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Speaker 1: You're listening to a Mamma Mia podcast.
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Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Well, the podcast for your health and body explained. I'm Dr. Ginny Mansberg. I'm a GP. I mainly see women.
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Speaker 3: And I'm Kath Mahoney. I am a single mum, a comedian and a hypochondriac. So here is what we are discussing today. The surprising science of being kind and how it impacts your health.
00:00:39
Speaker 2: I love this.
00:00:40
Speaker 3: Why early onset cancers have substantially increased globally. And in asking for a friend, we're talking about whether ice cold water can cause a mini hot flush and why coffee can trigger an urgent cold.
00:00:53
Speaker 1: Non-negotiable, need-to-run-to-the-toilet tech.
00:00:57
Speaker 2: But first, it's time for What the Health? Your quick dose of women's health headlines.
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Speaker 1: What the?
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Speaker 2: Oh, what the?
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Speaker 4: I don't understand.
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Speaker 2: What the health?
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Speaker 3: Actually, Ginny, I need to interrupt because we are on Well, the podcast, and I've not been very well.
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Speaker 2: I know, you poor darling. What's going on?
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Speaker 3: Well, I don't know if it's burnout, if it's midlife life, or if it was just a sneaky cold that caught up with me. But yeah, it wasn't good in the sinus department and snotty, but not bad enough to go to the doctor.
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Speaker 2: It is actually really, really common at any time of the year. But Kath, This all came on you like a pile of bricks.
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Speaker 1: Yes.
00:01:36
Speaker 2: When you were away, like you were feeling burnt out, went away and then like got sick.
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Speaker 3: Took two days off, two precious days as a solo parent. Had to wait, you know, for sort of school stuff to align and work. Took two precious days off, arrived at the destination and fell into a heap.
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Speaker 2: Do you know how common this is?
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Speaker 1: Is it really common?
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Speaker 2: So common.
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Speaker 1: Are you saying I'm common?
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Speaker 2: Uncommonly common, of course. Do you know what I think is going on? So this is the University of Ginny Mansberg theories, as opposed to anything that's been scientifically proven. But I just hear this all the time. And I think that for people who live on adrenaline and cortisol, just getting through the shit show of life, and then they go away, finally relax, and they get a cortisol withdrawal and an adrenaline withdrawal. And you just get everything happening at once. And you pile in, your viruses just go Awesome. I've got a great in here. I've got an opportunity to take hold of your throat and your nose. And we know we're being assaulted by viruses all the time, but our immune systems are kind of at war with the viruses. Mostly they're winning, often with a bit of help from some of your immune warriors that are unleashed when you're actually stressed out. But when that stress goes and you get a cortisol withdrawal, often your immune system just goes, okay, I give up.
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Speaker 1: So is there anything I could have done? Do I need to go on an adrenaline holiday to relax?
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Speaker 2: I actually think the secret, and this is generally for people who are, as you are like just so busy with life and work and kids and everything, I think a two-day holiday just doesn't work. Because by the time you actually relax, get your cortisol withdrawal, feel exhausted, want to sleep for like 20 hours of the first 24 hours and then have an invading virus come and live in your throat, I think you can recover from that. But you need the second half of the holiday to actually enjoy it. And so I think the secret is actually to take at least a week, if not 10 days. Can I have that as a doctor's note? Yeah, treat me well. I'll give you one.
00:03:37
Speaker 3: Ginny, thank you for giving me some tips on going away and getting sick. I will come to you first next time. Now, let's get into it. What health headlines have we got to go through?
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Speaker 2: Kath, have you been seeing these cortisol cocktails coming up in your algorithm?
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Speaker 1: No, should I be? What is it?
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Speaker 2: Okay, so people are basically making some kind of shake, which they're saying is going to reduce somatic shaking. that's going to reduce trapped stress and lower your cortisol levels. And what they're doing is they're... What is that about? This, Kath, is completely science gibberish, which is running a whole lot of terms together, where people are mixing a whole lot of different things like vitamin C and what's called adaptogens, which is these kind of plant-based chemicals that are meant to have some kind of impact on your brain, maybe some coconut water, maybe some cherry juice. And the various sugary cocktails are meant to be had just before bed, often with a little bit of sparkling water, I have found. And that's meant to make you sleep better and lower your stress levels. So I see this big chugging of an entire half a litre of something and all I can think of is I'm going to wee all night. That's just making me stressed out. Just before bed. Just before bed. Okay. Not been studied. You'll be amazed to know.
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Speaker 3: So I should just erase the recipe I've just written down because we don't need this, is what we're saying.
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Speaker 2: I'm saying if you really love to mix a whole lot of things together and It's a beautiful pre-bedtime routine for you that makes you feel really good. Oh, is this like with my crystals? Yeah.
00:05:11
Speaker 1: Like this lovely little routine.
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Speaker 2: Yes, I think it's really like the crystal in your bra. If you enjoy that being there, then you do you. And very happy days for myself. My bladder's saying a hard no. But there's no science behind it.
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Speaker 1: What's the cortisol element?
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Speaker 2: So cortisol is a natural kind of hormone that's made by your adrenal glands, often gets pumped out more at stressful times. But it does follow this really predictable pattern, which we call a diurnal pattern. So according to the time of the day, fascinating. It actually peaks about an hour before you naturally wake up. And so that you're meant to wake up with a lot of zing, you know, and helps you wake up really, really quickly. That's why we measure cortisol. If we're going to do a blood test, we like it to be done at 8 a.m.
