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113: Debunking Menopause Grifters: Dr. Mary Claire Haver and Dr. Vonda Wright
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In this episode, Dr. Sarah Court and Laurel Beversdorf delve into the claims and marketing tactics used by two high-profile menopause experts and social media influencers, Dr. Mary Claire Haver and Dr. Vonda Wright. They explore and critique various aspects of their advice, including the advocacy for supplements like turmeric and collagen, the promotion of hormone therapy, and questionable exercise prescriptions. The hosts analyze the scientific validity of their claims, the potential harms, and the prevalence of fearmongering in their messaging. The episode aims to empower listeners to become more critical consumers of health information, especially in the menopause space.
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References:
Episode 37: Plyometrics – Get More Bang for your Bones
Episode 96: Bone Density Grifters – Introducing the Grift-O-Meter!
Episode 103: Do Weighted Vests Do Anything For Us?
Episode 109: Hot Flashes, Cold Facts: Menopause Myths That Won’t Die
Episode 111: Make Stacy Sims Make Sense
Calorie Restriction with or without Time-Restricted Eating in Weight Loss
Inflammatory mechanisms linking obesity and metabolic disease
The power of creatine plus resistance training
The Effects of Creatine Supplementation Combined with Resistance Training
Dose-Response of creatine supplementation on cognitive function
Effects of Collagen Supplements
Dietary Supplementation with Specific Collagen Peptides
Oral intake of specific bioactive collagen peptides
Specific Bioactive Collagen Peptides
The musculoskeletal syndrome of menopause
Managing Menopausal Skin Changes
Topical estrogen for skin aging
Dr. Wright Instagram Posts:
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Transcript
Introduction and Philosophy
00:00:01
Speaker
Welcome to the menopause, nope, that's not what it's called. Might as well be for this season though. The menopause. Logic. Logic podcast. We're trying to logic our way through a lot of these menopause people and man, it's hard.
00:00:15
Speaker
I'm Laurel Beversdorf, strength and conditioning coach. And I'm Dr. Sarah Court, physical therapist. With over 30 years of combined experience in fitness, movement, and physical therapy, we believe in strong opinions loosely held. Which means we're not here to hype outdated movement concepts.
00:00:31
Speaker
or to gatekeep or fearmonger strength training for women. For too long, women have been sidelined in strength training. Oh, you mean handed pink dumbbells and told to sculpt? Whatever that means, we're here to change that with tools, evidence, and ideas that center women's needs and voices.
00:00:47
Speaker
Let's dive in.
Laurel's Turkey Trip
00:01:01
Speaker
Welcome to the Movement Logic Podcast. I am Dr. Sarah Court. I'm a physical therapist and I am here today with my partner, Laurel Beaversdorf. She is a CSCS, strength and conditioning coach and yoga teacher. Laurel, what is up?
00:01:16
Speaker
What is up? Oh, man. What am I doing? How am I doing? You're going to Turkey. I'm going to Turkey. but That's happening. I'm so excited for you. Thank you. I'm excited, too. I've been brushing up on my Ottoman Empire history. I thought you were going to say, well, what language did they speak in Turkey?
00:01:35
Speaker
Turkish? Turkish, yeah. Do you have learn any of the, probably some like, please and thank you. I always try to please and thank you down. Yeah. If I know the founder of the Ottoman Empire, but I don't know what language they speak. You're like, well, I could definitely talk to them about their whole history as long as it's in English.
00:01:51
Speaker
Listen, that was the rabbit hole I went down. So thanks for digging me out. Yeah, we're going to Turkey. My husband has a conference there. and He was like, hey, you want to go to Turkey? I was like, well, yeah, we're going to take a hot air balloon ride in Cappadocia.
00:02:06
Speaker
Oh my God. Which i don't know if you've heard of Cappadocia, but it's the ancient cave dweller structures where there's these multi-story entire villages built into caves. Oh, wow.
00:02:21
Speaker
You get into these beautiful, bright, hot air balloons, which you are lifting off early in the morning for however many meters or miles around you. Everyone's floating up into the air and then you're looking down at these gorgeous caves. my God.
00:02:36
Speaker
Well, that sounds amazing. I'm so excited for you to go on this trip and I can't wait to hear all about it when you come excited. We're looking forward to it. Okay.
Free Strength Class Announcement
00:02:43
Speaker
So before we get into today's episode, we've got to talk to you about our free...
00:02:48
Speaker
free strength class coming up. And this free strength class is, it's actually the first class that we teach as part of our lift for longevity, our bone density course. As a sample, it's not, we're not starting the course, but it's our sample class and it's basically just lifted out of the course.
00:03:04
Speaker
Right, exactly. You can come take this class completely for free. You don't even need to have barbells. All you need is whatever like hand weights you have at home. If you've got a couple of dumbbells, you can bring a broomstick or a dowel as a stand-in because we're going to teach you how to lift barbells, right We're going to teach barbell technique.
00:03:20
Speaker
But you can still take the class even if you don't have barbells yourself. And it's a way for you to just get a little, it's an amuse-bouche. It's a tasty little sample of what it's like to work with us, right? You've got a sense of who we are from the podcast.
00:03:35
Speaker
And you maybe you're like, well, I think I like them, but i do I like them enough to spend six months with them? Right? So you get a chance to see what we're like in action. Laurel and I will both be teaching. We'll be co-teaching the class. And it's just a really fun time and you'll learn tons.
00:03:48
Speaker
One of the people in our cohort, I was actually talking to her about it and she mentioned how much she learned just from the free class, not even from taking the whole course. So we would love for you to join us. The class is on October 17th. It's 8 a.m. m Pacific and 11 Eastern.
00:04:06
Speaker
There is a replay because it's 2025 and there's always a replay. So don't feel like you need to arrive and work out if you'd rather just watch the class and be there live so that you can ask questions. Also, if you want feedback, we give feedback in this free class. We want you to get a sense of what...
00:04:26
Speaker
the course is like from that live class component especially, which is probably the most valuable aspect of this course. Camera on if you want feedback, camera off if you just want lurk.
00:04:40
Speaker
I'm a lurker. I always lurk. I'm a lurker too. And so this is, i think, a great way that even if you're just moderately curious, this is a great way to really get a very good sense of what most of the course content will be like.
00:04:56
Speaker
That's right. So again, that's on October 17th, 8 a.m. m Pacific,
Focus on Menopause Myths
00:05:00
Speaker
11 a.m. m Eastern, and you will be able to sign up for that class in the link in the show notes. So we have talked a lot this season about menopause and menopause myths.
00:05:13
Speaker
For example, episode 109 is about menopause myths. We also talked about myths around exercise for women and in particular for women in the menopause transition in our interview of Lauren Colenso Semple.
00:05:26
Speaker
And we also talked about myths for women in the menopause transition and other myths for women in our Make Stacey Sims Make Sense episode.
Menopause Grifters Introduction
00:05:35
Speaker
So this episode is all about menopause grifters, and it is the return of the Grift-O-Meter TM. Woo-hoo!
00:05:44
Speaker
Laurel, are you excited about getting to use the Grift-O-Meter again? I am. we have not We have not registered it yet, though. It still has the TM symbol. That's right. Well, wait, does TM mean?
00:05:55
Speaker
We just TM'd it because everybody TMs everything. It's fucking joke. It's fucking joke. We did not fucking trademark this. did not trademark. But the reason it's a joke is because a lot of the grifters that we examine have trademarked a lot of things. A lot of things.
00:06:09
Speaker
So today we are focusing on two specific menopause grifters, Dr. Mary Claire Haver and Dr. Vonda Wright. We have chosen these two as they have a lot of skin in the menopause game. Now, Laurel,
00:06:22
Speaker
Do you notice anything right off the bat about these two folks? Is it their title as doctor, perhaps? It is. Both are medical doctors. Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding.
00:06:33
Speaker
ah Yeah, and I think that this is important to flag because it's a reason i think people often drop their defenses. around certain individuals that are espousing certain claims or selling certain products. like As soon as you see that they have a doctor in front of their name, it signals expertise, it signals medical doctor, and it signals all kinds of appeals to authority. We should trust this person. They had a lot of schooling. They have an expertise. They would never put us in
Critique of Menopause Grifters
00:07:07
Speaker
danger. They would never sell us harmful dubious products they're doctors right we've seen plenty of examples of this not being true dr oz is a great example he seems to have drifted away from the straight and narrow path of the hippocratic oath and evidence-based medicine in pursuit of the mighty dollar has
00:07:31
Speaker
I think for all the doctors that start branding themselves and start having a public face and a persona kind of a thing, like them, like Peter Atiyah, don't know. It seems like it's only a matter of time before they start doing things that are a bit sketch.
00:07:50
Speaker
I think that there's room for nuance here. I think it is possible to walk this line and still be evidence-based, to still draw from epistemologically sound information when advising certain behaviors, when even selling something.
00:08:12
Speaker
and Where it gets really sticky is that a lot of the things that doctors might sell probably should involve some type of evaluation from the doctor selling the thing, right?
00:08:27
Speaker
Or at least involve some kind of individualized guidance. And doctors on the internet can never provide that. Right. Even when Sarah gives advice to injured students or students with pain in Lift for Longevity, she's basically a lot of the time asking them very general questions, getting them to potentially seek out an eval from a PT in their area.
00:08:54
Speaker
she's not giving super specific advice about what to do about the hip pain. So when you have, think, doctors online selling some type of intervention, okay, and by intervention, we could mean a lot of different things, but I'm going to take, for example, supplements.
00:09:09
Speaker
and If a person has not received an evaluation, like a blood test, to know that they're deficient in a supplement,
Dr. Mary Claire Haver and the Galveston Diet
00:09:18
Speaker
what basis does the doctor then have to say that their audience of however many thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of, i don't know, followers, what basis they have to suggest that that supplement has any value, right? That's where I think it gets pretty sticky. So I think when doctors are asking for there to have been an evaluation before providing some type of
00:09:45
Speaker
advice or treatment, then I think we're on the right track. But very little of that is happening with the people we're talking about today. Yeah. And it's kind of impossible, right? If your goal yeah yeah as is to become a public figure as a doctor, which is what these people are doing, right? There's plenty of doctors out there who have no interest in becoming a public figure, but these people have decided that that's what they want.
00:10:09
Speaker
And so to become a public figure, you are going to be doing things like writing books, you're doing speaker engagements, you're doing all of these things to make a living as a public figure.
00:10:20
Speaker
And I agree. I mean, it is a very slippery slope. I think it's a very fine tightrope to walk where the things you are saying are general enough that it's not going to be endangering or useless to the people listening.
00:10:35
Speaker
yeah But at a certain point, You run out of, I'm not going to become a famous physical therapist by my platform being like, everybody needs to exercise more and get enough sleep. You know what I mean Like you have to, at some point, out and explain something that's maybe a little controversial or like come up with some new thing so that people have something to grab onto.
00:10:56
Speaker
I don't know if that's always true, though. And and the reason i think this is important to mention is that because I think that the nuance helps people be more critically minded about who they're listening to and whether or not they should trust them. So, for example, the barbell medicine people are doctors.
00:11:11
Speaker
Right. To my knowledge, the things they sell are personal training and exercise programs. No, there's definitely doctors out there that are doing the right thing, but these people are not on the set. Mary Claire Haver has 7 million followers. I think there's a level of fame that you get to where that kind of, I feel like it's the Oprah kiss of death, where it's like, as soon as become someone that Oprah is aware of,
00:11:35
Speaker
you've probably sold your soul a little bit. Right. I think that might be a criteria to look for, but I think more importantly is to look for when you're looking at a famous doctor. Okay. So docs who lift are arguably famous doctors, the barbell medicine people, arguably famous doctors, uh,
00:11:50
Speaker
But I think these doctors, for the most part, what they're doing is they're coming on, yes, in some cases to definitely boost their brand. they a lot of them have podcasts.
00:12:01
Speaker
A lot of them even are selling things or selling services. But they aren't using cherry-picked studies to do it. They're using best available evidence to do it.
00:12:13
Speaker
Right. And a lot of what they're doing is actually helping to myth bust all of the doctors out there selling fake solutions. I just want to make sure that we're not saying like all doctors online who have a brand and are selling something.
00:12:27
Speaker
Absolutely. You know, I don't think that's true. I don't think that's true either. And I don't think that's what we're saying. I think there's definitely like good docs and bad docs. I think it probably gets harder the more money gets offered to you.
00:12:39
Speaker
I will say that. And I think once you get into like the Oprah sphere, things probably get a little sticky. I definitely think there's something to this idea that when you enter into the millions of followers, right, that you have probably had to simplify your message in some pretty deal-breaking ways. Yeah, yeah.
00:13:01
Speaker
And in so doing, they end up doing harm. Yeah. Because it can never be as simple as the millions of people who follow them right believe that it is and want it to be. Right.
00:13:12
Speaker
Well, and that's also, that's a human nature thing, right? We want this five-step solution. We want to we want these figures of authority to tell us what to do. You know, I mean, all that stuff. So yes, thank you for making that point. I think it's a really good point to make that not all doctors online are grifters trying to sell you something.
00:13:29
Speaker
And I'm also hopeful that based on all the episodes that we've done this, i was about to say semester, season, especially the Stacey Sims one where we talk about the kind of language people use when they're trying to sell you something. Hopefully my goal for listeners is to make them more savvy and have the antenna up so that when you see claims from doctors online,
00:13:50
Speaker
You can really go through and be like, okay, wait a minute. What is this? What are they saying? What are they claiming? is this actually Is this evidence good evidence? Are other people saying this? All that kind of stuff.
00:14:01
Speaker
So that's my goal for people. Hopefully this episode will help with that as well. So here's how this episode is going to go. We're going to talk about each of these people, Dr. Mary
Debunking Intermittent Fasting Myths
00:14:10
Speaker
Claire Haver and Dr. Vonda Wright. We're going to give you some background on them.
00:14:14
Speaker
We're going to give you some of their professional history, how they came to be grifty, and then we're going to put them through the griftometer and see how they fare. Now, the last time we used the griftometer was for bone density grifters, which was episode 96. All of these episodes will be in the show notes, of course.
00:14:31
Speaker
Today, we're using it for menopause grifters. So since we're using it for a different style of grifter, I changed it a little bit because some of the categories didn't quite fit. Yeah. so Let's just roll through all of today's categories so we can familiarize ourselves with them before we get into the individual particulars of each person. Laurel, could you start us off?
00:14:52
Speaker
Yeah. So the first criteria is, do you even know what the real problem is, bruh? No, you don't. This is the tactic, right? They'll try to make you believe you don't know what the real problem is. I'm going to tell you what the real problem is.
00:15:08
Speaker
The problem is that you're in menopause. And your muscles are melting off your body. Your bones are crumbling to dust. You're halfway to dementia already. And your cortisol is shooting through the roof.
00:15:20
Speaker
Another way to say this classic pseudoscience where the grifter will create an outsized problem. They'll scare you about it. And then they'll sell you a solution that's ineffective and unnecessary. Category number two is called everyone needs this.
00:15:33
Speaker
And this is when we see no differentiation between an individual's needs or a population, for example. So everyone going through menopause needs to be taking supplements. Everyone going through menopause needs to be intermittent fasting.
00:15:46
Speaker
Everyone going through menopause needs a weighted vest. Number three, appearance assassinators. Are they selling you products that are supposed to improve your ugly, wrinkly, no longer of childbearing age therefore attractive and valuable to so society appearance.
00:16:04
Speaker
This is grifting in a patriarchy where women's value is, of course, based on what they look like. And of course, then their deepest fears are seated in the possibility that they won't look up to snuff.
00:16:17
Speaker
And so obviously not based on what they can do, skills, talents, none of that. So both women and men will often sell products to women that claim to decronify us.
00:16:32
Speaker
It's so awesome to chronify. Are you crone? Buy my product. All right. Number four is fiddle faddle, also known as word salad.
00:16:43
Speaker
Nonsensical claims that don't mean anything when you try to parse their meaning. This is a sort of classic marketing tactic where you emphasize buzzwords or phrases like cortisol belly that get people all riled up and freaked out, but don't have any basis in fact and are not even remotely evidence-based.
00:17:01
Speaker
All right. Then number five, we have microscope of practice. So ask yourself, the person who's talking to you, is selling you something, telling you have all these problems, does this person have
Inflammation and Weight Gain Myths
00:17:12
Speaker
the credentials to be talking about these problems and what to do about them?
00:17:18
Speaker
As such, do they have any business selling you the solutions they're selling? So if they're a medical professional, does that mean they also have particular credentials to push nutrition advice, exercise advice?
00:17:32
Speaker
are they leaning very hard into the trust me, I'm a doctor narrative? Yeah. Also, what kind of doctor are they? Are they an orthopedic surgeon who is also telling you about your skin?
00:17:44
Speaker
Stuff like that. You know, just let that raise your hackles a little bit. All right. Our next one is called Unfair Advantage. And it's called that because this is one of the supplements that the Bulletproof Diet sells.
00:17:58
Speaker
And so this category is about selling supplements. Does this person sell supplements or other diet-related products? If so, is there any oversight as far as the claims made about what these supplements can do, or have they just cherry-picked evidence that to support these claims in particular, are they picking evidence that has been funded by the product that is being tested?
00:18:21
Speaker
Because there's a big problem with that. And we're going to see some of that later on. And then the last criteria is called army hammer. Do you know who army hammer is? Oh, okay.
00:18:32
Speaker
Wait, is that that actor who- Yes. Oh God. He, ooh. Yes. that's You're exactly right. Wasn't cannibal or something? Well, no. I mean, i don't know what's up with him, but he comes from a very wealthy family, and then he also became a famous actor.
00:18:45
Speaker
And then some text messages came out where he talked about cannibalism with a girlfriend, I think, or something. It's really not a good thing when your name becomes associated with cannibalism. Well, listen, we're not here to kink shame, but ah we're calling it Army Hammer because this is about an army of people, right, Laurel?
00:19:03
Speaker
Okay, fine. Back on track. Army Hammer. Okay. It's when your army of followers becomes like a cudgel, a hammer in the comments section of anyone who is critically evaluating your claims.
00:19:16
Speaker
Okay, so this isn't necessarily something they do, right? We can't just conjure an army of hammers. But it's something that kind of emerges from online presences like the ones we're going to talk about today. We evaluated, for example, many of the tactics Stacey Sims uses.
00:19:36
Speaker
in episode 111. These are persuasive rhetorical tactics that easily win people over. But what happens inside an ecosystem where these tactics are regularly employed to persuade and to win trust or to basically establish yourself as an authority to make promises for the products you're selling is that you end up with a lot of followers who are not great critical thinkers.
