Unmasking Supplement Hype: Real Food Stories and Nutrition Insights for Women Facing Menopause Challenges

Are you feeling overwhelmed by the supplement hype surrounding menopause? You’re not alone! In this enlightening episode of Real Food Stories, host Heather Carey dives deep into the misleading wellness culture that often targets women, particularly those navigating the complexities of midlife and menopause. With a keen focus on the misinformation that floods social media, including supplement hype, Heather sheds light on the dangers of quick-fix solutions and the marketing tactics that prioritize profit over genuine health benefits.

As a culinary nutritionist, Heather draws on her expertise to empower women to reclaim their health through real food and nutrition. She discusses a revealing study that highlights how a staggering percentage of menopause-related posts on Instagram promote supplements instead of providing valuable education. This episode is a wake-up call for listeners to be discerning about where they seek advice and to challenge the nutrition myths that clutter their feeds.

Throughout the conversation, Heather emphasizes the importance of focusing on whole foods and sustainable eating practices rather than succumbing to the latest diet fads and trends. She encourages women to embrace their personal food journeys, question the information they encounter online, and prioritize healthy lifestyle choices that truly nourish their bodies. By advocating for a return to midlife nutrition and self-care, Heather inspires listeners to cultivate a positive relationship with food that supports their changing bodies.

With insights into menopause health and the role of nutrition, this episode offers practical healthy eating tips and cooking techniques that resonate with women 40 and over. Heather’s empathetic approach shines through as she shares personal stories and encourages women to embrace body positivity during this transitional phase of life. Discover how to empower your menopause journey by nourishing your body with real food, and learn to navigate the complexities of hormonal changes with confidence.

Join Heather Carey on this transformative episode of Real Food Stories as she unpacks the truth behind the supplement hype and encourages women to embrace a holistic approach to health and wellness. It’s time to ditch the confusion and reclaim your health journey with knowledge, compassion, and the power of culinary wellness. Tune in and take the first step towards a nourished, empowered you!

