Summary:

Karen Martel, a certified hormone specialist, discusses her journey into the wellness industry on the Wellness Your Way podcast. After experiencing unexplained weight gain and other health issues following the birth of her first child, Martel discovered she had hormonal imbalances. Despite trying various diets and exercise regimes, she continued to gain weight. After testing her hormones, she found she had high estrogen, low progesterone levels, and low levels of cortisol and DHEA, indicating adrenal burnout. She also discovered she was severely hypothyroid. Martel then embarked on a holistic approach to fix her hormonal issues, which led her to become a nutritionist and weight loss coach. She now runs a worldwide clinic offering hormone replacement therapy and holistic hormone coaching. Martel emphasizes the importance of eating a diet that aligns with one’s hormonal state and encourages women to replace their hormones for better health and quality of life.

Full Episode:

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Transcription:

Megan Lyons:

Thank you so much, Karen Martel for coming on Wellness Your Way. I’m excited to have you here.

Karen Martel:

Thanks for having me, Megan. I’m excited to be here.

Megan Lyons:

Of course, I have read your bio to the audience, but why don’t you start by giving them an overview of who you are and how you wound up here today?

Karen Martel:

Yeah, so I’ve been in this industry, oh my gosh, for over 10 years now. It makes me feel like I’m really old. My second career, and it started actually back in, I would say probably like 32, 33. I ran into a whole bunch of health problems, like most people, how they get into this industry, and it was after the birth of my first child and I lost all the baby weight was feeling great, and suddenly something happened. It was like something broke inside of me and I started to very rapidly gain weight and I hadn’t changed anything, hadn’t changed my diet, hadn’t done anything stupid or chomping back, McDonald’s, nothing like that. And it was just unexplainably gaining weight and I started getting chronic migraines. I couldn’t sleep anymore, so I was getting really bad insomnia, digestive problems, horrible PMS depression and could not figure out what was going on.

And so I did what every woman does, and I decided, well, I better start working out and I better eat less. And so I started trying all of these different diets. I did vegan, I did Atkins, I did the zone, I did detoxes. I tried everything. I was meticulously counting calories. I joined a CrossFit gym where I was working out crazy six days a week, and I just kept gaining weight. And I was like, what? There was some times where I was eating 800 calories a day and I couldn’t lose a pound. And I was like, what is going on? I go to the doctor, she gives me an antidepressant and a sleeping pill and basically see ya. And I actually, I did take them. I was, I was so desperate at the time and I didn’t know what was happening, so I was like, fine, I’ll try these.

Of course, they didn’t work. So finally about a year into this, and I was at the heaviest I’d ever been. I met with a friend of mine who was a naturopath, and I asked him, what could be going on and could you test my hormones? Because I said, I feel like it’s hormonal. And so he did, and it came back that my estrogen was really high. I had really low progesterone levels. My stress system was completely tanked, so I had really low levels of cortisol as well as another adrenal hormone called DHEA. So I was completely burned out, which I was doing everything wrong, working out like a crazy woman, barely eating, which would’ve just completely stressed out. My system even more later, found out that I was severely hypothyroid, so my thyroid was tanked. So I had all of these hormonal problems and I was like, I’m doing everything wrong according to what’s going on with my hormones.

And no doctor would’ve told me at that age I am in my early thirties. No doctor would’ve said, oh, it’s your hormones, because at that age we shouldn’t have hormonal problems. And so I went on this quest afterwards to fix my own problems, which took a long time. It was not an overnight fix. It probably took a good year of figuring out the best way to eat for my hormones, trying to figure out what’s the best type of exercise, which was yoga, doing all this stress management, I really had to work at things. I had to work at the psychological level. I had to work at the spiritual level. I had to have this complete holistic view of what was going on in order to fix myself. And I eventually did, and I came out of that experience going, there’s got to be more women like me.

