Love Lives - Dr Hazel Wallace busts myths around the clitoris, female masturbation, and the ‘orgasm gap’

Episode Date: July 7, 2022

We’re back with another episode of Millennial Love where this week, we’re joined by registered nutritionist, best-selling author, and founder of ‘The Food Medic’ podcast, Dr Hazel Wallace. We chat with Hazel about the taboos around women’s health, the ‘orgasm gap’, and how better sex can lead to better sleep. She also reveals which foods to eat and which to avoid during your period, how diet can ease symptoms of PMS, and why it can be so hard to diagnose endometriosis. Hazel’s book, The Female Factor: Making women’s health count – and what it means for you is out now. Check out Millennial Love on all major podcast platforms and Independent TV, and keep up to date @Millennial_Love on Instagram and TikTok.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/millenniallove. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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talk about female sexual health and how nutrition and masturbation and sex are all connected. So I hope you enjoy the show. Hi Hazel. Hi, thank you for having me. Thank you so much for coming on. So for those who aren't familiar with your work, could you start us off by just describing what it is that you do? Yeah, so first and foremost I'm a doctor, medically trained. I'm also a nutritionist and podcaster. I host a podcast called The Food Medic which is a brand that I, well an educational platform that I built 10 years ago now so it's in our 10th anniversary this year. An author so I've got my third book coming out, The Female Factor. And I guess most people know me best for The Food Medic or call me the food medic because I started this

platform when I was in medical school and it was around a time where I was just about to go into university. I did a previous degree, was living my best life, didn't feel like I was probably in my healthiest kind of place at the time and was very interested in the role of like nutrition and exercise and sleep and stress in our health. And when I was a teenager, I'd lost my dad to a stroke. And I think I was always very aware that how we live our lives impacts our health and it's not just genetics or trauma there's a lot more to it but when I started medical school I was hearing that we were like paying lip service to all of this but we weren't actually learning very much about it so I started

the food medic and it was like my way of kind of writing a blog a very basic blog on the role of nutrition and lifestyle in our health. And at the time, like wellness was very much on the rise, but a lot of it was coming from people who are just kind of at home bloggers who weren't really qualified to talk about it. A lot of it was hearsay, a little bit woo, not really backed in evidence. And so that kind of set me apart from other pages online. And I think that was the reason why it grew quite quickly, because people were just hearing about what they should be eating or how they should move their body and what diets they should be on, but not from someone who's qualified to give them advice. It's interesting what you were saying about how you kind of, how the account grew alongside, I guess, like the clean eating movement. And because I remember all of that happening and I remember getting really sucked into all of it. Like I've written about this before,

but I became really obsessed with all of it. And, you know, chia seeds and the spirulina and all that nonsense that, like you said, no one was really qualified to be telling people this is what you need to be having. And I remember your account being different because you had a medical background. So I think I think that's really interesting. And I guess when it comes to the female factor, I'm interested to know what brought you to focusing on women's health specifically and I guess the majority of your followers are they are they women? Yeah like I think my demographic is like 88 percent or 89 percent female but I think as a woman and as a doctor to lots of women

I noticed that there is this unmet unsppoken need in health and healthcare for women. And most of the research and most of the ways that we treat people are based on kind of male centric medicine. And this was not something that I kind of was very aware of until like in the last three or four years and a couple of books have come out speaking about a gender gap in other areas whether it's like politics whether it's kind of the gender pay gap whether it's technology and science and then some was coming out about medicine but from a practical point of view we weren't changing anything and how science sees women is basically just as like a smaller version of a man um which is very inaccurate and i think we assume that the only difference between us from a biological point of view is that we have

ovaries and that's why we call women's health like basically we're just focusing on ovaries or reproduction or the fact that we can have a baby or the fact that we've got boobs and that's the only thing that we should focus on but I wanted to expand that definition and kind of look at whole body health but through a female lens because we're a lot more than our ovaries and we experience all the conditions that men experience but I don't think we're being diagnosed as much or we're being underdiagnosed, misdiagnosed, undertreated and just having poor outcomes because physiologically we're very different you know we have these hormones that are fluctuating on a monthly basis or we go through a menopause which men don an experience we

have babies that change our bodies change our physiology and that was why I wanted to write the book um and I think when I initially started writing it I was a bit like angry and was very activist and it wasn't going to be very practical and I had to re rethink it a couple of times and kind of put my own frustration aside and think right well how is this going to be practical for a woman who picks it up and so I've shaped it in a way that's more of a lifestyle approach focusing on nutrition movement sleep and mood as kind of the four pillars of the book and talking about the science but also talking about like practically what does this mean for you like how can I help you it's funny what you say about the rage because getting

