Believe Big Podcast

75-Dr. Nasha Winters - Diving Deep into Hormone Replacement Therapy

• Ivelisse Page & Dr. Nasha Winters • Season 2 • Episode 75

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Join me today as I get to speak with Dr. Nasha Winters about the topic of HRT - Hormone Replacement Therapy.  Dr. Nasha is a  leading expert in the world of integrative oncology, an author and a passionate advocate for healthy metabolic terrain.

In this episode, Dr. Nasha provides many insights into the complexities of hormone therapy and menopausal health, encouraging listeners to make informed decisions about their hormonal health.  She touches on several areas of this subject matter by: 

  • providing historical context of hormone replacement
  • discussing the role of estrogen in a woman's body
  • sharing the risks associated with HRT
  • outlining bio-identical vs. synthetic hormones
  • and suggesting tips for getting off HRT

There is something here for everyone and you will walk away with a better understanding of the importance of your individual metabolic terrain.

Learn More About Dr. Nasha Winters:
https://www.drnasha.com/

Suggested Resources:


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Ivelisse Page:

​Hi, I'm Ivelisse Page, and thanks for listening to the Believe Big podcast, the show where we take a deep dive into your healing with health experts, integrative practitioners, biblical faith leaders, and cancer thrivers from around the globe. Welcome to today's episode on the Believe Big podcast. My name is Ivelisse Page, and it's an always an honor to be with you. Today, my friend, Dr. Nasha Winters will be joining me to talk about a topic that is filled with much confusion, hormone replacement therapy. Is it a life restoring miracle? Abundant in risks? Both? Or neither? Dr. Winters is a global health care authority and best selling author in integrative cancer care and research, consulting with physicians around the world. She has educated hundreds of professionals in the clinical use of mistletoe, and has created a robust educational programs for both healthcare institutions and the public on incorporating vetted integrative therapies in cancer care to enhance outcomes. Nasha has been on a personal journey with cancer for the last 27 years. Her quest to save her own life has transformed into a mission to support others on a similar journey. She is currently focused on opening a comprehensive metabolic oncology hospital and research institute in the United States where the best of standard of care has to offer and the most advanced integrative therapies will be offered. This facility will be in a residential setting on a gorgeous campus against a backdrop of regenerative farming, yay, EMF mitigation, double yay, and retreat, as well as a state of the art medical technology and data collection and evaluation to improve patient outcomes. Wow, I am so excited to have you on the show. Welcome Nasha.

Dr. Nasha Winters:

Hey there, Love. It's good to be here with you and all of your beautiful listeners. So thank you for having me.

Ivelisse Page:

Yes. So we always like to begin the show with the question, what is your favorite health tip?

Dr. Nasha Winters:

Oh, so easy. It's so simple and it's free for all. My sort of non negotiable daily practice, no matter where I am on the planet and what season it is to do my darndest to meet the sunrise. If I'm lucky enough, I'll also meet the sunset, but at least meet the sunrise and where I live in Mexico now, my upstairs balcony looks into the east and I get to sit there in the morning, oftentimes in my little portable far infrared sauna, if not in sitting on a chair where Steve and I get to do kind of a morning meditation you know, together facing the sunrise. And that is one of the most profound ways to set the very topic we're talking about today, our hormones and the cascade of our hormones into the right, the right direction from the get go. And it's just a really peaceful and most beautiful and just, yeah, blissful time of day for me.

Ivelisse Page:

Wow. I love that. And I don't know if you know this, but you know, sunrises is my one word for this year. So that is incredible. So I love that word. I love that. It's a resetting of our body. It also means new beginnings and just so much hope for the day. And so I love that is your health tip. That's awesome.

Dr. Nasha Winters:

That's really powerful. I like that you reiterated that the newness, the new beginnings of it all, which is exactly every day we get a start afresh, start anew. Yeah.