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Speaker 1: Yes.
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Speaker 2: Because that's where it's as close to peak in your blood as it can naturally be. We can't do a blood test at 6 a.m. No labs are open then. But this is really interesting to me, but there's no proven way to drink anything or eat anything that can actually lower your cortisol at night. We don't have that science there. I think I might just stick with my crystal. And a candle and a nighttime meditation.
00:06:19
Speaker 1: Okay, what else have you got in your.
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Speaker 2: Bag, Dr.
00:06:21
Speaker 1: Ginny, today?
00:06:21
Speaker 2: I have such good news. I'm basically beside myself with excitement.
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Speaker 3: What?
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Speaker 2: It turns out that full-fat milk seems to be as healthy, if not even potentially slightly healthier than the low-fat version. Yes. So I am a milk drinker. I'm not a dairy avoider. A lot of my patients don't drink dairy.
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Speaker 3: Yeah.
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Speaker 2: I don't love skim milk. I'm not going to lie. I like the full fat stuff.
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Speaker 1: It's a bit like white water.
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Speaker 2: Yeah. And we've been told for years that the low fat dairy options are better. And there have been a lot of kind of scientists pushing back. But now there's this new study. It was only done on 74 people, but they basically randomised people to either have low fat or full fat dairy three serves a day and no difference in terms of weight gain or weight loss. Is this insane?
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Speaker 3: Yeah.
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Speaker 2: And also the people who had the full fat dairy had slightly better outcomes when it came to blood pressure. But also in good news, they actually consumed more calcium, more protein and more vitamin D, which is really important for all of our health. And we have found that as people are avoiding dairy, they are missing out on protein. They are missing out on calcium in particular. And we're really worried about this coming towards people like a train in osteoporosis and other things because So how good is it that we're getting increasing evidence that if you like milk, just have whatever milk you like, which is great news.
00:07:46
Speaker 1: This is great news.
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Speaker 3: I'm going to face plant into my full fat Greek yogurt when I get home.
00:07:52
Speaker 1: Up next, it's time for Are You Well?
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Speaker 3: And we're unpacking why early onset cancers have substantially increased globally.
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Speaker 4: How are you?
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Speaker 2: Well, how are you feeling?
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Speaker 3: Are you well?
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Speaker 1: Are you well?
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Speaker 2: Kath, I don't know about you, but my social media feed has included something pretty devastating, which was the tragic early death at 26 of a content creator, Sydney Tao, beautiful young girl who died of a very rare cancer. I don't know whether you saw this.
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Speaker 4: I saw that.
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Speaker 1: Heartbreaking.
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Speaker 2: Heartbreaking of a really, really rare cancer. But it kind of got me thinking about this rise that we're seeing of cancers among young people. And it's not just, she had this really rare one called cholangiocarcinoma. It's just so beautiful and so positive, but it just was so heartbreaking. We're seeing both men and women like in the time of their lives, increasingly getting cancers from colorectal like bowel cancer to breast cancer, uterus cancer used to be like an older lady's cancer, stomach cancer, pancreas cancer, so many of them. And in fact, a lot of public health bodies have forecast that cancers amongst young people are expected to increase by about 30% globally from 2019 to 2030. Why is that?
00:09:15
Speaker 1: What are they basing that on?
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Speaker 2: We just don't know. And there's probably not a single answer, but it's not enough to explain it by saying, oh, everyone's got a bad lifestyle. Like increasingly you see Gen Zs who are like really serious about health and like really amazing attendance at gyms and doing really healthy kind of, they're not drinking or smoking as much as us. And there's theories that there are things that are now in the environment that were not there, let's say, in the 50s that have just increasingly become prevalent in the environment, whether it's in the air or in the soil or even like pollutants, plastics, different things that are being put on vegetables, you know, like weed killers, things like that. We don't know any of these things. These are just theories that are potentially contributing to this that are now impacting young people in a way that I don't think any of us saw coming and so traditionally, when someone in their 20s has come to a doctor and said, I've got a terrible tummy pain, cancer's just not been something we've even considered. Because they're too young. They're too young. Or like if somebody has a breast lump in their 20s, We don't go and send them for things because we just don't consider that they could have breast cancer. And it's really changing the way we need to think about things. But because we don't know why it's happening, it's not like we can give young people advice on what to do to avoid these cancers. So all we can do is say, doctors, people out there, you've got to be aware of this and not dismiss people, young people's symptoms as it could never be cancer.
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Speaker 3: And on the flip side, any young people listening shouldn't not go to the doctor thinking, oh, well, it can't be cancer because I'm too young.
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Speaker 2: Absolutely. I think we just need to, you know, I don't want to freak people out, but I think it just needs to be in the back of our minds. If you get symptoms, not something that's there for a week, but if something's persisting and getting worse, I think you need to go and see a doctor earlier just because you know, it is out there in a way that it never was before.
00:11:11
Speaker 3: I mean, and also, I guess, for younger people that sadly have contracted cancer, that would be quite a lonely path because you wouldn't really have any peers in the same boat.