a lot of this at the moment with women I'm talking to the female rage is building and building and I think particularly when you talk about medical care and you talk about the lack of funding for so many services I mean just this, I was writing about abortion clinics and the underfunding there and the protests. And you know, there's so much that is going on, women are at such a disadvantage, it is very easy to just get really ranty and angry at your keyboard. But I think what you've delivered is something very practical that will really, really help a lot of people. I guess I want to talk about some of the specific things that you touched on in the book that people don't necessarily think about from a health point of view. So one of them is

you talk about the benefits that sex and masturbation can have on sleep. Talk to me about that because I think that's really interesting. Well first of all I wanted to see what research was there and there wasn't a huge amount on sleep and sex which I thought was quite interesting because they like they tend to go hand in hand and but majority of men and women 50% of them will say that sex improves their sleep and what's really interesting is men kind of in general will just say sex improves their sleep but women tend to find it improves their sleep if they orgasm and that can be either sex with another person or it can be masturbation. But what's really interesting is, even with that knowledge, not many women, especially straight women, actually orgasm with sex. And so this kind

of opened another conversation around the orgasm gap which is this gap between heterosexual women and men and the fact that orgasm rates are in their 90s for men and for women are down in the 60s and then in between the kind of like people who are either having sex with women or gay men who are having sex the rates are kind of in the middle of that. So heterosexual men at the top of the graph and then straight women at the bottom. Right. What's wrong with straight men? What is wrong with straight men? Well, I think, I mean, there's lots of reasons why this is. And I think obviously for a man, it's a lot easier to orgasm because from an anatomical point of view it's a very straightforward process whereas for

women majority of women need clitoral stimulation so not just penetrative sex when you go to sex ed in school you learn about penis and vagina sex and that's like the gold standard and that's like the thing that you shouldn't do because you'll get an STI or get pregnant and we don't talk about pleasure at all and we think that that's the route to orgasm and it is for men but not for women and so I think there's a lack of knowledge I think for a lot of especially when it's casual sex men are less likely to prioritize a woman's needs and women are less likely to advocate for themselves. So they're not going to be like, excuse me, this is what I need in order to orgasm. But I think the reason that we see the rates slightly higher in a bisexual couple or in a gay couple with women is they understand each other's needs. And so they're more likely to achieve orgasm that way and we also see in

relationships versus casual sex that orgasm rates will increase and again if you're more comfortable with someone you get to know someone's body then you're more likely to know what works for them and like one study I think that I quote in the book four percent of women said that they can have sex, they can orgasm through penetration alone. 4%? 4%. Wow. So that leaves 96% of women in that particular study who can't. Whereas when I speak to women, so many of them will feel like there's something wrong with them

because they're not orgasming through penetration and they then they feel like they have to fake because they don't want to like you know affect their partner's ego but then when does that end when does that end and it's not just like you know losing out in pleasure and there's so many things that sex offers us beyond the fact that we can conceive you know it's a lot more than that and kind of from the sleep point of view I'm like it's a public health problem that women aren't able to orgasm it is because sleep's so important for so many things beyond just making us feel rested it's like really important for all of our biological processes from heart health brain health you know whole body health

it's really important what is it about sex and masturbation to the body that benefits sleep is it is it something physiological or is it mental yeah does it work there's loads of things that go on and I think there's a huge psychological component to it but also on a physiological level you release hormones like oxytocin and prolactin and they're bonding hormones and they also reduce cortisol in the body um it's why you feel like really bonded with someone after you orgasm or why you feel really sleepy and that happens in both men and women but I think we portray it a lot in men like in movies and things like that that just men want to go to sleep but actually it makes us feel more bonded and restful um as a woman as well so it's it's kind of helps us

fall into that sleepy state a lot quicker i have been sleeping terribly lately so this is all very interesting i'm gonna take this all on board um Going back to what you said about the reasons why women don't necessarily feel emboldened to ask for what they want in bed in casual sex. I think that really taps into like a deeper societal problem, doesn't it? And about like the shame that we attach to female sexuality in our bodies. Do you think that is a problem that we are getting closer to solving because you know we are having these conversations more and more and you know people are writing about this stuff more and more we're seeing you know female pleasure prioritized in popular culture a lot more do you think things are changing a little bit yeah a little bit but I think it's like female pleasure is still