There’s got to be more women that are doing everything and doing what the social media is telling you to do and their doctors are telling them to do, and that still can’t lose weight and it’s not their fault. And my heart went out to all of the thousands of women out there that were going through what I was going through and not able to get the help and everybody assuming that they were closet eaters or that they’re not doing those things. And so I eventually went back to school and I became a nutritionist and a weight loss coach. And then in my early forties, I actually had another hormonal storm happen, and I went into menopause at 42 and I lost ovarian function and I ended up being able to bring it back, went on another deep dive on hormones, became a certified hormone specialist, and started to bring awareness to what happens to women in perimenopause and menopause because we’re not being told this information by our doctors. We’re not being told by social media what’s happening. And there’s so much misinformation and lack of information out there that I’m really trying to change that. So that’s where I am today. I now run a worldwide clinic, but we do hormone replacement therapy, we do holistic hormone coaching.

We’ve been able to reach a lot of women, which has been great.

Megan Lyons:

That’s incredible. And I am sorry you had to go through all of that, but thank you for turning your pain into it.

Karen Martel:

Glad I did. I wouldn’t be here, right?

Megan Lyons:

Yes, exactly. When you said there’ve got to be other women out there like me, I was thinking, yes, there are so many I find in my practice, hormone imbalances are on the rise and almost everyone’s issue who comes into me is in some way rooted in hormone imbalance. So what’s going on? Why are these things on the rise these days?

Karen Martel:

So many different things, but I think main cause is the toxins that are in our environment, number one. So we are bombarded by thousands and thousands of toxins every single day, but a lot of these toxins mimic our hormones in our body. They’re a lot stronger though, and they cause more havoc like negative symptoms, and your body will actually use that fake chemical like hormone over your own hormones because they’re stronger. And so we’re becoming very what’s called xenoestrogen dominant, so fake estrogens, chemicals that act like estrogen in the environment. We are overloaded with these coming from our plastics, heavy metals, mold toxicity. There’s so many things coming at us right now that is destroying our hormonal system for men and women. And so we’re seeing a rise in fertility. We’re seeing a rise in hormone dysfunction. We see a rise in polycystic ovarian syndrome, which has a huge xenoestrogen component to it.

We’re seeing endometriosis going up. We’re seeing heavy periods and just period dysfunction where women are having PMS for two weeks out of the month when it should be a couple of days. And it’s just the list goes on as far as what is so prevalent, and it’s just more and more and more of these hormonal disruptions, more hypothyroidism than ever before. It’s crazy. It’s crazy what’s happening. So I think that that’s number one is the toxins. I think there’s a huge piece of, and I think this had a lot to do with what happened with myself, is how much women specific specifically are taking on right now. We fought to have equal rights, great, but at the same time we shot ourselves in the foot because as women now, we’re just trying to do everything and we value our worth on how much we can do a day, and if we’re not running around like crazy and taking care of children and watching the household and cooking and cleaning, and also bringing home just as much money now as our partners and working.

And so now we’re doing both things, all of it. And so I think that that stress component has a lot to do with what’s happening to our hormones. A lot of wrong dieting advice that a lot of women have been given has just also destroyed their hormones. We’re seeing the chronic fasting, low carb diets great for so many things, but chronic use of those diets we’ve seen now really take an impact on women’s hormones, and I’m happy to go into that some more. But yeah, there’s many different kind of factors coming at us right now. The artificial lighting, it’s really screwing with our circadian rhythms, which each hormone, all of the hormones have circadian rhythm in the system. So we have constant bombardment on the hormonal system. So now we’re seeing that women are starting perimenopause earlier. We’re seeing that they’re starting to go into it between the ages of 35 and 40, and some women even before that. Same with men. Men are losing testosterone one to 3% a year after the age of 35. They have less testosterone in their bodies than their forefathers did. So we’re seeing a decline in testosterone and fertility in men as well. So it’s just this whole perfect storm, let’s say.

Megan Lyons:

Yes, absolutely a perfect storm of so many factors. You very clearly explained how for those xenoestrogens or those estrogen mimickers that are found in toxins and plastics and things like that, it’s almost like those will latch onto the receptors that our cells have for the hormone. And so our body kind of won’t produce as much as it needs to. So I think that mechanism can make more sense for people. But I wonder if you could explain your other two, or you could go wherever you want. How does stress impact hormones? They’ve heard over and over stress impacts hormones. I say that all the time, but what’s the mechanism by which that actually happens?