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Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, I think with Sydney Tell, her path was actually connecting with her incredible community and actually sharing it online and getting that support. But a lot of people who do have cancer early they kind of describe that they're so different to the life path that is happening to their peers, to the kids they went to school with, or the people they went to uni or college with. They don't have anything in common with them anymore. They're going off and living an amazing life. And these guys are stuck doing chemotherapy and having surgery after surgery. So I think if anyone is experiencing that, finding their way to reach out to a community is really important. But for the rest of us, reach out to the people who do have cancer and make sure that they're feeling loved and included in in this journey. Absolutely.
00:12:07
Speaker 1: Up next, Are You Well? We're talking about the science of kindness.
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Speaker 2: Our next Are You Well? is about the science of kindness. And it turns out Being kind is really good for your health. And I am looking at you, Kath Mahoney, one of the kindest people I've ever met in my life. This is great news. Oh, I love that.
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Speaker 1: I don't think my son would agree.
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Speaker 2: No teenage son does. No.
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Speaker 1: So, Dr.
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Speaker 3: Ginny, tell me, doesn't the saying go, you have to be cruel to be kind? Have we been sold the wrong information all these years?
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Speaker 1: We have.
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Speaker 2: It turns out you've got to be kind to be kind. Yeah, and who'd have thought? I love this. No, no, we actually do have some pretty amazing... science where as a proxy for sort of generally being kind, scientists use things like giving a gift or saying something kind and then studying you afterwards. So it turns out that if you are kind, so you sort of say something really nice, you have an immediate drop in your stress hormone cortisol. Like, isn't that insane? There was another study where people who did like pro-social acts, so just like let somebody in front of them in the queue or stood up for somebody on the bus, that kind of thing, it actually reduced inflammatory markers in the blood. Like we can measure these things. And it's pretty quick. And one of the things that I loved, a study that actually looked at people who did three distinct acts of kindness in any given week, they actually had less anxiety and higher self-esteem. And this was a reasonably big study. Like it was 777 people. It was done in 2020 around the time of the pandemic. I just thought it was such a beautiful study to reinforce this. And actually giving, like so an act of giving doesn't need to be charity, like just giving a friend a gift, like giving somebody something before you go into a stressful act. So let's say you're going to go into a really stressful meeting. One of the antidotes could be just going and giving somebody in the office a beautiful gift or buying them a coffee. That actually in a study was shown to reduce your blood pressure, reduce your heart rate. And it was actually a study of two different groups. And so the people who were giving before a stressful act had these like really lowering effect on the sympathetic nervous system. So I reckon there's a message in here for all of us.
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Speaker 3: Well, look, I love this. And I think it's like being of service, isn't it? When you get off yourself and you help someone else, you both have a win because you're doing something kind and you've stopped.
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Speaker 1: But I mean, I'm quite anxious. I wake up in the morning and worry.
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Speaker 3: So I immediately do like a little gratitude list and I send it to a girlfriend. She sends one to me and it just gets you in a in a better sort of headspace straight away, straight off the worry. And you're like, hang on, look at all the things I've got to.
00:14:53
Speaker 1: Be grateful for.
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Speaker 2: But one of the other things I've really noticed about you, Kath, is you're very quick with compliments. You send beautiful text messages to people. It makes you feel so good to receive that. But now we know that you sending that, that little gift from you to your girlfriends is just such a beautiful act both ways, like for you and for us.
00:15:15
Speaker 3: But don't you love it when you might see like a beautifully dressed woman? Perhaps she's an older woman, like I'm talking, you know, 70s, 80s age. To be able to sort of walk past a random stranger and just say, you look absolutely beautiful. I love doing that. I mean, you only do it when it's true. You're not saying it to everyone on the street. But then you see someone light up and they're like, what? No one said that to me for a long time.
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Speaker 1: You know, and it's just, I think it's free gold that we can give to everybody.
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Speaker 2: I feel like I'm the sort of person who just is so... busy and I don't take the time to write a card to somebody, to think of my girlfriend's birthday. I always remember three days later and send them a text message. I'm so bad at this and always think it's about the other person that I should be better. But I actually am now going to invest in this as a gift to myself, to my own health, because who doesn't need lowering their inflammation in their body? Who doesn't need a lower heart rate? Like it's an obvious no brainer. So I'm actually going to put in my diary half an hour a day to do acts of kindness and just send those messages and do things that are an investment in me as well as the other person.
00:16:20
Speaker 1: I'm having this. Thank you.
00:16:21
Speaker 3: But also disclaimer off air, you were just talking about making me chicken soup.
00:16:27
Speaker 1: I think you're one of the kindest people I know.
00:16:29
Speaker 2: Oh, you're so sweet.
00:16:32
Speaker 3: Up next, asking for a friend. Your awkward health questions that we all know aren't actually about your friend, but we pretend they are anyway.
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Speaker 1: I love this bit.
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Speaker 2: I'm just asking for a friend.
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Speaker 4: So, my friends, they want to know.
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Speaker 2: It's not for me. Hashtag just asking.
00:16:52
Speaker 4: For a friend.
00:16:52
Speaker 1: Okay, it is time for my favourite, asking for a friend. Today, we have two questions. And the first question comes from Jess.
00:17:02
Speaker 2: Hi, Ginny and Kath.
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Speaker 4: I'm 44 and something started happening when I have an ice cold glass of water. I get like a mini hot flush. It's like a flush of sweat across my.
00:17:13
Speaker 1: Face and neck.
