3 to 75% of women do not get the treatment for perimenopause and menopause what they deserve and women are asking, why is it that I can't manage to stress the way I once did? Why do I have this belly fat that appeared out of nowhere? Am I usual techniques for how to deal with that aren't working? Why would I rather mop the floor and have sex with my husband?
But there's more than 100 plus symptoms that women aren't aware of. But you believe many of the symptoms of menopause are avoidable? Yes, and let's get into that. Dr.
Sarasal is the Harvard trained physician and hormone expert. Who's unlocking the science and simple tricks behind feeling your best no matter your age? Most people have imbalanced hormones. Think of them as text messages that your body sends to keep everything functioning optimally.
But for example, out of the 40,000 people I've tested and treated around 80% of them have a problem with their cortisol hormones. And if my body's making too much cortisol, what is the hub? It's associated with more belly fat. We know that it shrinks the brain in women but not men.
It's associated with depression. But also if you're someone who's making a lot of cortisol, you're going to make less testosterone. And that leads to a whole host of serious problems. And what about trauma?
Does that impact your hormones? Oh yes. And one of the ways to measure trauma is the ACE test. It's a validated questionnaire and they found that people who had won or higher ACE scores had a greater risk of 45 different chronic diseases.
And my score is 6 out of 10. But those ACEs are living on in your body. And you went on a journey to heal yourself? Yes, with lifestyle medicine.
Not a pharmaceutical. Tell me about that, Jodie. I find it incredibly fascinating that when we look at the back end of Spotify and Apple and all the channels, the majority of people that watch this podcast haven't yet hit the follow button or the subscribe button. Wherever you're listening to this, I would like to make a deal with you.
If you could do me a huge favor and hit that subscribe button, I will work tirelessly for now and forever to make the show better and better and better. I can't tell you how much it helps when you hit that subscribe button. The show gets bigger, which means we can expand the production, bring in all the guests you want to see and continue to do in this thing we love. If you could do me that small favor and hit the follow button, whatever you're listening to this, that would mean the world to me.
That is the only favor I will ever ask you. Thank you so much for your time. Dr. Sarah Zal, what is it that you do for people?
I'm a physician, so I work in academic medicine. I do research for people, I teach, and I take care of patients. So that's the official BBC answer, and the unofficial answer is I'm a healer. And what does that mean, a healer?
Because that's a broad term, so that can mean many things. It means that my task is to connect to your innate healing capacity and to work with you to activate it. And who'd you do that for? So I do it for professional athletes, executives, and everyday people.
And when you say healing, if someone came to you and they said, how do you heal people? What would your answer be? My answer is I don't heal people. That's a to me, that's a patriarchal way of thinking about it.
What I do is I work with someone who's got the capacity to heal, and we work to be in the service of that. So it's not me providing something that they don't have already. It's more understanding what some of the obstacles might be to their own healing, understanding what would allow them to be the best version of themselves, to feel fully alive. And what was your training?
So can you talk me through your academic journey? Sure. So my training is as a bio-engineer. I did the Harvard MIT program, which is designed to train physician scientists.
So the ethos of this particular program was to train the future researchers and academic physicians so that we could move the field forward. And all along, I was really interested in how do you bring the best of conventional medicine together with more ancient ways of thinking about the body? Things like Ayuweta from India or traditional Chinese medicine. How do we take these wisdom traditions and use that to inform mainstream medicine?
So that's the type of care that I learned how to do. I became a surgeon. I did primary care after I finished a residency in obstetrics and gynecology, but I also realized pretty early on that I wanted to take care of men too. So I've done that for about the past 15 years.
And I would say that training and bioengineering and a comfort with big data and with optimizing datasets to improve whatever the goal is like performance or having the most the best conversations you can have on a podcast. That's what gets me excited. How many people do you think you've treated or seen or worked with directly in your career? Probably about 40,000.
And if you had to try and summarize maybe the top three or five things that you're doing for them, what would you say? Well, number one would be hormones. Hormones are the portal that most people start with me. It's a way of thinking about what drives what you're interested in.
Most people have imbalanced hormones. I haven't detected that you do yet. But most people have an issue, say with cortisol, either making too much of it or too little or even both within the same day. And it affects energy.
It affects mitochondria. So I would say the number one thing I help people with is their hormones, getting their hormones back into balance, starting first with lifestyle medicine, not a pharmaceutical. So that includes breathwork, which I think is one of the most underutilized tools that we have in health. Number two would be nutrition.
But take it to the next level, not which you might think of that a nutritionist would advise you, but what specifically is ideal food planned for you, for your goals? So whether you're an entrepreneur, an investor, an investor, or you're a professional basketball player, or you're a woman in a parry menopause at each point.