such a taboo and um even you know like people feel afraid to talk about kind of their needs or what feels good or watching porn or buying sex toys and I think again thinking back to when we learn about sex pleasure is just not part of it and actually when I was in university I used to be part of this organization called Sexpression and we would teach sex ed to students and what we'd do at the end of a session was give them a piece of paper and everyone had to write down a question and you know people were really curious but it was still like oh I don't want to ask it out in front of the class and I get when you're a teenager you're going through puberty it's a bit more uncomfortable but I've got friends who are in their 30s and they still feel like they can't talk about it I've got patients who feel afraid to talk about it yeah you know even talking

about this topic on my platform is often greeted with a lot of resistance really how so well I think you know recently I this like the last week I put up a kind of anatomy drawing of a clitoris. And I think like a lot of people think it's just this tiny pea-shaped hump that we have when it's actually a lot bigger than that. There's a lot more there. And there's evidence to say that if you educate both men and women with clitoral anatomy and education it increases sex satisfaction for both partners and it was really interesting because the only people who were pushing back were men and a lot of it was well I thought you were kind of I thought this was a nutrition page and I mean I am a doctor and I'll talk about far more topics than just nutrition on my page in general. But this one topic seemed to

be really uncomfortable for people. And I was like, well, I'm just going to keep talking about this because this shouldn't be, this is anatomy, this shouldn't be uncomfortable. And I know that when I went to medical school, we didn't do a deep dive into clitoral anatomy. And up until like, you know, quite recently, I think it was the 1980s, like an image of the clitoris didn't exist in textbooks. So it's only now that we're starting to talk about it, learn about it and understand it. And it's far more than just sex. I think like the sexual experience and female pleasure extends beyond that. And I think it does feed into a lot of other kind of societal, cultural questions, conversations we should be having. Yeah.

You know, like to talk about it, it's almost like we're being promiscuous or it's not considered something that I don't know that women can talk about. I'm trying to think about what would motivate a man to actually get in touch with you and criticize you for posting something like that and I wonder if it's if it's like a sort of they feel affronted because a it's something that they're supposed to know about if they're a straight man and they don't and they feel like they don't want to be told that they're wrong do you think it's like an ego thing could it really be something as like simple as that or is it that it's unfamiliar and people are resistant to things that are unfamiliar anyway i think it could be a bit of both um i just think it's very interesting that that was from a man and then there was like some kind of jokey other comments from men as well.

What kind of comments do you get from people? Do you get a lot of questions about dating and sexuality and sexual health? And what are some of the kind of main issues that people want to talk to you about? I think it wasn't until recently that I really like stepped into talking about kind of sexual health as a bigger part of our overall health and well-being and when I did I was like so it was just so interesting the questions that come in like is this normal should I feel this way can you get addicted to sex toys um am I normal if I can't orgasm like a a lot of those things. And I think there's a lot of

people who aren't having those conversations with people in their lives and they're not sure what normal is. Not many things are normal and we all exist on a spectrum. I think because I talk about a lot of female focused topics, a lot of it is women wanting to understand their bodies and not feeling listened to especially when it comes to kind of menstrual cycle changes contraception the menopause and changes to your body and female pleasure all of that which are kind of things that are all very much like I think we're told when we're teenagers that like you need to talk about it in a room with just women and it's very hush-hush and it's not something that's out in public very much so I find that really

interesting and I think you almost like hear this or feel this sigh of relief when you talk about it because people feel heard and feel listened to and so it makes me want to talk about it more and learn about it more. ACAST powers the world's best podcasts. Here's a show that we recommend. world's best podcasts. Here's a show that we recommend. I'm Jessie Kirkshank, and on my podcast, Phone a Friend, I break down the biggest stories in pop culture, but when I have questions, I get to phone a friend. I phone my old friend, Dan

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Acast helps creators launch, grow, and monetize their podcasts. Everywhere. Acast.com One of the other things you talk about in the book, which I want to ask you about, is food easing PMS symptoms. That sounds like a glorious myth. Is this real and what do I need to eat to make me less of a tyrant when I have my period? Yeah, I mean, it's so interesting, that kind of

that field. And again, like the caveat is, the research is not where I'd like it to be to write like, you know, really clear, clear concrete guidelines but PMS is basically the days leading up to your period and during your period where you tend to experience symptoms there's 150 different symptoms that a woman can experience during PMS and in that kind of late luteal phase which is just the kind of part prior to your period, we tend to feel really bloated, cravings tend to be high. We actually have a higher resting metabolism. So we burn more calories at rest, which I think is really interesting because that really seems to be the reason why we have these increased cravings. So your body's basically being very intuitive.

