Transcript

Hello, and welcome back to the hormone hub. It’s Kylie Pinwill, your host. And while we talk all things hormones, perimenopause, menopause, weight, loss, [00:01:00] stress, tiredness, fatigue, all of the things. I think it’s pretty timely that we actually talk about heart disease, heart attacks, and also what that means for you. So a pretty sobering sort of statistic is heart disease is the number one killer of women worldwide.

And in Australia, it’s actually the leading cause of death in women over the age of 45. So, you know, it’s pretty scary when you think that almost 10 times more women are dying of heart disease that they are of breast cancer. And to put it in perspective, one woman in Australia, every single hour is dying of heart disease.

And, you know, the thing is it’s actually highly preventable. It’s never too early to start making better changes, and you know, better choices. So, you know, like I said, most of you know, a lot of what I do is focused around hormones. But in actual fact, how we sort of [00:02:00] manage that with dietary changes, lifestyle changes at the same time, we’re also reducing your risk of heart disease.

So very much a holistic approach. So ladies, I really urge you to please don’t wait for that magic pill because you know, it very well could be too late. Personally, I’ve lost already, you know, before we hit our fifties, I’ve lost school friends, both male and female, from heart disease and heart attacks.

Okay. And you know, recently we’ve had, Warney go, there was another cricketer, who was in the news last week. There was a Senator down in Victoria, you know, who were all healthy, well, relatively healthy, obviously not. But you know, young, vibrant people contributing who still had a lot, a lot of life left to live, you know, so it’s crazy.

So, you know, please don’t wait around [00:03:00] for a diagnosis. Don’t wait around for something to happen or it’s worst case, it’s actually too late. All right. So let’s kind of run through, like, what does a heart attack look like? All right. So the actual heart attack itself, we see it on TV and you know, there’s a lot of chest clutching and it’s very dramatic as somebody sort of slowly drops to the floor.

But you know, the reality is for women, it’s actually quite different. Okay. So we’re more likely to experience a lot of non chest pain. Okay. So, and this is the problem. So this is why a lot of women actually, or more women actually die from heart disease because we don’t register the symptoms and we don’t actually kind of connect what’s going on.

So quite often, you know, these heart, there could be a heart attack going on, but our symptoms might be presenting as you know, pain in our jaw or neck pain or pain in the back of our shoulder. So [00:04:00] it’s, you know, generalized pain, more so than the actual heart itself. It could be manifesting in the form of nausea or vomiting.

It could be dizziness, you know, that lightheaded sort of feeling. So, and you know, then for no particular reason, it could be shortness of breath or having difficulty breathing, indigestion. So, you know, that pain that sort of sits up around your bra line. So, you know, sort of higher up in your chest and you know, it can also be, you know, pay attention if for no particular reason you’ve got sort of tiredness, fatigue, which is hard to kind of pinpoint at our stage of life.

Let’s face it. Cause tiredness and fatigue is a really common symptom, but when s ome of these things sort of intermittently come and go away. It’s always a good idea to get it checked out. Okay. So the risk factors, there’s common risk factors for men and also for women when it comes to [00:05:00] heart attacks and heart disease.

But there’s also specifically, you know, risk factors for women as well. So that’s, that’s what I’m going to sort of chat about today because I’ll quite often where we don’t make the connection between certain conditions and our heart health. So, obviously, you know, being overweight, being obese, having a waist measurement of, you know, and I hate the BMI.

 It’s a tool. It’s not a great assessment of what’s going on with your health. But if we’re looking at a waist measurement and you know, if it’s, if your waist is sitting over 88 centimeters, ideally we want it under 80 centimeters. But if it’s 88 or higher, you’re in a high risk category for heart disease.

 Having high blood pressure obviously is, you know, puts you in a high risk. If you’ve got high LDL cholesterol and I’ll talk more about cholesterol in a second. But you know, it’s that LDL cholesterol we want to look at. If [00:06:00] you have type two diabetes, if you have insulin resistance, if you are drinking alcohol.

You know, and not giving yourself regular breaks from it. And of course smoking. So, you know, they’re the sort of things that go for both men and women, but here’s some sort of symptoms that, or some risk factors that are specific for women. So when you’re over, so just being over the age of 45 puts you in a higher risk category.

Yay. And then also being, you know, if your Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander, it’s over the age of 30. So, you know, it’s actually quite a lot lower. So if you’re a woman or identify as a woman, you know, Aboriginal Torres Strait Islander, you’re automatically in that higher risk category over the age of 30. Having polycystic ovary syndrome or PCOS can put you in a high risk category.

