Your Brain On (And Off) Estrogen

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Today’s 30-Second Summary

If you don’t have time to read the whole email today, here are some key takeaways:

• Menopause affects the brain, but why and how? A lot of it has to do with the knock-on effects of declining estrogen levels, but taking estrogen isn’t the only answer.

  • Today’s main feature shares expert insights on how declining estrogen levels increase the need for antioxidants, why this often goes unnoticed, and how it can be corrected.

• We’ve written before about the powerful neuroprotective properties of quercetin and bromelain against inflammation.

  • Today’s sponsor, Nature’s Craft, is offering a quercetin+bromelain combination that you won’t want to miss out on!

• Today’s featured book is about how “You Are Not Broken” down there, and what to do about it if it seems like you are!

Read on to learn more about these things, or click here to visit our archive

A Word To The Wise

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10 Great Exercises To Improve Your Eyesight

If your eyesight has been declining a bit, all is not lost. Just like many other muscles in the body, the muscles of the eye—including those responsible for changing the focal length of your vision—can atrophy without exercise.

So, without further ado, here are the exercises recommended:

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Tuesday’s Expert Insights

Your Brain On (And Off) Estrogen

This is Dr. Lisa Mosconi. She’s a professor of Neuroscience in Neurology and Radiology, and is one of the 1% most influential scientists of the 21st century. That’s not a random number or an exaggeration; it has to do with citation metrics collated over 20 years:

A standardized citation metrics author database annotated for scientific field

What does she want us to know?

Women’s brains age differently from men’s

This is largely, of course, due to menopause, and as such is a generalization, but it’s a statistically safe generalization, because:

• Most women go through menopause—and most women who don’t, avoid it by dying pre-menopause, so the aging also does not occur in those cases

• Menopause is very rarely treated immediately—not least of all because menopause is diagnosed officially when it has been one year since one’s last period, so there’s almost always a year of “probably” first, and often numerous years, in the case of periods slowing down before stopping

• Menopausal HRT is great, but doesn’t completely negate that menopause occurred—because of the delay in starting HRT, some damage can be done already and can take years to reverse.

Medicated and unmedicated menopause proceed very differently from each other, and this fact has historically caused obfuscation of a lot of research into age-related neurodegeneration.

For example, it is well-established that women get Alzheimer’s at nearly twice the rate than men do, and deteriorate more rapidly after onset, too.

Superficially, one might conclude “estrogen is to blame” or maybe “the xx-chromosomal karyotype is to blame”.

The opposite, however, is true with regard to estrogen—estrogen appears to be a protective factor in women’s neurological health, which is why increased neurodegeneration occurs when estrogen levels decline (for example, in menopause).

For a full rundown on this, see:

Alzheimer’s Sex Differences May Not Be What They Appear

It’s not about the extra X

Dr. Mosconi examines this in detail in her book “The XX Brain”. To summarize and oversimplify a little: the XX karyotype by itself makes no difference, or more accurately, the XY karyotype by itself makes no difference (because biologically speaking, female physiological attributes are more “default” than male ones; it is only 12,000ish* years of culture that has flipped the social script on this).

*Why 12,000ish years? It’s because patriarchalism largely began with settled agriculture, for reasons that are fascinating but beyond the scope of this article, which is about health science, not archeology.

The topic of “which is biologically default” is relevant, because the XY karyotype (usually) informs the body “ignore previous instructions about ovaries, and adjust slightly to make them into testes instead”, which in turn (usually) results in a testosterone-driven system instead of an estrogen-driven system. And that is what makes the difference to the brain.

One way we can see that it’s about the hormones not the chromosomes, is in cases of androgen insensitivity syndrome, in which the natal “congratulations, it’s a girl” pronouncement may later be in conflict with the fact it turns out she had XY chromosomes all along, but the androgenic instructions never got delivered successfully, so she popped out with fairly typical female organs. And, relevantly for Dr. Mosconi, a typically female brain that will age in a typically female fashion, because it’s driven by estrogen, regardless of the Y-chromosome.

The good news

The good news from all of this is that while we can’t (with current science, anyway) do much about our chromosomes, we can do plenty about our hormones, and also, the results of changes in same.

Remember, Dr. Mosconi is not an endocrinologist, nor a gynecologist, but a neurologist. As such, she makes the case for how a true interdisciplinary team for treating menopause should not confined to the narrow fields usually associated with “bikini medicine”, but should take into account that a lot of menopause-related changes are neurological in nature.