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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. Hey, everybody, and welcome back to the Real Food Stories podcast. I am your host, Heather Carey, and today I want to talk about something that I think is unavoidable and is happening all around us, and that is the noisy, tantrum-y, loud world of wellness. Now, I know I have spent a lot of time talking about the quackery around supplements and herbs and the people selling them on the internet. I have many, many podcasts about that. I’ll maybe put a couple of my links in the show notes if you want to see more. Even last week, I did a podcast on the newest craze, which is peptides. So definitely if you’ve heard about peptides or you’re not really sure what they are, I advise you to take a listen to that one. Now, I know that I am a nutritionist with an emphasis on food. And honestly, it’s really all I used to talk about and teach. How to eat and cook food. How to enjoy real food. How to enjoy our food. How to grow our food. Because I still believe that what we eat is the most important thing that we can do for our health. It’s really all I want to be talking about to tell you the truth. I want to be telling you how to cook your food. But I am constantly coming up against walls of wellness and this world of wellness that is seriously distracting me because this is all you see on the internet right now. Making yourself over by swallowing a pill or injecting yourself with a substance is just the belief now that we don’t have to even talk about food. We could just stop eating food altogether because the bigger pursuit is probably We… losing weight, and that comes with a price. Now, for women in midlife who are going through menopause and so many other changes to their bodies, we women are particularly vulnerable when it comes to the messaging about the wellness world and supplements and injectables on the internet. Now, it usually starts pretty innocently, right? Or it can start dramatically. But it always starts with that feeling of not being quite like yourself anymore. Your body is changing. Maybe your sleep is off. Your energy is off. You just look at food and you gain weight. I have heard this from dozens of women. I just look at food and I’ve gained five pounds. Your mood feels different and you start looking for answers. I understand this. No one is blaming you. We are going through an enormous amount of change. And the other thing is that you know deep down that, like, this is no longer your mother’s menopause, right, where you just have to tough out hot flashes and just suffer through and just get old, right? We have all those messages, too. We don’t have to suffer through menopause anymore and tough it out. But where do we all go now? Okay, so when we’re looking for our answers as to what to do exactly, where do we go? We primarily go online and we go on to ChatGPT and we open up Instagram, right? Or we Google something, which is just another version of ChatGPT. Or you start listening to a podcast. And before you know it, you are deep into a world of powders, supplements, protocols. and gigantic promises. So here’s the thing I really want to talk about today. This is not happening because women are naive. It’s happening because the system is designed to pull you in. Now, recently, I just came across a study published in the British Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology that kind of stopped me in my tracks. It was the first time I’d ever seen a study like this. So the researchers looked at… What comes up when women search menopause content on Instagram? So I was immediately intrigued with this because, as you know, I’m a little consumed with it right now because it’s getting in the way of what I want to be talking about and what I think we need to be talking about, which is just real food and health and movement and not getting caught up in all of this supplement nonsense. But anyway, here’s why I was intrigued. The researchers looked at what comes up in a search on Instagram, not what the doctors are saying, nor what the guidelines recommend, but what women are actually seeing on the internet. And what they found was this, about 66% of the posts, now they looked at thousands of posts, okay, so 66% of these posts were promoting supplements. So if you search menopause content on Instagram, you are going to come up with 66% of posts promoting something that you can buy. That’s two thirds of the posts that you see. Now that’s not education, that’s marketing, right? They’re marketing something to you. They want you to buy something. But it gets a little more interesting. Now only about 18% of the people posting were actually. credentialed clinicians. Now, I’m going to pause there for a second too, because even credentialed clinicians, okay, we know a couple of them and I’ve talked about them on the podcast, with MDs after their name can sell you all sorts of questionable supplements. So that’s interesting, you know, but let’s be real, okay, that there’s a lot. When you see a doctor selling a boatload of supplements to you. I would take that as a warning, okay? And I would not buy into their quackery. But anyway, only about 18% of the people posting were actually credentialed. The majority, the rest of them, were businesses, influencers, individuals, without any formal medical or nutrition training. So if you’re scrolling and trying to make sense of your body right now, You’re mostly being guided by people who are selling you something, or at the very least, they are trying to build a brand. And it’s not just menopause either, okay? There’s a growing body of research showing that nutrition misinformation is everywhere online. Studies published in journals like the Journal of Medical Internet Research or Nutrients describe it as pervasive, not occasional. but pervasive. And here’s where it gets even more important, I think. These studies also show that social media doesn’t just influence what we think, it changes what we do. Okay, you see enough women, super thin women in their 50s, time after time after time promoting stuff, you’re going to start to get brainwashed around it. Okay. So… People are buying supplements, they are changing their diets, following protocols based on what they see online. And what they see online has absolutely zero regulation. And so the question becomes why? Why are smart, thoughtful, capable women, and I know that you are, women who are not easily fooled. Why are you getting pulled into this? And the first reason, I think, is actually just very human. Okay, we’re looking for relief. We want so desperately that magic bullet. Because midlife and menopause can feel like your body changed the rules without telling you, right? I didn’t sign up for this. I didn’t sign up for my body just completely going out of whack with my hormones. I mean, who wants this? You don’t feel like yourself. What used to work doesn’t work anymore. And when traditional medicine doesn’t give you clear answers or enough time or enough nuance, you start looking elsewhere. When you go to your regular doctor, and I have had plenty of talks about my stories around doctors and how they’ve completely failed me and not giving me answers that I am wanting. you’re going to go start looking elsewhere. So that’s not irrational. You’re just trying to adopt and make yourself feel better. All right, the second reason is something that the researchers are starting to talk about more. And it’s that misinformation doesn’t look like misinformation anymore, right? It’s not some, like, guy on the internet selling, like, something, like, that looks kind of weird. These are very polished, seemingly scientific pages or posts that you’re seeing using words like clinical and research-backed and doctor-approved. I mean… People are gullible around this stuff, okay? When you see clinical or we’ve done research, you have to be very, very aware of what that means exactly because the research could have been done on mice, on five mice in a lab 20 years ago, and they can call it research. There’s even research showing that people are more likely to trust information if it looks credible, looks credible, even if it isn’t. You see someone in a lab coat. You see someone holding up a chart. You see before and after pictures. You see testimonials. Okay, I’m going to tell you that testimonials and before and after pictures are not research. We want research because a lot of this stuff can get flat out dangerous. Okay, you don’t know what you’re taking exactly. Maybe you’re on other medications. Your doctor doesn’t know about it. And