00:20:04
Speaker
You've never encouraged them to think critically, right? Because your whole shtick is, I'm an authority. You have problems. Believe me, I'm going to persuade you of the things I need you to believe in order to buy my products.
00:20:19
Speaker
So these people, then when you start critiquing their follower, they get really upset and they come at you and they like to lob a lot of criticism from such as you shouldn't bring women down.
Grift-O-Meter Categories
00:20:36
Speaker
You don't need to tear women down. Why are you so mean? Why are you swearing? Why are you saying these negative things about this person who helped me so much, right? There's that survivor bias where we don't hear from all the people that this person actually led astray. Frankly, a lot of them just move on and find better solutions. But the people who stick around,
00:20:59
Speaker
They don't like it when you criticize their dear leader. So we've had a few up close and personal experiences with this. We're going to tell you about it. Okay. So those are our seven categories for the Grif-O-Meter.
Social Media Backlash
00:21:09
Speaker
Once we have talked about each of these people, we're going to score them and see how they do.
00:21:15
Speaker
So let's start with Dr. Mary Claire Haver. Now, speaking of the army hammer, if you follow us on Instagram, you may have seen the, I think kerfuffle is the best way to describe it, that took place in July over a couple of posts that Laurel and i made. We each stitched part of an Instagram post that Haver had made showing her working out.
00:21:40
Speaker
And what we were both commenting on was the fact that she was wearing a weighted vest, which she has an Amazon affiliate link for, throughout the workout. even for her deadlifts and for her assisted pull-ups, right? Which if you think about it, putting on a weighted vest and then doing a deadlift, a deadlift is essentially your ability to pick something heavy up from the ground, right? So putting the weighted vest on is not gonna increase your ability to pick up something heavy from the ground, right? It's just gonna make your body heavier.
00:22:10
Speaker
And then adding the weighted vest to your body, but then using a jump band under your foot to do your assisted pull-up to take weight off your body, that just does not make a ton of sense. It doesn't make any sense.
00:22:22
Speaker
So Laurel made a post about the deadlift and I made a post about the assisted pull-up and Laurel, what happened? Okay. So we posted and people got mad.
00:22:33
Speaker
Well, first of all, the post did really well. They got a lot of views. Yeah. And a lot of comments on both sides. And in the middle, right? So like a lot of people had something say. It generated a lot of engagement, I think is the correct social media speak.
00:22:47
Speaker
yes And I got shared a lot and all that good stuff. And, you know, obviously, like Sarah and i we disagree with the information Mary Claire Haver's putting out there. We disagree with her, what we think are her motives, right? I mean, at least her motive of using dubious claims and products to make money, right?
00:23:08
Speaker
yeah She might think what she's doing is helping, but the evidence suggests otherwise. So our whole purpose of making these posts is to really... call attention to these types of individuals online who are pushing products that are a distraction, a waste of money, or they're just not a really adequately explaining like why, for example, you would wear a weighted vest. So this is all about the weighted vest, right? And it was squarely within Sarah and my scope of practice as people who teach strength training to call into question Mary Claire Haver's
00:23:41
Speaker
ineffectual use of the weighted vest in two exercises where it literally makes no sense to be wearing a weighted vest. So we knew it was a perfect opportunity to make people go, does this woman actually know what she's talking about? Like, why is she stepping outside of her lane, frankly, to share strength training advice in a way that's really nonsensical?
00:24:04
Speaker
And we got a lot of blowback from her army hammer. who thought we were tearing down ah woman. And therefore that's just a mortal sin because she's a woman. We immediately cannot be critical of what she's doing or saying, which is just a horribly anti-feminist thing to think.
00:24:24
Speaker
It's like women are too, you know, too delicate to be criticized. Or why would you criticize another woman? It's so hard for women out here. It's very infantilizing. It's this whole idea that like we have to be very kind of gentle with children, too. It's like, no, this is a person who is a full grown fucking adult. She has a lot of money, an enormous following.
00:24:48
Speaker
She happens to be a woman. She's selling bullshit. She doesn't know what she's talking about. She's captivated a lot of people for unknown reasons. And we're going to throw a little...
00:24:59
Speaker
wrench in that. Yeah. The hammer came for our wrench for sure. And i think we are both now blocked by Mary Claire Haver. We are. Yeah. Which is, I think, a rite of passage. Like if you want to consider yourself someone who's contributing to the dialogue, you need to get blocked by her.
00:25:16
Speaker
Well, we had people in our comments on our posts talking about how they were blocked by Mary Claire Haver for literally just asking an honest question yeah as people who were looking for an answer from her about something, right? And they weren't trying to push her buttons. They weren't trying to question her authority. They weren't trying to challenge her with some counter argument.
00:25:38
Speaker
And Mary Claire Haver immediately blocks them. And they're like, yeah, i didn't I didn't really know what to do about that. Why was I blocked? Yeah. You probably asked a question she couldn't answer.
00:25:50
Speaker
She's a big fan of blocking and also of taking posts down, which is, you know, you're allowed to curate your social media however you want. But the immediate blockage kind of thing is like, well, all right. So you're not allowing any conversation even around what you're doing. You're like, agree with me or else.
00:26:09
Speaker
right So we're going to get more into what we think is the driving force for her followers, why they are so the way they are, and in particular, their dislike of our tone. But first, let's talk about the woman herself, Dr. Mary Claire Haver. So this information is all from her website, The Paws Life.
00:26:27
Speaker
It's paws with an apostrophe before it. So she's kind of coined this term of the menopause life, the paws life, right? So this is from her bio. Dr. Mary Claire Haver is a board-certified obstetrics and gynecology specialist, a certified menopause practitioner from the Menopause Society.
00:26:43
Speaker
The North American Menopause Society is now just called the Menopause Society. An adjunct associate professor at University of Texas Medical Branch, a certified culinary medicine specialist.
00:26:55
Speaker
That's interesting. And a passionate entrepreneur and best-selling author with a focus on women's health. Dr. Haver graduated from Louisiana State University Medical Center and completed her obstetrics and gynecology residency at UTMB.
00:27:10
Speaker
As her patient population grew older, Dr. Haver started receiving numerous complaints and concerns about weight gain during menopause. This inspired her to do a deep dive into the science of menopause, aging, and inflammation,
00:27:22
Speaker
beyond what she was taught in school and residency, which led to the creation of the Galveston Diet online program and in 2023, a national bestselling book, The New Menopause.
00:27:33
Speaker
The Marie Claire Wellness Clinic was born in 2021 after repeated requests for in-person appointments. The clinic is a unique practice dedicated to caring for menopausal patients.
00:27:45
Speaker
Dr. Haver integrates a patient's medical history, symptomatology, nutrition, exercise, supplements, and possibly hormone therapy, or what she likes to call, quote, the menopause toolkit.
00:27:57
Speaker
She founded The Pause Life, a comprehensive approach to menopause education and support using techniques that focus on overall lifestyle, helping women reach their best feeling selves.
00:28:09
Speaker
So we've got a few different things to look at here. And I'd actually like to start with the Galveston diet, which evidently is named for Galveston, Texas. Haver is from Texas. Laurel, could you tell us about the Galveston diet?
00:28:21
Speaker
Sure. So she's written a book for women in menopause called The Galveston Diet. And here's the blurb from her website about it. The doctor developed patient-proven plan to burn fat and tame your hormonal symptoms.
00:28:35
Speaker
The Galveston Diet is a patient-tested nutrition and lifestyle program to balance nutrition and sustain weight loss, including more than 40 delicious recipes and six weeks of meal plans tailored to women in midlife.
00:28:52
Speaker
Are you hearing that high pitched whistle, Sarah? Yeah, the dog whistle. We're already seeing some lingo aimed at women here. So we've got burn fat, tame your hormonal symptoms, claims that are for certain overstated, quote, tailored to women in midlife.
00:29:08
Speaker
Last I checked, men and women don't have to eat different types of food. Sounds like a really lazy attempt at pseudo feminist virtue signaling. Yeah. And I just want to talk about the tame your hormonal symptoms part as someone who's gone through a real shitty menopause. It is known that there are certain types of food and drink that can irritate and worsen your hot flash symptoms specifically. So caffeine, sugar, alcohol, spicy foods, like these are common known about culprits, but not everything bothers everyone for me, for example,
00:29:39
Speaker
I can drink caffeine, no problem, but if I have something alcoholic, my face is on fire. Avoiding certain categories though, it only serves to not worsen symptoms. There's no nutrition plan that I know of that can tame hormonal symptoms if we're taking tame to mean get rid of.
00:29:57
Speaker
Every women's menopause transition is different. So this is really broad marketing claim. This is not science. Yeah. Now, if you go on Amazon and look up the Galveston diet,
00:30:09
Speaker
The Amazon page highlights three aspects of the book. One aspect is intermittent fasting. A 16 to 8 eating to fasting window to utilize the body's fat stores and reduce inflammation. The 16 to 8, can I ask, is it 16 hours in which you can Fasting. Eight in which you fast? No. Or 16 in which you fast, eight in which you... Okay, great. So the 16 to 8 fasting to eating window.
00:30:39
Speaker
all right, and then anti-inflammatory nutrition. So this means limiting added sugars, processed carbs, chemical additives.
00:30:52
Speaker
ah So this, anytime you hear chemical, it's like an immediate red flag, like whistle of watch out for chemicals. Ultra processed. Newsflash, everything is chemicals. Yeah.
00:31:03
Speaker
Preservatives. And so this is about limiting all that. And then it layers in anti-inflammatory foods like leafy greens, olive oil, berries, nuts, and tomatoes. Okay.
00:31:14
Speaker
And then fuel refocus. So starting in their 30s, women need a specific ratio of healthy fats, lean protein, and quality carbohydrates to optimize their overall health
Menopause Supplement Market Critique
00:31:28
Speaker
and efficiently burn fat.
00:31:30
Speaker
Oh, boy. As fuel. Yeah, it's such a two truths and a lie type of a thing going on here. Yeah. So this is a weight loss book. Let's be clear about that, right? It's not just about eating the kinds of foods that help with menopause symptoms. Again, it's questionable that those foods exist.
00:31:49
Speaker
It's leaning into the fact that for many women going through the menopause transition, they notice that they've increased their fat mass around their belly area And we talked a lot about this in our Menopause Myths Hot Flashes Cold Facts episode.
00:32:04
Speaker
To reiterate, a large-scale study by Ponzer et al. showed no sudden increase in weight gain for women during the menopause transition. So blaming weight gain on menopause...
00:32:16
Speaker
is incorrect. Women, of course, might be gaining weight. I mean, we're not gaslighting you. and And that's due to probably a myriad of factors having to do with lifestyle shifts as you get older.
00:32:33
Speaker
It's complex. Also, yes, body composition shifts to where fat is stored more around the middle, which we talk about in Hot Flashes, Cold Facts. But this means that a weight loss book that's main claim is that it's tailored to women in menopause who suddenly have weight gain.
00:32:53
Speaker
And it's prescribing all of these different ways of eating for people in menopause to promote fat loss. This book was published in 2023. Okay. The Ponsor study was published in 2021. I'm just going to leave that there.
00:33:08
Speaker
Let's just pick through these claims to begin with. So the first one. A 16 to 8 ratio intermittent fast, or sometimes it's called time-restricted feeding, TRF, or sometimes it's called time-restricted eating, TRE.
00:33:22
Speaker
So that is when you only eat during an eight-hour window and you fast for the remaining 16 hours of the day. I asked ConsenSys, which is the AI app that we use to do literature reviews,
00:33:33
Speaker
What does the research show about the efficacy of a 16 to 8 time-restricted feeding for women in menopause? And here's what it says. This is a quote. Research consistently shows that 16 to 8 time-restricted feeding leads to modest but significant weight loss in peri- and post-menopausal women.
00:33:51
Speaker
Studies report average weight reductions of 1.3 to 4 kilograms, which is roughly between 3 9 pounds, Over six to 12 weeks with high adherence and acceptability rates.
00:34:03
Speaker
Fat mass reduction is observed, though changes in visceral fat and lean mass are less consistent, with some studies noticing no significant change in these parameters for women. Now, I'm not a dietician and neither is Laurel, so I'm speaking anecdotally right now. But it seems to me that you could lose three to nine pounds over six to 12 weeks,
00:34:25
Speaker
by restricting calories, right? Which is the current best evidence for weight loss for all populations. These results are not like spectacular suddenly, oh my God, intermittent fasting. So I asked a follow-up question to ConsenSys.
00:34:38
Speaker
And this is the question I asked. Is time-restricted feeding a superior weight loss method over calorie restriction for women in menopause? And it said, no.
00:34:49
Speaker
Time-restricted feeding is not superior to calorie restriction for weight loss in menopausal women Both methods yield similar results. And so here's one of the studies that it cites, but there were a lot of these. Can I just say something? Sure. The reason that time-restricted feeding would be as effective as calorie restriction is when time-restricted feeding causes calorie restriction.
00:35:14
Speaker
Exactly. They're not going to lead to weight loss unless there is calorie restriction. Yeah. Right. And so what this study that i looked at found, so this is called Calorie Restriction with or Without Time-Restricted Eating in Weight Loss by Lou et al. from 2022. It was a randomized control trial.
00:35:32
Speaker
It followed over 100 people with obesity. And this is also so much of the weight loss studies are looking at people with obesity. They're not looking at people with maybe 5, 10 pounds to lose, like say.
00:35:44
Speaker
Right. I don't know. Again, I'm not a dietician. I'm not a metabolism specialist, but it strikes me that these populations might have different needs. So this study was looking at people with obesity. They were randomized into two groups, one that followed calorie restricted diet, but no time limitations.
00:35:59
Speaker
And one that followed the same diet, but with time restricted eating between 8am and 4pm only. And the results found, da, da, da, da. No significant difference between groups. So the intermittent fasting on its own did not do anything without calorie restriction, right? And when you haven't bought into this idea that it's not about calorie restriction, which a lot of grifters will try to tell you that that's a lie.
00:36:20
Speaker
Right. For women in menopause in particular. Right. That it suddenly doesn't work anymore. suddenly Suddenly women in menopause's bodies no longer follow the laws of physics. Right. Yeah. And so there's other studies that pit time-restricted feeding against calories in, calories out, right?
Supplement Claims Scrutiny
00:36:36
Speaker
That's calorie restriction. And they found that without the caloric deficit, time-restricted feeding by itself is not a viable method of weight loss.
00:36:46
Speaker
So it's kind of like, what's the point? A little bit. So the next claim is that inflammation in the body is the underlying cause of many diseases and the underlying cause of weight gain. Hmm. Yeah.
00:37:01
Speaker
So we asked consensus, is inflammation in the body the underlying cause of many diseases and weight gain? And here's what it found. This is a quote from consensus itself.
00:37:13
Speaker
Quote, chronic low-grade inflammation is a central mechanism in the development of many diseases associated with obesity, including type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, certain cancers,
00:37:30
Speaker
neurodegenerative diseases, and autoimmune conditions. And here's one of the papers it cites. Inflammatory Mechanisms Linking Obesity and Metabolic Disease by Saltiel and Olewski from 2017.
00:37:43
Speaker
It shows that, yes, for people who have obesity or metabolic disease, there is a strong link with chronic inflammation in the body. Association and link does not equal cause, and we're going to get into that. Quote, numerous studies indicate that inflammation occurs as a consequence of obesity,
00:38:02
Speaker
And recent insights suggest that it may play a causative role in generating insulin resistance, defective insulin secretion, and disruption of other aspects of energy homeostasis.
00:38:15
Speaker
We have this book suggesting that inflammation is the underlying cause of many diseases and Inflammation is the underlying cause of weight gain.
00:38:26
Speaker
I think we're mixing up what the meaning of cause is with what the meaning of association is, okay? So this paper and consensus don't suggest that inflammation causes weight gain.
00:38:39
Speaker
They suggest that inflammation causes chronic diseases and that these chronic diseases, okay, brought on by inflammation are associated with weight gain,
00:38:51
Speaker
Okay, I think we can say it this way. Obesity tends to be associated with inflammation, but inflammation doesn't cause obesity, yeah right? and And obesity and chronic disease might be associated, inflammation and chronic disease might be associated but inflammation doesn't cause obesity.
00:39:12
Speaker
I think this distinction is important, okay? Higher levels of body fat, particularly visceral fat, are indeed associated with more inflammation, but it's not universal.
00:39:23
Speaker
So people classified as overweight can have relatively low inflammation if they're active, if they eat a nutrient-dense diet, if they don't smoke, if they have good sleep and stress management.
00:39:35
Speaker
Conversely, someone at a normal weight can still have high inflammation if they're sedentary, if they have poor diet quality, if they smoke or they live with chronic stress or illness. And the Galveston diet won't fix this necessarily, right?
00:39:50
Speaker
So this whole idea that inflammation causes weight gain is backwards. And then our our final claim about fuel refocus and this list of the types of food that will be in the diet, it just kind of sounds like a typical well-balanced diet that might be recommended for anyone, not specific to women going through menopause. I was like, yeah, that sounds like the kind of just general nutrition advice that people get as humans.
00:40:18
Speaker
So of these claims, the intermittent fasting is false. The inflammation link is questionable. And the well-balanced diet is fine. It's a well-balanced diet. So it's like one and a half truths and a lie.
00:40:32
Speaker
So moving on from the Galveston diet, she has several free guides on her website that are for women going through menopause. so let's take a look at these before we move on to her social media presence.
00:40:43
Speaker
So the first one is called the lab test checklist, and it's a guide to what lab tests you should be asking your physician for. This kind of stuff always makes me itchy because it's assuming that your doctor doesn't know what you need. It's sort of the same idea as why you see drugs advertised on TV, because you're then supposed to go to your doctor and say, hey, should I be taking Humira or whatever? Should I be taking Viagra?
00:41:09
Speaker
As opposed to thinking that your doctor will understand what your symptoms are and prescribe the appropriate medication. Again, I'm not a medical doctor, neither is Laurel. I read through the list. i don't know which one is an average test that anybody would get and which one is like off the charts weird. I did ask a doctor, but there's a few things that I want to point out.
00:41:29
Speaker
So if you have a shitty doctor, which unfortunately some people do, and especially for a population of women that have been dismissed a lot medically, their needs have been dismissed.
00:41:44
Speaker
They've been told oh, you're going through menopause, just wear layers and get a fan. They've been underrepresented historically. So if you're one of these people who's like, well, I go to my primary care doctor, but he's very dismissive of everything that I ask for, you may need to advocate for yourself, right? And that's what I think of as kind of the goal of this list. They even give you prompts for what to say when your doctor is dismissive of certain needs.