we have these increased cravings. Your body's basically being very intuitive. But as a woman, you're told to kind of resist those cravings and to restrict and to not listen to your body. Whereas my message to women is lean into those cravings and listen to what your body needs during that time because you're burning extra energy, you need extra nutrients. And so your period in itself is a very inflammatory process because you're basically shedding the lining of your womb and I want you to focus on kind of anti-inflammatory foods and that does sound kind of woo and kind of wellness but foods that I guess you would typically feel that you'd see in like a Mediterranean style diet so omega-3 fatty acids that you'd see in like a Mediterranean style diet. So omega-3 fatty acids that you'd find in oily fish, chia seeds, flax seeds, walnuts can be really good. Getting in lots of colorful fruits and vegetables that are like rich in antioxidants that can help dampen the inflammatory response.

Complex carbohydrates are really important. So high fiber carbohydrates and things like that, that will help sustain you and give you energy and will probably help control those cravings but again having a little bit of chocolate is not going to be harmful and i think again chocolate is contains polyphenols antioxidants it's good for you um magnesium can really can be helpful for if you experience bloating or breast tenderness. Salt is also another thing that you'd want to be a bit more conscious of not consuming too much of. So not adding too much salt to your meal if you find that you're retaining a lot of water, feeling bloated and things like that. I want to ask you about the pill because you write about, I think, and just contraception more generally, because I think this is such a big problem for so many women um you know we go through the rigmarole

of trying out all of these different methods the pill the coil the implant and they all affect us differently it's a huge injustice that we have to go through all of this and there is still no male contraceptive pill that's a whole other issue um but from your point of view you know what what are these contraceptives actually doing to our bodies and what can we do to limit the symptoms that we might experience from them yeah i think it's such a huge topic and we need like more nuance around the conversation because you have to weigh up the risk and benefit and there's you know there's a lot of benefit to using contraception and you know the risk of having an unwanted pregnancy can also be harmful to a person if that's not what

they want so I always kind of caveat it with that so obviously obviously we, if we're not in contraception, we have like a natural ebb and flow of our hormones across a typical textbook 28 day cycle. None of us are 28, are textbooks. So if you don't have a 28 day cycle, there's nothing wrong with you. But when you take hormonal contraception, the purpose of that is to dampen that response. So downregulate those hormones. so it'll flatline it and those hormones don't just orchestrate your reproduction they affect your mood they affect your metabolism they affect your strength so many things basically all the organ systems in our body I would thread very carefully with some conversations online because there's lots

of hormone experts out there who and they're not experts and he will talk about balancing your hormones and to not go through and not go on contraception or avoid this blah blah blah not all of that is grounded in evidence and a lot of that can come from personal experience kind of feeding into that wellness space and the other note on that is that hormonal contraception isn't where like hormonal methods are not just used for contraception and some women are on the coil because they have really heavy painful periods and are unable to cope without that or some people take the pill because they've got hormonal based acne or PCOS and we don't have other medications or there are but those medications don't suit that person and so there's reasons people take

these hormonal methods outside of not having a baby so it's such a nuanced conversation and I feel like women need to be better informed. We probably need a lot more research to fully understand the implications. But also we shouldn't shame a woman if she feels like she's having a side effect from a medication that we don't fully understand. So it's a really tricky conversation and it's kind of,

it does feel like it's slightly being hijacked by the wellness space. So I'm quite like territorial about it when I'm talking about it because I want to protect women and make them feel like you know they feel fully informed and they understand the risks of coming off that contraception should they feel like they want to do so and also you you know one woman's experience of a contraceptive is never going to be the same as another's. You know, I'm on the hormonal coil, I think. Yeah, the hormonal coil. And I love it.

It's great. But I have had friends that have had it and it's been terrible. I had one friend, it got lost inside her. You know, there are all these like scary things that happen. But for me, it's great. So it's like you just never know. I think don't listen to other people's experiences just talk to your doctor and try and decide what the best option is and unfortunately you do have to maybe go through

a few until you find the right one. Finally I want to ask you a little bit about some of the conditions women's health conditions that people still really don't know much about even a medical level things like endometriosis and polycystic ovaries um I think conversations around these things particularly endometriosis is getting a lot better um I think it was Lena Dunham who had like a hysterectomy because of her endometriosis and and things like that which have really like raised awareness um but why is it that you think these conditions in particular there's still a lack of knowledge there and they are really common aren't they? Yeah I think the reason why we don't know much