Ivelisse Page:

Yes. So I am so glad you're with us today to help talk through the vast amount of information that is out there about hormone replacement therapy or what some also call MHT, menopausal hormone therapy. You know, there are pros and there are cons. It's complicated and it's a divisive issue. And I know that you will be able to shed much light on this topic, especially with your expertise in cancer and your years of research. So, so let's begin. Okay. So the average age of menopause is 51. And we don't go through menopause, right? We stay there. So this is where the 12 full months have passed since a woman had her final menstrual period or like myself surgically due to a hysterectomy or even caused sometimes by chemotherapy that caused enough damage to the ovaries that brought a woman into menopause. So balancing quality of life, marital relations and health risk, you know, they're all vital. So before we get into those details, can you share with our listeners, what the role of estrogen plays in a woman's body?

Dr. Nasha Winters:

Absolutely. Well, first of all, you're correct. This is a bit of a controversial discussion. A little bit of context, I think is important for folks to know that we, the first time we actually started using hormones in our, in, in our bodies as an exogenous treatment was in the 1930s. And basically if you were a pregnant woman between 1940 and 1971, or within the body of a pregnant woman between 1940 and 1971, you were likely exposed to this sort of original hormone, which is known as DES, which is, oh gosh, di, diethyl, Rol or something, but I call it DES And so that was about the first time we've ever been exposed as humans to like a medication treatment of hormones. And we were using that in our hopes of helping, uh, women maintain healthy, strong pregnancies. We saw this as a benefit to preventing miscarriage, and so we, we brought it on board as something we thought was going to make our lives better. Okay. So let's just put that one on the parking lot for a moment as we go, because this is going to be important for us to discuss. The next piece of when hormones started to come into our environment was when we started to introduce in the 1940s to our food systems. We started introducing hormones into fattening our livestock, uh, to get it to market quicker. Right. And so in doing so that should probably give your, the listener a little bit of a, okay, we're giving hormones to fatten up, to grow these animals quicker. That might be a little bit of something to pay attention to so that we could then ingest them later, which also means we are what we eat, but also what they eat or are injected with. And then the third is birth control pills. You know, uh, oral contraception, all of those things started coming into play in the 1960s. And it wasn't really until the latter part of the 1960s that we started to look at ways that we could manipulate this transitional phase that you talked about, which was the menopausal years, whether that was natural menopause or surgical or medically induced menopause. And so really, if you look at the clock of humanity, we've only been working with exogenous hormones for a very short period of time. And we already started learning from our DES women and DES babies and now two, three generations downstream from DES prescribed women. We only started understanding the last couple of generations that was probably a bad idea. So for instance, people exposed to DES, both the women as well as the babies they carried have a much higher risk of a variety of cancers. Specifically in women, a lot of gynecological, vulvar, vaginal cancers and in men prostate cancers. And then even the folks that were in vitro exposed to that, their next generation, their children have higher incidents as well. So we've been able to track at least three if not four generations that were directly impacted by the exogenous use of a well meaning hormone to make for a better quality of life and a better outcome. Same type of thing with the animal world. We've learned a lot about that. It's like we've now tried to go and find hormone free milks and different things, and we've understood the process that we probably should not be eating animals that have been treated with hormones. We understand the safety considerations of that, and so we're willing to think about that. Right. And then we look at birth control pills, all the crazy studies that have come out around that, that women may even choose different partners based on the manipulation of their bodies and their hormones and their psychology based on those well