Karen Martel:

Yeah, so cortisol, specifically one of our stress hormones, the one that everybody’s most familiar with, I mean, we are going to produce that when we’re faced with a stressful event where we have to fight or flight, it is a life or death hormone. Your other hormones, not all of them, but some of them are not life and death hormones. So sex hormones specifically, you can live without estrogen. You can live without progesterone and testosterone. You cannot live without cortisol, you’ll die. So it’s our survival hormone. And so if you are constantly telling yourself that you are stressed out because it’s all comes from your brain, if you’re constantly telling yourself that you’re stressed and you’re worried about this and that, and you’re keeping yourself in that fight or flight spot, your body’s going to be making all of this cortisol and it’s going to say, screw these other hormones.

We’re not going to, why would we want to produce progesterone and estrogen so this woman could get pregnant? Why would we do that when there’s so much stress around, your body doesn’t know on the inside what that stress is, it doesn’t know that it’s just because your kid doesn’t clean up after himself or herself and stress stresses you out. Your body just sees this as constant stress, constant stress. There must not be a safe environment, and women we’re just here to procreate. That’s it. That is the full function of our body is to procreate. That is it whether you want to or not. And so everything runs off of that. So if you’re telling your body, this is not a good time to get pregnant because there’s stress around, then all of these hormones start to downregulate themselves. Your ovarian function starts to go down because the body doesn’t want to get you pregnant if there’s all this stress where you’re fighting and fighting all the time.

So there’s that. There’s also, they all work very synergistically together, the hormones. So if there’s constant stress, for instance, it can impact thyroid and then thyroid can impact sex hormones and then vice versa, sex hormones, depletion of sex hormones will slow down thyroid function and metabolic rate. And then that can cause insulin resistance. And insulin resistance can cause other hormonal dysfunctions. And so they all work together synergistically. And so if you’re constantly telling yourself, Hey, we’re stressed out, this isn’t good. We got to just survive here, then everything starts to become affected by it, and then that’ll affect keep that effect. Like if it’s vice versa, keeps going back and forth, back and forth with each other. If there’s insulin resistance, thyroid’s going to go down, but then a thyroid goes down, it causes more insulin resistance. It’s a shit show.

Megan Lyons:

Yes, that’s a clear way to put it. I absolutely agree. And also that hormone DHEA, that you mentioned, another adrenal hormone, that’s the building block of so many of the other sex hormones. So if our body is so in demand for cortisol, then that DHEA and the cortisol are going to pull all the resources over to the stress side and not have resources left over for some of the sex hormone side. I love the way that you put it. Your body just thinks, oh, now’s a stressful time. Now’s not the time to get pregnant. So we don’t need those sex hormones. We can live without them, but we can’t live without them. We can’t really feel like we’re alive and vital without them. And that will lead me into one of my next questions, which is what are symptoms of hormone imbalance? I know you’re describing so many different hormone imbalances and almost everyone has felt something related to, I’m sure the symptoms you’re about to describe, but what do you see very commonly in your clients?

Karen Martel:

Yeah, so probably best to kind of talk about the symptoms of perimenopause because I mean, we can get into, there’s so many different hormonal imbalances like PCOS and endometriosis and things that happen when we’re in our fertile years, and those each kind of have their own podcast episode on what to do about that. But what happens in perimenopause, women really need to know about, because we typically don’t think that perimenopause hits us between the ages of 35 and 40. Most women don’t have a clue that that happens. Perimenopause are the years leading up to menopause, and menopause is considered one day, and that’s one full year without a period, and then after that, you’re postmenopausal. No rhyme or reason for the 12 months, they just made that up and it’s like, yeah, we’re going to make this a year. It’s really stupid. But perimenopause, those years leading up, they can be 10 years, 12 years of losing hormones and having symptoms because of that hormonal loss.