We recently reviewed another book by Dr. Mosconi:

The Menopause Brain – by Dr. Lisa Mosconi

…and as we noted there, many sources will mention “brain fog” as a symptom of menopause, Dr. Mosconi can (and will) point to a shadowy patch on a brain scan and say “that’s the brain fog, there”.

And so on, for other symptoms that are often dismissed as “all in your head”, as though that’s a perfectly acceptable place for problems to be.

This is critical, because it’s treating real neurological things as the real things they are.

Dr. Mosconi’s advice, beyond HRT

Dr. Mosconi notes that brain health tends to dip during perimenopause but often recovers, showing the brain’s resilience to hormonal shifts. As such, all is not lost if for whatever reason, hormone replacement therapy isn’t a viable option for you.

Estrogen plays a crucial role in brain energy, and women’s declining estrogen levels during menopause increase the need for antioxidants to protect brain health—something not often talked about.

Specifically, Dr. Mosconi tells us, women need more antioxidants and have different metabolic responses to diets compared to men.*

*Yes, even though men usually have negligible estrogen, because their body (and thus brain, being also part of their body) is running on testosterone instead, which is something that will only happen if either you are producing normal male amounts of testosterone (requires normal male testes) or you are taking normal male amounts of testosterone (requires big bottles of testosterone; this isn’t the kind of thing you can get from a low dose of testogel as sometimes prescribed as part of menopausal HRT to perk your metabolism up).

In terms of supplements, therefore, she recommends:

• Antioxidants: key for brain health, especially in women. Rich sources include fruits (especially berries) and vegetables. Then there’s the world’s most-consumed antioxidant, which is…

• Coffee: Italian-style espresso has the highest antioxidant power. Adding a bit of fat (e.g. oat milk) helps release caffeine more slowly, reducing jitters. Taking it alongside l-theanine also “flattens the curve” and thus improves its overall benefits.

• Flavonoids: important for both men and women but particularly essential for women. Found in many fruits and vegetables.

• Chocolate: dark chocolate is an excellent source of antioxidants and flavonoids!

• Turmeric: a natural neuroprotectant with anti-inflammatory properties, best boosted by taking with black pepper, which improves absorption as well as having many great qualities of its own.

• B Vitamins: B6, B9, and B12 are essential for anti-aging and brain health; deficiency in B6 is rare, while deficiency in B9 (folate) and especially B12 is very common later in life.

• Vitamins C & E: important antioxidants, but caution is needed with fat-soluble vitamins to avoid toxicity.

• Omega-3s: important for brain health; can be consumed in the diet, but supplements may be necessary.

• Caution with zinc: zinc can support immunity and endocrine health (and thus, indirectly, brain health) but may be harmful in excess, particularly for brain health.

• Probiotics & Prebiotics: beneficial for gut health, and in Dr. Mosconi’s opinion, hard to get sufficient amounts from diet alone.

For more pointers, you might want to check out the MIND diet, that is to say, the “Mediterranean-DASH Intervention for Neurodegenerative Delay” upgrade to make the Mediterranean diet even brain-healthier than it is by default:

Four Ways To Upgrade The Mediterranean Diet

Want to know more from Dr. Mosconi?

Here’s her TED talk:

Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!

Enjoy!

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Bromelain vs Inflammation & Much More

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One-Minute Book Review

You Are Not Broken: Stop "Should-ing" All Over Your Sex Life – by Dr. Kelly Casperson

Many women express “I think I’m broken down there”, and it turns out simply that neither they nor their partners had the right knowledge, that’s all. The good news is: bedroom competence is an entirely learnable skill!

Dr. Casperson is a urologist, and over the years has expanded her work into all things pelvic, including the relevant use of both systemic and topical hormones (as in, hormones to increase overall blood serum levels of that hormone, like most HRT, and also, creams and lotions to increase levels of a given hormone in one particular place).

However, this is not 200 pages to say “take hormones”. Rather, she covers many areas of female sexual health and wellbeing, including yes, simply pleasure. From the physiological to the psychological, Dr. Casperson talks the reader through avoiding blame games and “getting out of your head and into your body”.

Bottom line: if you (or a loved one) are one of the many women who have doubts about being entirely correctly set up down there, then this book is definitely for you.

Click here to check out You Are Not Broken, and indeed stop “should-ing” all over your sex life!

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Wishing you a wonderful day of wellness,

The 10almonds Team