Hello and welcome to Zoey Shorts, the Bite Size Podcast where we discuss one topic around science and nutrition.

I'm Jonathan Wolf and as usual I'm joined by Dr Sarah Berry and today's subject is the menopause.

So Jonathan the menopause affects more than half the world's population as you can imagine and often with really severe symptoms like night sweats, bone loss and even heart problems and yet so many women just suffer through it.

So is there anything that can be done about menopause symptoms?

Well as Zoey we've been running the world's largest survey on nutrition and menopause and symptoms and we've made some really interesting discoveries in this area.

So don't leave me hanging, let's hear all about them.

So menopause is a really big deal because it has such a huge impact on most women.

It impacts our health, it impacts our disease risk and really importantly it impacts how we feel.

And yet despite the fact that we know we'll all go through it we still don't know enough about it.

Now if there was another kind of illness that made us feel this rubbish I think actually lots more would be done about it and lots more research would be done in that area.

And I think on that point you know the thing that's really struck me as a man is that it's not really discussed.

There's just this air of secrecy around menopause.

Yeah there's so much stigma and I think this also means that there's so much misinformation out there about the menopause.

And I think you're right it's because in part we just don't talk about it but also it's because there's still so much we actually don't know about it as well.

And so maybe just to start with like what exactly is the menopause Sarah?

So technically speaking the menopause is the 12 month period after a woman's last period.

So it's when the menstrual cycle stops hence why the term menopause and it's when our levels of estrogen fall and the years leading up to that where women have changes in their period and other symptoms is what we call the menopause transition or also known as the perimenopause.

And we did some research and today in in the US that transition usually starts between 45 and 55 the average age of the menopause is 51 and the menopause transition can last about seven years.

But up to 14 years for some and that's similar really across the rest of the west and that duration depends on factors that include smoking and race and ethnicity.

So the term is actually coined Jonathan in 1821 but despite us talking about it since then it's been massively understudied throughout history and this is the case for actually all women's health really in general.

We don't still actually understand why we've evolved to go through the menopause and we also don't fully understand what happens to our ovaries when they begin to fail and our hormone levels start to fluctuate.

We don't even really know why about a quarter of women have almost no symptoms while others have really problematic and burdensome symptoms.

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