00:42:07
Speaker
So I don't think this is ah completely stupid document. I think that it may have value if in the instance that you have a really crappy doctor.
Wellness Clinic Costs and Consumer Exploitation
00:42:17
Speaker
If you don't have a crappy doctor, you should probably assume that of whatever these tests are that are truly important for you, they will be doing them for you.
00:42:27
Speaker
How about a document that helps you evaluate if you have a crappy doctor? Yes. For sure. Do they do these things? Right. Find a different doctor. Well, and find a different doctor is an insurance problem for a lot of people. Unfortunately, sometimes it's not that easy in this country. And I think sometimes we think we run the risk of automatically assuming our doctor does not have the most up-to-date knowledge and information when it might well be that this list is overkill or over-testing without reasonable cause.
00:42:56
Speaker
Again, i don't know if this is a good, bad, or ugly list, but it also feels like the Peter Atiyah thing where everyone is supposed to get all this testing done that they may or may not be able to afford if their insurance covers it or doesn't cover it.
00:43:09
Speaker
And it might be a total waste of time and resources. It feels like optimizing testing, right? Like everyone needs to get the most tests to make sure that they have the most clear information.
00:43:22
Speaker
Here's the thing. There are guidelines that are backed up by large bodies of evidence that inform doctors on when to order tests for what purpose and to figure out what.
00:43:35
Speaker
These are guidelines that are extremely well supported by evidence. Their doctors are probably basing the ordering of tests off of these guidelines that are supported by large bodies of evidence. In other words, they're saying, don't trust your doctors, instead trust me and ask for these tests to be ordered.
00:43:53
Speaker
And it's doing two things at once. One, it's causing people to mistrust their doctors and instead trust a doctor like Mary Claire Haver or Peter Atiyah. And two, it's creating a mistrust in science, right?
00:44:07
Speaker
Because now these evidence-based guidelines don't mean anything, clearly, because Peter Atiyah is saying that it's actually better to go against the guidelines and run these tests. There is something called iatrogenic harm. This is the very real possibility of harm caused by an intervention.
00:44:26
Speaker
Overtesting doesn't just create unnecessary costs. It increases the chance of what are called false positives. When the test comes back and shows that you are positive for something, but the test result is wrong.
00:44:41
Speaker
This sends you down a rabbit hole, costs a lot of money, it burdens an already overburdened system. So while it seems like the intention is to empower patients to advocate for themselves, the flip side is that we have this culture of taking a lot of tests.
00:44:58
Speaker
searching for answers that we don't have a real good reason to have a question around. The crux of it is we should get evaluated by a doctor in person, and they should order tests based on what that evaluation discovers.
00:45:13
Speaker
Okay, when you're telling patients to ask for tests, irrespective of needing them to be based on an evaluation, you're setting this patient up to mistrust their doctor to potentially head down this rabbit hole of iatrogenic harm.
00:45:27
Speaker
It's irresponsible. It's not following the Hippocratic Oath, right? It's ethically dubious and troubling. that any doctor would do this. Yeah. So I asked a colleague that I know who is an internist, I sent him this document and I asked him, what are your thoughts on the tests? Is this like overkill?
00:45:47
Speaker
Are these reasonable? And he wrote back and here's what he said. This is a quote. He said, most of what she's asking for is reasonable. A few things I wouldn't necessarily chase, but generally speaking, I order almost all these tests in the appropriate clinical situation.
00:46:03
Speaker
Bing, bing, bing. Yeah. Those last five words in the appropriate clinical situation. That's just another way of saying, if I find out the person in front of me warrants that test. Exactly.
00:46:14
Speaker
So there's no individuation with this list of tests. I think some number of them are pretty standard. Like, you should be getting them anyway.
00:46:24
Speaker
But it seems from what he said that there are some that you wouldn't just right off the bat test for this without probable cause. And I think this also does play into some of that pseudo-feminist virtue signaling where it's like, I'm standing up for you and your needs as a woman.
00:46:40
Speaker
You need to get all these tests. Here you go. And it's pseudo-feminist because it's really not good for women to be told this. The next free resource we got from her site is something called the Menopause Empowerment Guide.
00:46:52
Speaker
that has the same testing and labs information, but it also has a large section on menopause hormone therapy, which she is calling by its previous name hormone replacement therapy.
00:47:04
Speaker
And this guide provides clear information on the safety and efficacy of menopause hormone therapy, as well as the various types that exist. But then she's also plugging the Galveston diet and intermittent fasting and her supplements.
00:47:21
Speaker
And all of this is mixed in with some pretty decent and advice on stress reduction and improving sleep. So it's tricky, right? it'ss It's that two truths and a lie, which I think comes with every single one of the criteria we named, right? There's always going to be probably more truth than lie, but the truth is like the Trojan horse that shuttles in the lie. And you can't quite see it until you realize it's ineffective or you are poor now, or you have some weird side effect from all the turmeric you've been, you know?
00:47:51
Speaker
So this is such a big part of the grift. We saw this with Stacey Sims surrounding the questionable and unsupported claim with lots of generally good advice, right?
00:48:03
Speaker
And then the last free resource is called A Citizen's Guide to Menopause Advocacy. And it's all about what menopause-related bills have been passed into law, where we still need to take action, and what we can do as citizens going through menopause to help these changes take place. So this is actually a great document that goes through several action items, like removing the black box warning for estrogen therapy.
00:48:27
Speaker
Sarah, can you tell us what that is? Yeah. Basically, there's a black box warning on estrogen therapy, warning about like risks of cancer and other serious diseases, which is all from that WHI study that that showed all these dangers that has since been completely disproven and shown that there are risks, but they're much, much lower. So the black box warning is something that that is potentially just making people more afraid of using estrogen than they should be. Right.
00:48:56
Speaker
Yeah. And this document also outlines where we are on a state level with some of these action items and what we can do to move things forward. This document in particular is just talking about where all the legislation is around all of these different products. And so I think it actually, for the most part, is a pretty good document because if you are the kind of person who likes to get involved in things like this and likes to write letters to state senators and governors, this is a document that's going to help you do some of that.
Broader Menopause Market Critique
00:49:28
Speaker
Okay. So far, there's a few things that have been problematic, right? We've got this insistence on intermittent fasting, which is problematic. We've got this lab checklist, which is problematic.
00:49:42
Speaker
We haven't yet gotten into her supplement stack, which is going to be, spoiler, problematic. yeah We're going to take a closer look at that and at her social media presence. But first- I was curious about this Marie Claire wellness clinic because I wanted to find out like, oh, can you see her in person? And what does it actually cost? yeah So let me tell you about what the clinic offers.
00:50:06
Speaker
The Marie Claire wellness clinic offers a one hour wellness consultation visit. Now, to be clear, this is not the same thing as your annual well woman physical that you should be getting.
00:50:17
Speaker
This is a totally different thing. So yeah. so for this one hour special wellness consultation, you get blood work done, you get an in-body composition scan, you get a lifetime access to the Galveston diet online community and the pause life, and you get a month subscription to several of her supplements, including her fiber, creatine, and collagen supplements. So Laurel, how do we feel about this in-body composition scan business?
00:50:47
Speaker
Yeah. so Okay. Body composition, you want to know your lean to fat mass ratio, right? And so there's ah couple of ways to do that.
00:51:00
Speaker
We've got the gold standard, which is i think called the four compartment model, which combines several different lab techniques for the most precise breakdown of fat to water, to protein, lean mass, to minerals, bone.
00:51:14
Speaker
Though It's only used in research. It's probably really fucking expensive. yeah We've got m MRI and CT scans, really fucking expensive. Yeah. Very impractical for routine use.
00:51:26
Speaker
Then we have the DEXA scan. Okay. These are actually not that expensive. There's different tiers of quality that you can pay for, but these are the most common clinical scans to order.
00:51:39
Speaker
They're very standard. They offer pretty reliable whole body regional data. Okay. At the practical end of the spectrum are devices like InBody.
00:51:53
Speaker
They're quick, they're affordable, but they're a lot less accurate. Yeah. I think there's one at my gym. Like when you sign up, you get a free in-body scan or whatever. They're just not very accurate. And so is this giving us good information? Not necessarily.
00:52:08
Speaker
Yeah. Okay. So you can see Dr. Marie Claire Haver herself, although the site does now say that she's not accepting new patients. So I guess you can't.
00:52:18
Speaker
Or you can see another OBGYN or you can see the nurse practitioner. So there's actually three tiers of pricing based on who who you're going to see. What do you think it costs to see Mary Claire Haver? What's your guess? Okay.
00:52:31
Speaker
Well, I think I heard in a comment on someone's post that she charges $1,000. No. So these are all just the prices for an in-person initial visit to see Dr. Mary Claire Haver. It's a very reasonable $2,000 to get blood work,
00:52:46
Speaker
blood work One of those things that you can also get at the gym, the in-body composition scan, a lifetime access to her online community and a month subscription to her supplements. Yeah. And I guess they also will prescribe you MHT if it's appropriate for you.
00:53:01
Speaker
So if you want to see her, that's what that costs. If you want to see the other ob b it's 1800. that's a steal. If you want to just see the nurse practitioner, which at this point, my feeling is like, if you're going to go do this, see the nurse practitioner. You don't need to pay for anything more than that. They're just running tests.
00:53:15
Speaker
That's only $1,500 to see the nurse practitioner. This is such a scam. Yep. It's such a massive scam. It really is. So this is not exactly accessible, right?
00:53:29
Speaker
And we see this a lot with grifters, this kind of limited access system. Based on who can afford it. Okay. Let's say I'm a big Mary Claire Haver stan.
00:53:39
Speaker
I can't afford to see her in person, but I love her and I trust her. So if I buy her products, now I feel like I'm doing the right thing for myself because she said so.
00:53:50
Speaker
All right. Yeah. Can about supplements? First of all, I've got to ask you, are you like immediately no anytime anyone's selling a supplement, Sarah? Are there supplements that you feel are like, this is okay?
00:54:03
Speaker
The reason I become automatically no is not because... the supplement itself is automatically a bad idea. I mean, the bigger picture is like the idea of a supplement suggests it's something that you're a deficit in, right?
00:54:16
Speaker
But there are things that people, a lot of people, not everybody, but a lot of people are deficit in, right? Like a lot of people aren't getting enough fiber. A lot of people aren't getting enough vitamin D. But my issue is usually with if you are creating your own product, you're going to have jacked the price up in some God awful way where I could probably get the exact same thing for a lot less at like Costco.
00:54:42
Speaker
That's my feeling. Yeah. I'm actually okay with people selling and performance enhancing supplements. Like I think that if it's for the purpose of performance and it's evidence-based, right? yeah.
00:54:55
Speaker
Don't come at me with your fucking tart cherry juice. But if you're selling creatine, if you're selling bicarb and it's not some proprietary blend where I'm not going to tell you what's in it because it's proprietary and it's like an evidence-based performance enhancing substance, then I'm okay with it. But if you're providing some type of supplement that you would need an evaluation from your doctor to be able to get, you absolutely should...
00:55:20
Speaker
acknowledge the fact that not everybody needs this. In fact, some people could overdo it and get really sick from taking the supplement. And then also you're probably jacking the price, like you said. Well, but some of her stuff is proprietary. We're going to get into that as well. All right. So let's talk about supplements. She sells, okay? This a large part of the pause life.
00:55:36
Speaker
We discussed this in Hot Flashes Cold Facts. The current menopause industry is valued at $17.79 billion, people, and it's projected to get to $24 billion by 2030.
00:55:48
Speaker
Okay. I think some of it is okay as long as you've gotten some type of test to show that you're deficient. Some of it is really not okay, really, like ever.
00:55:59
Speaker
So here are the okay ones I think Sarah and I might... disagree a little bit on these, but so fiber. Okay. Tell people to take your fiber powder. Yeah. Lots of people are deficient in fiber. Fiber is really important.
00:56:11
Speaker
However, what I'm going to say is that if you're getting your fiber from a supplement, you're not getting all the other micronutrients and macronutrients that would come along with the fiber if it were delivered to you in a food, right? So you're You're not eating the broccoli.
00:56:24
Speaker
You're not eating the spinach. You're not eating the legumes that have more than just fiber to offer you. People also don't eat enough fruits and vegetables. So maybe try to get your fiber from fucking fruits How about that? And I will say, she's got a 28-day pause challenge, which...
00:56:39
Speaker
if you are able to do what she wants you to do, you may well be getting enough fiber from your fruits and vegetables, but we're going to talk about that in a second. The second one is on the list here is it's omega-3 and then vitamin D. Well, can I talk about vitamin D real quick?
00:56:53
Speaker
Vitamin D is something that people are deficient in a lot of people. And in particular for women who are concerned about bone and building bone, let's say you have discovered that you need to get more calcium in your diet, and now you're eating more calcium rich foods, which would be the way to do it rather than taking like a calcium supplement. Ideally, vitamin D actually allows your body to absorb calcium better.
00:57:20
Speaker
So this is not an outrage. There's other ones that are, to me, are more outrageous. This is not the most outrageous of the things that she could be selling. These are not like really weird supplements. Like you see these around a lot.
00:57:33
Speaker
like You do. And people should be prescribed these by their doctor. Okay. I was shown to be vitamin D deficient. My doctor put me on a supplement that I bought at Costco for very little money. I took it, went back for a retest. And she was like, you need to stop taking it because now you're too high.
00:57:47
Speaker
So if you're not deficient, you don't need it. The only way you figure out if you need it or when to stop taking it is through a fucking evaluation. Same thing goes for omega-3. I don't think we need people running out and drinking fish oil.
00:58:00
Speaker
All right. A far better way to get omega-3 is to eat fish, right? There are also flax seeds. But basically, if you are taking an omega-3 and you also have cardiac conditions or you also take blood thinners,
00:58:13
Speaker
This can pose a risk to you. You don't have any good way of figuring out if you need it or could benefit from it other than a blood test. yeah So the fact that she's just wholesale selling this shit is harmful.
00:58:28
Speaker
It's not good. I mean, to your point, like I live in Southern California. It is sunny most of the time here. I do wear sunscreen a lot, but I am vitamin D deficient because I am a ginger and I don't spend a lot of time outdoors. The only way that I know that I was vitamin D deficient was from a freaking blood test.
00:58:45
Speaker
Yeah. Otherwise, I would assumed I was fine. I live in a very sunny part of the world. Yeah. So we got to talk about turmeric. We really do have to talk about turmeric. Okay. I love turmeric. By the way, I made ah a really yummy lentil stew that had turmeric in it. turned it up It's a delicious bright shade of orange.
00:59:02
Speaker
So pretty. I was like, I'm getting my turmeric. I can feel the inflammation just leaving my body. Okay. Here's the claim from Mary Claire Haver's website.
00:59:12
Speaker
Quote, turmeric may help fight oxidative stress and support a healthy inflammatory response in the body. Unquote. Then there's an asterisk. Note the asterisk.
00:59:26
Speaker
Okay. We'll talk about the asterisk in minute. So first, oxidative stress sounds horrific, but it's not a disease. It's a normal physiological process your body manages all the fucking time.
00:59:37
Speaker
Free radicals are real and chronic oxidative stress, yeah, it can contribute to disease. But the best protection against that is the boring basics.
00:59:48
Speaker
Balanced nutrition, exercise, sleep, You don't need a special capsule of turmeric to handle what your body already does well when you support your body with those basics.
01:00:00
Speaker
So yes, there is a compound, a polyphenol in turmeric called curcumin, and this has been shown to be an antioxidant and an anti-inflammatory, so that part is the true part.
01:00:14
Speaker
But here's the catch. Turmeric in supplement form is not some magic bullet. It's not in supplement form very well absorbed by the gut, which is true for a lot of supplements in capsule form, right?
01:00:28
Speaker
You're much better off getting it from your food. It's going to be absorbed better by your body. You might need high doses to get the amounts that were used in studies, many of which were done on rats, is my understanding.
01:00:42
Speaker
Most trials, most evidence comes from like short-term trials on things like arthritis, not on healthy midlife women. So also, it always has to be said, like any supplement, there are almost always risks.
01:00:57
Speaker
Turmeric can interact with blood thinners, antacids, certain heart medications. It can cause stomach upset. It can even cause liver injury. So for menopause specifically, i think there's one small study done in perimenopausal women suggesting turmeric reduces waist circumference and that it improves some metabolic markers, but that's not enough to recommend it.
01:01:23
Speaker
Certainly not enough to market it as this go-to supplement for all women in menopause, but that study gets cherry-picked all the time by folks who sell turmeric supplements. The bigger point is this. Menopause isn't This state of chronic inflammation, okay?
01:01:38
Speaker
Perhaps if you have obesity, diabetes, other inflammatory conditions, but you're not automatically inflamed as soon as you start the menopause transition. Your hormonal status doesn't equal inflammation.
01:01:52
Speaker
So it's real questionable, the recommendation of turmeric in a capsule form for fucking anything, but it's especially problematic when it's being recommended for some type of fat loss benefit to women in menopause. And when that fat loss is, it's suggested that inflammation causes weight gain, which it doesn't. I just want to break in and say, to be fair to Mary Claire Haver, she is not selling turmeric as a weight loss supplement. She's specifically talking about reducing inflammation. Not that that makes it any better, but I just want to be clear in what we're saying that
01:02:24
Speaker
Yes, there are people out there who are saying it's going to reduce your menopause belly, but she's not one of them. I think she has actually used her platform to suggest that turmeric will reduce belly fat specifically. And there's this misconception that inflammation causes weight gain.
01:02:44
Speaker
It's the other fucking way around. And really lifestyle causes inflammation, right? Lack of exercise, maybe not eating the right types of just generally balanced diet.
01:02:55
Speaker
I talk to people all the time who are like, I'm eating these types of foods. Like I've gone vegetarian to reduce inflammation. I'm like, how do you know you have inflammation? Have you received a test that shows that you do?
01:03:06
Speaker
Everyone has this idea. Inflammation is like cortisol, right? Just say inflammation, just say cortisol. And people will think like what you're saying is legit and science-based.
01:03:18
Speaker
And whatever you tell them to do to get rid of their inflammation or cortisol will have additional resonance. It's such bullshit. Yeah. It's some of that fiddle faddle world salad, like buzzwords that get people all riled up. You can go to the doctor and get tested and figure out if you have inflammation.
01:03:36
Speaker
But as soon as you ask people if they've done that, they're really uninterested in having that conversation. right They'd would much rather talk about how they're so inflamed from the foods they're eating and that's why they're gaining weight. Yeah.