So typically between the ages of 35 and 40, we stop ovulating as often, and when we don’t ovulate, we don’t produce progesterone. So progesterone is typically made after ovulation in the second half of your cycle. So we start to see less and less ovulation, less and less progesterone. So symptom-wise, what starts to happen? Number one, worsening PMS. This is because progesterone counterbalances the growth effects from estrogen. So we produce estradiol through our entire cycle. First half of the cycle is just estradiol, and then the second we do progesterone and estrogen. So if we don’t have progesterone come in in that second half of the cycle, we’ve got estrogen, which is a growth hormone, and it’ll keep growing that uterine lining and thickening it, and then there’s no progesterone to counterbalance that growth, which then causes heavier periods, more menstrual cramping. Also even in the breast tissue, that’s when you’ll get lumpy sore breasts before your period, because progesterone counterbalances the growth even in the breast tissue, progesterone acts on what’s called the GABA receptors in your brain, and GABA we know of as being a supplement.

It’s great for anxiety, it’s in lots of sleep. Supplements will progesterone acts on the GABA receptors in your brain to help calm you down and help induce sleep. So as we start dropping in progesterone, women can start to develop insomnia, and you’ll hear this, they’ll be like, I’ve slept like a baby my whole life and then suddenly I’m not sleeping anymore. What happened? That’s like a switch went on, and that’s because you’re not getting that nice calming progesterone. Insulin resistance can go up with the loss of progesterone. So women may gain a little bit of weight, usually not a lot. Usually we see like a five pound weight gain in their late thirties, early forties, but it’s enough to go where women go, I didn’t change anything. What just happened? I just gained five pounds. Progesterone. If any of you have ever taken your basal body temperature to get pregnant, you’re looking for a temperature spike halfway through your cycle because that tells you you ovulated.

And that is because progesterone raises metabolism. So without progesterone on board, now the metabolic rate doesn’t go up. So it slows metabolism and that weight gain happens. So progesterone, those are the first signs of perimenopause and you losing progesterone. Some women will lose testosterone during this time, typically though not until they’re into their mid forties, but testosterone, we produce about 40% of it out of ovaries, and then the rest is coming through like DHEA and through other conversions in the body. So testosterone, when it starts to drop, women will start to notice that they can be working out like crazy and not putting on any muscle tissue because testosterone’s really important for muscle growth. You can become more insulin-resistant without your progesterone. So you could see without your testosterone because of that muscle loss, muscle processes or blood glucose. So without it, we can get more insulin resistance, so we can see blood sugars begin to rise. Once again, weight gain can happen because of that insulin resistance that starts to happen, lowered sex drive. So that’s a big symptom where women will be like, I used to have the best sex drive, and it’s just like now, as Suzanne Summers said, I’d rather drink a smoothie than have sex.

That’s what you hear is you’ll hear women say, I just suddenly have zero interest in having sex, and this is the drop of testosterone. As well as actually estrogen has a lot to do with our sex drive as well. Typically, we don’t see estrogen dropping until we get to about mid forties into our early fifties, and then estrogen drops. That is when we see the most weight gain happen because estradiol specifically is so important for insulin sensitivity. So we see a lot of type two diabetes develop, we’ll see insulin resistance develop, and then that weight gain around the midsection. Foggy brain is another symptom of estrogen loss. Skin changes. So women will get drier skin, they’ll get more wrinkles. The elasticity starts to go in their skin. We need estradiol to make collagen. So that’s why we start to see all this change in our skin pain for women because estrogen, estradiol lubricates your body, so it lubricates your joints.

So you’ll start to get joint pain, muscle pain, inflammation, gut problems can start to happen. Estrogen’s really important to help us make serotonin and dopamine. So without it, women can get depressed, and so now you’ve got progesterone causing some anxiety. We’ve got the estrogen causing depression and fatigue, and then the testosterone, you’re not putting on muscle, you’re becoming insulin resistant. So it’s just this one thing after the other starts to pile on, and the symptoms can really vary. Yes, there’s also the typical hot flashes and night sweats, but then there’s also vagina atrophy. Some women’s vagina literally shuts closed. I’ve had them be like, nothing’s going in there, because it drys and it actually begins to atrophy and tighten, and the skin in there becomes so thin that they can’t have sex or else it tears them.

Megan Lyons:

It is terrible,

Karen Martel:

Terrible as if we would put up with this as this was happening to men, not in a million years, the heavy bleeding, the brain fog, we start to develop Alzheimer’s and dementia and heart disease. So there’s so many symptoms of hormonal loss that I don’t think most women realize a lot of what’s happening to them during this time because it creeps up slowly that it can actually be attributed to the loss of these crucial hormones.