meaning, protective, you know hormones to prevent an unwanted pregnancy and yet that manipulates even their choices of partners, lots of studies and research about that. So I plant seeds here that probably should be telling you that this is messing with you. Maybe not in the best place So I recognize that people do not want the discomfort that peri or post menopause may have, or PMS may have, or a perceived loss of their fountain of youth of this whole process. And yet, what I think is really unfortunate is most of that has been perpetuated by kind of a myth in our culture and in our society, that's what inevitably happens when you make these transitions into your life. And so, that is the backbone in which we need to talk about what does estrogen do, right, in our bodies. What does this do here? And so let's talk, let's go through the phases and the seasons of life briefly. One of them is the first season of our life is our adolescence, our our monarchy, which is the moment when we start to enter into puberty and into menstruation for women in puberty for men and women boys and girls. And we call that the spring of our life. And that's a mechanism that kicks in, which is like the waking up and the expression of all these hormones, including androgens, which are the DHEAs and the testosterone, but also the estrogens the various forms, estradiol, estrone, estriol, as well as progesterone. These all kind of wake up and get moving. The word hormone in Greek is derived from the word messenger. So it means it's a messenger. And so the way I like to think about hormones, whether they're endogenously produced or exogenously replaced, is that they're like a text message that's sending a trigger for a reaction elsewhere in the body. Alright, whether your body is making that endogenously, are you giving, you're giving it a medication exogenously. So in the springtime of our being, we start to tell the body to do things like grow breasts, grow genitals, prepare the body to start to menstruate, to do things. So that's the whole point is like to grow. Right. I mean, that's just it. And to prepare the body, which is very important for people to hear, like that's its power and it's starting to shape our brains. It's starting to shape our vasculature. It's starting to shape our bones, which is a big endocrine organ of our system. And it's starting to interact with the world around it. Then it prepares us to move into the summer of our life, which is that time of creation, procreation, preparation for reproduction. Again, we have to grow things like babies and so hormones, that's what their job is to do. And then moving into the sort of actual pregnancy and childbirth and those few months beyond when we're moving into feeding those babies that moves into the autumn the harvest of our life, which is the moments again of like nourishing another growing things inside of yourself to feed and nourish another and then when we move into that perimenopause menopausal window that is the winter season of our life, which is about going back into the dormancy, like we don't have to grow so much anymore. We can more rest, go inward and utilize the resources that are already in and around us. And so I'm wanting people to even think about the context of that. That is how we have been wired and how we have evolved to develop since the beginning of time. And somehow in the 1960s and 70s, we started to medicalize all of these seasons. We started to label all of these seasons and we started to have symptoms associated with all of these seasons in a way that we just had never really seen to the extent that we do today in modern times. So instead of us saying, why are women now more symptomatic with their periods or their fertility or their lack of fertility or menopause than ever before, we just started to medicate them. All right. And instead of saying, well, why is this person maybe aging quicker or losing muscle mass quicker? We assume it's a deficiency in hormones, but I'd like to offer that it's a lot more complex than that. That is a reaction, that's a symptom, not a cause of what's going on there. And so hormones are, they're messengers, but they're also growth factors. Okay. And that includes estrogen and all of the others. So I think that's a good moment to kind of take a pause and take a breath and see if there are some questions that burbled up there. But I thought context is really important for people to understand so that maybe already and understanding that context, you're already drawing your own conclusions just for yourself, but, or at least starting to question things in a different way.

