for everyday symptoms that you do not have to suffer with. So all you need to do to check it out is go to katenorthrup.com/amata. Katenorthrup.com/amada. And the link is also in the show notes.