Megan Lyons:

Yes, that was such a great, I’m not even going to say it was a list, a poem of all of the symptoms that was really clear, and I know many people are nodding their heads now. I’m curious because for me, it’s a challenge as a practitioner knowing that in those years, seven, 10, or however many years of perimenopause, these hormones can be going up and down. You described the general patterns, but there can be fluctuations in there and symptoms can come and go, and it can kind of be a little bit of a guessing game. So I’m curious, in your practice, if you rely more on symptoms or more on labs or you use your expert judgment to combine them both, what do you do?

Karen Martel:

I do both. Because the thing is some women can do really well. For instance, with low levels of estradiol, they don’t really notice it. They feel okay, their levels are dropping. So you look at their labs and you’re like, oh, you really don’t have much estrogen, but yet they feel great. But then that same woman, she loses her testosterone and even just a little tiny bit, and she feels it immensely. She’s depressed, she has no energy, no, get up and go, can’t put muscle on, has no libido. And so looking at her labs, you could think, well, her testosterone level though, it’s in range. It looks good, but for that woman, it’s not enough. And so you really need to take that kind of bio-individual approach to each woman, because genetically some women are more estrogenic and they really depend on their estrogen. And then there’s other that really depend on their androgens, which is the testosterone, the DAGA.

And so just genetically then that person, they just don’t do well when their levels drop on those certain hormones. So you really want to pay attention to what that woman’s feeling looking and look at her lab levels and know, okay, you know what? When your levels were up here two years ago, you felt great. Now even though they’ve hardly dropped, they have dropped. You don’t feel well and you’re feeling this, so let’s address it. So I always like to get a baseline and get a little bit an idea of symptomology as well as what’s happening with their labs. And then there is of course, when you’re looking at a woman’s estradiol levels in perimenopause, for instance, and they’re just chronically low, her follicular stimulating hormone is maybe on the rise, and so it’s above 20. We know that the estradiol, let’s say it’s below 50 picograms per milliliter, she’s missing her period, even if she feels good. I know. Then that level though is too low, and so that’s too low to get the safety and the protection that estradiol gives a woman on her brain, her bones, her heart. So then it’s like, okay, even though you might not be getting hot flashes and all that, we still know that we need to get that number up a little bit to give you those health benefits of that estrogen.

Megan Lyons:

Oh, wonderful. So it is a little bit of art and science combined, and having done this for so many years really helps you out, which is amazing. I’m guessing you’ll give the same answer art and science combined to my next question, but let’s see what happens. I’d love to hear about your nutrition guidance. Let’s talk about for people going through that perimenopausal transition, it will be individualized, I’m sure, but what are some things that we can do to generally be supportive of our hormones and what are some things that are generally detrimental?

Karen Martel:

So I think it’s really important for women to eat the diet that goes with their hormones at that time. And so it’s one of the best ways to figure out what diet you should be doing. There’s benefits to majority of diets. You’ll find research to back every fricking diet there is out there and testimonials from people that back it up. But it really comes down to what are your hormones doing? If you’ve got a low thyroid function, which is really prevalent in women and middle age and your adrenals are shot, let’s say you’ve got really low cortisol O-D-H-E-A like I had while eating a low carb ketogenic diet is going to destroy you and it’s going to dig you farther into the ground. So somebody like that, they need to eat the carbs, they need to eat nutrient-dense foods. They need to be very mindful of actually getting in enough food and nutrients when the next person may have a history of polycystic ovarian syndrome, they have high insulin and high blood sugar, and they’re inflamed and they’re infertile, then you know what?

We’re going to have to maybe do a low carb ketogenic diet or diet for a period of time to reverse those things. That’s one of the best ways to do it. There’s other people that I don’t ever recommend vegan, but I respect any you choose. If that’s what you want to do, fine. Great. I just don’t see it being the best diet for women, especially as we age because we do start to lose muscle tissue and that sarcopenia, we really need to start to, we know that the demand for protein goes up in women that are in menopause, in perimenopause. So eating good protein is definitely key.