Ivelisse Page:

Yeah, that's so beautifully said. I never have heard of it expressed or explained, in the sense of seasons, right? And, uh, So that was so beautiful how, how you described that and it gives a really good picture of our lives and you know just because we're in a winter season doesn't mean that doesn't need to be just as beautiful as the springtime where all the flowers are blooming. And so I guess for many women you know I think the main reason is that they're just trying to find such relief from these symptoms from the hot flashes, the night sweats, the low libido, the fatigue, the joint pain, you name it. So what exactly is hormone replacement therapy and how does it work in managing those symptoms for women conventionally?

Dr. Nasha Winters:

I love it. Well, first of all, what you just described as what we have equated to hormone deficiency syndromes in the medical arena are actually metabolic syndromes and cortisol syndromes. Okay, so my dear friend and colleague, Dr. Mindy Peltz, wrote a beautiful book called Menopause Reset, and it was the first and only book I've read in the hormonal realm for women that I actually could fully get behind and endorse. Dr. Nushin has a book coming out in May that is really good as well. But what's on the market right now is her book is the first time I finally heard people actually talking about the reason why we're having hormonal symptoms. When she talks about it, I call it the three S's sugar, sex, stress, and she calls it the levels of insulin, which is back to the sugar piece, cortisol, which comes back to the stress piece and sex, which is all the hormones, the whole hypothalamic, pituitary, adrenal, ovarian axis, and just basically the interaction and communication between all the hormonal systems of the body, of which sex hormones are about one of that. And so what happens when we become symptomatic, we are only looking in one area and then we write a script pad, you know, to treat that symptom, which is exactly what it is. It is a symptom. It is not a cause of a medical condition. And so this is where I think that women, of course they're desperate, of course they're uncomfortable, but I don't think they're being asked the right questions, nor are they asking themselves the right questions, which is to explore their metabolic health, their stress response and resilience and their connection because the biggest hormone that's missing out in women that we think is like, let's just use the concept of libido. Okay. A lot of people treat women thinking that their libidos are tied up into a deficiency in testosterone or estrogen, but I am here to tell you, it's much more than that. It's actually more of a deficiency in oxytocin, which is our desire to bond, desire to connect, desire to be intimate, desire to be vulnerable, right? When you're stressed, when you're exhausted, when you're a little perturbed at your partner for whatever reason, when there's any resentments that are being held, oxytocin is out of the building. And so what happens is we may give some medications that make you feel for a moment kind of, yee, it's no different than like a Red Bull. Like that short lived effect of a little bit of a bump of caffeine or a little bit of a bump of sugar, which is what we reach towards. It's kind of affecting sort of these other reactions in the body. And yet, really, if women come back and men too, and deal with their stress response, deal with their insulin levels, get themselves metabolically healthy and metabolically flexible, and really work with connecting with another and really kind of cleaning house on whatever debris has accumulated in your most meaningful close relationships. Then and only then can you really be in balance in a beautiful, sacred, perfect balance within your hormonal milieu.

Ivelisse Page:

What are some natural ways that people's oxytocin can rise? Like what are some things that you have found that can help that?

Dr. Nasha Winters:

Well, I love this because it comes up so much like even in Dr. Kelly Turner's work. It comes up in the work of the Blue Zones. It comes up in the work of longevity. It comes up in my belief system of the, my version of the CDC, which is about circadian rhythm, diet, and community. It's about connection. So this is where even work of people like Bernie Siegel from the 1980s his book, Medicine, Miracles, Love Medicine, Miracles, I believe is the title of it. He showed a lot of the studies back then and we've repeated these studies for decades now showing that people who were in support groups, had much better outcomes, much better overall, you know, progressive free survival as well as overall survival. So that's just one example where community and connection does so much. But the simplest places to raise our oxytocin are things like playing with babies. Playing with baby animals, baby humans, you know, looking at pictures of kittens. The silly TikTok videos of cats and puppies are really powerful to raise your oxytocin levels. Laughter is a very powerful oxytocin raising opportunity. And then it just actually the act, the act and the expression of love through orgasm is a very powerful connection, but it's like, you have to have enough oxytocin to even want to get to that point to then to get to the other side of that point, which kind of just creates this spill it forward effect of wanting to continue to merge with, you know, with another. And so those are some really good examples that are simple and accessible to all. And so I think those are places where you can start on that because also in the world today, we're more isolated than ever, maybe more connected than ever in social media, but more alone than ever in other ways. A lot of us are walking around carrying our burdens on our own. And we have so many resources, either in your spiritual community, in your relationships, in your friendships, in your romantic relationships, there's places that we really should be reaching out and connecting more, which will help bring that oxytocin level up and lower. When oxytocin goes up, estrogen comes down, the excess estrogen comes down, the cortisol comes down, the insulin comes down. When oxytocin is down, all of those kind of run wild, right? So they all fit together in this, this beautiful quilt of life.

