Part 5: Suzanne Somers On Hormone Therapy For Menopause

   We’re all sitting in a restaurant looking at women; the ones who have the menu are fanning like this; I think, oh, get on hormones. But women, for the most part, don’t realize what symptoms are even. The most difficult age group is the 70-year-olds.

When I speak to women who are in their 70’s, they go oh, I’m over that. And that’s when I say no, you’re not. It’s a continual drain, it’s not going to come back if it doesn't level off. You just have gotten used to the symptoms. Do you sleep? Yeah, but I’ve never slept. Well, let’s go back. When did you stop sleeping? I haven’t slept for years. When? Maybe when you were 40, you stopped sleeping? Could be? You know, losing hormones? Cortisol went up it’s sky high; you can’t sleep?

Women need to understand this. You're the ones that can tell them it’s not from me women need to understand that. I explain hormones like this to a group of women: it’s a teeter-totter. On this end of the teeter-totter is the estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone, your sex hormones are down here.

On the other end of the teeter-totter are your major hormones: insulin, thyroid, adrenal, cortisol. So when you start losing your sex hormones, that are the first things to go, your teeter-totter tips up and guess what is at the top here? Your cortisol. Well, once your cortisol is high, you can’t sleep; it’s impossible. That’s your stress hormone, cortisol thinks some tiger is chasing you, and you can’t sleep.

What I explain to women is so okay; you’ve gotten used to not sleeping; I guess that’s okay with you. It wouldn’t be okay with me. But if you thought about this, go look up cortisol go look up William Jeffries; Google is so incredible; chronic high cortisol leads to a heart attack.

When I was writing ageless, I thought that’s an interesting thing. I wonder what is the leading killer of women. I look it up; oh, heart attack? No, no. A heart attack is just the end result. What they’re dying of is hormone loss.

So by getting the teeter-totter back in balance, you’re saving women from heart attacks. You’re saving lives; this saves lives. Young people are level, so let’s try to keep it at this level as long as we can, so that we can feel good. It’s terrible not to sleep.

When I ask women in an audience how many of you sleep 5 hours or less, I swear, almost every hand goes up. I go oh, you poor things. They’re all overweight, bursting because guess what? When these sex hormones go down, guess what’s also up on the other side of the teeter-totter? Insulin. So you want to get balanced to get your weight back down.

And burnt-out adrenals. Gosh, everybody, I was working with a 42-year-old guy in New York the other night. I’m looking at him, big, dark circles under the eyes, and he’s missing the lower third of his eyebrows, and I’m thinking, wow, your constipated. He exercised 2 hours a day, fanatically he says, but I’m looking at him, he’s not buffed at all, and I’m thinking it’s not working whatever you’re doing it’s not working.

Then I asked somebody if they didn’t sleep last night and he said I never sleep. I said you never sleep? He said never. Never. I said what does that mean? He said I don’t know, I sleep an hour, then I’m up for 4 or 5 hours, then he said maybe I get 2 or 3 hours a night I said how long? He said since I was a teenager. I said I think your adrenals have been out-of-whack your whole life. Adrenals, everybody, I have people coming to me, TO ME, I’m not a doctor, I just send them to you, they come to me showing me rashes, RASHES, I’m in the bathroom in some restaurant some girl says look at these rashes. Then she goes look at this over here, she’s got a rash all over.

I said I’m not a doctor but it looks like your adrenals are shot, maybe you better go check them out, that rash is usually your adrenals, that rash all over your face don’t ask me, and then the other night at the bathroom at the four seasons in New York this woman walks in, and I’m washing my hands, and she comes up to me, and she says my mother has just been diagnosed with Lymphoma.

I said, oh, gosh, I’m so sorry. She said what do you know about white blood cells? And I said nothing, nothing, and then she starts crying. I’m in the bathroom with an absolute stranger going. I’m so sorry about your mom. Usually, it’s about hormones. I’ve never been asked about white blood cells. These things happen with hormonal loss that nobody understands. They take drugs for it, and it doesn’t seem to work.

