Are you confused by diet myths that seem to pop up everywhere, especially when it comes to nutrition advice for women in midlife? Join host Heather Carey in this enlightening episode of Real Food Stories, where she dives deep into the complexities of nutrition and the overwhelming misinformation surrounding dietary advice for women navigating perimenopause and menopause. As a culinary nutritionist, Heather brings her expertise to the table, emphasizing the importance of evidence-based nutrition over the often misleading claims found on social media.

Throughout the conversation, Heather reflects on the evolution of nutrition science, debunking common diet myths about fats, sugars, and essential vitamins like B12. She sheds light on a critical issue: most doctors receive insufficient training in nutrition, leaving many women in the dark about how to maintain healthy eating during midlife. This lack of guidance often leads to confusion and frustration, particularly around misconceptions about menopause, such as the belief that weight gain is inevitable or that simply ‘balancing hormones’ will solve everything.

Heather is on a mission to empower women with the knowledge they need to reclaim their health and relationship with food. She shares her vision for a new course designed specifically for women, focusing on perimenopause nutrition and how to navigate this transitional phase with confidence. By promoting real food, balanced meals, and intuitive eating practices, she aims to help women break free from the cycle of dieting and embrace a sustainable, joyful approach to healthy lifestyle choices.

Throughout the episode, Heather encourages listeners to seek credible sources of information and to be wary of sensationalist claims that often accompany diet fads. With a focus on midlife body positivity and the seven pillars of abundance, she provides practical healthy eating tips that resonate with personal food journeys and family food traditions.

Whether you’re looking to improve your menopause health, understand the impact of hormonal changes on your body, or simply want to learn more about mindful eating and cooking techniques, this episode is packed with valuable insights and inspiration. Tune in to discover how to nourish your body, overcome diet myths, and embrace a healthier, more fulfilling lifestyle as you navigate the complexities of midlife.

Don’t miss out on this opportunity to empower your menopause journey with real food and expert guidance. Join Heather as she helps you transform your relationship with food and embrace the vibrant life you deserve!

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Hang out with Heather on IG @greenpalettekitchen or on FB HERE.

Let’s Talk!
Whether you are looking for 1-1 nutrition coaching or kitchen coaching let’s have a chat. Click HERE to reach out to Heather.

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Transcript:

Speaker #0
Well, hello, everybody, and welcome back. And if you are just tuning in with me for the very first time, it’s so nice to meet you. And I’m really glad you’re here with me today. I am your host, Heather Carey, nutritionist, chef, mom, and a woman who has been around the block with food. I want to open up about real food in relation to health, weight, and our bodies so you can make peace with what you eat. Hi everybody and welcome back to the Real Food Stories podcast. This is your host Heather Carey, culinary nutritionist and real foods chef. I have been doing a lot of nutrition 101 lately because I want you to understand that there is the wild west of social media that dictates so much of where you might be getting your nutrition information. And then… all the way on the other side is the real evidence-based nutrition that really focuses on credible research. It’s not always perfect, and I’ll explain why in a minute, but it really does try to use the most credible research out there. You might know by now that I lean on the side of evidence and research because it actually makes me crazy when I see some of that woo-woo stuff going on out there. Like the most extreme I’ve seen recently are coffee enemas or using muscle testing to see if your supplements are credible. It’s just head scratching to me. On the other hand, I kind of get this because I think that people who work on the research side of things have also gotten a reputation as being the woo-woo people. Honestly, in the world of nutrition, science has evolved a lot. I mentioned in my last couple of podcasts the old theories around fats being bad for you and sugar replacing fat in many grocery store products. This was back in the 80s. Things have radically changed since then. The world of nutrition science is not that old to tell you the truth. It was only in the 1900s that the discovery of vitamins and minerals came to light. It was only then that physicians started learning about nutrition in general. And it was only in the late 1940s that a vitamin was discovered to help anemia. This was vitamin B12. We now know that vitamin B12 only comes from animal products and that if you are vegan, you need to supplement with this vitamin. That was not that long ago. By the 1950s, medicine started to create subspecialties and nutrition and food became low priority for physicians to study. And. You can see this today. I say this all the time to my clients. Doctors are not nutritionists, unfortunately, but they can’t be everything. You do not go to your doctor for nutrition advice. You go to them for a diagnosis for medications or lab work. Nutrition is a subspecialty unto itself. And I think personally that that is a good thing. However, what we eat is so incredibly vital to our health. It does fit somewhere in the medicine category. So how are we learning about what to eat? Even in schools, only 50% have district or state requirements to teach nutrition. And that number significantly drops as you get into high school. That is baffling to me. What to eat is so fundamental to our lives. It’s the one thing every single person participates in every single day. Yet we are so utterly confused by it. And on top of it, there is a lot of dysregulation in the field of nutrition science, which has led to a plethora of health gurus and quacky theories around how and what to eat. Anyone, and I mean anyone, can create a diet, package it into a book, and sell it to you. Anyone can profit from your fears or your confusion as to how to lose weight. or heal yourself when you feel like the medical community has failed you. Anyone can take an online course and call themselves a health coach. The takeaway is nutrition science is relatively new, and it is evolving, and we need to have some patience, but always stick to the side of evidence. What we do know so far is not complicated, and I talk about this a lot. Balance your plate of food with a lot of vegetables and fruits. Those are your edible vitamins. Make them preferably in season because that’s when they are freshest and taste better. Make this half of your plate of food when you’re eating breakfast, lunch, or dinner, even your snacks. Eat very high quality protein from fish, chicken, and plants like beans rather than junky protein from protein powders and bars. Incorporate whole grains. Yes, we can eat grains because whole grains we know from tons of research are really good for you. Whole grains like brown rice, quinoa, farro, whole wheat are really perfect examples. And then fats. Eat fat, please. Again, emphasize your best, most well-studied sources. Extra virgin olive oil. and those social media dreaded seed oils, sesame and canola, top my list. But most people, women especially, think that it cannot be this easy. Just eat real food. Because what we have learned, we got from our mothers or our grandmothers or magazines. And my grandmother and my mother, for example, were always on and off diets. I grew up with the belief that you were supposed to be always dieting and worrying about how much you ate. I was not really supposed to enjoy food, but rather fear it for the weight I might gain. And those magazine and news articles drilled into me too, that I was always following the latest diet from those pages. I know I’m not alone in this. And now here we are, women in midlife, most of you still utterly confused by food, especially now that peri and menopause looms large and we are not feeling our best some of the time. Mystery weight gain, no matter how much you try to diet and detox, brain fog, hot flashes, fatigue, or just to name a few. And you feel that at least back then when you were dieting, that you had some control over your body. And now and it’s not really working the way it used to, which leads to even more confusion and then spending way too much time and money on the internet trying to figure it all out. I hear things like, I know how to eat, I’m just not doing it, or just tell me what to eat, and the ever-famous, I just want my body back. And rather than go in the direction of simplicity, many women try and take the quote, easier and albeit riskier path. And I say risky because some supplements and detox can be really risky and it is a risk to your mental health. When you spend money and these things don’t work, it can get really depressing and defeating. At the end of this podcast, I am going to go into some