Hello and a big welcome back to the podcast. I'm your host, as always, Dr. Hazel.

Right now there's lots of interest or chat about hormone imbalances or balancing hormones

with various recipes and supplements, which can be found on social media. So I just wanted to ask an actual hormone expert,

her thoughts. Today I'm joined by Dr. Angeli Amin, who is a consultant in diabetes and endocrinology,

which is a doctor that treats diseases related to problems with hormones.

She's also an honorary clinical senior lecturer at Imperial College London and completed a PhD in 2018

looking at the effect of dietary factors on appetite. Here's Angelly.

Angelie, welcome to the Food Medic podcast. Thank you. Lovely to be here. Yeah, it's so nice to have

you here and chat all about hormones. For those

listening at home, you are a consultant of endocrinology, which is a doctor of hormones essentially.

And I think it would be really great to just start there. What exactly is a hormone and what does

it do? So hormones are chemical messengers so they're produced from

specialist glands in the body endocrine glands and they send signals to other parts of the body

where they have effects on things like growth metabolism reproduction all of those things that

are essential for life essentially.

Yeah, and I think right now there's a lot of chat around hormones

and I don't think people fully realise how many hormones there are in the body

and how many different processes they have an impact on.

And you hear a lot about like hormone balancing and hormone imbalances.

And it's a very vague and non-specific term.

And I mean, even if you go on TikTok, there will be recipes to balance your hormones.

As an endocrinologist, is this something that we can do?

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