They take Prozac, and they get fat; they feel better on Prozac so it’s hard to give up the Prozac; it’s a real bind that women are in. Women are in worse shape; you men are following right behind; you’re not doing so great either. I’m not talking about the men in this room, I’m sure you’re all practicing what you preach. But I’m looking out there at the big view of men losing the spark, 60-70-year-old men with the spark. At 60 or 70, you should have a spark.

The women are just besides themselves with a lack of understanding about what is happening to them. Now, I said there’s two things working against you. Pharmaceutical companies because if we figure out, it’s just this simple, we won’t have to buy all their drugs, they’ll lose that much.

They probably have it worker out per person that’s alive from middle-age on, how much money they’re going to make from us until we get into the nursing home. And then there’s a lot more medicine in the nursing home, and, who knows, they probably own the nursing home.

If I were the pharmaceutical company, I would think of that pathway if I was in that position, I’m glad I’m not. The other thing that’s working against you for what you’re doing and working against all of us in our nation is the American food manufacturers. The chemicals in our food. It’s a disaster.

I interviewed Dr. Russell Blaylock, you probably know him, and I said, how’d it get like this? He said I’ll tell you how it got like this. At the end of WW 2, our American GIs capturing Japanese soldiers noticed that the Japanese rations tasted a lot better than our American GI rations. So they did a study, and they found out that there was MSG in the Japanese rations.

So they brought over all the American food manufacturers to Japan around 1947. There’s a company called Ajinomoto which is the largest manufacturer of MSG and hydrolyzed protein in the world. The Ajinomoto company explained to our American manufacturers how they could take the lousy can of Campbell’s Soup and put MSG in it, and it sure tastes a lot better.

We could put these chemicals in all of our food, and it would taste much better. That is how the chemicals started creeping into our lives. Now what’s really terrible is that Alzheimer's is starting to appear in 40-year-olds, 50-year-olds, and 60-year-olds. This is unprecedented. Dr. Blaylock said that in the next 20 years, we’ll have to have total care for 30-year-olds for dementia. I said why? He said because the next generation started ingesting chemicals in the womb.

Mothers who were pregnant thinking they were doing something good for their kids drank diet soda. So in the womb, they started getting the glutamates, the aspartame. Once you get a taste for chemicals, we start liking them. In fact, the American palate has adjusted to chemicals. We actually like it better. When you first switch someone over to organic food it’s kind of tasteless to them.

Children love chemicals. Doritos, they love Doritos, right? 40% excitotoxin. Everybody putting in the little blue packet NutraSweet; 40% excitotoxin. Diet sodas are crazy. People don’t just drink one diet soda. They drink a minimum of a six-pack to 10-15 a case a day. It’s very hard for people to get off diet soda.

If one diet soda so overstimulates the neurons in the brain literally exciting them to death, in 6 to 8 hours, one diet soda, what is the accumulation of all these chemicals do? We have billions of neurons, but over time you can see what’s going to happen. So this is a disaster That is I’m sure a big part of what you’re doing: trying to get your patients to eat real food.

I’ve written 9 books on eating real food, it's good. Our parents used to eat real food. They weren’t as wacky as we are; they weren’t as sick as we are. We’re sick, we’re sick. Think about it. Have you been hearing about a whole lot of brain tumors? I had never heard of a brain tumor.

• SUZANNE SOMERS ON HRT FOR MENOPAUSE, PART 1/6
• SUZANNE SOMERS ON HRT FOR MENOPAUSE, PART 2/6
• SUZANNE SOMERS ON HRT FOR MENOPAUSE, PART 3/6
• SUZANNE SOMERS ON HRT FOR MENOPAUSE, PART 4/6
• SUZANNE SOMERS ON HRT FOR MENOPAUSE, PART 5/6
• SUZANNE SOMERS ON HRT FOR MENOPAUSE, PART 6/6

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