And the reason that this is because [00:07:00] polycystic ovaries often comes with blood sugar dysregulation and insulin issues. So there’s a link there between polycystic ovaries and insulin resistance and type two diabetes, which puts you in that higher category. Premature menopause can put you in a high risk category.

So when we’re talking about hormones, you know, estrogen’s, one of our protective cardiovascular hormones. So it protects your heart, protects our cardiovascular system. And when we sort of hit menopause, we lose that estrogen and particularly the younger you are, that means the less protection you have across your lifespan.

So it does put you in a more vulnerable category. Then, you know, you’re also at a higher risk of insulin resistance as well, because it’s a double whammy. Okay. So for women also having an autoimmune condition puts you in a high risk category. If you are having certain cancer treatments, [00:08:00] particularly for breast cancer or other sort of hormonal cancers and any sort of cancer treatment in your chest and neck areas, you know, that that can put you in that high-risk category.

And also depression. So, like I said, like for the most part, you know, heart disease is largely preventable. So what I’m going to do is sort of go through a couple of things that I, I would recommend. So first up I recommend all women getting a full checkup. So by a full checkup, you know, it’s going to give us a starting base.

So you might not like what comes back. You might be totally okay with what comes back, but it gives us a starting point so you’d know upfront what your risk factors are and when you’re aware of these risk factors, you know where you’re at, which means you get to start making choices. All right. So we want to reduce the risk of developing heart disease and you get to choose to make some changes.

 And [00:09:00] sometimes, you know, it does take that shock for you to make the change. All right. So don’t just go to the doctor and say, you know, ah, I think I should just get my heart checked and then I’ll be fine. All right. Be specific with what you want to take control over and what you want out of that doctor’s appointment. Okay. So first up you want your blood pressure checked and ideally of course, we want this in a healthy range. So that’s the first one. And like I said, blood pressure is one of the biggest risk factors for heart disease. Then we want to get our blood sugar levels checked. And quite often, you know, when we go to our GP, they’ll just do regular glucose testing, but we also want to get our insulin checked as well, because you know, we’ve talked about this in previous episodes when we’ve got too much insulin sitting around in our blood that signals our body to store body fat.

And obviously excess body fat [00:10:00] puts us in that higher risk category for heart disease. So how much insulin is sitting in our blood? Then, you know, when we know that, you know, we have the ability to regulate our blood sugar. Okay. So, and look it doesn’t mean that you have to have full blown diabetes, but if you already know that you have insulin resistance or you already have high level higher than normal levels of insulin in your blood. We can work on this to reverse with diet, lifestyle changes, but I really kind of urge you don’t wait until it becomes a diagnosable condition before you do something about it. So totally changeable and, you know, we ideally want to prevent it rather than, you know, trying to work backwards when it’s already sort of worst case scenario.

So the next one we want to get checked is our cholesterol and triglycerides. Now cholesterol is a really interesting one, you know, and I think the tide’s turning a bit on this. Not all cholesterol is bad. Okay. We’ve got two types of cholesterol. So [00:12:00] one is the one that goes around our blood. It mops up all the the junk in our blood that we don’t want and gets rid of it. So if you think of this as HDL, this is our, if you think of it as H for happy, our happy cholesterol, this is the one we want. It’s heart protective, it mops up all the bad stuff. And you know, it gets, you know, gets rid of it. Then we’ve got lDL. So if you think of this as L for Lousy, so this is the one we want to watch, this is the damaging, kind of type of cholesterol.

So this is the one we need to get down. So it’s, you know, a lot of GPs, depending on, you know, their sort of train of thought where they’re at is, you know, statins is the bog standards approach to managing cholesterol. It is changing a bit, at one point GPs were handing statins out like Smarties, but you know, the problem is, when you go on these sorts of medications, it often [00:13:00] has a lot of side effects or, you know, knock on effects.

So it’s not just a matter of, oh, well, we’ll take the medication, you know, and everything’s going to be fine. The consequences of taking some of these medications is, you know, it can open up a whole other can of worms. So if possible, you know, it’s sort of a medication. Yeah, sure. Your doctors recommended it.

 I’m not saying don’t take it, but it’s one of those ones we want to avoid if necessary. So again, ideally the earlier we get onto it, the more choice we’re going to have in whether or not we need to be on these types of medications. Okay. So the next one is, you know, we want to get checked out is our liver.