is because they affect women like if I'm being completely blunt yeah so if they affected men we'd know so much about them yeah it takes from onset of symptoms to time a woman gets diagnosed it's on average eight years with endometriosis eight years where a woman is completely suffering going back and forth to her GP told her it's all in your head because the only way to really diagnose endometriosis is laparoscopic so opening up a woman and looking inside and seeing that endometrial like tissue on other organs other than her womb and it's really debilitating it causes really really terrible symptoms it can cause infertility or difficulty getting pregnant it causes pain during sex pain opening your bowels or going to the toilet, really painful periods. It can grow

on like other parts of your body, like typically on the bowel and bladder, but it can grow in your lungs. And it's just a really horrible thing to live with. And it, you know, the hormones tend to, or the symptoms tend to fluctuate with your cycle. So you're experiencing this month on month. When I was a medical student i remember on my ops and kiney rotation i was sitting in an endometriosis clinic and it was just for women with endometriosis and the consultant who was there was actually absolutely fantastic and almost made me want to go into ops and Kiney because he just really understood these women and really listened to them and every single woman who came in was being diagnosed for the

first time and they just cried and cried because they weren't able to get pregnant for years and they didn't have a diagnosis they weren't sure why every time they went to the toilet they were in really severe pain and I remember him sitting down and telling me if you hear these symptoms don't disregard a woman like take her seriously and it's just one of those conditions that we just don't fully understand and we have medications that can help but for some women it gets so bad that they have to have their womb removed and you can have um part of the tissue removed from your bowel and your bladder but it can grow back so there's no cure for it which is really horrible and obviously even getting diagnosed can be quite um traumatic because

you have to undergo surgery but there is some like research ongoing that um there's a group of female researchers actually that have kind of pitched ways that we could potentially diagnose it through like a urine test. So fingers crossed in a couple of years, we'll have methods to diagnose it quickly and effectively that is not invasive. OK, it's time for our lessons in love segment. So this is the part of the show where I ask everyone to share something that they've learned from their previous relationships um but I guess it's up to you if you want to come at that from a personal point of view if you want to come at it from a health perspective of something that you think the listeners would find helpful for me you cannot go fully into a

relationship and be and allow someone to love you until you fully love yourself and fully understand yourself and I'm currently in a relationship but was single for a while and was in a very long-term relationship before that I think until I turned 30 that was the first time that I really fully understood myself felt very accepting of myself could stand in my own and and advocate for myself was that after the long-term relationship because I think when you're 20 you want something very different to what you want when you're 30 and it's fine for relationships to end and it's fine to change what you want because even my career and my wants in my life are very different to what I wanted when I was 20 to what I want when I'm 30 and I think we often think that we're a failure if a

relationship ends but oftentimes it's just like an evolution of what we want and it can be a really healthy sign. You mentioned you were single for a while in between how long were you single for and how long did it take for you to get to that point do you think was it and is it just a matter of time or is it a matter of you know really doing the work and self-reflection yeah it's really I think well I was single for the full two years of the pandemic so we broke up prior to that which was in my head the worst timing ever but actually it was the best thing for me I worked as a COVID doctor so I was very like head in the game for that but I was also living alone and so it really forced me to like find

happiness in me and look inward and then I just did like in between the pandemic just spent a lot of time kind of journaling I took myself to Malta for a month and like was finishing off the book and just really forced myself to find acceptance and happiness in me and then when I came to meeting someone I was in the right place at the right time and and emotionally in the right place that I was very much open to it so I think yeah there's a lot of pressure again on women to to find the right person or be with the right person when I'm like you are you already have the right person you are the right person and I too can add to that not kind of complete you and it sounds a bit like wanky but I think I've got a lot of friends who are single in their 30s and it's almost like a

rat race to find someone and I wish I could like kind of shake myself two years ago and I kind of say don't put life on hold to go on holidays to enjoy yourself to take yourself out for dinner to do all of those things because I think it's it's very easy to say I'll be happy when I find Mr. Right or Mrs. Right. Yeah, and then you're just constantly waiting and it's about trying to find it within yourself. Yeah, yeah, absolutely, absolutely. I think that's a really lovely note to end on. Thank you so much, Hazel.

It's been so nice to chat to you. That's all we've got time for today. Thank you so much for listening. If you have enjoyed this episode of Millennial Love, you can subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Acast, Spotify, or wherever it is that you get your podcasts. You can also now watch us online if you're more of a visual person. So head over to Independent TV if that sounds like something you're interested in.

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