Ivelisse Page:

Yes. Yeah. And so, you hinted at it at the intro, you know, about hormones. And so what should women be aware of in relation to risks associated with hormone replacement therapy?

Dr. Nasha Winters:

Sure. Well, first of all, I think everyone needs to be worked up fully with their terrain to understand what is going on with their cortisol, their insulin levels and their stress response, et cetera. Like those are really important to take a look at because those are the underpinning drivers of all metabolic diseases of today. Cardiovascular disease, dementia, cancer, autoimmunity, all the things, right? So it's important to really get a handle on that, which will also change the expression of your hormonal milieu, in general. The other piece, if you are looking at even, Hey, you're really struggling, maybe you've had a medical menopause and you're really struggling and the road is very bumpy. This is where I would look at your epigenetics. I would look at your single nucleotide polymorphisms, which are some direct to consumer testing that's available out there today. So for instance, if you've got issues with something called CYP1B1, or CYP1A1, or COMT, known as the Com T SNP or issues with MAO SNPs, E SR 1&2 SNPs. These are just a few examples of single nucleotide polymorphisms that mean you already have problems metabolizing your own endogenous hormones. And so living in the swimming pool of the exogenous in you know, endocrine disrupting xenoestrogen swimming pool of the world we live on today. Then if you decide to write a script pad and add more, cram more into the receptor sites of your already overburdened hormonal receptors, you are adding insult to injury. You are about to topple the machine, and if you also have glutathione SNPs, and you've got SNPs with your vitamin D synthesis, which is also around how your body processes dopamine, progesterone, estrogen as well, you're even a higher risk for these. So there's actually lots of evidence showing that if you've got a CYP1B1 or CYP1A1, a GSTP1 or GSTM, or a VDR SNP, you are just absolutely right there not a candidate for exogenous hormone replacement therapy. So I would really look at that and I would really ask your doctors. There's a lot of people really coming in and massaging the data to make it sound like this is safe for the general public, as well as for people who've already had cancer or actively have cancer. But I just really challenge your listener to just be intuitive about this. And also, I mean, I, this is where I, people want to throw rotten tomatoes at me. This is a very lucrative business. And so I do also challenge folks to a little bit of their cognitive dissonance. Let's just leave it at that. And maybe, uh, you know, conflict of interest here because I had a private practice, family practice for 17 years before I really focused entirely on oncology and I never had to use hormones to bring balance to fertility, balance to menopause, balance to PMS, balance to PCOS. I didn't have to use hormones. I treated the terrain. I treated those three S's we talked about and the women and men regulated. That is where, and this is also going to upset people, I think it's lazy doctoring when you're quick to write a script and you don't address the fundamentals first and you don't ask the right questions and you don't do your due diligence for who's at risk and who's not. I really strongly feel that anybody who's actively cancering and coming out of the cancer zone or has a strong family history of cancer, I do not advise you adding growth factors to your exogenously, no matter what. I need people to reframe the way they think about it. It's not that these hormones cause cancer, but they certainly are signaling agents and growth factors that will have an impact on how the cancering process is taking root.

Ivelisse Page:

Yeah, and I'm a perfect example of that. You know, I was worried about all of that, especially, you know, I was heading into that area anyway and going through surgical menopause and for me the SNPs that you're talking about were a hundred percent. Even my integrative doctor said, well, let me look to see what your SNPs are first because potentially you could do vaginal estrogen if it was an absolute need, right? But let me just look. And then for me, after looking through that, she was like, absolutely not.

Dr. Nasha Winters:

Oh, bless her.

Ivelisse Page:

Absolutely not. And I was concerned that, oh my goodness, it was going to cause so much disruption in my life. But like you said, she has done so many things to my terrain and using homeopathic remedies and other things that my sleep and making sure my sleep is well. And I, I have some hot flashes, but it's minor, you know.