So we want to have a full liver panel when we do our blood tests. So effectively, you know, our liver removes all the stuff that we don’t want in our body. So, you know, we’ve all sort of like excess fat. Our healthy cholesterol goes around, mops up our excess [00:14:00] fat, and we get rid of it. But if we’ve got a clogged up liver, a sluggish liver, or a sluggish detoxification pathways, our liver is not going to be that healthy and it won’t be doing its job properly.

So if you have elevated liver enzymes, you know, these can go on. If you’re not looking after your liver these can go on and develop a condition called non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, which you know, is about as sexy as it sounds ladies. So, you know, if that non-alcoholic fatty liver disease is left to go on, this then trickles into diabetes, which again puts you at that high risk of heart disease. So looking after your liver is so important. So one thing we want to do in our blood test is have a look at those, liver enzymes and also our inflammation markers, because this can be an indication that we’re at higher risk of heart disease.

So [00:15:00] next up that we want to cover in our GP checkup is have a look at our iron levels. So healthy iron levels means we’re carrying around lots of beautiful oxygenated blood. So the oxygen is getting to where we need it. Again, vitamin D is another one that we want to have a look at because this is a very sort of protective, nutrient.

 Then also a good thing to get checked is a full thyroid panel. And, you know, I bang on about this all the time. So having your, just your TSH, which is your thyroid stimulating hormone is not enough. We want to see what your actual thyroid hormones are doing. So what’s your T4 doing? Which is your inactive thyroid hormone. And then what is more importantly, what’s your T3 doing? That’s your active hormone. That’s the one that goes around and does its job. So, you know, quite often doctors won’t check T4 T3, and we’d need to know what they’re doing. [00:16:00] Okay. B12 is another one. So B12 is a vitamin, and it’s, you know, again, in our blood tests and what I’ll do in the show notes below I’ll pop a list of all the blood tests and the, you know, what we’d like to see, ideally. And this is what we certainly do with all the women who we work with in the well-balanced woman program is we have a look at your blood tests and you know, when you’re in the optimal range, this is where we feel healthy and well, okay. So if your blood’s come back and your, you know, doctor might’ve said, okay, everything’s normal and you still don’t feel great.

This probably means there’s a good chance you’re hanging on the outside of normal levels. Okay. You’re not in that optimal zone where you feel well and be well, okay. So we go to our doctor, we get all of these things checked out. This gives us a baseline. All right. Then the next thing we need to do is okay, where can we clean up our diet and lifestyle?[00:17:00] 

So, you know, I’m a nutritionist, so I’m going to say, number one is obviously nutrition and seriously having good nutrition. This is the easiest way to look after your heart and your general health as well. So, you know, we get everything, you know, for the most part that we need from our food. So let’s think about fiber.

So fiber is what keeps food moving through our body. So we want to be able to, you know, aiming to go to the loo for a good old poop, you know, at least two or three times a day. You know, if you aren’t going, at least once a day, we’ve got an issue, you know, we need to, to make sure that the fiber is sort of helping move everything through your body. Eating a variety of foods, lots of colors, you know, all that sort of stuff. It gives us vitamins, minerals, polyphenols, antioxidants, all of the things that our body needs to function. So how can we get a variety of colors [00:18:00] so this is by including fruit veggies at every single meal, we want to be including beans and legumes, you know, super high in fiber.

We want healthy fats. So these are the things like nuts, seeds, avocados, olive oils, you know, healthy fats are fats that occur in nature. We want quality proteins. So this means, you know, fish, chicken, salmon, lean red meats. That’s going to help us as well. If we are plant-based, you know, we want to be looking at, are we getting enough beans, legumes, organic soy, you know, particularly in the form of tofu, Tempe, we want to stay away from processed foods.

So anything out of a packet. So all of those additional sugars, the unhealthy forms of fat, the unhealthy forms of sodium. If we’re eating packaged foods, we’re getting way more sodium than we need, which again, it’s that processed sodium, which is not good for our [00:19:00] heart. So the golden, my golden rule is, you know, eat real foods in their natural form.

 That’s what our body wants to eat. So that’s what makes us feel good. So everything, every time you go to get something out of a packet, just sort of think, is this the way food is meant to be? So if you’re looking at Tim Tams, if you’re looking at chips or if you’re looking at, you know, just crap like that, but you won’t eat a banana because there’s carbs in it, you know, we need to kind of rethink the logic. Okay. So the next one, you know, the biggest preventer is, you know, the way we move our body. So our bodies were designed to move every single day. So, you know, at least we need to be moving some form or other for at least half an hour. And it’s really not a long time.