00:17:13
Speaker 4: It lasts for about 30 seconds and it's only happening when I'm having really cold drinks. I don't know if this is my internal thermostat malfunctioning or something, or is this just another sign of peri?
00:17:26
Speaker 2: That is so interesting, Jess. I do hear this sometimes. It's not common, but I am going to blame perimenopause. So basically, as your estrogen drops, there's this area in your primitive brain right down the bottom near where your neck meets your skull. There's a part of your brain called the hypothalamus, and it's common to a lot of animals. Oh, no, the hypothalamus. And in there is the thermoregulatory zone. which basically regulates your body temperature. So like when you're overly hot, it will help stimulate you to sweat. When you're really cold, it'll put your hairs on end and actually sends blood to different parts of your body to try and keep you all the time at that kind of roughly 37 degree level that is perfect for human functioning. It really shrinks and narrows, which means that really little things can actually make your body think that it's really cold and make you try and heat up. And little things can make you think that you're overly hot and try and cool you down. And it basically just gets mixed up, which is why you get so many hot flushes around perimenopause. It does tend to settle down despite that lack of estrogen for most women. But around peri, particularly the end of peri, it can be really, really nasty. And for some people, a real rush of cold can actually trigger a hot flush in the same way that a hot flush can trigger a real chill for some people afterwards. So they have a hot flush and then they're freezing just when they've taken off all of their clothes. They're like, oh my God, I'm so cold. And they need to put everything back on again. So it can actually go either way. So I do think it is a peri thing just in case. Definitely go and see your GP, Jess. It's always a good idea just to go and get checked, double checked. I think somebody needs to actually do an examination, take your pulse, take your blood pressure, but my bet is on the peri.
00:19:06
Speaker 1: Okay.
00:19:06
Speaker 2: All right.
00:19:07
Speaker 3: I've got another dilemma for you, Ginny.
00:19:09
Speaker 1: This question comes from Anonymous. I'll read it out.
00:19:12
Speaker 3: I'm 39 and within about four minutes of drinking my morning flat white, I have an urgent non-negotiable need to run to the toilet.
00:19:20
Speaker 1: It's not just a mild urge.
00:19:22
Speaker 3: It's an abandon all tasks immediately situation. Why does caffeine hit my bowel at lightning speed? And is this just a sensitive gut or a sign of something like IBS?
00:19:33
Speaker 2: I don't think it's IBS. I think it's like ridiculously common, particularly for women. I love this because I got to say, I can toilet time so well. I can time my coffee and then like I'm sorted. So like don't have a coffee when I'm about to get on the train is my hint for you. This is actually really common. There was a study, believe it or not, of women and it found that 63% of women who had a coffee there were changes in their bowels, like the nerves started to activate, actually pushing like things through. And you know what the fascinating bit was? Didn't matter whether it was caffeinated or not caffeinated. So it's not the caffeine. It doesn't appear to be the milk. It does seem to be something else in the coffee. What, like a placebo that they think, oh, it's the coffee? No, I think it's actually the coffee because it doesn't happen after tea. So I'm thinking it might be one of our favourite flavanols.
00:20:24
Speaker 1: Oh. He's back.
00:20:25
Speaker 2: He's back from Greece. He's here again. Yes, hello, Flav. So I think it could be one of the flavanols that actually impacts the bowels. But I think... You can use this to your advantage, Anonymous, because like if you know coffee does this and you're like, okay, I have now got the next half an hour at home. I don't need to do anything else. Time your latte. Like I reckon instead of going out and being at work where you need to like urgently use the toilet and your boss is next door and you don't want to be letting one rip when the CEO is in the next cubicle, I think you can actually do it at home like maybe first thing in the morning where you've got a toilet nearby.
00:21:02
Speaker 3: I always wake up and have my number one poo. Then I have two coffee pods and then I have my number two poo. And then any coffee after that is fine. So for anonymous, maybe you do need to do that. Have a coffee first at home, near a toilet, just like you said, and then you're off on the day.
00:21:20
Speaker 2: Love that. Hey, well, that is it for us today. Make sure you follow the show so every new episode lands straight into your feed and come and find us on socials too, where we are going to keep you posted on what we're up to between episodes.
00:21:37
Speaker 3: And if you want to hear you're asking for a friend question, super easy. Send us an email or a voice note to well at mamamia.com and.
00:21:44
Speaker 1: We, aka Dr. Ginny, will get to the bottom of it.
00:21:48
Speaker 3: Please remember information discussed in this podcast is for education purposes only and is not intended to provide professional medical advice. Please seek your own medical advice specific to your circumstances from your healthcare professional.
00:22:02
Speaker 1: See you next time.
00:22:03
Speaker 2: Stay well.
00:22:06
Speaker 3: Mamma Mia acknowledges the traditional owners of land and waters that this podcast is recorded on, the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation. We pay our respects to elders past and present.
Speaker 1: You're listening to a Mamma Mia podcast.
00:00:18
Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Well, the podcast for your health and body explained. I'm Dr. Ginny Mansberg. I'm a GP. I mainly see women.
00:00:26
Speaker 3: And I'm Kath Mahoney. I am a single mum, a comedian and a hypochondriac. So here is what we are discussing today. The surprising science of being kind and how it impacts your health.
00:00:39
Speaker 2: I love this.