Dr. Nasha Winters:

But it will be maybe a couple of months to a couple of years post surgery will be a little flares here and there, but even as your body's creating hormesis around it, amazing. And there are so many things we can do. Like women still don't have to suffer. I like most of my women, just vaginal vitamin E can work really well. And then if that's not quite enough, there's some really good, healthy, safe lubricants on the market. Good Clean Lovin' is one of them. I really love their brand. It's very safe, non hormonal extremely uh, friable uh, shrunken tissue that's having really problems, we can use things like hyaluronic acid. There's a woman I'm getting ready to interview soon, Dr. Sherry Ong, she's a vaginal rejuvenation surgeon and her specialty was in postmenopausal, post, uh, cancer patients who can't use the hormones and she's been able to do for those extremely aggressive cases that don't respond to anything, not even hormones, to bring so much relief, but there really are the list of options to help symptom treat while you're getting to the why of those symptoms are far safer and far more numerable than you're probably being led to believe.

Ivelisse Page:

Yes. And I've, have you ever heard of Intimacy Melts? I was, that came across.

Dr. Nasha Winters:

Oh, that's interesting. Oh, yeah. I'll check it out.

Ivelisse Page:

Yeah. They're infused with 50 milligrams of CBD. It's by Foria.

Dr. Nasha Winters:

Oh, Foria. If you would have said Foria, yes.

Ivelisse Page:

Okay. Okay. So I heard them. And then also Uriel Pharmacy has an intravaginal ointment called Argentum Calendula Ointment. Wow. And that's supposedly for vaginal dryness. So there's lots of options, like you're saying, that are readily available. But I was curious about the Foria, if you had heard of them.

Dr. Nasha Winters:

And I've had a lot of women over years that didn't even have cancer issues that had things like Lichen Planus, which is an autoimmune issue or that had like dyspareunia. So painful intercourse or just painful tenesmus like extreme contracted, uh, vaginal canal. The Foria products have literally, I mean, Steve and I were having dinner one night at our favorite restaurant in Durango, Colorado, and the chef came up to our table and basically bought us dinner because it changed his wife's life. An odd conversation to be having around dinner, but all the people around could see him, like writing notes on their napkins. Like, what was this product again?

Ivelisse Page:

I know that people are thinking this, that are listening to this episode now and I'd love for you to clear this up too. Does it make a difference if hormones are bio identical versus synthetic or patch version?

Dr. Nasha Winters:

I love this question so much. So sort of like sugar is sugar is sugar, hormones are hormones are hormones. And what's interesting is the idea that people have gotten this idea that bioidentical hormones are somehow natural hormones. I really want to put that belief to bed today because bioidentical hormones simply mean that they biomimic. They're so close to what your normal endogenous created hormones are that they compete more assertively and more aggressively for your hormone receptors in your body. There are synthetic versions. There are neutral, like a phytochemical, very, you know, concentrated phytochemical versions that people have formulated here that are far more than just what you eat. You know, so I don't like, don't freak out about your food sources as much unless you're eating a ton of soy and different things like that. But ultimately what we're putting into a supplement tends to be highly concentrated if it's coming from the herbal side. Otherwise, it's all synthetic and it's competing with your endogenous hormones and it's more assertive into that receptor site, and it's also more difficult to pop out of the receptor site or to metabolize. And so it is stronger and more aggressive than your own hormone. Right. And if you already, if you were born with a blueprint, that makes you have problems metabolizing your endogenous hormones, you bet your bottom dollar you're going to have issues metabolizing the exogenous hormones, not just from your environment that we're all completely stewed in right now, but also any pharmaceuticals or nutraceutical interventions that might be added to the mix.

Ivelisse Page:

Yeah, and so inform those who are listening. What are the dangers of hormone replacement therapy that they should really be aware of a research and maybe their studies in regards to that? Like I've heard of cardiovascular, you know, issues and blood clot, blood clotting. And what are the main ones that you find besides cancer?

