165. Cynthia Thurlow: The Menopause Gut - Why Healing Your Hormones Starts With Healing Your Gut
5/19/20261 hr 5 min
The gut and hormones have always been treated as two completely separate conversations in medicine, and that disconnect is quietly behind some of the most frustrating symptoms women experience in midlife. From bloating and brain fog to autoimmune conditions and weight that will not move, the answers have been there all along, hiding in a connection nobody thought to make.
We dive deeper into this in the Extend Podcast with Cynthia Thurlow. We also talk about why perimenopause is the ultimate litmus test of how well you have been living your life, why every woman deserves a conversation about hormone replacement therapy regardless of her age, and why the gut microbiome may be the missing link behind why so many women start HRT and still do not feel better.
Cynthia Thurlow is a nurse practitioner, internationally recognized speaker, and host of the Everyday Wellness podcast, with over 25 years of experience in health and wellness specializing in perimenopause, menopause, and intermittent fasting. Her second TEDx talk on intermittent fasting has garnered over 15 million views, and she has been featured on ABC, FOX 5, KTLA, Medium, Entrepreneur, and The Megyn Kelly Show. She is the author of Intermittent Fasting Transformation and the upcoming book The Menopause Gut, one of the most important and underexplored conversations in women's health today.
What's Discussed:
(4:27) What the gut microbiome actually is and why perimenopause changes everything about how it functions.
(9:40) How accumulated childhood stress and trauma ages the ovaries faster and pushes women into menopause earlier.
(20:05) How to assess where you stand with your nervous system and the simplest ways to start improving it.
(31:59) What the estrobolome is and why it may be the missing link behind every perimenopausal symptom you cannot explain.
(37:32) How to reinvigorate your estrobolome and get your gut back to actually processing hormones correctly.
(43:44) Why every woman deserves a conversation about hormone replacement therapy and what most practitioners are still getting wrong.
(49:59) The truth about oral contraceptives that a generation of women was never told.
(56:52) The first two or three things every woman should do if she knows her gut is off.
Listen to this episode of the Extend Podcast and walk away finally understanding why everything you have been doing for your hormones, your weight, your energy, and your symptoms has not been working, and what the one conversation nobody is having, could change about all of it.
Thank You to Our Sponsors:
Momentous: Head to livemomentous.com/fiber and use code DRSHAH for up to 35% off your first order.
Learn more about Dr. Darshan Shah:
Website: drshah.com
Clinic: next-health.com
Instagram: darshanshahmd
Find out more about Cynthia Thurlow:
Website: www.cynthiathurlow.com/
Instagram: @cynthia_thurlow
Facebook: www.facebook.com/cynthiathurlowofficial
Podcast: www.cynthiathurlow.com/podcast
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/cynthia-thurlow
YouTube Channel: www.youtube.com/@CynthiaThurlow
Substack: https://cynthiathurlownp.substack.com/
Twitter/X: https://x.com/_CynthiaThurlow
Pre-order: The Menopause Gut: www.penguinrandomhouse.com/the-menopause-gut-by-cynthia-thurlow
Clips
Transcript preview
First 90 secondsDarshan Shah· Host0:00
[gentle music] Welcome to Extend with me, Dr. Darshan Shah, a podcast dedicated to cutting-edge science, research, tools, and protocols designed to help you extend your health span. Having become one of the youngest doctors in the country at the age of 21, and trained and board-certified at the Mayo Clinic, I've accumulated three decades of practice as a board-certified surgeon and longevity expert. Over that time, I've discovered that a mere 20% of health knowledge yields 80% of the results when it comes to your health span. We are living in a new era where we are creating a new healthcare system no longer focused on disease management, but achieving optimal health and vitality. Join me as I interview world-renowned experts, offering you a step-by-step guide to proactively avoid disease and, most importantly, extend your health span. You're eating well. You're exercising. You're doing everything you've always been doing, but somewhere in your 40s, your body stops cooperating. Your weight starts to shift. Your sleep gets broken. The brain fog settles in, and no one gives you a really good explanation about why. The menopause conversation has come a long way, but there's still a missing piece most clinicians aren't talking about: the gut. Specifically, what happens to the microbiome when the hormones shift, and how that one change cascades through virtually every system in your body. Cynthia Thurlow is a nurse practitioner. She's a good friend of mine and a host of the Everyday Wellness Podcast. She's authoring a new book called