00:00:40
Speaker 3: Why early onset cancers have substantially increased globally. And in asking for a friend, we're talking about whether ice cold water can cause a mini hot flush and why coffee can trigger an urgent cold.
00:00:53
Speaker 1: Non-negotiable, need-to-run-to-the-toilet tech.
00:00:57
Speaker 2: But first, it's time for What the Health? Your quick dose of women's health headlines.
00:01:04
Speaker 1: What the?
00:01:04
Speaker 2: Oh, what the?
00:01:05
Speaker 4: I don't understand.
00:01:06
Speaker 2: What the health?
00:01:08
Speaker 3: Actually, Ginny, I need to interrupt because we are on Well, the podcast, and I've not been very well.
00:01:13
Speaker 2: I know, you poor darling. What's going on?
00:01:16
Speaker 3: Well, I don't know if it's burnout, if it's midlife life, or if it was just a sneaky cold that caught up with me. But yeah, it wasn't good in the sinus department and snotty, but not bad enough to go to the doctor.
00:01:29
Speaker 2: It is actually really, really common at any time of the year. But Kath, This all came on you like a pile of bricks.
00:01:36
Speaker 1: Yes.
00:01:36
Speaker 2: When you were away, like you were feeling burnt out, went away and then like got sick.
00:01:41
Speaker 3: Took two days off, two precious days as a solo parent. Had to wait, you know, for sort of school stuff to align and work. Took two precious days off, arrived at the destination and fell into a heap.
00:01:53
Speaker 2: Do you know how common this is?
00:01:54
Speaker 1: Is it really common?
00:01:55
Speaker 2: So common.
00:01:55
Speaker 1: Are you saying I'm common?
00:01:57
Speaker 2: Uncommonly common, of course. Do you know what I think is going on? So this is the University of Ginny Mansberg theories, as opposed to anything that's been scientifically proven. But I just hear this all the time. And I think that for people who live on adrenaline and cortisol, just getting through the shit show of life, and then they go away, finally relax, and they get a cortisol withdrawal and an adrenaline withdrawal. And you just get everything happening at once. And you pile in, your viruses just go Awesome. I've got a great in here. I've got an opportunity to take hold of your throat and your nose. And we know we're being assaulted by viruses all the time, but our immune systems are kind of at war with the viruses. Mostly they're winning, often with a bit of help from some of your immune warriors that are unleashed when you're actually stressed out. But when that stress goes and you get a cortisol withdrawal, often your immune system just goes, okay, I give up.
00:02:55
Speaker 1: So is there anything I could have done? Do I need to go on an adrenaline holiday to relax?
00:02:59
Speaker 2: I actually think the secret, and this is generally for people who are, as you are like just so busy with life and work and kids and everything, I think a two-day holiday just doesn't work. Because by the time you actually relax, get your cortisol withdrawal, feel exhausted, want to sleep for like 20 hours of the first 24 hours and then have an invading virus come and live in your throat, I think you can recover from that. But you need the second half of the holiday to actually enjoy it. And so I think the secret is actually to take at least a week, if not 10 days. Can I have that as a doctor's note? Yeah, treat me well. I'll give you one.
00:03:37
Speaker 3: Ginny, thank you for giving me some tips on going away and getting sick. I will come to you first next time. Now, let's get into it. What health headlines have we got to go through?
00:03:48
Speaker 2: Kath, have you been seeing these cortisol cocktails coming up in your algorithm?
00:03:53
Speaker 1: No, should I be? What is it?
00:03:56
Speaker 2: Okay, so people are basically making some kind of shake, which they're saying is going to reduce somatic shaking. that's going to reduce trapped stress and lower your cortisol levels. And what they're doing is they're... What is that about? This, Kath, is completely science gibberish, which is running a whole lot of terms together, where people are mixing a whole lot of different things like vitamin C and what's called adaptogens, which is these kind of plant-based chemicals that are meant to have some kind of impact on your brain, maybe some coconut water, maybe some cherry juice. And the various sugary cocktails are meant to be had just before bed, often with a little bit of sparkling water, I have found. And that's meant to make you sleep better and lower your stress levels. So I see this big chugging of an entire half a litre of something and all I can think of is I'm going to wee all night. That's just making me stressed out. Just before bed. Just before bed. Okay. Not been studied. You'll be amazed to know.
00:04:55
Speaker 3: So I should just erase the recipe I've just written down because we don't need this, is what we're saying.
00:05:00
Speaker 2: I'm saying if you really love to mix a whole lot of things together and It's a beautiful pre-bedtime routine for you that makes you feel really good. Oh, is this like with my crystals? Yeah.
00:05:11
Speaker 1: Like this lovely little routine.
00:05:13
Speaker 2: Yes, I think it's really like the crystal in your bra. If you enjoy that being there, then you do you. And very happy days for myself. My bladder's saying a hard no. But there's no science behind it.
00:05:24
Speaker 1: What's the cortisol element?
00:05:26
Speaker 2: So cortisol is a natural kind of hormone that's made by your adrenal glands, often gets pumped out more at stressful times. But it does follow this really predictable pattern, which we call a diurnal pattern. So according to the time of the day, fascinating. It actually peaks about an hour before you naturally wake up. And so that you're meant to wake up with a lot of zing, you know, and helps you wake up really, really quickly. That's why we measure cortisol. If we're going to do a blood test, we like it to be done at 8 a.m.