Megan Lyons:

I will totally agree with that. And I’ve worked with several vegans and I understand if people are doing it for ethical, religious, et cetera reasons, but from a nutrition and especially hormone health perspective, I will put my seal of approval on that. I love your twists though. On more PCOS, more insulin resistance. That’s when we’re going to lower the carbs versus I had a similar situation to you doing all the exercise, low cortisol, low thyroid, all of that. I needed the carbs to bring me back up. So it really is individual, and I find that people, once they narrow in on something that’s right for them, all of a sudden they’re like, oh, this is how I’m supposed to feel. And that’s why we see these testimonials for all kinds of different things. They’re not lying. It’s just that these people found what fit for them, and that doesn’t mean it’s going to fit for the next person.

Karen Martel:

That’s it. Exactly. It’s like there’s so much dieting dogma out there right now. It’s like this way or the highway, this is the only way to eat. This is the best way to eat and I’m going to prove it to you. And it’s like, no, that’s not how it works. There’s definitely some foundational pieces like prioritize protein, and I always, my goal is to get everybody metabolically flexible. You don’t want to stay low carb typically not good for you. And so if you can reverse that insulin resistance, but then you want to pull out of that as fast as you can and start having metabolic flexibility where you can eat carbs without it destroying you, and then go to a low carb day the next day. And so we want to do that fluctuation of same with calories. We want days where we’re in an excess of calories and then days where we’re in a deficiency of calories and same with carbohydrates.

So there’s certain things that I see definitely that work well. I love the paleo-based diet. I find it’s kind of like a happy medium of Whole Foods. It’s not super restrictive. Very easy for women to do long-term and men long-term that you’re getting rid of the grains and the inflammatory foods because inflammation is a real problem as we age. So removing that can be really great for skin, for gut health and for weight loss and insulin sensitivity. And it’s flexible. Like I said, you could have days where you’re lower carb paleo and then other days that you’re higher where you’re doing more exercise and throwing a little bit of intermittent fasting. And that’s typically what I see working really well for the masses. And then you have those little branch offs of, okay, we’re going to put you a little lower carb, more keto, more carnivore for a period of time, whatever it might be, and you just make it. You match it to that person.

Megan Lyons:

That’s great. For women who are still cycling, do you recommend that intermittent fasting that you mentioned at certain times in the cycle or all through the year? It just depends on the length. What’s your general recommendation?

Karen Martel:

So typically if you listen to your body, the answer to that will come very naturally to you. Love it. Typically, in the beginning half of our cycle, the first two weeks when estrogen’s most dominant, we are the most insulin sensitive and have the most blood sugar control. So those are the two weeks that it’s actually really easy for women to work out fast, intermittent fast, have the energy to do things. We’re more sexual, we’re more into socializing. This is all estrogen. And then the second half of the cycle, your cravings go up and you want to eat more carbs. And so I always say, save it for that. Save your carbs for when you really are like, I can’t go without them right now. Give me the chocolate. Save it for those times because your body, that is a way that it can make serotonin is through carbohydrates. And so because serotonin drops in the second half of the cycle because estrogen drops, then listen to that and eat some carbohydrates during that time. Remember that your metabolic rate actually goes up in the second half of the cycle, so it does counterbalance those extra carbs.

Megan Lyons:

That’s so amazing. Thank you for that. I’d love to dive into a topic that I believe you use in your practice regularly, which is bioidentical hormones. Are you comfortable going there?

Karen Martel:

Oh yeah.

Megan Lyons:

Love it. Okay, amazing. I would love to hear from a person who uses them regularly with your patients and your clients. What do you say when people come to you and they say, oh no, I’m not taking hormones. I’ve seen the research. That stuff has detriment. I’m sure you have a great answer, and I’m guessing I know what it is, but I’d love to hear it.

Karen Martel:

Well before the late 1990s, hormone replacement therapy, specifically estrogen hormone replacement therapy, which came from pregnant horses, was the number one most prescribed medication in North America, number one most prescribed. So that tells us majority of women were once taking hormone replacement therapy and benefiting from it immensely. And then the Women’s Health Initiative came along, which is probably what you knew I was going to talk about. Yep. So have you had anyone talk about it on your podcast?

Megan Lyons:

I don’t think so. I genuinely don’t. I know from just other non-podcast experience, but I’d love for you to share with the audience.