01:03:46
Speaker
Right. And so, yeah, maybe she doesn't say that turmeric will cause you to lose weight. I do think she has, though. But she's connecting turmeric with reduction in inflammation. And then she's connecting inflammation with a cause of weight gain.
01:04:00
Speaker
Can I just can we pause? Why the fuck are we talking about turmeric? Like literally at all. Like what a huge, stupid fucking distraction and a total waste of time. So much for Mary Claire Haber is a huge fucking stupid distraction and total waste of time.
01:04:15
Speaker
But somehow it works to get people wrapped up in her narrative and embedded in her ecosystem so they eventually buy her shit. Yeah. Just to back up the Oprah menopause o award.
01:04:27
Speaker
Yes. i also was like, what the fuck is that? So I went and looked it up and basically there's a page on Oprah's website where it's like all of Oprah's, it's Oprah's favorite things for menopause basically. So it's like Oprah's favorite cooling fan, Oprah's favorite cooling sheets, Oprah's favorite cardigan, you know, whatever.
01:04:44
Speaker
And so a bunch of different supplements made on the list. For some reason, her turmeric made the list. You could also just buy it and cook with it, right More deliciously. So- Let's talk about creatine because people are jazzed about creatine.
01:04:58
Speaker
Now, the creatine that she sells is something called Crea Vitalis with an R. It has a registered mark, right? So this is a trademarked product. And already, again, this registration is making my eye twitch because it often means that there's going to be a study done on this particular product that shows that it's beneficial.
01:05:19
Speaker
But when we zoom out and look at larger studies on creatine in general, it might not do as much as we think. So the website says, quote, creatine monohydrate is an amino acid that has been shown to help increase energy and build muscle mass.
01:05:36
Speaker
Asterix! Hey, that's not our first asterix. What do we know about asterix? Well, they lead to this, and this is at the bottom of the page. These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.
01:05:52
Speaker
All right. So in the list of supposed benefits of creatine on the website, it lists that it supports building lean muscle, asterix, muscle recovery, asterix, physical endurance, asterix, brain health, asterix.
01:06:07
Speaker
All right. ah So the claim is this specific crea vitalis R has the best bioavailability, which is something that is talking about the degree and the rate at which your body can actually absorb something.
01:06:22
Speaker
Okay. But what does the research show about creatine in general? Does every menopausal woman need to be taking creatine? tried to find a study on Crea Vitalis because I would assume that this claim around bioavailability would have some sort of research to back it up. And here's what I found.
01:06:41
Speaker
And this is actually not a research study, by the way. It's called The Power of Creatine Plus Resistance Trading for Healthy Aging Enhancing Physical Vitality and Cognitive Function by Bonilla et al. from 2024.
01:06:55
Speaker
So again, this is not a research paper. It's an opinion article. And what I found the most interesting ah thing about it is that it had an incredibly long conflict of interest statement.
01:07:06
Speaker
And there were so many conflicts of interest. They included instances of people who were involved in the study, but they were doing other industry sponsored research, people sitting on advocacy boards that were sponsored by Cria Vitalis, and so on and so on.
01:07:22
Speaker
And so here's what they say. In this opinion article, we advocate for the combination of creatine monohydrate supplementation and resistance training as a safe and effective non-pharmacological strategy to prevent and treat sarcopenia, right? That's muscle loss.
01:07:39
Speaker
That should be internationally recognized by health practitioners and public health organizations, right? So they're not even saying this crea vitalis specifically. They're just talking about using creatine, but really importantly,
01:07:51
Speaker
Because this is not something that Haver highlights, which is that even though all of these authors are sponsored out the yin yang, they are advocating for creatine plus resistance training.
01:08:05
Speaker
They're not advocating for just taking it without also doing resistance training. Now, nowhere on the page selling creatine. does Mary Claire Haver talk about the resistance training requirement at all?
01:08:17
Speaker
Of course not. I wasn't able to find a research study that specifically tested Crea Vitalis. But if we step back and look at the research in general on creatine, here's what we know. So Women have lower synthesis of creatine, meaning we make less, right?
01:08:32
Speaker
But that's likely because creatine in your body is synthesized in your muscles and women tend to have less muscles on their body than men, which is why there's this argument that we need to supplement. But it actually turns out that our storage of creatine is really good.
01:08:50
Speaker
So the idea that we're lacking in creatine exists because we're comparing it to men's synthesis and storage, but Since this is something that is relative to muscle mass, this doesn't automatically mean that we're inherently too low in creatine.
01:09:05
Speaker
We've talked a lot about creatine in some of our other menopause episodes, so you can check out what we've said about it there. but essentially It's problematic that she's selling it without saying the part that to for it to have any effect, you also need to be doing resistance It's useless without resistance training. And if you're resistance training, it taking creatine is the difference between getting like 11 reps versus 10. It's not going to be body composition completely altering, right?
01:09:32
Speaker
You're not going to suddenly hulk out from taking it. No, no. Do you want to talk about the brain health? Yeah. I've seen a lot of jumping the gun on the brain health claims around creatine.
01:09:44
Speaker
from what I have considered to be like trusted sources and also people like Mary-Glaire Haver, when you look at the data from ah specific population and you hypothesize that it has meaning to the general population, you're grifting, okay? And so what will often happen is that people will look at studies done on people with brain injuries.
01:10:08
Speaker
We can cautiously say that maybe creatine is helping them heal their brains or people with cognitive decline or disorders of some kind. I'm not exactly sure, but basically these are special populations. And we're cautiously optimistic that maybe creatine is playing a positive role, right?
01:10:24
Speaker
It's biologically plausible that it could be helping healthy populations as well, but we don't have any studies showing that. So when you have someone like Meric-Claire Haver pushing creatine for brain health to her audience of probably more majority of whom are a healthy population of women in perimenopause or menopause,
01:10:44
Speaker
it's grift because this is not supported by evidence. It's not supported by research. You would need to look at that specific population and then see if creatine showed improvement to some marker of cognitive function to be able to say that it does.
01:10:58
Speaker
Currently that doesn't exist. Yeah. Yeah. But that doesn't matter. Yeah. We're still going to say it's good for your brain. All right. So let's get into the one that really pisses me off.
01:11:11
Speaker
which is that she's selling collagen for your wrinkles and for your cellulite. In my notes for this, I wrote, kindly go fuck yourself because this really pisses me off. This is no longer even under the umbrella of claiming supplements that you need for menopause symptoms, unless we're starting to call wrinkles and cellulite a symptom of something, which they are not.
01:11:36
Speaker
Wrinkles are a symptom of living on a planet that is warmed by a sun. Period. Women have been bullied about their wrinkles and their cellulite for decades and sold billions of dollars of products like this to try to change the appearance of what is a naturally occurring non-event called normal female physiology.
01:11:57
Speaker
It's not ugly. It's not wrong. And I'm fucking sick to death of this shit. I really am. Yeah. I mean, a lot of this is a repeat of every other fad. that we've seen across the decades that has drained women's wallets and left them anxious. But collagen is probably one of the more ridiculous ones. So in the 1970s, we had royal jelly and bee pollen as hormone balancers.
01:12:21
Speaker
Sounds ridiculous, right? In the 1980s, we had wild yam cream as a natural progesterone. Sounds silly, doesn't it? In the 1990s, we had fen-fen diet pills and soy isoflavones as nature's HRT.
01:12:36
Speaker
Kind of ridiculous sounding, right? In the 2000s, we had detox teas and colon cleanses and slim fast shakes that would make the fat disappear off our body. Total crock of shit, right? In 2010, we had garcinia, cambogia, raspberry ketones, biotin, and probiotics to help with our fucked up guts, right?
01:12:55
Speaker
And in the 2020s now, we have collagen powders, we have turmeric, we have hormone balancing stacks and adaptogens, right? Mushrooms. And guess what? In 2030, we're going to look back and go, what a crock of shit.
01:13:07
Speaker
But we're currently all embroiled in our own gullibility and believing all of this shit. So we've got people with fancy credentials on these platforms, blasting these myths to millions using all these fear-based hooks.
01:13:23
Speaker
Your hormones are fucked. You've got cellulite. We've got to erase that. We've got to fix how your belly looks. Sarah, why do we keep falling for this shit? don't know, but it drives me crazy. It also is frustrating to me that for...
01:13:39
Speaker
Women who are entering an age where ideally we're giving less of a shit about a lot of this stuff. I have found that a lot of myself and my friends, as we are in our late 40s, right, as we're getting older, we're trying at least to be less sucked into this idea of maintain your beauty at any cost, right? And we're starting to not care about that stuff so much, hopefully.
01:14:03
Speaker
And so I find it even more irritating that this is being marketed to women at a time in their life. And I mean, never should you be spending all of your time and attention on your appearance, but it's very easy to do.
01:14:14
Speaker
as a younger woman, right? Because our society emphasizes the value of youth and the value for women of their beauty. And here we are, we're at a time where you're turning into a crone. All that estrogen is taking your beauty away, but don't worry.
01:14:26
Speaker
You can take this collagen supplement and it's going to help your skin fucking cellulate. Jesus Christ. So she sells something called skin and bone collagen. And the claim is bioactive collagen peptides, again, with a registration mark,
01:14:41
Speaker
specifically formulated to support your skin, hair, nail, and bones. Asterisk. We know about the asterisk. Okay. Are you ready for this? 30-day supply is $70. Oh, Jesus Christ.
01:14:54
Speaker
That is off the scale of ridiculous. I expect a lot of these things to be maybe like $35, $40, something like that for 30 days. $70. Okay. A fucking 30-day supply of skin and bone collagen for $70?
01:15:09
Speaker
You could buy an entire month's worth of actual high quality protein for that. I think many people think because when you buy collagen powder, it shows you that it has a certain amount of grams of protein per serving.
01:15:23
Speaker
That they're like, well, okay, the collagen, maybe it's not doing as much for my skin, but hey, it's more protein, right? Not all protein is created equal We've got animal proteins like whey and casein and eggs and meat.
01:15:37
Speaker
These are considered high-quality proteins. They provide all the essential amino acids in the right proportions to support muscle growth and repair. We also have high-quality plant proteins that can do a lot of the same things. And if you're eating a balanced diet, you're probably going to have a complete protein profile in your diet.
01:15:54
Speaker
but Collagen, on the other hand, isn't in the same league as these other forms of protein. It's missing a key amino acid, which is tryptophan. So your body can't use collagen to build muscle the way it can with animal or plant proteins.
01:16:07
Speaker
So you think, okay, it's not helping it my skin, my hair, my nails, my fucking cellulite. At least it's giving me protein. No, it's not. It's not giving you the protein you actually need. yeah It's just a big-ass waste of money.
01:16:20
Speaker
It is. i Full disclosure, I'm a former collagen in my coffee user. This was at a point where like I was post-cancer, my hair and my nails were looking shit because that's what the chemo did.
01:16:33
Speaker
And I was like, all right, well, this is going to help my hair and my nails. And I don't think it did. But I liked how it made my coffee creamier, honestly. But then I was like, oh, I could also just use half and half.
01:16:45
Speaker
So that's what I do instead. Hey, I'm going to attest to the fact that the collagen in the coffee was actually pretty good when I visited you. i was like, this it's not gross. It's not gross. Okay. But is it an expensive waste of time? Probably.
01:16:56
Speaker
So Mary Crow Haver did a social media post about this collagen where she stood in front of, you know, when people stand in front of a study and point at it, I've done that, but she did it on three different studies that she flashed really quickly. So I took screenshots so that I could look up these studies and Before we get to her claims about what collagen can do for your wrinkles and your cellulite and your bones, let's actually look at the prevailing evidence around collagen and what it can or cannot do, because this is very interesting, I think.
01:17:26
Speaker
And it gets into that question of funding sources. So this is a study called Effects of Collagen Supplements on Skin Aging. a systematic review and meta-analysis of randomized control trials by Myung and Park from 2025. So this is some brand new evidence.
01:17:44
Speaker
I'm just going to read you the results because I think this is interesting. So this is a quote. A total of 23 RCTs, randomized control trials, with 1,474 participants were analyzed.
01:17:56
Speaker
in a metaanalysis of all twenty three rcts collagen supplements significantly improved skin hydration, elasticity, and wrinkles. However, in the subgroup meta-analysis, so when they separated out by funding source, studies not receiving funding from pharmaceutical companies revealed no effect of collagen supplements for improving skin hydration, elasticity, and wrinkles, while those receiving funding from pharmaceutical companies did show significant effects.
01:18:30
Speaker
Similarly, high quality studies revealed no significant effect in all categories. Right. So that should not make you feel good about it. So let's take a real quick look at the studies that she cited.
01:18:42
Speaker
The first one is called dietary supplementation with specific collagen peptides has a body mass index dependent beneficial effect on cellulite morphology. Okay. And the other one is called oral intake of specific bioactive collagen peptides reduces skin wrinkles and increases dermal matrix synthesis.
Verisol Collagen Product Studies
01:19:02
Speaker
So these two are by the same group of authors and both of them are studying a registered and patented product called Verisol registered, which is in her collagen product, right? She uses this stuff called Verisol.
01:19:16
Speaker
yeah The product claims to reduce wrinkles and cellulite and I don't know if I don't think these were RCTs. Why? Why are we talking about cellulite as if it is something other than a naturally occurring phenomenon in women's bodies that is not a problem? It's not a pathology. It's not a disease state. It's not a marker for future.
01:19:41
Speaker
cardiovascular health. It just exists. Why is a medical doctor pushing a product for wrinkles and cellulite? i this It just pisses me off so much. Dollar bills, dollar, dollar bills.
AlgaeCal Studies and Conflict of Interest
01:19:54
Speaker
hu Okay. And then the last study that she cites is called Specific Bioactive Collagen Peptides in Osteoporosis and Osteopenia, Long-Term Observation in Post-Menopausal Women.
01:20:07
Speaker
And this one claims to improve bone density. But it's also testing a registered and patented product called Fortibone R, which is also in her collagen product, right? So she's got this Fortibone and this Verisol.
01:20:22
Speaker
So all three of these studies are of products that a company called AlgaeCal makes. Oh, shit. Oh, yes. And if you go to their website, it's a very impressive array of stats and research claims. But when I scanned the list of studies, and to be fair, I didn't go into all of the studies because I was starting to go totally cross-eyed at this point. But when I scanned the list of studies, a lot of them were done by the same people.
01:20:50
Speaker
which to me at least does not build confidence. Like the idea in peer review is that other scientists come in and they review your work or they replicate your work and they get the same answers.
01:21:02
Speaker
Not that you put out a body of tests on the same thing that all show the same thing. AlgaeCal separately.
Skepticism Towards AlgaeCal
01:21:10
Speaker
I've been seeing more and more instances of it coming up in social media. We were approached by someone from AlgaeCal.
01:21:16
Speaker
I think AlgaeCal is kind of sus. We do know some things about it, but we're not ready to talk about it yet. Yeah. So it's going to be an episode about AlgaeCal in the future for sure. The bottom line is stay skeptical out there, people.
01:21:29
Speaker
Yeah. We have a t-shirt in our in our store. Merch. Merch. Stay skeptical. All
Weighted Vest Humor and Critique
01:21:36
Speaker
right. Last thing we got to talk about here is Mary Claire Haver's apparent obsession with the weighted vest. So if you follow her on social media, she never takes that fucking thing off.
01:21:43
Speaker
She really never does. She wears it all the time. When she's just sitting in front of her table talking to us, she's wearing her weighted vest. When she's fucking doing tricep exercises lying on her back, she's wearing a weighted vest. When she's doing assisted pull-ups, she's wearing a weighted vest.
01:21:58
Speaker
Which is quite possibly the most ridiculous time to wear a weighted vest. Yeah. so Sarah. wrote this one thing as a joke. Sorry. Having sex. No, I don't think she posts.
01:22:09
Speaker
I don't think she's on AnyFans. Is it called AnyFans? don't know. OnlyFans. OnlyFans. But now that's given me idea. Maybe I should start an OnlyFans page where I'm just wearing a weighted vest all the time. And then people write in and ask me to do activities. Will you paint your toenails while you're wearing a weighted vest? Sure. Sure.
01:22:25
Speaker
So Sarah did a whole episode about weighted vests and bone density, which we will link in the show notes. Essentially, in order to make a weighted vest impact your bone density, you have to wear it and do exercise formats that improve bone density, like engage in impact training or do resistance exercises that load your hips and spine, like lunges, squats, or... right, I just want to clarify. You have to do that for a year.
01:22:53
Speaker
You can't just do a couple of them and be like, my bones are better. The research shows you got to do those exercises for a year. Yeah. I mean, you can't even... Tests to see if someone's improved their bone density unless they've been doing an exercise intervention for at least eight months, right? Or you have to wear for eight to 10 hours a day. Wait, so there are studies showing improvements to bone density from wearing ah weighted vest for eight to 10 hours a day, or was that improvements to weight loss?
01:23:18
Speaker
So no, you can wear it and just like walk around and live your life, but you have to wear it eight to 10 hours a day. And there are a lot of instances of people saying like, well, it's giving me back pain. It's like, yeah, no shit. Or it's making my fucking body sweaty.
01:23:32
Speaker
Walking or hiking with a weighted vest a few times a week is not going to improve your bones. So check out the episode. But Mary Claire Haver isn't going to let go of her Amazon affiliate code for a weighted vest that quickly. And we've also heard she's developing one for women that doesn't smash your boobs.
01:23:49
Speaker
But we haven't seen any official confirmation of this. So here's a blog on our website called, What is a weighted vest and why should I use one? And we're not going to read you the whole thing because We respect and appreciate you.
01:24:03
Speaker
But there are a few choice passages that we're going to highlight. Of note, the blog has no cited author, so we have no idea who wrote this. Overall, it cites a lot of the research around bone density and muscle strength, but only vaguely describes using the weighted vest during walking, resistance training, or household chores. It doesn't provide any parameters around how much time you need to wear it or what kind of exercises you need to do.
01:24:28
Speaker
It does go into detail around how to select the right vest and what weight it should be, but I'm assuming those are very general recommendations. So here's a quote from the website. Quote, adding a weighted vest into your fitness routine and activities is easy.
01:24:44
Speaker
You may choose to strap it on for your usual walk or runs, making your cardio more challenging, or you can wear it during your warmup, stretching, or cool down to add a little extra effort.
01:24:57
Speaker
But the real magic happens during strength training. Exercises like squat, lunges, and upper body moves become more intense, pushing your muscles further. One study even had participants wear vests while jumping or using a vibrating machine.
01:25:11
Speaker
The beauty is even low-impact activities like yoga or Pilates benefit from the added resistance. A weighted vest can ultimately improve your overall strength. and stability.