Dr. Nasha Winters:

Yeah, sure. So, in in our book, The Metabolic Approach to Cancer, we have an entire chapter on hormones and it's well referenced. So I would encourage people to go back, even though it's from 2017 the data is not only still really good. There's actually been more to, to back what we're talking about here. That's one of the things I think this mythology that women are also taught that their brains won't work as well, or their bones won't be as healthy, or that their hearts won't be as healthy without these hormones. And yet all of those things are things that are responsive to your diet and your lifestyle. Okay. And they're metabolic in nature. And so, I want people to understand that your hormonal health, your brain health, your heart health, your bone health are much more about what you're eating and doing every day of your life than what hormones are actually contributing to the mix and be their prevention or treatment of that. So I want to, that's also a myth that needs to be busted. But as far as exogenous hormones go, this is, if people have clotting disorders, you actually have a higher incidence of of a clot cascade on hormones. So this is where you see a huge incidence like women with PCOS for instance, which is a huge swath of our population today, have a higher incidence of having blood clots on hormones. on hormones, whether it's you know, oral, uh, contraceptives, whether it's things like NuvaRings, whether it's things like Depo Provera or even on the bioidentical hormones, they have a much higher incidence of clotting cascades because the hormones themselves kind of coagulate. It has to process through the liver. And so it kind of creates this, which is where the blood clot cascade is in the liver as well. So they interact there in a really frightening way. So I got horror. In fact, there's a story in that chapter about a young woman that was under my care. I was her nanny. And there's actually an entire website, an entire documentary based on her and thousands of other women like her who've lost their lives to, uh, the use of these types of treatments. You know, she was taking, used NuvaRing in treatment of her polycystic ovarian ovarian disease. She was a young woman who thought it would just be easier to throw a NuvaRing into the mix, despite everyone educating her, she snuck it. Nobody knew until her parents had to unplug her life support on Thanksgiving Day of 2011, it still just guts me to this day. And that's where the doc, one of the doctors said, do you know if she has any? I mean, the, when they saw the, her lungs filled with clots, that was one of the doctors said, do you know if she has a an IUD or a nuva ring or any of those things? And of course, the family said, no, she doesn't. And they did an exam and found it. And so by then it was unfortunately too late and you just see class action lawsuit after class action lawsuit on that. So there's definite problems just even in the younger areas of this, especially if you are a smoker on top of it or have PCOS on top of it. And then when you're looking at the others, like people talking about your brain health, it's really interesting. Hormones themselves, exogenous hormones and endogenous hormones actually change your brain structure. It changes the actual physical anatomy of your brain. And so that's something like, like things like SSRIs are, will increase estrogen levels. So people taking antidepressants will raise that. Copper IUDs, copper in your pesticides, copper pipes, those all also sequester estrogen in your body. Pesticides, most of those use a copper base in that. And so that really brings up the estrogen levels in your body. Metals such as cadmium, arsenic, mercury, they're known as metallo estrogens are out there. The endocrine disrupting chemicals such as parabens and phthalates, which are in just like ubiquitous in our body care products, our makeup, our cleaning products even the things we treat our furniture with, like the flame retardants, et cetera. And then if you live on campuses or in HOAs or in your fields of agriculture, you're being exposed to the big known carcinogen and endocrine disrupting chemical glyphosate. And so the point is that we are constantly exposed to these other hormones. And what those are doing is they're causing metabolic syndrome. So hormones of any kind, exogenous from the environment, exogenous from pharmaceutical prescriptions. They're messing with your metabolic rate. They're messing with your metabolic health. They cause fatty liver. They set you for a whole cascade of events to have a higher incidence of insulin resistance, things like that, typically. They cause a lot of changes just in again, your, the way you see and perceive the world. So there's a lot, there's so many things like your brain health. We call autism or excuse me Alzheimer's, type 3 diabetes. So it really is more about getting your insulin under control. Our Cardiovascular issues in women, this is related to our COM T SNP, the way we process our catecholamines, which means our stress response. So our heart disease issues in women are much more related to how we tolerate catecholamines and stress than it is about an estrogen problem. And if we start to go to bat and actually get to the root of these issues your brain will be healthier, your heart will be healthier, your libido will be healthier your skin will be healthier and your longevity will be healthier, so like you said they are problematic for folks as far as cancer, especially now that one in two of us are expected to face that in our lifetime, I, I want people to do their part to be as resistant to cancer as possible. And that's just one of those other pieces that you need to be very aware of and mitigate or prevent even using in your life.