detail about my new course that I am creating and I am super excited about it because I see such a need. to get women out of the world of fear and quackery and into the real way to eat and live while they are in perimenopause and menopause. I want to show women that while it might take some effort, the work pays off in so many ways. And the biggest one is that they can make peace with what they are eating, knowing that it works and that they are doing their very best. And here are the problems that I am looking to solve. with creating a course, how to easily incorporate and cook all those amazing, delicious, and nutritious foods that I often talk about, how to pay attention to your food and eating and learn to use your intuition, how to not let food rule your emotions, how to enjoy and not be scared of food, and how to rely on food for your nourishment. Food counts more than ever when we are in midlife. There are very solid health concerns that women face when going into menopause. Bone health, heart health, weight gain, diabetes, and certain cancers are just to name a few. Knowing the right way to eat is vital at this time. Okay, so before I get into more detail about my upcoming course, because I am so excited about it and I am going to be offering something that I have never offered before, I want to spend some time looking at a few common myths and misconceptions just surrounding menopause and how to identify reliable sources of information and the red flags. So the first myth and misconception around menopause that I want to talk about is just taking hormone replacement therapy, which is estrogen and progesterone. Now, we can blame this misconception on one very single flawed study that came out in the 2000s, the Women’s Health Initiative, which was studying the association of hormone replacement therapy on health outcomes. The results were misinterpreted to make it seem that hormone replacement therapy had detrimental effects on women in relationship to breast cancer and heart disease. But this was not the case. It turns out… that hormone replacement therapy is actually protective. Now, I am summarizing this greatly here, but the bottom line is that this study created a great deal of fear around using hormones, and to this day, women still feel like it is very risky to take them. I talk to many, many women who are filled with fear because of the risks of taking hormone replacement, even though they are suffering with a lot of symptoms. Whether or not you want to take hormones and menopause and the benefits to taking them are something I want to cover in detail in my upcoming course. But just know that hormones now are known to be safe and extremely effective for many symptoms of peri and menopause, as long as you are a candidate for taking them. I am not here to give medical advice. I am not here to tell you what to do. This is a very personal choice. But You do not need to tough out hot flashes and night sweats if you are a candidate for taking hormone replacement. So that study has been well debunked, and you can find very credible information on it. I will link some links in the show notes. My next myth and misconception around menopause is that you will automatically gain weight right when you are going into perimenopause and menopause. While I talk to many women in my practice about weight gain, many women think that weight gain during menopause is simply unavoidable and that it’s impossible to maintain a healthy weight. But the reality is that while hormonal changes during menopause can make weight management sometimes more challenging, we are definitely going through certain shifts in our bodies at this time, weight gain is not inevitable. Maintaining a healthy diet, staying physically active, and managing stress are key to helping prevent or reducing weight gain during menopause. It’s important to focus on overall health and well-being rather than just the number on the scale as well. And midlife is a time really to tweak some things in your diet, which doesn’t translate into a diet, by the way, and to get more mindful about what we are eating and drinking. And in my course, I will go into great detail about this because I know this is the number one sticking point for many, many women is that they claim that they just look at food and they gain weight. They cannot figure this out. And I understand this. This is a very vexing problem for many women. Okay. And my last and my favorite myth is that we need to balance our hormones in order to lose weight or simply get through menopause. Let’s talk about the word balance for a second. We can balance the food on our plates like I talked about before. We can even balance our work and our life like is so talked about on social media. But when it comes to balancing hormones, this is truly a baffling myth to me. I don’t really know exactly what that means to balance. hormones. And if you asked any credible health professional, I think they would say the same. Yes, we can use hormone replacement therapy to replenish what we have lost, but the idea of balancing hormones really oversimplifies a very complex process in our bodies. Hormones are not just estrogen and progesterone. We actually have over 50 hormones that are in charge of running All the systems out of our bodies in keeping us alive, they all count. And even in peri and menopause, there is insulin, cortisol, testosterone, thyroid, lots of other hormones to consider. Hormone levels fluctuate naturally during menopause and treatments should be personalized. What we eat matters as well. Genetics might matter. Stress definitely matters. You cannot take a pill or supplement to help balance hormones. So if you see this on social media and there are plenty of people peddling supplements for balancing hormones, just do yourself a favor and stay away. I want to now identify a few ways to look for red flags when it comes to menopause information on the internet. The first one is to check the source. As I said before, anyone can sell a diet or a supplement, and they can make wild claims as to its proof. If you listened to my supplement podcast a couple episodes ago, you might remember that the FDA, which is the Food and Drug Administration, has no regulation over supplements. I highlighted a supplement formulation that Goop founder Gwyneth Paltrow sells on her website that is filled with untruths and really shoddy