00:05:55
Speaker 1: Yes.
00:05:55
Speaker 2: Because that's where it's as close to peak in your blood as it can naturally be. We can't do a blood test at 6 a.m. No labs are open then. But this is really interesting to me, but there's no proven way to drink anything or eat anything that can actually lower your cortisol at night. We don't have that science there. I think I might just stick with my crystal. And a candle and a nighttime meditation.
00:06:19
Speaker 1: Okay, what else have you got in your.
00:06:20
Speaker 2: Bag, Dr.
00:06:21
Speaker 1: Ginny, today?
00:06:21
Speaker 2: I have such good news. I'm basically beside myself with excitement.
00:06:26
Speaker 3: What?
00:06:27
Speaker 2: It turns out that full-fat milk seems to be as healthy, if not even potentially slightly healthier than the low-fat version. Yes. So I am a milk drinker. I'm not a dairy avoider. A lot of my patients don't drink dairy.
00:06:41
Speaker 3: Yeah.
00:06:42
Speaker 2: I don't love skim milk. I'm not going to lie. I like the full fat stuff.
00:06:45
Speaker 1: It's a bit like white water.
00:06:46
Speaker 2: Yeah. And we've been told for years that the low fat dairy options are better. And there have been a lot of kind of scientists pushing back. But now there's this new study. It was only done on 74 people, but they basically randomised people to either have low fat or full fat dairy three serves a day and no difference in terms of weight gain or weight loss. Is this insane?
00:07:10
Speaker 3: Yeah.
00:07:10
Speaker 2: And also the people who had the full fat dairy had slightly better outcomes when it came to blood pressure. But also in good news, they actually consumed more calcium, more protein and more vitamin D, which is really important for all of our health. And we have found that as people are avoiding dairy, they are missing out on protein. They are missing out on calcium in particular. And we're really worried about this coming towards people like a train in osteoporosis and other things because So how good is it that we're getting increasing evidence that if you like milk, just have whatever milk you like, which is great news.
00:07:46
Speaker 1: This is great news.
00:07:46
Speaker 3: I'm going to face plant into my full fat Greek yogurt when I get home.
00:07:52
Speaker 1: Up next, it's time for Are You Well?
00:07:54
Speaker 3: And we're unpacking why early onset cancers have substantially increased globally.
00:08:04
Speaker 4: How are you?
00:08:05
Speaker 2: Well, how are you feeling?
00:08:06
Speaker 3: Are you well?
00:08:06
Speaker 1: Are you well?
00:08:08
Speaker 2: Kath, I don't know about you, but my social media feed has included something pretty devastating, which was the tragic early death at 26 of a content creator, Sydney Tao, beautiful young girl who died of a very rare cancer. I don't know whether you saw this.
00:08:23
Speaker 4: I saw that.
00:08:23
Speaker 1: Heartbreaking.
00:08:24
Speaker 2: Heartbreaking of a really, really rare cancer. But it kind of got me thinking about this rise that we're seeing of cancers among young people. And it's not just, she had this really rare one called cholangiocarcinoma. It's just so beautiful and so positive, but it just was so heartbreaking. We're seeing both men and women like in the time of their lives, increasingly getting cancers from colorectal like bowel cancer to breast cancer, uterus cancer used to be like an older lady's cancer, stomach cancer, pancreas cancer, so many of them. And in fact, a lot of public health bodies have forecast that cancers amongst young people are expected to increase by about 30% globally from 2019 to 2030. Why is that?
00:09:15
Speaker 1: What are they basing that on?
00:09:16
Speaker 2: We just don't know. And there's probably not a single answer, but it's not enough to explain it by saying, oh, everyone's got a bad lifestyle. Like increasingly you see Gen Zs who are like really serious about health and like really amazing attendance at gyms and doing really healthy kind of, they're not drinking or smoking as much as us. And there's theories that there are things that are now in the environment that were not there, let's say, in the 50s that have just increasingly become prevalent in the environment, whether it's in the air or in the soil or even like pollutants, plastics, different things that are being put on vegetables, you know, like weed killers, things like that. We don't know any of these things. These are just theories that are potentially contributing to this that are now impacting young people in a way that I don't think any of us saw coming and so traditionally, when someone in their 20s has come to a doctor and said, I've got a terrible tummy pain, cancer's just not been something we've even considered. Because they're too young. They're too young. Or like if somebody has a breast lump in their 20s, We don't go and send them for things because we just don't consider that they could have breast cancer. And it's really changing the way we need to think about things. But because we don't know why it's happening, it's not like we can give young people advice on what to do to avoid these cancers. So all we can do is say, doctors, people out there, you've got to be aware of this and not dismiss people, young people's symptoms as it could never be cancer.
00:10:46
Speaker 3: And on the flip side, any young people listening shouldn't not go to the doctor thinking, oh, well, it can't be cancer because I'm too young.
00:10:52
Speaker 2: Absolutely. I think we just need to, you know, I don't want to freak people out, but I think it just needs to be in the back of our minds. If you get symptoms, not something that's there for a week, but if something's persisting and getting worse, I think you need to go and see a doctor earlier just because you know, it is out there in a way that it never was before.
00:11:11
Speaker 3: I mean, and also, I guess, for younger people that sadly have contracted cancer, that would be quite a lonely path because you wouldn't really have any peers in the same boat.
