Grow Your Own HRT: Sprout hormone-rich greens in only two minutes a day - Softcover

Duffell, Sally J.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1844097374 ISBN 13: 9781844097371

Publisher: Findhorn Press, 2017

Synopsis

Feeling menopausal and need some help? Did you know you can grow your own HRT? Sprouted foods are one of the world’s richest sources of plant hormones and not only the densest form of nutrients on the planet but also easy to digest. As we evolved on plant hormones, we have receptors in our cells looking for them and it supports our systems to get them back into our diets. "Grow Your Own HRT" shows the scientific proof of why some women menopause without problem and how you can become one of them. You find detailed instructions on how to grow hormone-rich plants on your windowsill in just two minutes a day. In addition, the author details how to self-diagnose, how much to take and which sprouts to grow for which symptoms.

This book shows scientific proof that sprouted foods contain
• Plant oestrogens
• Plant progesterone
• Plant sterols
• Natural detoxifying nutrients.

Plus all the studies on how sprouted foods help
* Menopause symptoms
* Cancer
* heart disease
* osteoporosis
* dementia
* diabetes
* autism

Say no to expensive supplements, changing your whole diet and synthetic hormones. Grow your own HRT the way nature intended--it's quick, cheap and natural--you have nothing to lose.

About this title

About the Author

Sally J. Duffell has been growing, teaching and writing about bean sprouting for many years. She extensively researched the scientific proof behind their rich bounty of plant hormones, their effects on menopause symptoms and the diseases of ageing. She lives in Hastings, UK.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter 1

Why Western Women have such bad time during menopause?

Why do some societies see menopause symptoms as a disease of modernity? Why do researchers find that in some traditional societies, women don’t have a word for menopause and look baffled when asked about hot flushes? Why was the word “menopause” only invented in 1821? Why do Japanese women only get menopause symptoms when they adopt a Western lifestyle? Why do some doctors refer to menopause as a disease when it happens to half the population?

These were all questions I set out to answer, when I hit 50 and had my first hot flush. I already knew there were such things as Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT), but I didn’t fancy taking pills made from pregnant horse’s urine. I heard I could make myself some menopause cake and eat it every day for the next ten years and also that there were supplements I could buy from the chemist containing plant hormones that were very expensive. But what was really bothering me was why do we need to do all this? None of these things were available a hundred years ago. What did females do for the millions of years that we have been evolving? What went wrong with evolution that gives us such a dreadful time?

“Well of course, it’s because we never used to live this long,” says one (male!) scientist friend of mine. “Women were old at 30 and dead at 40”.

I was intrigued. Were we really only meant to live as long as we could reproduce? Is that it? Are older women no longer viable? I checked it out and it’s simply not true. One study, found that all those horrible, “the average age of death was 36,” statistics are because infant mortality and women dying during childbirth was so high that it brings down the overall average. Whereas studies into the modal age of adult death, which looks at when you are most likely to die, found that if a hunter gatherer could survive childhood and giving birth then you had a big chance of making it to 70. If there’s any doubt, we just need to look to the fossil record. Researchers found that even Neanderthals lived long enough to menopause.

Archaeologists can also tell that it was at least 30,000 years ago that human beings started living longer, which coincided with an explosion of both population and cultural innovations such as art and pottery. This gave rise to the “Grandmother” theory, the idea that having older women around is both advantageous for the survival of their grandchildren and to pass on complex skills, such as art and culture.

This, of course, is lovely for our offspring and our artistic natures but does that mean that women have had at least 30,000 years of hot flushes?

I talk to my scientist friend again.

“Yeah, probably,” he says, “because humans are the only primates to menopause, no other animals do, we haven’t evolved enough to cope with it!”

This worried me. Are we freaks of nature? Did evolution overstep the mark? Are older women paying the price, with hot flushes, osteoporosis, heart disease and cancer?

So I checked it out and found that he was wrong again! Although we used to believe that humans were the only ones to menopause, a recent study at an American primate centre, pointed out that apes and monkeys do too, it’s just less obvious because they don’t have a regular pattern of menstrual bleeding. That doesn’t mean menopause doesn’t happen. Since then other researchers have found, it’s not just primates either, whales, dolphins and even rats menopause and, here’s the interesting thing, some of them help out with the grand-children. One study found that, "bottlenose dolphins and pilot whales babysit, guard, and even breastfeed their grandchildren." Yes, breast feed! As an older woman I find that very impressive indeed. Although not all species are so helpful, rats, who as I said, also stop being fertile, don’t bother to help out at all, but that’s rats for you.

It all means that evolution did not make a mistake. Females everywhere can be useful post reproductively and interestingly can get by without any pills, patches, hormonal creams or injections. You don’t see old monkeys unable to swing through the trees because they’ve got osteoporosis or are having a hot flush. So why can’t modern women in Western Societies get by? Are we spoilt? Are we looking for problems? Or are we having a completely different experience to women in traditional societies and our monkey cousins?

Most books and websites say that menopause happens when the number of eggs we have is so low that the ovaries can’t respond when our brain hormones, what’s known as the hypothalamus, pituitary axis or HPA tell them it’s time to hatch. Jenni Murray in her book Is it me or is it hot in here, says:

“as the supply of eggs in the ovaries dwindles, ..…the pituitary gland recognises what’s happening and frantically increases its production of FSH, in an attempt to kick-start the reproductive system as normal. As things progress, other symptoms such as flushes and sweats begin..”

Gynaecologist, John Lee, in his book, What your doctor might not tell you about the menopause, is even more dramatic: “The hypothalamus beings “shouting” trying to tell the pituitary to tell the ovaries to ovulate.”

It’s not just hot flushes and night sweats either, he says we will also get, “mood swings, fatigue, feelings of being cold and inappropriate responses to other stressors.”

And that’s just going through the menopause. When our periods stop altogether, the descriptions get even worse, we have dry skin, sagging libidos, are more prone to osteoporosis, cancer, heart problems and dementia. In the 1960’s gynaecologist Robert Wilson argued that menopause was “living decay” and stated that all post menopausal women were “diseased castrates”. He pronounced that menopause was a result of ovarian failure which led to, what he called, oestrogen deficiency disease. This, he argued, was what was causing all the menopausal symptoms, not just those mentioned above but suicidal thoughts, depression and frigidity too. Although, let’s be honest, it if a doctor told you that you were going to become a diseased castrate, you’d get depressed too. None of this sounds a good prospect, and the way Robert Wilson writes you really think this happens to all women, everywhere.

Except it doesn’t.

There are lots of women who don’t get menopause symptoms. Famously Japanese and Chinese women don’t even have a word for menopause. There are studies of women in traditional societies all over the world showing them alive, well, strong, healthy, and blissfully unaware of what hot flushes are. One commentator, writing in 1897 observed Native American and Eskimo women failed to find any noteworthy experience of menopause. Later studies found that in Mayan women the only sign of menopause is the end of menstruation.

So my next questions is: Why can’t we all do this? What is happening in the bodies of women who menopause without symptoms that makes them do so well? I couldn’t find the answer in any of the standard textbooks or internet sites that talk about menopause. So I started searching the hard core science websites, where research centres publish their findings. There I found another scenario for the way women menopause and the shocking thing is, not just that it exists, but that no-one, outside the science world has heard about it.

Edition details

• Publisher: Findhorn Press
• Publication date: 2017
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1844097374
• ISBN 13: 9781844097371
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 224