01:25:24
Speaker
I haven't stepped foot and in a yoga class in a while, but I have no doubt people are wearing weighted vests in yoga. I would love to see it. well I would love to see someone putting on a weighted vest and then lying down on a reformer.
01:25:37
Speaker
i I'm not against the idea of wearing a weighted vest in yoga. I mean, that would be hypocritical of me because I taught an entire training called yoga with resistance bands. But If your goal is to improve bone density or your goal is to lose weight or your goal is to improve muscle mass, the weighted vest matters a lot less than the exercise format you're engaged in and yeah a lot less than whether or not the load you're applying to your body is sufficient to make a change, which is going to depend on your current level of strength.
01:26:08
Speaker
yeah Again, nowhere in this article do they talk about how much time, right? Recall eight to 10 hours a day or how long you need to be doing the resistance training with it on. Or nowhere in the article did they talk about how to use RPE and RIR to know how many reps you need to do of an exercise wearing your weighted vest, right? There's none of this education provided.
Haver's Amazon Store and Profit Motives
01:26:28
Speaker
There's just a link to the Amazon store, right?
01:26:31
Speaker
Because that's the whole point is to sell you the vest, not necessarily to educate you. Mm-hmm. I will say her Amazon store is extensive and she really sells everything from running shorts to blenders to the weighted vests, her pajamas.
01:26:45
Speaker
So the last thing I want to mention quickly, because this is just really kind of
Complex Dieting Advice Critique
01:26:49
Speaker
bananas. She has something called the 28 day pause strong challenge to quote, combat the symptoms of menopause.
01:26:57
Speaker
And as far as these kind of like 28 day challenge things goes, it's not terrible, except there's one single bonkers part. So the first two things are like, make sure you're eating enough protein.
01:27:09
Speaker
Make sure you're eating enough fiber. No problem with that. The third one is journal daily. Write down your feelings about what's going on. Sure. No problem. As general guidelines go, these are fine. Right. And then the fifth one is exercise five days a week. And they specify walking and weightlifting.
01:27:25
Speaker
I mean, there's not really parameters around that or anything, but again, these as general guidelines go, these are not terrible. For literally anyone at any age. I mean, it's not specific to menopause. No, not at all. This is like, do you want to be healthy? Try to do these things.
01:27:37
Speaker
But the crazy one, the crazy one was number four. Because number four was consume 30 plants each week. And at first I thought this meant like 30 servings of plants, which makes sense and is actually in line with the RDA, right the recommendations, right? yeah But no, it then goes on to say, throughout the course of the week, work to consume a variety of plant-based foods so that by the end of the week, you've eaten 30 different plants over the course of the week.
01:28:08
Speaker
So apart from the fact that that sentence needs some serious editing, 30 different plants a week? I mean, I eat, generally speaking, a fair amount of fruit and veg, but I don't think I eat 30 different plants. Right. I wonder what that 30 is based off of. I think it's just made-up number. mean, it doesn't seem to be based anything. like whole 30, right? 30 is a popular number associated with dieting. Right. It's like, I mean, but it's a 28-day challenge. It's not 30-day.
01:28:34
Speaker
and It's just so weird. i't There's no reference for what this is based off of. I don't think it's based off of anything. And it also, to go back to the Stacey Sims and her cherry juice and her purple potatoes, this is starting to feel like purple potato territory, like lifestyle aspirational bullshit. Right.
01:28:50
Speaker
The average American woman is likely not getting enough fruit and veg in general. Right. Right. Now we're asking her to go out. Yeah. and pay for 30 different plants every week?
01:29:02
Speaker
The fuck? and Do you have thoughts about this? I mean, it's creating this ridiculous, hard-to-achieve parameter. It's like complicating advice that could be so much more simple.
01:29:16
Speaker
It's creating a barrier. Now you have to have access to 30 different plants. You have like 30 different plants. This is like a whole technique where we're going to take some simple advice and we're just going to layer it with a ton of complexity to make it really hard and to make you feel like a total fucking failure when you can't do it. You not only are you not getting enough fruits and veg, but as soon as you start getting enough fruits and veg, you're still not doing it right because you're not getting 30 different kinds.
01:29:47
Speaker
I mean, I tried serious. I was like, okay, wait, how many do I get? And I started trying to like count up. Yeah. Yeah. the average number. and then I got into like different types of lettuce. I was like really, really trying. And I think I got somewhere between like 15 to 20.
01:30:01
Speaker
And I have so many questions to you. I'd be like, is corn a vegetable? Is potatoes? good Exactly. What about the ba the dried oregano I put in my spaghetti? It's piece of basil on top of my pizza. just is kind vegetable It's just so stupid. It's focusing on the wrong thing, right?
01:30:20
Speaker
It's terrible. All right. Before we start flipping tables over here, let's run our Dr. Mary Claire Haver through the griftometer. Let's do it.
01:30:31
Speaker
So the first one is, do you even know what the real problem is, bro? If I were to say, like, what is the real problem? First of all, it's people like Mary Claire Haver. Right.
01:30:44
Speaker
ah She's just a spawn of capitalism. So maybe the real problem is capitalism, but that almost also seems too simple, right? Maybe the real problem is human nature. I don't know where the real fucking problem starts, but it's not my fucking tumeric, lack of tumeric. It's none of the things she's saying the problem is.
01:31:03
Speaker
She is the queen of criteria number one. Her whole deal is telling you you have a lot of problems you don't have. yeah And failing to tell you that she's your number one problem in this moment. Okay, so we've got to score her out of zero to five. Zero would be like she does not exhibit these properties and five would be she highly exhibits these properties.
01:31:25
Speaker
Okay, she's a five. She's a five? fucking five. me write this If she could be a six, she'd be a six. Okay. The next category is called everyone needs this. She's a five. Yeah, she's a five. I don't think I've ever heard her...
01:31:39
Speaker
qualify any of her well actually i'll take that back she qualifies menopause hormone therapy she does say like you need to talk to your doctor yeah seriously but everything else is like make my smoothie with all of my supplements in it and there's no qualification around who needs what yeah yeah not in her supplements either i don't think right i think she gets a fucking five okay the next one appearance assassinators oh jesus yeah She is saying, you know, take my supplement for your wrinkle skin and your cellulite.
01:32:11
Speaker
i'm yeah I'm almost certain there's a turmeric connected to belly fat claim in there. yeah I'm going to give her a five. Yeah, i think she's a five on that one as well. All right, fiddle faddle, which is just using buzzwords like menno belly and all that kind of stuff.
01:32:27
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I guess if we compare, if we say fiddle faddle is similar to mechanism theater from the Stacey Sims episode. Yeah. I don't think she scores terribly high on this.
01:32:37
Speaker
No, I don't either. ah She tries to use a lot of science to back things up, but that's not this category. I think never her wide appeal is because she avoids the fiddle faddle, actually. She's attracting the general population more broadly because I think she makes the language much more accessible, actually. Yeah, I think that's right. So what do we want to score her?
01:32:59
Speaker
I'd give her a two. Two? Okay. All right, next up, microscope of practice. She's an OBGYN. She does have, what is that... Bullshit. Hang on.
01:33:10
Speaker
She has some culinary, medical culinary something. certification, Sarah. Yeah, she got a food certification. it makes Hang on. yeah She's a hang on, because I did look it up. A certified culinary medical specialist. It just means that she went through this one course. Fine.
01:33:26
Speaker
You know what? Because she's a doctor, because she's an MD, her scope of practice is quite large, right? Like, I think it's it's fine that she gives some general nutrition advice. The problem with her is that she propagates a lot of unsupported, unsubstantiated myths and claims that she miseducates, that she espouses a lot of pseudoscience.
01:33:51
Speaker
Sure, you've got a large scope of practice. You're a medical doctor. You're an expert in female physiology as an OBGYN. No question. But you choose to use all of that education and all that good information and all that ability to like draw from solid evidence, and you don't.
01:34:08
Speaker
I mean, I wish we could rename this like Hippocratic Oath Hypocrite or something like that. We could. We could call it Hippocritical Oath. Hippocritical Oath. She gets a fucking five. Okay. Next one is just do they sell supplements? Unfair advantage. Yes. yes She's a five. She sells supplements. She gets a five. It's a lot.
01:34:26
Speaker
And then the last one, she's going to get close to 100% score. But anyway, Army Hammer. Does she have an army full of people that will come after you? Yeah, does. Yes, she sure does. Okay. I'm going to do the math.
01:34:38
Speaker
Let's see. She gets a 94%. ninety four Yeah. Percent. She gets a just on the edge in A. an a So that, riifter I got to say, that feels accurate. But let's talk about our sort of like summary. Do you have like summary thoughts about Mary Claire Haver? I think we wanted to get into some of the cultural nuances that we see circulating around her and her army hammer, right? I think that she leans...
01:35:05
Speaker
toward appealing toward conservative, more conservative leaning women based on the Armie Hammer yeah And women who perhaps have never really thought of themselves as feminist until someone like Mary Claire Haver starts ringing the pseudo-feminist virtue signaling bell and ah inspiring them to have some kind of feelings or outrage or really justifying some of their justified misgivings around how they've been treated in the medical system, right? Like pointing out the fact that there hasn't been good medical practice for women
01:35:40
Speaker
experiencing the symptoms of menopause, right? And that there has been a lot of dismissal happening in doctor's offices, and there has been a downplaying of the symptoms, which can sometimes be debilitating. And so she's using that truth to then lure them into her ecosystem and to convert them to customers.
01:36:01
Speaker
These women that follow her, they strike me as having been for their entire life really unbeknownst to them trapped in a patriarchy.
01:36:12
Speaker
And Mary Claire Haver appears to be showing them an exit, but it's a false exit, right? It's one that sells this kind of souped up form of female liberation that really just leads them down a dark hallway right back into the patriarchy. Yeah.
01:36:31
Speaker
Yeah. Your point about it appealing to more conservative women, I feel like is really spot on because so much of the critique that we got from her followers was about our tone. There was so much tone policing. They really didn't like that I said motherfucker.
01:36:45
Speaker
And I was like, but that's not the point. and And also that's just a strategy to try to like shift attention from what I'm saying. But Yeah, they didn't like the tone. They didn't like that we were like, quote unquote, bashing another woman.
01:36:57
Speaker
But some of them were perfectly happy saying stuff about the dark circles under my eyes. And one woman was like, based on the look of the dark circles under your eyes, you should be on hormone replacement therapy.
01:37:10
Speaker
And exactly. and And they're more than happy to come to her defense as a woman, but they're also more than happy to pick you apart as a woman. Exactly. You know, the through line is not there. It's real contradictory. Yeah. Yeah. There's just really a sense of everybody needs to be nice to her.
01:37:24
Speaker
And I'm like, why? i think if you get to the point when you have 7 million followers, you're going to attract a lot more attention from people like me and Laurel. And you can't get away with shit for that reason. It's also decidedly anti-woman.
01:37:41
Speaker
to say that because a person is a woman, they are above critique. They are above critical evaluation. yes Because what that is is basically infantilization.
01:37:54
Speaker
It's saying that women are not capable of standing up to the test of logic and rational thought and evidence and basically saying because they're a woman, they get a pass.
01:38:08
Speaker
on the intellect front. um They get a pass on being honest, on having integrity. It's really, it's like saying women, because they're women, we should be softer on them somehow.
01:38:20
Speaker
Right, right. It's like, no, actually, until we start taking women seriously, they're never actually going to be equal with men. right So if men can take men seriously, women can take women seriously, men can take women seriously, just like women feel very okay with taking, for example, someone online who's a guy who's saying bullshit about women, they're fine with women taking that guy down.
01:38:51
Speaker
Well, what if there's a woman online saying bullshit about women? Right. It's not actually feminist to say we can't critique that because she's a woman, but it seems to be just another way of saying women are too fragile.
01:39:02
Speaker
Women are too weak. Women can't play by the same rules. They don't have to because they're women. It's like, no Right. It's a very, to your point, infantilizing. and They're there. She's trying her hardest.
01:39:12
Speaker
We wouldn't hold her up to the same criteria because she's just a woman. Right. Until we can apply the same rules to women as we do to men, we are upholding the patriarchy. Yep.
01:39:27
Speaker
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01:40:34
Speaker
Okay, so we are going to switch our focus now away from Dr. Haver and onto another Menno grifter. And something to note, there is a group of these sort of doctor slash influencers who have started to call themselves the Menno posse.
01:40:50
Speaker
And it does include, it includes both of these women. I'm not exactly sure who all is in the meadow posse, but anyway, we're going to talk about Dr. Vonda Wright, who is our next person of interest.
01:41:02
Speaker
Now, if you go to her website, I will say right off the bat, Dr. Wright is impressive. She doesn't have just one about me section. She has four about me sections based on what category about her that you are interested in So here's here's what they say.
01:41:19
Speaker
All right. So as an author, Dr. Vonderreit is an accomplished author whose work provides practical science-backed guidance for anyone seeking to live an active, vibrant, and healthy life at every age. With her unique ability to translate her insights as a surgeon and a woman into relatable and actionable advice, her books serve as essential guides for optimizing health and unlocking the full potential of longevity.
01:41:44
Speaker
Then, Vonda as speaker and consultant. Dr. Vonda Wright is a sought-after speaker and consultant whose expertise lies at the intersection of active aging, sports medicine, and innovations in women's health.
01:41:56
Speaker
With more than 20 years of experience as a leading orthopedic surgeon and health advocate, Dr. Wright captivates audiences with her ability to translate complex medical concepts into engaging, actionable insights.
01:42:07
Speaker
Okay. And then the next one is as a researcher, Dr. Vonda Wright is also a researcher whose work synthesizes the fields of sports medicine, the science of aging, and the nuances of women's health.
01:42:19
Speaker
Her innovative approaches and history of groundbreaking research continue to redefine how we view human performance, healing, and longevity. With a steadfast commitment to both clinical outcomes and practical applications,
01:42:31
Speaker
Dr. Wright is shaping the future of sports medicine, women's health, and active aging. And then as a surgeon, alongside her career as an educator and consultant, Dr. Vonda Wright is a double board certified orthopedic surgeon and researcher dedicated to enhancing the lives of her patients through innovative care, expert techniques, and unparalleled compassion.
01:42:52
Speaker
unparalleled, specialized in treating athletes and active individuals of all skill levels, Dr. Wright helps her patients achieve optimal mobility and performance at every stage of life.
01:43:04
Speaker
Her practice combines cutting edge technology, minimally invasive approaches, and evidence-based solutions to treat a wide range of orthopedic conditions. She also has a podcast called Hot for Your Health.
01:43:16
Speaker
And of note, she's written six books, which I think is pretty impressive. Now, I first became aware of her on social media because she made this like super viral post where you see her and she's literally just walking out of the surgery, like the operating theater.
01:43:31
Speaker
And she's talking about the woman who she was just operating on and how she had really weak bones and like warning us slash scaring us that we don't want to end up in that situation. So Dr. Vonda Wright's very pro staying strong. She's pro healthy bones. She's pro healthy minds. And she emphasizes the importance of continuing to exercise into our middle old and old age.
01:43:54
Speaker
But it seems like as of late, she is getting more into selling products and supplements on social media. So we're going to dive into that. But she's very big on promoting exercise and movement as the most important thing that a lot of people aren't doing.
01:44:09
Speaker
And she says things like lean muscle mass will save your life and that there is nothing more metabolically important. We largely agree yeah with all of her messaging around staying active.
01:44:22
Speaker
We'll talk about how we feel her exercise prescription can skew overly specific, similar to other people we've covered. Yeah. In essence, and this is in my opinion, and I guess maybe this is a bit of a spoiler, I don't think Vonda Wright is as bad as Mary Claire Haver.
01:44:38
Speaker
and No. As a grifter. Not all. When I was going through her website, I didn't really find anything problematic to talk about. The thing that I really don't like is one of her books is called Younger in Eight Weeks, which I just kind of hate that.
01:44:53
Speaker
Because again, it's this whole, it's better if you're younger. which you can't do because everyone's aging every second of the day. And it has this tagline that claims that it can renew your DNA and reverse signs of aging.
01:45:05
Speaker
But weirdly, this book seems to be out of print. I don't think it's maybe her most recent work. Do you agree, Laurel, that she's not as bad as Haver? Oh, 100%. She is very much more leaning toward using exercise for anti-aging. And that actually is true if we consider it to be a loss of functionality, a loss of capacity. Like she's absolutely right that exercise is anti-aging.
01:45:31
Speaker
But I think what we're starting to see from her is that she is starting to shill for skin cream companies and she's starting to lean into supplements and probably overhyping those. And I think it's probably only going to head more in that direction as her follow-up goes. So it's something that I think you should keep your eyes open for if you do follow Dr. Wright and find some of the things that she says helpful, because I think a lot of what she's saying is helpful.
01:45:57
Speaker
yeah Also notice the things that she might be starting to say more and more and more that are potentially misleading, not as helpful, even veering toward harmful because there's a lot of financial incentive for her to start to push things that aren't necessary, that aren't evidence-based, that aren't necessarily even safe, fullest sense of the word, because how much monetary gain she has to benefit from from doing that.
01:46:23
Speaker
Because I want to be fair in the sense of like really being transparent about my take on her, which is that I think of everyone we've covered critically, she's probably in the best shape. Okay, so her most recent book is called Unbreakable.
01:46:38
Speaker
And in it, she details something that she has come up with, which is the musculoskeletal syndrome of menopause. And she has a paper that she wrote about it. So let's look at that paper.
01:46:49
Speaker
The paper is called The Musculoskeletal Syndrome of Menopause. It's by Wright et al. from 2024. and Okay, this is a review paper in which Wright introduces this phrase that she coined to cover the musculoskeletal symptoms that women experience during menopause, which she says are more overlooked than the other symptoms like hot flashes, brain fog, and sleep disturbances.
01:47:11
Speaker
She states that 70% of menopausal women will experience musculoskeletal symptoms, 25% of whom will have severe symptoms, and 40% of whom will have no structural findings.
01:47:22
Speaker
The paper states that these symptoms include but are not limited to musculoskeletal pain, arthralgia, which is joint pain, loss of lean muscle mass, loss of bone density with increased risk of resultant fracture, increased tendon and ligament injury, adhesive capsulitis frozen shoulder, and cartilage matrix fragility with the progression of osteoarthritis.
01:47:48
Speaker
So the claim that this paper is making is that all of these symptoms are from the drop in estrogen that takes place during the menopause transition. And estrogen has its finger in many pies in your body, so to speak.
01:48:01
Speaker
And so, yes, the drop in estrogen could be the reason for having these symptoms. I think the challenge really arises in determining if estrogen loss is the sole cause or if some of these symptoms are simply related to the aging process that all of us are going through.