And this is what keeps our heart healthy. It keeps our blood pumping through our body. In 30 minutes, think about how much time we spend on social media everyday, [00:20:00] you know, that time that you’re spending on social media is enough time for you to go for a walk, or go for a beach walk, lie on the floor, have a stretch, you know, things like walking, swimming, yoga, Pilates, and pop on a podcast, pop your headphones on, go for a walk, listen to the podcasts.

So, you know, it’s really a no brainer. So, yeah. And speaking of no brainers, uh, you know, don’t smoke, we all know that, you know, it’s probably the worst thing you could do for your heart health and just on alcohol as well. So alcohol sort of works against you in so many levels. Yes, there’s studies that red wine is good for our heart, but you know, seriously, the studies they’re talking a hundred mls, which is way less than an average glass of wine that we would pour for ourselves. So next time, if you kidding yourself, thinking that drinking red wine is good for your heart, I want you to actually [00:21:00] measure out a hundred mls. All right. So if you’re drinking more than a hundred mls, you’re drinking way too much.

All right. So, yeah, so at least, you know, we want to be aiming for four or five alcohol free days a week. So my golden rule of thumb is, you know, yeah. Okay. If it’s something you enjoy, you shouldn’t have to give it up altogether, but one to two glasses of wine or one to two drinks, one to two nights a week.

So you can still have one or two glasses on a Friday night and a Saturday night. You know, we don’t need to be drinking every single night. That’s a whole other episode. Okay. So now I want to bust a few myths. All right. So, you know, I get asked all the time about, you know, cholesterol and salt and you know, all this sort of stuff.

So, you know, when we’re looking at cholesterol, our body makes cholesterol. So we’re always going to have it, like I said, we’ve got the good [00:22:00] cholesterol, which is your HDL, your happy cholesterol and your lousy cholesterol LDL. So when we are, you know, eating foods in a natural form, you know, eating cholesterol that occurs naturally, it’s totally fine.

So things like eggs, eggs got a bad rep for a long time, but actually, you know, the form of cholesterol that comes in eggs is a healthy form, the form of cholesterol that comes in something like a stick of salami. All right. So that’s a processed fatty kind, you know, not what we want. So fried , processed meats, you know, and then for the love of all things, please, ladies stop with the margarine and cholesterol-reducing margarine. Have butter any day of the week over, you know, margarine. Butter is a food. Cholesterol is a, sorry margarine’s a highly processed, refined oils, chemical concoction of yuck. So don’t look at, [00:23:00] you know, have avocado on your bread instead of margarine, you know, it’s a chemical shitstorm seriously, and you know, it’s a hundred percent marketing. It really needs to go. All right. Now I just wanted to dip into the other myth, which is salt. So often we get told for our heart, we want to reduce salts and you know, this is where not all sodium is created equal. So if we’re looking at, things like Celtic salt, we’re looking at sea salt, rock salt, Himalayan salt, you know, these occurred naturally and also, you know, mineral rich and, you know, it gives us iodine for our thyroid and you know, other minerals as well.

Whereas when we look at processed salt, so your good old Saxa table salt that we grew up with, it’s highly processed and this is not what we want. And, you know, again, sodium. So this comes in packaged foods. So even sweet things is, you know, [00:24:00] can be full of salt because you know, that processed salt is a preservative.

So yeah. So just sort of let’s watch what we eat. So just to sort of wrap up, you know, get checked out, you know, have a look in the show notes, I’ll put the list of blood tests that we need to, you know, you can print that off, take along to your doctor. Start watching, start thinking about what you’re putting in your body, like, what are we eating?

You know, that’s the simplest form of, you know, changing the what’s going on, move your body every single day, half an hour. Watch what you’re drinking and quit smoking. Like it’s really not rocket science. So, you know, if you are looking to start making some changes, I can certainly help you. So please reach out.

 Like I said, this is highly preventable. I have lost people I went to school with already, gone. They’ve left families behind. So it’s not really not something that we want to put off. So you are responsible for your own [00:25:00] health and it’s much harder for a magic pill to come along and save you once you are already unwell.

All right. So ladies be well, stay well, be proactive, take charge of your own health. And I will see you in the next episode.