Karen Martel:

So this was a study that was going to be done to prove that hormone replacement therapy was beneficial, and it was one of the biggest studies of its kind. So there was more participants than majority of studies out there. They had several arms to the study, like the placebo study, but then they had two arms of the study. One arm of the study, the women were taking Premarin, which was the horse’s estrogen with a fake progesterone, which is a progestin in all our birth control pills. And then the other arm of the study, the women actually had hysterectomies. So they just gave them Premarin, just the horse’s estrogen, because the point of adding in the progestin was to protect the uterine lining and to counterbalance the growth, which it did, did a great job of that. The study started, and four years into it, they saw a little tiny, tiny, tiny increase in breast cancer, uterine cancer and heart attack and stroke because of it.

And this was an extra one person out of every 1000. That’s how much the increase was. They sent word out literally to the world that hormone replacement therapy caused breast cancer and to get every woman off of their hormone replacement therapy, and literally tens of thousands of women, hundreds of thousands, millions of women hopped off of their hormone replacement therapy because like I said, at that time, majority of women were on it. It was the most prescribed medication. So doctors told them, oh my gosh, this is going to give you breast cancer, get off. And doctors are still telling women to this day that it will cause breast cancer. And whether you know it or not, it’s why you think estrogen is going to give you breast cancer. Now, the study has been reanalyzed several times and word has been put out there, but nobody’s gotten it, or very few people have gotten it that the study was interpreted wrong, and that wasn’t what happened. What happened was it was the arm of the study that had the progestin in it that had that increase of breast cancer. But the arm of the study where women only use Premarin actually had a decrease in breast cancer cases, a decrease a small one at that, but it was still a decrease. But yet nobody heard about that. Nobody heard that, oh, actually estrogen, even horses, estrogen, which is nothing like our own actually protected our breasts.

Have any of you heard that? Everyone’s going, no, no. So this was 24 years ago, and we’re still being harmed by that misinformation because women still are so afraid to use estrogen. And I will tell you right now, estradiol does not cause breast cancer. Why would God or whomever’s who created us, give us a hormone that would cause cancer? That makes no sense. We also have an abundance of it in our fertile years, loads of it, and no doctors running around to every 25-year-old woman going, we have to shut down your estrogen production because you’re going to get breast cancer. Yet that same doctor will tell the menopausal woman when she loses her estrogen, God forbid you take that because you will get breast cancer. And this happens all the time in majority of doctor’s offices. It’s not just a couple of them. It’s still are running off of that old study, the WHI study, and that misinformation and estradiol, we know that women that replace their hormones have a decreased risk of developing breast cancer. When do we see breast cancer? Most often it is in menopausal women when they don’t have estrogen.

Megan Lyons:

So not only was the risk so overblown, it was actually one in a thousand, but it was really the reverse risk. It was not a risk or it was a decrease in risk when it was estrogen alone, even the horse’s estrogen. So you feel very confident that using bioidentical estrogen is not only super beneficial to symptoms, long-term health, but does not create an increase in breast cancer. I really appreciate your clarity on that. How about progesterone? So we know progestin increased the risk. How do you feel about bioidentical progesterone?

Karen Martel:

So bioidentical progesterones completely different than progestins. So progestins are chemical, they’re synthetic, and they’re an endocrine disruptor. So they are part of that group of chemicals that is completely screwing with our hormonal system. And yet how many people are putting their 13-year-old daughter on progestins to help with acne? And how many of those doctors who are saying don’t take estrogen replacement therapy, giving out birth control pills like it’s candy. So it’s really backwards because it’s the progestin that is increasing your risk of breast cancer amongst many other health problems that it’s causing. So that’s very frustrating that we are being told such misinformation, bioidentical progesterone is exactly like how our bodies make it. There’s no difference in the chemical makeup. And now we have estradiol that’s bioidentical as well, so that we don’t have to take the horse’s estrogen anymore. And we know from research that taking progesterone bioidentical with your estradiol will act like your own progesterone and counterbalance the growth of that estrogen because growth unopposed can cause cancer. So if you’ve got cancer cells in your breast tissue and it’s an estrogen receptor positive breast cancer, that means that estrogen can go there and because it’s a growth hormone and can cause proliferation, it can actually feed the cancer. So it doesn’t cause it, but it could certainly feed it.