01:48:17
Speaker
The paper also discusses how estrogen is a powerful anti-inflammatory and how menopause hormone therapy can be used to treat the joint pain symptoms that women have during the menopause transition Jen Gunter agrees with this in her writings as well.
01:48:34
Speaker
It also discusses how in animal models, when they remove estrogen, the animals had a decrease in muscle mass and strength, but then goes on to say that aging is also a cause of sarcopenia, right? Loss of muscle mass, which we also talked about in our Hot Flashes Cold Facts episode.
01:48:50
Speaker
There is evidence that shows that the rate of muscle loss does not increase over the menopause transition time period. And there's also evidence that adding hormones back in does not magically increase muscle mass again. And then they also cite animal models where they have removed the ovaries and shown a decrease in satellite cells, which is a type of stem cell that's located on the muscle fibers and that's activated whenever there's an injury in order to help regenerate the fibers.
01:49:20
Speaker
Estradiol, which is a form of estrogen, has been shown to be involved in the activation and proliferation of these cells. But again, these are animal models, which depending on how picky you are about your evidence, you may not feel that they can be extrapolated to human models. For example, Stacey Sims feels that you can extrapolate but Lauren Colenzo Semple feels that you cannot.
01:49:43
Speaker
But they do use this as and ah another reason for promoting menopause hormone therapy. Yeah. And it also discusses how osteoporosis and osteopenia can be effectively treated with menopause hormone therapy, citing several studies, including one that is a meta-analysis from 2002, that shows the efficacy of menopause hormone therapy on bone mineral density and reducing fractures.
01:50:08
Speaker
But we know that there are a lot of risk of fractures outside of estrogen that play into osteoporosis and osteopenia, including genetics, and and how much bone you banked in your earlier years and general physical activity and nutrition, as well as risk factors like smoking, drinking, excessively low BMI, family history, steroid use, and more.
01:50:32
Speaker
We cited Jen Gunter on this in our Hot Flashes Cold Facts episode as far as what symptoms can be improved with menopause hormone therapy. And she says that menopause hormone therapy for osteoporosis should only be for those at a high risk and should not be the first line of defense against osteoporosis.
01:50:52
Speaker
She also says that you can use it for joint or muscle pain, but that it won't do anything for maintaining muscle mass. The paper summarizes by talking about the use of vitamin D, magnesium, and K2, as well as the importance of resistance training.
01:51:10
Speaker
But in essence, the big push seems to be to encourage clinicians to consider menopause hormone therapy for all of these symptoms. As I'm thinking more about this, what most people take for joint-related pain is they see a physical therapist, right? They get an eval, they get some work to do, some movement to do, and then they might take some painkillers.
01:51:35
Speaker
Right. Right. And this idea that joint pain being the sole reason you would prescribe someone menopause hormone therapy sounds a little bit dubious as there are other things that can be done about stuff like joint pain. Right. So yes that's just a thought that I had.
01:51:50
Speaker
Yeah. So Laurel and I are not medical doctors, if you didn't know. So it's not really appropriate for us to decide if there is sufficient evidence to warrant this new category called musculoskeletal syndrome of menopause.
01:52:04
Speaker
However, going over the evidence, it does not appear that it is perhaps as open and shut as they are claiming. But if this is ultimately going to get more doctors to take women's needs seriously and to consider menopause hormone therapy as an intervention where appropriate,
01:52:22
Speaker
it's not the worst thing in the world. Yeah, I am very skeptical of anyone on the internet pushing for menopause hormone therapy that isn't an OBGYN. She's an orthopedic surgeon.
01:52:38
Speaker
Her pushing menopause hormone therapy in a kind of specific way as a way to treat something that is within her wheelhouse, I guess I would want a second and third and fourth and fifth opinion on that. And I would most certainly go and talk to my OBGYN about it.
01:52:55
Speaker
She has a lot of posts that seem very like pro-hormone therapy, which we see from the menopause in general. And I think a charitable interpretation of that very enthusiastic push for women to seek out hormones is that its blowback, or it's rather a response to what was earlier this idea that hormone therapy was dangerous, like menopause hormone therapy was dangerous because it would automatically cause breast cancer or there was a high risk of breast cancer, which was bordering on a fraudulent claim. If you look at the Women's Health Initiative story and how the data was mined in a particular way to
01:53:40
Speaker
create a massive scare overnight. Women were taken off their hormones and experienced many of them debilitating symptoms as a result. And like a lot of what we're seeing now with this very pro hormone, people are like, of course I'm on hormones, like hormones and hormones and hormones, and let's all be on hormones.
01:53:58
Speaker
I feel like is that example of the pendulum swinging from one side where, oh, hormones are dangerous and they cause breast cancer all the way over to this other side where like everybody should be taking hormones for every little symptom.
01:54:09
Speaker
And I think that the truth is somewhere in the middle. Yeah. And that there is definitely a big negative trade off for saying that hormones are dangerous and cause breast cancer. But there might also be a big negative trade off for pushing too many people to take hormones.
01:54:24
Speaker
The more cautious approach, I think the more responsible and ethical approach as a medical doctor wouldn't be to be so enthusiastic about hormones, which it appears that Vonda just expresses very little caution around whether or not they're appropriate for everyone. Like, I don't think I've ever heard her say anything along the lines of, consult your doctor, this might not be right for you. Maybe I just am not familiar enough with her work. Maybe you've encountered...
01:54:54
Speaker
this cautionary message, but I hear it all the time from Jen Gunter, right? Jen Gunter will frequently put out posts, right? Again, in response to the menopause, no hormones are not for everyone.
01:55:05
Speaker
This is when I would prescribe it as an OBGYN. talk to your doctor. in one of Vonda Wright's posts, she's like, millennials, where are you getting your hormones? And then she's like talking up this company that provides menopause hormone therapy, right? And I'm i'm like, whoa, like that really kind of creeps me out.
01:55:23
Speaker
You know, I'm like, what kickback are you getting for this? What kind of deal do you have with these people? Do you really have our best interests at heart? Like you are unparalleled in your compassion, apparently.
01:55:35
Speaker
So where's the concern for our safety? Yeah. Where's the nuance? Right. I'm not seeing it. And that strikes me as somewhat reckless as a doctor. Yeah.
01:55:47
Speaker
I think the reality is if you go to your doctor and you say, I should be on menopause hormone therapy, they're going to look at you as a whole person and determine whether or not that's true. so Yeah.
01:55:58
Speaker
But there are these companies now, like Alloy is one, where you can just go online and it's that same thing where it's some random doctor that you tell them your symptoms...
01:56:09
Speaker
And they ask probably some basic questions that would rule you out. And then you can get it through them. You don't have to go through your primary care doctor who knows you and your medical history much better.
01:56:19
Speaker
Who you would then follow up with about how it's working and other symptoms you might be having and who might know your blood tests and your blood work. It's kind of like what's happened with the GLP-1s where first you had to like go to your doctor for it. And now you can just like get it online.
01:56:32
Speaker
They're pushing GLP-1 for people who don't qualify. And- and getting kickback for enrolling people or selling. And it strikes me as like menopause hormone therapy is kind of either in that same direction or headed in that same direction. And it's just very like, dude, you're telling people to put hormones in their body.
01:56:52
Speaker
That's a significant piece of advice there. yeah And I feel like there's just a lot of dollar signs in people's eyes right now. And it doesn't seem entirely right to me. yeah Let's talk about her face.
01:57:08
Speaker
but No, we don't mean counting her wrinkles, though that is going to come up in a bit. FACE, F-A-C-E is the acronym she uses for the four things we need to work on for our bodies. And It's like facing something about facing longevity or facing your future or something like that is yeah the origin of that acronym.
01:57:28
Speaker
So this is from an interview with Mark Hyman.
01:57:34
Speaker
Yeah. So she's got an Instagram post where she was apparently interviewed on his podcast, here's where I want to flag something. First of all, Mark Hyman is deeply problematic. And when I see Vonda associating with Mark Hyman, I'm immediately less trusting of her.
01:57:51
Speaker
I think it's really important to watch for how someone you're following online starts to associate with other professionals in their sphere and ask yourself,
01:58:05
Speaker
Why von der Reit stands to benefit from associating with Mark Hyman, what mutually beneficial purposes that serve? So here's a bit about Mark Hyman, if you're not aware. He is, quote, pro-vaccine safety, which is a dog whistle term for basically casting doubt on the safety of vaccines.
01:58:24
Speaker
He suggests that vaccines cause autism. god In addition to his very irresponsible stance on vaccines, he will promote restrictive dieting.
01:58:35
Speaker
He will claim that saturated fats don't cause heart disease, which flies in the face of a whole shit ton of evidence. He routinely undermines trust in evidence-based medicine, suggesting that doctors are fed lies in medical school.
01:58:51
Speaker
He takes a, quote, functional medicine approach and endorses things like ozone therapy and heavy metal detoxification. Oh, boy. His functional medicine approach often includes extensive lab tests, supplement regimens, and detox programs. He frames a lot of his ideas as, quote, nuanced.
01:59:08
Speaker
But really, they're just totally lacking in evidence. He does what a lot of grifters do, which is he often rejects scientific consensus and and instead espouses ideas that live in very gray areas scientifically. So when you see someone like Vonda Wright go on Mark Hyman's podcast, for me at least, that raises my hackles.
01:59:29
Speaker
It's likely a mutually beneficial audience capture opportunity where Now Mark Hyman is going to get Vonda's audience and Vonda is going to get some of Mark Hyman's audience. And why would they think that these two audiences would be attractive to each other? Right. Obviously, they understand that they're working with the same kind of people. They're selling a lot of the same kind of ideas.
01:59:51
Speaker
Don't get me wrong. I think Vonda's leagues, and leagues better than Mark Hyman at this point. But... Each lends the other a kind of borrowed credibility. They create an illusion of consensus. And by doing this, they expand their reach, which in the attention economy is just another way of saying like they improve their earning potential.
02:00:09
Speaker
So these alliances aren't about... truth or having an interesting discussion to get to the bottom of things as much as they're about amplification and mutual gain. I think it's really important to see who people are associating with. So Peter Atiyah, for example, had a couple of grifters on his platform, people like Gabrielle Lyon and Mike Boyle, both of whom have very questionable messages around exercise and nutrition.
02:00:41
Speaker
Whereas I thought Peter Atiyah for the most part, except for a couple of his weird mechanistic theater type rabbit holes and some of his like self-experimentation and his obsession with self-optimization. I have his book and I've read parts of it him. like A lot of what he's suggesting is pretty sound advice, kind of like what we're saying about Vonda. But now he's platforming Mike Boyle. He's platforming Gabrielle Lyon.
02:01:07
Speaker
He's recently platformed someone like Rhonda Patrick, who is another person who has some very questionable ideas and spreads a lot of misinformation around exercise and health. So, you know, just keep an eye on who they're consorting with.
02:01:25
Speaker
Yeah. So yeah, let's take a look at her face. So face, let's break it down. F stands for flexibility and joint mobility. She says we need to stretch tendons and ligaments and muscles daily so that we don't become shuffling old people. And we can use Pilates and yoga for this.
02:01:43
Speaker
A stands for aerobic. She prescribes what's called base training and heart rate sprinting. C stands for carry a load, which is just talking about lifting weights. And E stands for equilibrium and foot speed. So she teaches people how to balance. She has recently started to add foot speed. She says, because we are, as we age, we're losing our type two fast twitch muscle fibers.
02:02:08
Speaker
and Okay. So let's break this down. All right. Let's start with flexibility and mobility. So do we really need to stretch our tendons and ligaments and muscles on a daily basis? We put this into consensus. Let's see what consensus says. So flexibility and range of motion slash regular stretching three to five times per week significantly improves flexibility and range motion. Okay.
02:02:30
Speaker
Daily stretching is not required. for most people to achieve these benefits. Okay, muscle and tendon properties. Most studies show that stretching protocols of three to eight weeks, even when performed daily, do not significantly change the structural properties of muscles or tendons.
02:02:47
Speaker
Improvements in flexibility are mainly due to increased stretch tolerance, right? It's a sensory adaptation. So stretching three times per week is more effective than once per week. No surprise there. Daily stretching does not show major additional benefits over three to five times per week for most healthy adults.
02:03:04
Speaker
Long-term benefits for special populations. So in older adults or those unable to exercise, daily stretching may improve blood flow and vascular function. It's a way of moving, right?
02:03:16
Speaker
For injury prevention and rehabilitation, Evidence is limited and mixed. The one thing that we would really want to kind of back up and do a thorough job of before even getting into the details of all of this is like, what do we mean by stretching?
02:03:31
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, which we should probably just do an entire series about. Yes. Stretching. It's a very complicated. So many things. And it's the research around it is difficult because the protocols for all these different studies are so different.
02:03:43
Speaker
that it's very hard to then do like a meta-analysis because the comparison is almost impossible. yeah I want to say, because she's claiming that the reason people shuffle is because they've lost flexibility, my experience working with older people is that they shuffle because they're afraid of falling.
02:04:00
Speaker
right They don't want to take big step because a big step feels risky. It's much more time in that single leg part of your walking. So they shuffle because it feels more stable because their feet are staying on the floor.
02:04:12
Speaker
But as soon as you give them something to hold onto, if you give them a railing and say, okay, walk along, but you're going to hold this railing, they'll take bigger steps. yep And it's not like you you don't need a ton of range of motion for walking anyway. yeah So I think attaching it to the reason why people shuffle is a bit of a stretch.
02:04:29
Speaker
Yeah, it doesn't seem to make sense to me that it would be a range of motion limitation, like you said. Like definitely more of a confidence thing and maybe also more of a power deficiency, right? Yeah, right. Exactly. Okay.
02:04:41
Speaker
A for aerobic. All right. So we're on F-A for aerobic. Base training is another term for zone two. So she calls it base training. And in the running community, slow running is usually called base training.
02:04:55
Speaker
You build your aerobic base. yeah So it's just below your first aerobic threshold, LT1, as a way to improve that threshold. So there's been more research coming out on zone two and the purpose it serves. Basically, all intensities above zone two can also improve your aerobic threshold. In fact, more efficiently than zone two, but zone two I think the benefit of zone two or any type of, the more accurate term is moderate intensity cardio is that it is very easy to recover from so you can accumulate more volume.
02:05:29
Speaker
It's a good place probably for beginners to start because the forces are often lower as experienced by the body when engaging in it. Okay, so then her definition of sprint training,
02:05:42
Speaker
includes things like rowing and climbing. That is very puzzling. She's just interested in getting your heart rate up. She's not saying you have to do that with actual sprinting.
02:05:53
Speaker
I don't know why we choose the word sprinting then because sprinting is actually pretty, pretty well-defined in the literature. So I think maybe what she should say is just higher intensity cardio. Yeah, definitely.
02:06:04
Speaker
Okay. I just, I don't know that this is the most accessible way to encourage people to engage. in aerobic activity. Like, why are you saying sprinting when it's not actually sprinting?
02:06:16
Speaker
You know, what are you trying to elicit? Well, so does Stacey Sims, right? Stacey Sims does the same thing. So yeah it does seem like there's a little bit of Stacey Sims influence going on here. If we're truly sprinting, it's something that you should probably work up to yeah within the mode that you're going to do it. So if you want to do be a sprinting rower, you're going to start at slower speeds and build up your volume over time. And eventually you start to be able to sprint as a rower. I don't see why we can't just say do a combination of moderate and high intensity rower.
02:06:45
Speaker
cardiovascular exercise as promoted by the CDC and just leave it at that. Yeah. It's not be so confusing and restrictive with our language. Yeah. Okay. So C, F-A-C is for carry a load. This is her saying that we need to lift heavy shit.
02:07:01
Speaker
Or she does say, start with body weight if you're a beginner. And she talks about this a lot. She talks about it in other posts as well. And sometimes she says we need to lift heavy in order to get as strong as possible, which is true.
02:07:14
Speaker
But sometimes she also says we need it for bone density, which research is now showing is not true, that you can do moderate and even possibly lightweights and still impact bone. I'm guessing that she's learned this from the Lift More protocol, right? I mean, that's our sense.
02:07:29
Speaker
And then the last one, E, equilibrium and foot speed. She does emphasize that we need to work on balance. Great. In other social posts, she shows standing on one leg for balance. Now, there is a systematic review from 2022 that shows single leg training can improve both static and dynamic balance, but it's looking at healthy adults without any musculoskeletal injuries or diseases that might impair balance control.
02:07:59
Speaker
So, Laurel, what this is telling me is I think we also need to do an episode about what are the most effective ways to improve different types of balance. That's great. So the one thing I'll say is that static balance is a component of fall risk reduction.
02:08:15
Speaker
It's something that is measured, but usually alongside other capacities slash things that can be measured to predict fall risk. it It's definitely one possible piece of the puzzle, but it's, again, just one piece.
02:08:27
Speaker
Yeah. And then she's now talking about foot speed as well. And it's not her way of talking about power exclusively, but she's using foot speed as a skill that people have lost, right? And she demonstrates in another post how she trains people to start tapping just their toes and then tapping just their heels and then alternating tapping toes and heels in order to get that faster foot speed, which I think if you've got somebody who's sedentary or who really can't start training power in ways that require more physical strength, This is a decent place to start. I don't have any problem with this.
02:09:00
Speaker
Get people to move their feet faster. I see that as a problem for seniors all the time. Well, I'm going to kind of play devil's advocate a little bit, which is that I've seen these videos that she's posted on her grid where people are sitting in a chair huh and they're like moving their feet up and down.
02:09:19
Speaker
I don't know what that's preparing their feet to be quick at other than to be quick while sitting in a chair. And do we need our feet to be quick while sitting in a chair? No, but my point is, and I don't know that she's saying this, but like my point would be, let's say I started working with someone and they're really, really physically deconditioned to the point that standing up is something they can't even do for very long. I would start here with them.
02:09:39
Speaker
I mean, if they can't stand up Sure, yeah. I'm just saying like it's not the worst thing in the world. But I i feel like there is and oversimplifying almost of what foot speed even means, which is kind of an oversimplifying a little bit of what fall risk prevention means when she talks about static balance is like trying to narrow it down into this like one thing you can tell people is very good for marketing and brand building, but it's not actually giving people a really solid understanding of how they can actually improve their foot speed and how they can actually improve their balance. Sure. It's little bit like of this hang up with protocols.
02:10:14
Speaker
Well, you're missing the forest for the trees. The other thing I want to say about that is that I don't know that there's any research that shows working on your foot tapping speed reduces your fall risk. Which kind of leads me in my next question is, what is she basing this recommendation off of?