research. It’s really difficult to check the sources behind supplements and diets, and it is one of the topics I am definitely planning on covering in my upcoming menopause course, so stay tuned for that. The North American Menopause Society, the Mayo Clinic, Harvard, Tufts, these are a few of the sites with very credible research, not a hormone balancing pill on Instagram. sold by somebody that you have never even heard of before. Now, the second red flag to look for is sensationalist language, promises of quick fixes or claims that seem just too good to be true. So here’s what to look for instead. A balanced tone of voice. Trustworthy information is usually presented in a balanced, objective manner without that sensationalist language. So be wary of phrases like miracle cure or instant results. You want to look for evidence-based claims. Look for statements backed by scientific research. Avoid sources that make sweeping claims without evidence or rely heavily on anecdotal testimonials. Testimonials are not evidence and they are not research. Anyone can put testimonials on their website. Also, look for disclosure of limitations. reputable sources often discuss the limitations of the information or treatment options, acknowledging that results may vary among individuals. That’s kind of important, rather than all people get the same amazing, miraculous results. Okay, I want to talk about something in my professional work that I have never talked about before or done before. You might have heard me simply referencing you the course I am offering, which sounds sort of generic. And that is because I am actually in the middle of creating this course. I don’t have a title for it yet, and I don’t have the full outline for it yet, because I am looking to create a digital course to help midlife women who are in perimenopause or menopause embark on a truly transformative journey from the uncertainty to complete confidence and empowerment about midlife and the menopause transition. My goal really for this course is to have you gain essential knowledge that fosters sustainable weight loss, reduces stress, boosts your energy, and empowers you to embrace this vibrant new season of your life with enthusiasm and peace. I want to give you back your power and feel like you are it. in charge of your body and your mind. So if getting real evidence-based knowledge on what to eat, how to lose weight, what it takes to feel good during this time, then this course could be a game changer for you. And we are going to cover the lesser talked about things in the world of menopause that I mentioned briefly earlier, how to easily incorporate and cook all those amazing, delicious and nutritious foods that I often talk about. we need to get into our bodies on a daily basis that might feel difficult for you to figure out how to incorporate, how to pay attention to your food and eating and learn to use your intuition rather than somebody else’s diet, how to not let food rule your emotions, how to enjoy and not be scared of food, and how to rely on food for your nourishment. There are a lot of reasons right now you why food should very much matter as far as our health. I have created many, many courses and workshops over my pretty long career, and some of the time I am making assumptions of what women want to learn and get empowered by. So here’s the thing that I am doing differently this time, and that I want you to be a part of, and that I honestly have never done before. I am opening up 10 spots for an early enrollment to my course, which I am planning on launching in September. And I’m offering this at a huge discount in exchange for your feedback. And that feedback will take you less than five minutes of your time each week for about six weeks. This discount that I am talking about is… only available for a few days. I am just opening up the window for this just for a couple of days, but I’m offering it, like I said, at a massive discount. My future course is going to be $5.97. My massive discount is available to you today for only $1.97. Now, once the course goes live in September, you will have access to the whole course. all the live events and all the amazing bonuses, everything that you with everyone else will get in the course, but you will not be paying the full price. You will be paying this massive discount in exchange for you literally helping me create the course because I want women just like you to let me know exactly what you are looking for. This will give me priceless feedback towards the course creation. So again, today, if you sign up, the fee for the course is only $197 versus the $597 that I will be offering for the course in the near future. I really want your participation for the creation of this course. I feel so excited about this and it just feels like something just new. something that you can be a part of. And I want to incentivize you to join me by offering you this massive discount. So as I have said, the thing is, I am only going to be offering this discount for the next three days. Today is July 9th, and the doors on this massive discount are going to close by the end of the 12th. And I am only opening this up to the first 10 women that Sign up. Once I hit 10 people, the doors will definitely be closed and the price will go up. I know this may feel risky because it’s a future course. It hasn’t been developed. I know I am asking a lot, but you will play a vital role in exactly what you want in a course on menopause. I would love for you to join me and you can go to the link in the show notes right now to sign up. I so look forward to seeing you there. I’m super excited in launching this course because I think there is such a huge need for real evidence-based, credible information that also honors you as a woman going through such a major change in your life. I want to end the confusion. I hope you will join me on this adventure. And if you have questions, please feel free to reach out to me at my email at heather at heathercary.com. Very simple. Please go to the show notes for all of the links to sign up, and I cannot wait to see you on the other end. Have a great day, everyone. And as always, if you loved this podcast, please consider gifting me with a five-star review. It is so helpful for me to get the word out on real eating. our real bodies and real food stories. Thank you so much and have a great week. Bye for now.