The Female Factor: Making women’s health count – and what it means for you

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The company has long faced criticism for removing and restricting female reproductive health information with a prominent report from the Center for Intimacy Justice early last year accusing Meta of systematically rejecting many female and gender diverse reproductive health ads. The CIJ report also accused Meta of having bias algorithms, stating that male reproductive health ads were found to be permitted, including ads that referenced male sexual pleasure. Jonathan Wolf: And then stop for 26 days. That's not a pattern. There's never any like good cheats. I have to say it's very disappointing things about this podcast, and no one comes to and says, oh, well you can just exercise once a month and you'll be fine. so you're saying here like, just make sure that like regular exercise has been shown to be helpful, but you are saying don't stop through this period.

Hazel Wallace: That regular activity can actually reduce menstrual symptoms and also how heavier period is amazing. Yeah, and you know, this was, this is evidence from the Cochrane review where we pool lots of research together and we look at.Jonathan Wolf: when you say sleep architecture. I love the idea that I have sleep architecture. Can you explain a little bit more what that means?

Hazel Wallace: I think the power that our reproductive hormones have on other aspects outside of our cycle. So our mood, our sleep, our metabolism, our gut health. I don't think that's something that many people know. We found that it increased engagement because it doesn’t flag your content as being inappropriate to certain audiences,” Wallace outlined. So people might have heard about, you know, REM sleep and non REM sleep, and we'll go through cycles of this threat. The night and old stages of sleep are important, whether it's light sleep or deep sleep or REM sleep, but they all offer different. Benefits to us and when we go into that luteal phase, there's some evidence to say there's less REM sleep, which is that dream sleep. The Female Factor is an all-encompassing book on women’s health from Dr Hazel Wallace; who is an NHS doctor, registered nutritionist and bestselling author. She started ‘The Food Medic’ blog in 2012, as a medical student, in a bid to bridge the gap between conventional medical advice and the latest thoughts and developments in nutrition and other areas of lifestyle. The blog has now extended to various other platforms and publications including social media, books, and a podcast.

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Gut issues are quite common, so thinking about potentially how you might need to adjust what you eat. And then I think at the end, we talked about intermittent fasting where you're quite cautious and it sounds like you're mainly cautious about people eating enough calories, enough food, so it can potentially work, but don't just assume that this is this wonder solution actually, it sounds like you, you're concerned there might even be some issues here. And typically women will have some physical symptoms of PMS as well. So the things that we mentioned, like headache, mood disturbance, cramps, things like that. But they'll have significant mood disturbance and that will impact their day-to-day quality of life. So they'll find that, you know, a lot of women will even use their annual leave because they'd feel like they can't go into work, which is something that is not okay. Jonathan Wolf: and this being the ZOE podcast, I have to ask you about the microbiome, but I think I know what you're gonna say. Do we have any understanding about whether the microbiome is actually fluctuating during this cycle as a result of all of these massive changes? This is a must read for all women with no-nonsense information about what is within your control and what is not. It’s received heaps of praise for a reason.

But there's also LH and F S H, and there's some higher up hormones as well from the brain. These hormones fluctuate across the month, the very start of the month, the first half of the cycle, we call the follicular phase, and the second half we call the luteal phase. And then we've got ovulation sandwiched in between. As a kind of a general statistic as well, women typically sleep more than men, but have. Worst quality sleep, and that's for multiple reasons. Do you want to be in with a chance of winning the below prizes? 3 first prize winners will each win: So for women who do wanna try it, I would say you have to be really, really clear on getting enough nutrients and. Most importantly enough calories in that feeding window. And it might be that you don't go for huge windows where you're fasting, so you're slightly more, cautious and going for maybe a 14 hour window of fasting as opposed to anything bigger than that.

Transcript

Hazel Wallace: Yeah, it can manifest in various ways, which is why there's certain criteria that doctors will use to diagnose it compared to other kind of symptoms like or other conditions like depression or anxiety. But typically it will be kind of low mood, tearfulness, irritability. Some women experience anger, so it can be a variation in different emotions and different moods, but it's very much tied to that, and there isn't enough research around why this happens.