02:10:31
Speaker
Yes, we know that power is an important capacity to maintain for fall risk prevention. Right. But Foot speed, how do we observe and measure foot speed as it relates specifically to fall risk prevention? And I doubt that there has been a study where people are sitting in a chair and moving their feet as fast as possible.
02:10:52
Speaker
And the other thing is when I'm working with patients who have who are a falls risk, who have fallen, and we're working on that foot speed, the way that I have them do it is they'll stand in front of me and have their hands outstretched and I'm holding their hands or their forearms.
02:11:07
Speaker
I'm facing them. And I have them just shift their weight forward until they feel like they're going to lose their balance and then take a step. That's very functional. That makes a lot of sense to me. Yeah. And then my hands are there just as an in case and then we do it again and then we do it again and we do it again and they do it with the other foot. Then we do it sideways. Then we do it backwards. Right.
02:11:24
Speaker
yeah I guess my feeling is like her heart's in the right place, but the advice maybe isn't the right advice. I think what happens is that she goes on these talk shows where people are sitting and she is being videoed for YouTube and she needs an example. And this is the one she uses because it's the one that's going to get attention, right?
02:11:41
Speaker
The other thing too is she's not talking about fall risk prevention. She's talking about balance. These are different things too, right? So anyway, I think it's very gimmicky. And I think that the gimmicky part of what she's doing really helps her brand, but I think it undermines her education Her ability to educate people yeah in a sound way, which we see a lot. We see an undermining of people's education in order to make something really simple and work for social media.
02:12:09
Speaker
Right. And unfortunately, sometimes we have to do that too. Right, Sarah? That's kind of a balance that you have to walk as communicator online. Right. So I don't want to come down too hard on it, but I also feel like there is a line that can be crossed. And I feel like this foot speed test might kind of cross it. You know what saying? Okay, so Vonda went on the Mel Robbins podcast. And so we did a whole episode on Stacey Sims and one of her interviews on the Mel Robbins podcast. And I just think it's worth noting if you did listen to our Make Stacey Sims Make Sense episode, you heard a little bit about Mel Robbins as well as an interviewer. And then I listened to Vonda write
02:12:47
Speaker
her interview on Mel Robbins, two times speed, didn't get all the way to the end, but here's what I'm going to say. So number one, Bonder Wright is a far superior science communicator than Stacey Sims.
02:12:59
Speaker
She is good at making complex subjects easy to understand. She puts it into simple words that people can understand. I do get her passion coming through. It doesn't sound like she's falling into mechanistic theater and trying to wow us with her science-y jargon. She's connecting on things that people practically care about.
02:13:20
Speaker
She emphasizes exercise almost exclusively so far in the interview and calls it anti-aging. And I actually think that that's a pretty refreshing reframe of anti-aging.
02:13:31
Speaker
If we're going to talk about anti-aging, let's lean into the exercise aspect of that. I'm actually totally on board with that idea. I think it's great. And I think it's great to call it anti-aging because you're going to get people be like, ooh, anti-aging. And then they're hearing about how they should be exercising. like That's fantastic.
02:13:48
Speaker
The only part of this interview where my hackles went up is when she started talking about the sprints. You know, she started talking about here's what you should do for aerobic activity. And she said walk. And she kind of defined it first anecdotally for what she does, which she said she walks at a ah four mile an hour pace on the treadmill at a four to five incline, which is actually really hoofing it.
02:14:12
Speaker
up a pretty good incline. Try to walk four miles an hour on a treadmill. That's walking a mile in 15 minutes. And then she's going on a four to five incline. So, okay, that's what she does. i was like, that's definitely zone two walking.
02:14:25
Speaker
Later in the episode, she defines zone two walking as you're not out of breath, but you wouldn't be able to solve the world's problems in a conversation with a friend. Like you'd have to focus a little bit more than that.
02:14:37
Speaker
Yeah. okay, I'm glad that she's at least trying to define the effort that you should should be targeting with walking. She then says that the other end of that, sprinting, is valuable. And again, her definition of sprints is at the end of your walk, run as fast as you can.
02:14:57
Speaker
Oh, wow. Really, as an orthopedic surgeon, suggesting people go from their walk to then just running as fast as they can, i am very allergic to any type of scaremongering around exercise. But there are a couple of types of exercise where, you know, sprinting is one of those things where I think you really...
02:15:17
Speaker
You don't want to go 10 out of 10 running if you don't have a lot of running under your belt, right? Yeah. Okay. So the thing that she then says is that the stuff in the middle, the stuff between zone two and sprinting is what you should avoid. And she defines that as being orange theory and other type of boot camp-like experiences, which I think is a form of miseducation.
02:15:40
Speaker
I think that Manda Wright knows more about exercise intensity to understand that zone three is not orange theory. Zone three is literally just a heart rate closer to your max than zone two. She's saying that orange theory is injurious, that she sees a lot of people in her office who've done too much orange theory, that you're not going to get the type of cardiorespiratory adaptations that you would get from zone two walking and sprinting.
02:16:10
Speaker
I think what's lost here is that, yeah, cardio with weights is probably not your best bet if you're trying to maximize the benefits of cardiorespiratory exercise. Like, a better bet would be to engage in cyclical cardio, right? To do something like biking.
02:16:24
Speaker
Right. rowing, swimming, running, walking, right? But to demonize orange theory, to say stuff like orange theory, Barry's boot camp, whatever is dangerous, is bullshit. She has no evidence to support that. Would love to see your papers, Dr. Wright.
02:16:44
Speaker
And then to turn around and advise that people sprint at the end of their walk, You're full of shit. Because to tell people that it's safe to sprint after their walk, and with no warning of maybe you should have started jogging slowly before you, like, that's fucking injurious, Dr. Wright.
02:17:02
Speaker
So this idea that you can't see positive cardiorespiratory adaptations from cardio with weights is bullshit. You absolutely can't. It's just got of comes with a high fatigue cost. And it's going to be less accessible for most folks. So I think that she's being overly restrictive. She's espousing non-evidence-based claims. She's scaremongering, but at the same time, giving really irresponsible exercise prescription.
02:17:24
Speaker
So I'm confused. It's a mix. yeah All right, well, let's get into some of the more dubious social media content that she's put out. I'm not going to lie. Yes, her messaging is a bit confusing, and a bit mixed.
02:17:36
Speaker
And she may be pushing this idea of the musculoskeletal syndrome of menopause, where the evidence may or may not be completely there. But she is talking about resistance training, and she is talking about picking up barbells and she is talking about exercise. I mean, her prescription again is a bit weird, but I wasn't a total Vonda Wright hater.
02:17:58
Speaker
No. Because I was like, she's doing something, right? She's showing herself doing barbell back squats and box jumps. She's trying, it seems, to put out at least some messaging about women, like really serious messaging about women need to do much more exercise.
02:18:14
Speaker
Can I also add that she looks like she actually trains. Yes. This is a person. She legitimately looks like she knows her way around a barbell, knows her way around plyometrics, is strong and actually trains.
02:18:27
Speaker
As opposed to Mary Claire Haver, who looks like once a week she turns on the camera and picks up a hex bar. Yeah. i read And puts on her weighted vest and does all her exercises. Right. Like yeah you can tell, you can see that Mary Claire Haver has either not been strength training until very recently or just very infrequently trained.
02:18:47
Speaker
Trains, maybe just for the camera. So I wasn't feeling terrible about Vonda Wright. I knew there were some problems, but I was like, she's not as bad as everybody else. And then this happened.
02:18:59
Speaker
This is a post where, when I sent this to Sarah very late at night, did a remix of it. I'm not going to post that remix, but basically. This is a post where we see Vonda Wright examining her face close up and pointing out her wrinkles, or rather the lack of wrinkles that she has.
02:19:16
Speaker
And she says she is obsessed with making sure she is feeding her skin with something called M4 Estriol face cream from a company called Alloy. And in the video, she points out what she calls a sentinel wrinkle that she follows to make sure she is doing everything me.
02:19:33
Speaker
This made me so mad. And this is the caption. I use M4 and partner with Alloy, who were the first to create skin care with Estriol, a prescription strength ingredient that addresses the hormone-related changes our skin goes through in midlife. And the results are incredible.
02:19:53
Speaker
In just 12 weeks, Women using M4 saw 23% increase in under eye hydration. How do you even fucking measure that? What does that mean? ah Up to 86% boost in skin elasticity and bounce.
02:20:08
Speaker
And they just pinch their cheek and pull on it a little bit. Bounces it. like Ooh, it's bouncy. Yeah. Bouncier. 86%. 86% bouncier. Not 85%. Up to 25% reduction in wrinkles under the eyes. Okay. And 68% improvement in overall skin health, which they were able to diagnose themselves.
02:20:28
Speaker
These are real clinically proven results. Wait, they're clinically proven. Clinically proven. I looked. Believe me. So, I mean, I guess this was a study. must be. I couldn't find it. Clinically proven. I wonder who the sponsor of the study was. Hmm.
02:20:41
Speaker
And right now, Alloy is offering $30 off the M4 bundle. That's the original M4 face cream paired with the newly launched M4 eye cream.
02:20:53
Speaker
Together, they hydrate, firm, and restore your skin inside and out. Inside and out. Inside and all the layers. If you're ready to transform your skin, check the link in my bio.
02:21:07
Speaker
I recommend Alloy to my patients. I promise you won't forget it. Hey, how much does the package cost? Oh, that's such a good question. Yeah. Please hold. Let me find that out. Let's pause find Do you want to talk about the comment section while I find that out?
02:21:19
Speaker
Yes. Okay. So... This post got 3,200 likes, a bunch of comments. And at the top, someone wrote, Dr. Wright, I take your advice very seriously. This feels like an ad.
02:21:34
Speaker
Are you receiving any compensation from endorsing this product? yeah You think? Someone else comes to her off defense. And writes, why can't she? She gives us free info.
02:21:46
Speaker
Can she not earn? And then the original commenter writes, yes, transparency. There's a loss of credibility when genuine medical expertise and advice crosses over into elevating one brand alloy among followers.
02:22:00
Speaker
Looking back, I see her image in an alloy review by health hackers on YouTube from July 2024. I'm now confused about her primary motive. Now, to Dr. Wright's credit, she has not deleted this comment.
02:22:15
Speaker
yeah Unlike Mary Claire Haver, which would have immediately deleted it. Okay? So Dr. Wright writes, it is the first line in the caption, I am a user and a partner. So she's confirming, yes, I'm profiting from this ad, basically, that I'm them pushing for Alloy.
02:22:31
Speaker
And then she writes to the person who is like, can she not earn? She writes, well, there is that. Thank you for realizing that I give thousands of hours of free time to everyone on the Internet.
02:22:43
Speaker
The time is not free. aye have to work for a living like everyone else and feed my family. oh boy. Thank you for understanding that, as I would rather charge companies than charge the people that I serve.
02:22:57
Speaker
Oh, boy. All right. Well, ah right. yeah So she's not charging us. She's charging this company. Right. Right. I'm serving you with this product. and not charging you.
02:23:09
Speaker
Since we're talking about not charging, let's talk about how much that product costs, which I just looked up. So the regular M4 face cream is $150.
02:23:18
Speaker
And the special M4 eye cream is $90. These bottles don't look especially big, just as a heads up. But you can get $30 Of all of that.
02:23:31
Speaker
Yeah. and So it's pricey. So someone else in her comments, right? You don't need to explain yourself, Dr. Right. All the advice that you and Dr. Haver share has changed my menopause life.
02:23:41
Speaker
I'm so grateful that I found you both online as I thought I was going mad. If this face cream works for you, that's amazing. And thank you for sharing. And if you're earning money, so be it.
02:23:52
Speaker
May you earn plenty for all the good that you do. Yeah. And as an aside, when I looked up Alloy, the first link that came up was The Paws Life. So Mary Claire Haver also sells this product, of course. Yeah.
02:24:06
Speaker
Yeah. I just want to say something about this. I need to feed my family and I need learn too. Because I'm sure as an orthopedic surgeon, she's not making any money. Right. It's not that she has six books to sell and then we're going to go into all the other...
02:24:18
Speaker
income streams that she has yeah flowing toward her bank account. Her online presence, no, she's not paid a dollar amount for every reel she posts. That's not how internet marketing works.
02:24:32
Speaker
Okay. The way internet marketing works is that you give them something for free so that they give you something in return. is She's acting as if all of the posts that she makes on Instagram are completely altruistic, that she doesn't stand to gain anything from them, that there's no marketing.
02:24:48
Speaker
You know, it's so clear that she is trying to pull the wool over these people's eyes. She's actually not being completely transparent in this moment. She knows exactly what she's doing. For her to suggest that she should be applauded for putting forth this information for free. It's such a misrepresentation of what she's doing that I cannot take her seriously. Anyway, before I gouge my eyes out, let's see what research there actually is out there on using yeah estriol specifically for your face. So there's plenty of research on using topical estrogen creams like Premarin and others for helping with GSM, your genitourinary symptoms of menopause, meaning you're applying it topically
02:25:31
Speaker
to the labia and possibly internally, and that it's actually safe and effective. What's out there about using it on your face? Because one of the things that I see on social media are a lot of anecdotal stories of women taking their topical vaginal hormone cream and mixing it with their face cream.
02:25:47
Speaker
And then I just wrote, oh, good Lord, Calgon, take me away because I cannot. So I found a couple of studies. The first one is called Managing Menopausal Skin Changes, a Narrative Review of Skin Quality Changes, Their Aesthetic Impact, and the Actual Role of Hormone Replacement Therapy in Improvement by Viscomi et al. from 2024.
02:26:10
Speaker
And here's what it summarized. Most studies reported positive associations between HRT and improvements in menopausal skin aging, but findings were sometimes inconsistent.
02:26:21
Speaker
Despite decades of research, clinical guidelines do not support HRT use solely for estrogen deficient skin due to a lack of robust clinical trials on skin-specific therapy. So there's no guidelines for this.
02:26:36
Speaker
Dr. Jen Gunter has said as much many times. Yeah. Yeah. And then the other one that I found is called topical estrogen for skin aging, a systematic review of safety and efficacy by Farkas et al from 2025.
02:26:48
Speaker
And I'm just going to read what it says in the results because I thought this was pretty good. The off-label application of prescription vaginal estrogen to facial skin for, quote, anti-aging benefits is a growing trend on social media.
02:27:02
Speaker
Patients should be cautioned that this expands overall estrogen exposure and no trials evaluated endometrial safety with combined facial and vaginal use, raising the potential risk of hyperplasia, which is abnormal cell growth and which then is possibly cancer precursor,
02:27:21
Speaker
if not paired with a progestogen. Evidence is constrained by small sample sizes, short durations, variable dosing, and heterogeneous study designs with inconsistent outcome and safety measures.
02:27:35
Speaker
This is just basically saying it's the wild, wild west. Yep. Many trials relied on compounded, non-FDA-approved formulations, lacking regulatory oversight and several disclosed industry conflicts.
02:27:46
Speaker
Given the significant heterogeneity across studies, confident conclusions about efficacy cannot yet be drawn and meta-analysis is not feasible. Larger control trials are needed to assess long-term safety, particularly endometrial risk in women with an intact uterus, not on a progestogen.
02:28:06
Speaker
So before you start whacking estrogen on your face, it seems like we need a lot more studies on this matter. Also, Fonda Wright, this makes me not like you very much because as soon as anybody in this menoposse starts talking about wrinkles or cellulite, I'm like, this is why we consider you pseudo feminists.
02:28:24
Speaker
This is not a real, this is not a problem. Wrinkles are not a problem to be solved. To your point about this being the wild, wild west, there's so much more testing that needs to go on. yeah There's so much more exposure if you're putting it on your face and on your vagina. For a medical doctor to be promoting this is something she uses. She wants all her patients on it.
02:28:44
Speaker
I think it's really, really irresponsible. I think that is the issue, right? which And that is also why it's pseudofeminist. Yeah. Okay. Which is you're trying to empower women. That's one of the pillars of your brand, right? To stand up for and empower women in the menopause transition.
02:29:00
Speaker
But at the same time, you're wantonly promoting this product that is akin to basically selling some untested substance that could potentially cause harm.
02:29:14
Speaker
And you're doing it to reduce wrinkles when there are evidence-based creams for reducing wrinkles, right? For improving skin quality. This is not one of them, not yet at least.
02:29:25
Speaker
And That is, I think, why ultimately it's pseudo-feminist is that it is preying on women's insecurities, to your point, right? Using their insecurities to then actually sell them something that's potentially harmful.
02:29:37
Speaker
Yeah. I don't like it. No, I hate it. It fucking boils my blood. So another company that she has partnered with, apart from Alloy, is MindBodyGreen.
02:29:48
Speaker
And they have a special creatine plus taurine blend that she is promoting. So I screenshotted several stories from her about this product because there was so much text on screen, I wanted to get it.
02:30:00
Speaker
And there's one ah with the on-screen text of, this is a quote, five things most doctors won't tell you about creatine. I mean, what doctor is talking anyway?
02:30:11
Speaker
Number one, you will recover faster after workouts, asterisk. Number two, you'll see lean muscle definition without looking bulky, asterisk. And then I was just like, oh, he can fuck right off.
02:30:22
Speaker
right Number three, it is essential for your brain health, asterisk. Number four, it can help support healthy blood pressure, asterisk. Number five, paired with taurine, it will increase your strength in just two weeks, asterisk.
02:30:34
Speaker
So we know about the already, Yeah, about them. We know about the asterisks. we've also talked about creatine with Marie Claire Haver, so we don't really need to go into the creatine part here. So I do want to talk about taurine. Basically, taurine is a non-proteinogenic amino acid, meaning it does not build protein. It's an amino acid, but it's not one of the building blocks of protein.
02:30:52
Speaker
that we all make naturally within our own bodies. And it's also found in meat, seafood, and dairy. And it appears that most studies on taurine's effects are either showing really modest effects, meaning like not much, or they're saying more studies are needed.
02:31:09
Speaker
And then additionally, if you are on blood pressure medication or some kind of heart medication, or if you've got an issue with your kidneys, there are serious interaction risks. So the sense I got overall from touring is that has not been sufficiently studied in humans specifically and that a lot more studies are needed.
02:31:26
Speaker
Yeah. Another category posts that she does is the come hang out with me, where she invites the viewer to join her for seminars and retreats. We wanted to highlight one in particular, as it's also in this aspirational category, and that is her girl's trip to Canyon Ranch.
02:31:41
Speaker
Oof. Do you know about Canyon Ranch? No. me about it. It fancy as fuck. Oh, yeah. Of course. It is high end. Yeah. If you're not familiar with it, Canyon Ranch is a very, very fancy retreat spa wellness place in Arizona. Sounds like a lot of fun to me.