So progesterone, as I said before, with the breast tissue, it counterbalances the growth in breast tissue in uterine tissue. So as long as we’ve got that nice yang and yang of estradiol and progesterone together, then we’re okay. Then I’m not going to say that you won’t develop cancer because I can’t say that. But the research shows the safety of that, and it’s very hard to find actually good research papers that distinguish between using progestin and progesterone. So that’s a real problem. So you can look up research papers and it’ll say the use of progesterone caused an increased risk of heart attack and stroke or cause an increased risk of breast cancer, and they were actually using progestin and they call it progesterone.

Megan Lyons:

Really frustrating. I’ve always said to people, it’s the same looking at progesterone or even hormone studies in general is looking at red meat studies when they do red meat studies, and yeah, they’re lumping in hot dogs and fast food burgers and salami and bologna and all that stuff. Yes, that actually does increase the risk of many long-term things, and yet if you isolate the one grass-fed filet per week or something like that, there’s not going to be risk. So I feel the same with progesterone, progestin, everything that you’re describing is so important for people to know, and I really appreciate that. I know people are going to be flocking to you for your help and guidance, so I’d love for you to leave the audience with any last thoughts you have, and then also tell them how they can get in touch with you.

Karen Martel:

Yeah, so I will say, because there was a lot of negative in there, we do know from the research that, for instance, replacing estradiol in menopause for six years or longer had showed a reduction from 75 to 80% reduction in developing Alzheimer’s and dementia. We know that women that replace their hormones have a 33% reduction in all cause mortality. So that’s everything that can kill you. We know that women that use estrogen in menopause, we’ll have a 47% reduction in cardiac mortality. So that’s the number one killer of women is heart disease. So 47% reduction, we know it reduces our risk of developing type two diabetes, osteoporosis, liver disease, high cholesterol. I mean, the list goes on and on and on. We know that it’ll even reduce all forms of cancer by 30%. So we know from the research that women, majority of women can safely replace their hormones and that they are better off health-wise to replace their hormones and menopause. So I just want everybody to remember that because the alternative to that is medications, and some people will say, well, it’s not natural to replace our hormones. It’s natural for us to go through menopause. Well, then it’s natural for you to also develop heart disease. And would you say no to the medication if you had heart disease? No, you wouldn’t. It’s lifesaving. So why not give the body what it’s actually missing in a lot of these cases and give back these vital hormones that keep us functioning at our best for

Megan Lyons:

Many people. That’s a good point. Yes. I like that response. It’s one I’ve struggled with too, but it’s a perfect response. It’s the blend of nature and science. Using science for our best natural selves I think is such a gift that people like you are giving us. Thank you for that.

Karen Martel:

Yeah, it’s quality of life. We never used to live past 45, so at menopause, we used to die, and so we’re living longer than ever, and so why not give the body what it’s missing to function at its best? Yes. Instead of taking all the prescription pills that would be coming down the pipeline, because we now have insulin resistance and heart disease and osteoporosis, you will develop osteoporosis a hundred percent if you don’t replace estrogen. So it’s really, this information really needs to get out there. The truth about it all, because it’s a detriment to our health as women that we don’t know this.

Megan Lyons:

Yes.

Karen Martel:

And quality of life,

Megan Lyons:

You are sharing it. 45, my goodness, I have way too much to do before I’m 45, so that’s not an option. No, I need many, many, many, many more decades beyond that.

Karen Martel:

Yes. And we want to live those decades with a functioning brain and body and Yeah, absolutely. I think you asked where people can find me, so KarenMartel.com and my podcast, the Hormone Solution Podcast. We’ve got over 300 episodes. That’s Karen Martel hormones on social media, and I’ve got a great quiz, a hormone quiz that everybody can take on my website, KarenMartel.com.

Megan Lyons:

Amazing. We are going to link to your Instagram, your website, and that quiz, which I know people will love in the show notes. And one more time. Karen, thank you so much for your wisdom. I really appreciate you sharing today.

Karen Martel:

Well, thanks for having me on. I appreciate it.

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