00:11:21
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, I think with Sydney Tell, her path was actually connecting with her incredible community and actually sharing it online and getting that support. But a lot of people who do have cancer early they kind of describe that they're so different to the life path that is happening to their peers, to the kids they went to school with, or the people they went to uni or college with. They don't have anything in common with them anymore. They're going off and living an amazing life. And these guys are stuck doing chemotherapy and having surgery after surgery. So I think if anyone is experiencing that, finding their way to reach out to a community is really important. But for the rest of us, reach out to the people who do have cancer and make sure that they're feeling loved and included in in this journey. Absolutely.
00:12:07
Speaker 1: Up next, Are You Well? We're talking about the science of kindness.
00:12:17
Speaker 2: Our next Are You Well? is about the science of kindness. And it turns out Being kind is really good for your health. And I am looking at you, Kath Mahoney, one of the kindest people I've ever met in my life. This is great news. Oh, I love that.
00:12:33
Speaker 1: I don't think my son would agree.
00:12:35
Speaker 2: No teenage son does. No.
00:12:37
Speaker 1: So, Dr.
00:12:38
Speaker 3: Ginny, tell me, doesn't the saying go, you have to be cruel to be kind? Have we been sold the wrong information all these years?
00:12:45
Speaker 1: We have.
00:12:45
Speaker 2: It turns out you've got to be kind to be kind. Yeah, and who'd have thought? I love this. No, no, we actually do have some pretty amazing... science where as a proxy for sort of generally being kind, scientists use things like giving a gift or saying something kind and then studying you afterwards. So it turns out that if you are kind, so you sort of say something really nice, you have an immediate drop in your stress hormone cortisol. Like, isn't that insane? There was another study where people who did like pro-social acts, so just like let somebody in front of them in the queue or stood up for somebody on the bus, that kind of thing, it actually reduced inflammatory markers in the blood. Like we can measure these things. And it's pretty quick. And one of the things that I loved, a study that actually looked at people who did three distinct acts of kindness in any given week, they actually had less anxiety and higher self-esteem. And this was a reasonably big study. Like it was 777 people. It was done in 2020 around the time of the pandemic. I just thought it was such a beautiful study to reinforce this. And actually giving, like so an act of giving doesn't need to be charity, like just giving a friend a gift, like giving somebody something before you go into a stressful act. So let's say you're going to go into a really stressful meeting. One of the antidotes could be just going and giving somebody in the office a beautiful gift or buying them a coffee. That actually in a study was shown to reduce your blood pressure, reduce your heart rate. And it was actually a study of two different groups. And so the people who were giving before a stressful act had these like really lowering effect on the sympathetic nervous system. So I reckon there's a message in here for all of us.
00:14:29
Speaker 3: Well, look, I love this. And I think it's like being of service, isn't it? When you get off yourself and you help someone else, you both have a win because you're doing something kind and you've stopped.
00:14:38
Speaker 1: But I mean, I'm quite anxious. I wake up in the morning and worry.
00:14:41
Speaker 3: So I immediately do like a little gratitude list and I send it to a girlfriend. She sends one to me and it just gets you in a in a better sort of headspace straight away, straight off the worry. And you're like, hang on, look at all the things I've got to.
00:14:53
Speaker 1: Be grateful for.
00:14:54
Speaker 2: But one of the other things I've really noticed about you, Kath, is you're very quick with compliments. You send beautiful text messages to people. It makes you feel so good to receive that. But now we know that you sending that, that little gift from you to your girlfriends is just such a beautiful act both ways, like for you and for us.
00:15:15
Speaker 3: But don't you love it when you might see like a beautifully dressed woman? Perhaps she's an older woman, like I'm talking, you know, 70s, 80s age. To be able to sort of walk past a random stranger and just say, you look absolutely beautiful. I love doing that. I mean, you only do it when it's true. You're not saying it to everyone on the street. But then you see someone light up and they're like, what? No one said that to me for a long time.
00:15:37
Speaker 1: You know, and it's just, I think it's free gold that we can give to everybody.
00:15:41
Speaker 2: I feel like I'm the sort of person who just is so... busy and I don't take the time to write a card to somebody, to think of my girlfriend's birthday. I always remember three days later and send them a text message. I'm so bad at this and always think it's about the other person that I should be better. But I actually am now going to invest in this as a gift to myself, to my own health, because who doesn't need lowering their inflammation in their body? Who doesn't need a lower heart rate? Like it's an obvious no brainer. So I'm actually going to put in my diary half an hour a day to do acts of kindness and just send those messages and do things that are an investment in me as well as the other person.
00:16:20
Speaker 1: I'm having this. Thank you.
00:16:21
Speaker 3: But also disclaimer off air, you were just talking about making me chicken soup.
00:16:27
Speaker 1: I think you're one of the kindest people I know.
00:16:29
Speaker 2: Oh, you're so sweet.
00:16:32
Speaker 3: Up next, asking for a friend. Your awkward health questions that we all know aren't actually about your friend, but we pretend they are anyway.
00:16:41
Speaker 1: I love this bit.
00:16:46
Speaker 2: I'm just asking for a friend.
00:16:47
Speaker 4: So, my friends, they want to know.
00:16:49
Speaker 2: It's not for me. Hashtag just asking.