02:31:57
Speaker
yeah In the post, she talks about how she's never been on a girl's trip before, but that you can join her in November or January and have spa days and learn how to become unbreakable. Okay. If you're going to join her for either of these trips, it's going to set you back about $6,000 for three nights.
02:32:15
Speaker
Yeah. Like all my girl trips, $6,000 for three nights. Just to go to Arizona. Yeah, exactly. And that's before airfare. So obviously your average person cannot afford this trip.
02:32:28
Speaker
Yeah. And this is another one of these aspirational experiences where you might say, well, I can't afford to go on the strip, but I can buy her book and use the product she tells me to use. And then I'm doing good things for myself.
02:32:40
Speaker
She provides ways for people to give her money at all different levels, right? So maybe you're ah buying a book for 30 bucks, or maybe you're getting the cream on your face for 200 bucks, or maybe you're going to Kenya Ranch for $6,000, right? We're putting in options for everybody.
02:32:57
Speaker
All right. ah So now let's look at what she's saying on social media about things like bone density, heavy lifting, grip strength, and the likelihood of dying when you break a hip. So there's one post where she's stating that estrogen, lifting heavy and jumping can change your bone density in six months.
02:33:17
Speaker
So we already talked about the estrogen part, and it appears she's still working, like we said, from the Lift More model, that heavy lifting and jumping are the best ways to build bone, where we know now that that's not entirely true. And if you haven't already, you should go listen to our episode, Does It Have to Be Heavy?, to hear a lot more about this. So this claim is a bit questionable.
02:33:37
Speaker
It's not... wrong, wrong, but it's not fully right. And the other thing is six months is a bit on the early side for bone changes. You're more likely to see it after eight to nine months.
02:33:49
Speaker
Yeah. And that's just the initial start of the changes, right? Yes. The longer you do it, the better off you're going to be. Exactly. And then a carousel post. In a carousel post of hers, she repeats a claim we hear a lot from her, which is,
02:34:04
Speaker
that an older woman who breaks her hip has a 30% chance of dying within one year. We put this question a number of ways into consensus, and it turns out that 30% is probably on the top end of the percentage of people who would die in a year. It's probably somewhere closer to between 15% and 30%. And if it's someone who does have 30% chance of dying within the year, these are probably the frailest of the frail that we're talking about. So she's kind of exaggerating in the sense that she's not giving the range and then she's not clarifying that 30% would be like extremely frail people.
02:34:42
Speaker
exactly But yeah, risk increases beyond 30% with age and comorbidity as well. I would say 30% up percentage risk is the frailest people.
02:34:53
Speaker
Okay. So if you have a 30% and up risk of dying within the year after ah hip fracture, it means that you're in this category of frail. You're someone who might be completely sedentary or even bedridden. You're somebody who has a lot of comorbidities. You're older. right This is not your 45-year-old person who's looking at menopause or perimenopause and wanting to do something about it, right? Those people are not breaking a hip and dying within the year.
02:35:18
Speaker
Yeah. and And I think that obviously she chose 30% because it has this like wow kind of scare factor to it. yeah And on one hand, you could say like, well, she's just trying to raise awareness and get people actually pay attention and think about this.
02:35:32
Speaker
But on the other hand, she's also just creating a lot of anxiety and fear too, right? These types of people like the menopause will frequently lean into this type of fear-mongering rhetorical strategy because of negativity bias and the fact that we're going we're much more likely to start listening to them.
02:35:53
Speaker
Right. Totally.
Bone Density Exercises Discussion
02:35:55
Speaker
Okay. So then there's this other post, and I didn't hate this, but I think Laurel maybe does hate this. It's this idea of starting to introduce jumping and landing for impact for bone density. So not like landing...
02:36:08
Speaker
softly the way you typically would after a jump, but landing a little bit stiffly. And I just thought it was an interesting way to, if you're someone who is not yet ready to do a full-on like drop landing from a step, she shows you like standing on a step stool,
02:36:23
Speaker
and then you're facing forwards like you're going to keep walking up the steps but then you drop one just one leg back so you keep one foot on the step and you drop one leg back and you land kind of stiffly on one leg and then you step back up again and then you land kind of stiffly on the other leg and i have to say to be honest i don't i didn't hate it i didn't hate it okay so i want to say something about this and this might be a little bit of a tangent so I don't actually see much value in having people do stiff landings when they could just be resistance training, especially when you're giving this advice to a lay public.
02:37:00
Speaker
of which you know nothing about on an individual level. Like, I don't think that this is great advice. Now, like the other thing I'll say is that there are ways to start jumping that are going to give you quicker feet.
02:37:13
Speaker
They're going to give you more power. They're going to potentially elevate your aerobic capacity and they're going to prepare you to be able to handle higher intensity, higher impact stuff like what she's describing. This is not where I would start with people.
02:37:26
Speaker
Right. I would start with skipping soft toe landings, maybe some slow jogging drops, heel drops. Right. I would start with something where they're being asked to have some reactivity with the ground. Drop landings are not reactive landings.
02:37:40
Speaker
Laurel, you know what I think this means? Yeah. What we have to do an episode on what kind of impact, what kind of jumping should you be doing? like We have done one called plyometrics, more bang for your bones. I know, but we need to update.
02:37:53
Speaker
and we talk Yeah, we do. We talk about the difference between plyometric exercise and impact training and how this, which she's describing here, having people do is is impact training without plyometric building, right? So plyometric capacity is like really training your muscle tendon unit to be more elastic and responsive and to generate and output more power.
02:38:16
Speaker
What's a good example? Like if you want somebody to be able to take one exercise and then have transfer to multiple different areas of their life, yeah this isn't it.
02:38:30
Speaker
no This isn't the exercise, right? We can have one exercise like pogos or skipping or jumping rope. and have it benefit us across multiple different ah expressions of force, okay?
02:38:46
Speaker
This doesn't actually improve our our ability to produce force. She's not claiming that's what it's doing. No, but here's the thing. Other ways of moving that improve your ability to produce force also cause your bones to experience impact. This is what I'm saying.
02:39:00
Speaker
Is this the best use of time? Because what if you have osteoporosis, osteopenia, and you're starting with this? Like people who sign up for our course, We're like, here's PDF and here's also live classes in which we're going to give you this menu of things to begin with. And here's why you might choose this and not this and this and not this. And then here's how you know you're ready to move on to this, right?
02:39:22
Speaker
There's none of that happening here. It's like, do this stiff-legged landing on one foot off a step. It's like, I can think of a ton of other pieces of advice that would be more valuable. Like maybe start by skipping and then learn to jump rope and then build up from there. And i know that that's not going to have your bones experiencing as much impact.
02:39:39
Speaker
right off the bat, but that might actually be a good thing. Should we do the next one? Okay.
Debate on Weighted Vests
02:39:45
Speaker
And then in another Instagram post, she's being interviewed and she's asked if wearing a weighted vest around the house will help build bone. And she says, no, sorry, Mary Claire Haver.
02:39:54
Speaker
Though super technically, according to one study, which is just one data point, we'd want a lot more than that. If you wear for eight to 10 hours, it might build your bones, which God bless you if you're going to do that for however many days or weeks people had to do that. Jesus.
02:40:08
Speaker
She states that what it is doing is it's increasing your workload or your work capacity in a kind of like two for one where you're doing chores and then you're also happening to have to overcome more resistance right in the process. Right.
02:40:23
Speaker
All right, so the last one I wanted to highlight, this one, I kind of love this. So this is one where they appear to be, it's a whole pun to a bunch of people appear to be at some sort of like event. Everyone's wearing little buttons that say, I love HRT.
02:40:34
Speaker
And she pulls out a dynamometer, which is that tool that you use to test grip strength.
Grip Strength and Fitness Advice Credibility
02:40:40
Speaker
And so she has all of the people there test their grip strength. And again, we know that grip strength is a marker for overall strength, but just having a stronger grip does not automatically mean you're going to live longer.
02:40:54
Speaker
With that said... The thing that was funny to me, and this might make me a mean girl, is that Mary Claire Haver is one of the people that does it. And her number is lower than the normative value for 50 to 59 year olds.
02:41:08
Speaker
Like she has the lowest possible number you could have. Yeah. Yeah. Again, it just kind of reaffirms my suspicion that Mary Claire Haver hasn't been lifting weights for very long. Hopefully she continues to do it more than just when she's filming reels for Instagram.
02:41:21
Speaker
All right. I think it's time to grift-o-meter this lady. Okay. Let's do it. Okay. All right, number one, do you even know what the real problem is, bruh? I think that she scores kind of low on this.
02:41:33
Speaker
Yeah, she's not terrible. No, I think what she's saying is basically your symptoms are coming largely from inactivity. Right. So she wants you to be more active. And I do think that that is kind of where some of the real problem is, bro.
02:41:44
Speaker
So I don't think she's misleading us. I mean, she's saying the real problem. Well, it's her face thing, right? It's the, you need to be more flexible. You need to do aerobic exercise. You need to do heavy lifting and you need to work on your balance. Good point. I don't think it's wrong to work on any of those things. You know, I think the real problem is going to be like, well, who we talking about? You know, on an individual level. And also my wrinkles are not the real problem.
02:42:06
Speaker
now No, no. And that's not what she's saying. I mean, in fairness. Right. So I think that she scores really low. Yeah. Like a one or a two. I mean, is there anything misleading that she's trying to suggest?
02:42:19
Speaker
Apart from her exercise prescription, that's a bit cattywampus. Yeah. So let's go to one. Okay. Everyone needs this. She does not separate out anybody from anybody, right? Everyone needs this alloy face cream.
02:42:34
Speaker
I mean, she's saying everyone needs to be exercising more, which is true. Yeah, I think that she, like most of the people in the Menno Posse, fails to qualify.
02:42:45
Speaker
There are very few caveats. There are very few consult your doctor because you this might be inappropriate for you if this, this, and this is going on. We just don't see that happening. So she's very kind of advertising a lot.
02:42:58
Speaker
Yeah. So what do we think? Like a three or a four? Well, why wouldn't we give her a five, I guess? Because some of the things that she's saying is true. Like everyone does need to be doing aerobic exercise. Everyone does need to be lifting weights. Right.
02:43:12
Speaker
Right. So when she says everyone needs this, she's partly right. Okay. In that case, I would give her like a three because okay most of what she's talking about is exercise. In fact, I would maybe even give her a two. Okay. Next one.
02:43:23
Speaker
Appearance assassinators. mean, she's selling me cream for my wrinkles, but she never talks about losing that ugly, stubborn belly fat. She's never doing any of that stuff. She's just talking about getting stronger.
02:43:35
Speaker
she ever talk about cellulite? No, not that I've seen. Yeah, she kind of veered off of her main storyline with the skin post. Yeah, it really kind of threw me. yeah It did seem really incongruous with most of her message. People were like, where the fuck is this? This is coming out of nowhere, doctor, right? right What are you fucking talking about now?
02:43:53
Speaker
I'm talking about dollar signs. That's talking about. I'm going to give her like a two. Okay. That sounds fair. Fiddle faddle. Does she just use a lot of words? Very little. Not really. Fiddle faddle. Like I said, she's actually quite yeah good science communicator, I think, yeah even though she...
02:44:09
Speaker
exaggerates a lot. yeah So therefore not a good science communicator, like not not a good science communicator in the sense that I don't think that she's interested in communicating the nuance, right at all, because that's not great for selling shit.
02:44:24
Speaker
But in the sense that she does not produce mechanism theater. Right. So for fiddle faddle, we give her a one? Yeah, By the way, listeners, mechanism theater, we talk about that in the Stacey Sims episode. It's just using a lot of really technical terms and kind of overwhelming people with words they don't understand so that they think that they can't possibly understand this without your help.
02:44:43
Speaker
I think that Vonda Wright does a good job of making things understandable when she talks. Yes, I agree. Microscope of practice. I think she gets a higher score here. Yeah. She's an orthopedic surgeon, but she talks an awful lot about hormone therapy.
02:44:59
Speaker
Yeah. Now, she talks about it within her scope of practice as it relates to what she's calling musculoskeletal syndrome of menopause. Okay. Which there does appear to be some evidence supporting the idea that women in the menopause transition do suffer from more musculoskeletal issues.
02:45:18
Speaker
However, now we've got the estrel for the skin and we've got the- pushing hormones for millennials in that post. Creatine and chlorine. Yeah, so creatine, so like I'm not anti-creatine. Like I said in the Mary Claire Haver section of this episode. But if we're talking about the question of, is it relevant as an orthopedic surgeon that she's promoting creatine? She's promoting exercise, right? Yes.
02:45:42
Speaker
You know, I actually think that from what I understand about orthopedic surgeons, they tend, many of them to have like very scaremongery attitudes toward exercise. They have a lot of non-evidence-based ideas about things that are bad for your knees and things that are bad for your back. And it's all because of their bias, right? They see all these people who've hurt their knees and hurt their backs doing certain things, and then they extrapolate that out to the general population, not keeping in mind that they're seeing a very small sliver of the population that's actually doing these types of exercises. So it's that same kind of Stu McGill bias where he's, well, people who flex their spine have ruined their back. And it's like, no, dude, that's your bias.
02:46:21
Speaker
I think for microscope of practice, her pushing creatine is a money grab, right? She yeah does not convey the nuance around how minimally helpful creatine was. we saw it She also overplays its benefits and says like, it's essential for brain health when there's not enough studies in like healthy populations to show that that's true yet.
02:46:40
Speaker
yeah I would give her like a three or a four, to be honest. My eyebrows go up. I'm like, you're an orthopedic surgeon and you sure are given a wide variety of little pieces of advice here. Right. Okay. Unfair advantage. This is, do they sell supplements?
02:46:54
Speaker
I mean, yes. She's affiliated with MindBodyGreen to sell this creatine product. She's not selling her own product. And she's not selling any other type of supplement.
02:47:06
Speaker
Is that right? So the fact that she sells creatine, I'm sort of like, so does barbell medicine probably. So does yeah a lot of other people I trust. And there is evidence supporting creatine for modest improvements to hypertrophy, modest improvements to strength.
02:47:22
Speaker
But, you know, I don't care so that she sells creatine. Let's give her a three. I mean, i think that's a little high. You want to give her a two? I'd give her a one. I don't care that she sells creatine. I actually think it's negligible.
02:47:35
Speaker
Like, okay it doesn't change my mind about her at all. Fair enough. You know, her realm is exercise, you know, and she's selling creatine and creatine does have some good support. It's safe, it's affordable, and it's effective.
02:47:48
Speaker
And then finally, we have Army Hammer. And while Sarah and I are not intimately familiar with the hammer of the army that Vonderreit's Army Hammer, because we have never done a critical post on Vonderreit, it does seem like based on a couple of posts that we've seen where people have chimed in and been like,
02:48:06
Speaker
wait a second, why are you selling me estriol cream? People swoop in to defend her. And look, like I've swept in on some of my favorite people's posts, like Lauren Colenzo Semple. I'll go to battle for her in the comments section.
Social Media Defense of Influencers
02:48:20
Speaker
I've gone to battle for other people in their comments section, because I kind of fucking like to argue, let's be honest. I don't have enough information. I don't have enough experience with the hammer of the army of Vonderreit to say,
02:48:32
Speaker
what score to give her here. Definitely, I would give her a one, but I don't know that I would give her anything higher than that because I just don't know. And we also haven't heard stories from other people about being blocked by her because you know dared to suggest something that was contradictory to what she was saying or getting into flame wars in the comments sections. We haven't heard that about her, but we really have heard that about Mary Claire Haver.
02:48:55
Speaker
And one thing I'll say too is the way that she responded to that critical comment that was questioning her motives for sharing the Estriol cream post, the way that she handled that person was really manipulative and lacking in transparency.
02:49:09
Speaker
It worked on some of her followers where they're like, yeah, she deserves to earn money, right? Can't she earn a little money every once in a while? So I think that it seems like her audience exhibits characteristics of the hammer.
02:49:22
Speaker
But again, I think for me, it's too early to say yeah how they would respond if we put up a negative post of Vonderwright. Well, so should we give it a two for now?
02:49:34
Speaker
I'd be okay with a two. Yeah. All right. So Vonda Wright is only 37% grifter. Yeah. grifter Yeah. yeah And I think that's fair. So yeah Mary Claire Haver was 90 something.
02:49:47
Speaker
94% for Mary Claire Haver, 37% for Vonda. I wonder how Stacey Sims have compared. My feeling is Stacey Sims is between Vonda and Haver.
02:49:58
Speaker
Probably. She has that whole thing with Momentus. She's not as high as Haver. because she's not wearing a weighted vest and every reel. She doesn't, to my knowledge, sell turmeric, but she does sell lots of adaptogens, which are real lacking in evidence.
02:50:18
Speaker
Anyway, it'd be interesting to see.
Comparing Influencer Credibility
02:50:20
Speaker
like Sims kind of rivals Marie Claire Haver, in my opinion. She's just a very different flavor. Yes, totally. All right. So if I was held at gunpoint and I had to pick like one of these two people as like the better one, obviously I'm picking Vonda, w right?
02:50:35
Speaker
Yeah. Because her overall message is very clearly about lifting weights, staying strong, getting exercise. There's way less confusing bullshit. Yes. And even though she's starting to dip her toe, it appears, into sponsored content and who knows where that's going to go. And I think that's a very watch this space. Mm-hmm. But that those are my thoughts.
02:50:55
Speaker
Do you have concluding thoughts about both or either of them? No, I think I agree. All right, folks. Well, there you have it. I hope you enjoyed this episode and got a little more clarity around these two members of the menopause.
02:51:07
Speaker
Who probably up appear ah often in your feed. Well, now that you've listened to this episode, they're both going to appear in your feed. Sorry. thing That's a thing. That's how it goes. Don't forget to sign up for our free strength class that is in two days from now. The link is in the show notes.
02:51:23
Speaker
And again, thank you for listening. And it always helps. We've had some very interesting reviews lately. Some of them are positive and some of them are Not positive. Some of them are five stars, but mostly negative.
02:51:36
Speaker
Some of them, yeah. Give us five stars, but say mean things. It's very funny. Yeah. but I look, we appreciate all of it. I enjoy all of the reviews. So please, if you have time and you are motivated, give us a review or rate us and subscribe to the podcast. Send this episode. If you've got a friend who's like a super MCH or VW fan,
02:51:56
Speaker
super fan send them this episode though they might not appreciate it but right and your friendship might might not benefit from it but if that's the case they're they're in the army hammer yo they're army hammer it's true all right have have a good day is what i was about to say have a great day we will see you next week