Ivelisse Page:

Yes. Yes. And, you know, we are coming to the close and I, you know, I'm not gonna, uh, end on that because I know that there are women that are out there that, maybe they are on bioidentical hormones. Maybe they're on their patches or other things. And so what would you suggest for them if someone wanted to stop the hormone replacement therapy? Where should they start? Is it recommended to stop cold turkey? Should they be weaned off? Like what are, what would be your best tips for that?

Dr. Nasha Winters:

First of all, I would love for them to get with a terrain expert, someone who can help them understand, look under the hood, look at their SNPs, look at their labs, look at how these, uh, look at what may be react, like what may be showing up that they aren't aware of. Okay. So look at the blind spots. Then if we see, yep, insulin is a driver here, or histamine. So women with hot flashes, histamine is often the number one culprit of that, or stress response. COMT is one of the biggest causes of hot flashes. So suddenly a good terrain expert is going to know how to ask you the questions to see what actually created your symptoms of menopause or whatever it was that got you to bring these medications on board. So knowing your terrain is number one. Number two unless you have a newly diagnosed, aggressive cancering process that is definitely hormonally sensitive I would not cold turkey them. Now, most doctors, most oncologists will pull you right off of them the second you're diagnosed. That should also probably tell you something. So like, don't wait for that opportunity. Yeah. Oh yeah. It's all the time. And so that's where you want to start now so that you can start to gently lean in while you're taking out. One thing you're building up another, so working with that terrain expert is helping you get to the root of why you needed those medications to begin with, and then works on correcting that so you can restore your body's function, not replace it. So that's really key. And then a slow, gentle titration down any step in that direction is going to make a difference and making sure that your organs of elimination are working well, that your detox pathways are working well, that your methylation pathways are working well. And again, only people who have had expert experience in terrain health are going to be able to help you through this because most of the time, unfortunately, you're nurse practitioners, your PAs, your MDs don't have that type of training. And so, uh, you know, that you have to go to extra training to learn these types of things. And even that in fact, I have a cohort of 54 clinicians right now going through my training program. And I would say 50 percent of them, their primary financial driver of their practice is hormone replacement therapy. And they're all happy to re look at this and say it's time for me to change things up. Which is also so courageous and powerful because I've had to change the way I see things and do things in my practice over the years. You don't know what you don't know until you know, but once you know, it's on you. Right? And so my doctors who are learning this are realizing they probably should have taken a very different approach to this. And they are, and it's really beautiful and powerful to see. And they're really helping themselves and their loved ones and their patients in a way that now, like my practice predominantly was bringing people in to get them off these medications. That's how these guys are going to be working is like, how do we actually correct this versus replace this?

Ivelisse Page:

Wow. Well, thank you, Nasha, for all that you do for the world of cancer and beyond and for training all these physicians and for opening our eyes to this topic, which as I said at the beginning, can be filled with much confusion. And so thank you for being so clear and speaking so beautifully to explain everything so well for us today. Really appreciate your time. I know you're super busy.

Dr. Nasha Winters:

Oh, so grateful. Thank you so much, Ivelisse, for having me.

Ivelisse Page:

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