these things have not been tested. Okay, so all of a sudden, all of these little things give a feeling of certainty. And when you’re feeling uncertain in your own body, this is incredibly appealing. When you see a woman your own age tell you on Instagram that this is what she does, and this is why she feels so great, and you should do it too, it is incredibly appealing and believable. I totally understand this. All right. The third reason, and this one matters a lot, is the algorithm. Social media platforms are not designed to give you the most accurate information. They are designed to give you the most engaging information. You know this. You click on one thing, suddenly you are flooded. I mean, I clicked on… pictures of golden retriever puppies because I have a golden retriever. And 99% of my feed on Instagram are pictures of puppies, reels about puppies, golden retrievers specifically. So it’s just the algorithm is designed for this. You’re slightly interested in one thing. It’s going to show you 500 more examples. It’s designed. to give you the most engaging information. So there’s even research published in journals like Nature Metabolism showing that algorithms tend to amplify content that is emotional, right, that you can feel strongly about. It’s simplified, though. It’s confident, and it’s often extreme because that’s what keeps you watching, right? Not, it depends, or we don’t have enough evidence yet. No one’s saying that. No one who’s trying to sell you the next supplement, the next expensive supplement or peptide is saying, well, we don’t really have evidence for it, even though they don’t really have evidence for it. But they don’t have to say that. So what comes up to the top? What bubbles up to the top? Fix your hormones with this one supplement. Balance your blood sugar in three days. This is what your doctor isn’t telling you. We’ve all heard that one before. So it’s really compelling and it’s clear and convincing and it’s often not true or at least not fully true. Now, there’s also research looking specifically at influencers and supplement marketing. One study found that supplement promotions on Instagram often lack basic safety information, dosing guidance, or the risks of taking any of these supplements. Of course, They’re not going to tell you about the risks. because they want to sell you this stuff. Another study concluded that influencers frequently disinform rather than inform. And yet, these are the voices that people are trusting out on the internet, not because they’re better, but because they’re louder. They’re just, they’re in your feed. They’re in your algorithm. They’re more consistent. They’re more relatable. When you hear one of these women say, I used to be 25 pounds heavier, and then I realized I could microdose Ozempic, and I could use a peptide, and here’s my 20 supplements, and I would not ever go to sleep at night without taking my collagen powder. And you see her and she looks great. Of course, that’s compelling. Okay, and then there’s the money. Now, the British Journal that I had referenced earlier, that study found that the average supplement being promoted on the internet costs around $40 a month for a 30-day supply. Now, that doesn’t sound like that much at first, but… multiply that by multiple products because you never need just one, and then multiply that by months and multiply that by years. And now we’re talking about a very real financial investment in something that may or may not be helping and probably is not helping. So again, I want to come back to this idea. This is not about women being gullible. or stupid. This is about a lack of clear, accessible guidance, and we’re a highly pervasive online environment and a wellness industry that knows exactly when you are most vulnerable. And this is the reason why I want to keep driving this point home on my own podcast, because I don’t want you to get duped. 99% of the stuff that’s being sold on the internet the supplements, the unregulated things, the peptides, the ozempic drops, that is utter nonsense. Okay, none of it works. If it worked, we wouldn’t be talking about the FDA-approved things like hormone therapy. If we could take an herb to resolve our hot flashes, go for it. But I don’t know one, okay, because they don’t exist. But the internet tells you that they do. So here’s what I want to be really clear about. This is not me saying all supplements are bad. They’re not. They’re not all bad. I mean, listen, I take very, very few supplements. I take a vitamin D in the winter mostly because I know that I’ve been vitamin D deficient. I have been starting to just take magnesium at nighttime just to experiment, see if that would help with some sleep. issues I’ve been having. Some supplements are hugely helpful. I get it. But most of them are not. Some women do find relief. And that’s great. If you take black cohosh and that helped with your hot flashes, okay, great. Good for you. But I know that you’re paying a lot of money for that, and I hope that it helps. But here’s what the research is also showing and what many of us, I think, are feeling, which… I am definitely feeling is that these promises for hormone relief and health relief and weight loss, these promises are far outpacing what the evidence is showing. Okay, if there was evidence, I would gladly promote supplements. I mean, if it was as easy as taking a pill, yes, let’s do it. But the evidence is just not there. And that is where the confusion lives because there’s so many supplements. They’re so widely accessible. All you have to do is pay your money, but none of them really, really work. And that’s the confusion. So what do we do with all of this? I don’t think the answer is to shut everything out or become cynical about everything. Right. I mean, some things are good. Some things are worth having. But I think the answer is awareness and education. We really need to get a good education on what works as far as a pill or a potion or an injectable or not. So I think we want to be understanding where the information is coming from, who is driving it? what is driving it, and what it’s asking you to believe. Because if it starts asking you to believe that you cannot be happy without what they’re trying to sell you, that’s a problem, okay? So I think the most important thing you can do right now is to just slow down before you buy into the next thing. Question everything that you see on the internet. It might be worth it and it might not, but you need to do your research and you need to get educated on what is real and what is not. Because the truth is there is no one supplement, there is no one powder, there is no one protocol that is going to fix everything that midlife brings you. Don’t believe any woman on the internet that tells you that. And I know that that’s not the most exciting message. I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but it’s really the honest one. The one thing that we can be doing that we have so much control over is the food we eat. right? The food choices we make, we know, we know through all the research that eating your best is the best thing that you can do. Eating tons of dark leafy greens, these are your edible vitamins right there. And look at how much cheaper it is. And you have to eat vegetables, fruits, whole grains, healthy fats, good for you proteins. That is the best first step you can take. So I hope this conversation can give you a little bit of space and breathing room before you decide to make a decision and buy into something like injecting yourself with a peptide or taking some supplement that Gwyneth Paltrow is selling you. And just step back from the noise and ask, is this actually helping me or just giving me something else to chase. and putting money in someone else’s pocket. Okay, that’s where I’m going to leave it for today. And if this resonated with you, I would love for you to share it or just sit with it for a bit. And if you have questions, I would love to hear that too. I would really love to hear about your supplement stories and how that has worked out for you. Because this conversation is… absolutely not going away. I mean, this is just getting louder and louder and it’s not going anywhere. So I’m going to keep, you know, screaming this from the rafters. And I think the more we understand it, the less power it will have over us and that we just need to take a breath, okay, and not get caught up in the hype of some miracle cures. All right. I hope that You got something out of this today, and I hope you have a great day. Bye for now. 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.