00:16:52
Speaker 4: For a friend.
00:16:52
Speaker 1: Okay, it is time for my favourite, asking for a friend. Today, we have two questions. And the first question comes from Jess.
00:17:02
Speaker 2: Hi, Ginny and Kath.
00:17:03
Speaker 4: I'm 44 and something started happening when I have an ice cold glass of water. I get like a mini hot flush. It's like a flush of sweat across my.
00:17:13
Speaker 1: Face and neck.
00:17:13
Speaker 4: It lasts for about 30 seconds and it's only happening when I'm having really cold drinks. I don't know if this is my internal thermostat malfunctioning or something, or is this just another sign of peri?
00:17:26
Speaker 2: That is so interesting, Jess. I do hear this sometimes. It's not common, but I am going to blame perimenopause. So basically, as your estrogen drops, there's this area in your primitive brain right down the bottom near where your neck meets your skull. There's a part of your brain called the hypothalamus, and it's common to a lot of animals. Oh, no, the hypothalamus. And in there is the thermoregulatory zone. which basically regulates your body temperature. So like when you're overly hot, it will help stimulate you to sweat. When you're really cold, it'll put your hairs on end and actually sends blood to different parts of your body to try and keep you all the time at that kind of roughly 37 degree level that is perfect for human functioning. It really shrinks and narrows, which means that really little things can actually make your body think that it's really cold and make you try and heat up. And little things can make you think that you're overly hot and try and cool you down. And it basically just gets mixed up, which is why you get so many hot flushes around perimenopause. It does tend to settle down despite that lack of estrogen for most women. But around peri, particularly the end of peri, it can be really, really nasty. And for some people, a real rush of cold can actually trigger a hot flush in the same way that a hot flush can trigger a real chill for some people afterwards. So they have a hot flush and then they're freezing just when they've taken off all of their clothes. They're like, oh my God, I'm so cold. And they need to put everything back on again. So it can actually go either way. So I do think it is a peri thing just in case. Definitely go and see your GP, Jess. It's always a good idea just to go and get checked, double checked. I think somebody needs to actually do an examination, take your pulse, take your blood pressure, but my bet is on the peri.
00:19:06
Speaker 1: Okay.
00:19:06
Speaker 2: All right.
00:19:07
Speaker 3: I've got another dilemma for you, Ginny.
00:19:09
Speaker 1: This question comes from Anonymous. I'll read it out.
00:19:12
Speaker 3: I'm 39 and within about four minutes of drinking my morning flat white, I have an urgent non-negotiable need to run to the toilet.
00:19:20
Speaker 1: It's not just a mild urge.
00:19:22
Speaker 3: It's an abandon all tasks immediately situation. Why does caffeine hit my bowel at lightning speed? And is this just a sensitive gut or a sign of something like IBS?
00:19:33
Speaker 2: I don't think it's IBS. I think it's like ridiculously common, particularly for women. I love this because I got to say, I can toilet time so well. I can time my coffee and then like I'm sorted. So like don't have a coffee when I'm about to get on the train is my hint for you. This is actually really common. There was a study, believe it or not, of women and it found that 63% of women who had a coffee there were changes in their bowels, like the nerves started to activate, actually pushing like things through. And you know what the fascinating bit was? Didn't matter whether it was caffeinated or not caffeinated. So it's not the caffeine. It doesn't appear to be the milk. It does seem to be something else in the coffee. What, like a placebo that they think, oh, it's the coffee? No, I think it's actually the coffee because it doesn't happen after tea. So I'm thinking it might be one of our favourite flavanols.
00:20:24
Speaker 1: Oh. He's back.
00:20:25
Speaker 2: He's back from Greece. He's here again. Yes, hello, Flav. So I think it could be one of the flavanols that actually impacts the bowels. But I think... You can use this to your advantage, Anonymous, because like if you know coffee does this and you're like, okay, I have now got the next half an hour at home. I don't need to do anything else. Time your latte. Like I reckon instead of going out and being at work where you need to like urgently use the toilet and your boss is next door and you don't want to be letting one rip when the CEO is in the next cubicle, I think you can actually do it at home like maybe first thing in the morning where you've got a toilet nearby.
00:21:02
Speaker 3: I always wake up and have my number one poo. Then I have two coffee pods and then I have my number two poo. And then any coffee after that is fine. So for anonymous, maybe you do need to do that. Have a coffee first at home, near a toilet, just like you said, and then you're off on the day.
00:21:20
Speaker 2: Love that. Hey, well, that is it for us today. Make sure you follow the show so every new episode lands straight into your feed and come and find us on socials too, where we are going to keep you posted on what we're up to between episodes.
00:21:37
Speaker 3: And if you want to hear you're asking for a friend question, super easy. Send us an email or a voice note to well at mamamia.com and.
00:21:44
Speaker 1: We, aka Dr. Ginny, will get to the bottom of it.
00:21:48
Speaker 3: Please remember information discussed in this podcast is for education purposes only and is not intended to provide professional medical advice. Please seek your own medical advice specific to your circumstances from your healthcare professional.
00:22:02
Speaker 1: See you next time.
00:22:03
Speaker 2: Stay well.
00:22:06
Speaker 3: Mamma Mia acknowledges the traditional owners of land and waters that this podcast is recorded on, the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation. We pay our respects to elders past and present.
