The Dr Louise Newson Podcast - 40 - How hormones reduce inflammation and keep you healthier for longer

Episode Date: December 30, 2025

In this episode, Dr Louise Newson speaks with longevity expert and patient advocate Leslie Kenny about health span, inflammation and why prevention matters more than ever.Leslie shares her experience of being diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis and lupus in her late thirties and being told there was nothing she could do. Rather than accepting this, she explored lifestyle, immune health and inflammation, leading to a remarkable recovery.Together, they discuss why medicine often focuses on managing disease instead of preventing it, the role of hormones in healthy ageing and how women are frequently dismissed during menopause. They also explore the Oxford Longevity Project and share practical, realistic ways to protect health, energy and independence for the long term.Want more from the podcast? Sign up to my premium offer: https://www.drlouisenewson.co.uk/premium-podcasts LET'S CONNECT  Subscribe here 👉 https://www.youtube.com/@menopause_doctor Website 👉 https://www.drlouisenewson.co.uk/Instagram 👉   / @drlouisenewsonpodcast  LinkedIn 👉     / https://www.linkedin.com/in/drlouisenewson/ TikTok 👉   / https://www.tiktok.com/@drlouisenewson Spotify 👉 https://open.spotify.com/show/7dCctfyI9bODGDaFnjfKhg LEARN MORE Find out more about the Oxford Longevity Project 👉 https://oxfordlongevityproject.org/ Download my balance app 👉 https://www.balance-menopause.com/balance-app/Get tickets for my new theatre tour, Breaking the Cycle 👉 https://www.nlp-ltd.com/dr-louise-newson-breaking-the-cycle/ 

We need to be thinking more about health span rather than lifespan. We need to be trying to prevent disease rather than cure disease. And in this podcast, I'm talking with Leslie Kenny, about longevity, about her journey of being diagnosed with an autoimmune disease, that she actually cured herself rather than taking medications that were suggested to her. So it's a great conversation that we can all learn from as well. So there's so much to talk about. I've known you for a little while, but I just love the work that you do

because you're coming from a scientist, a patient advocate, a woman, someone who's inquisitive, and just wants to learn more. And that's great, isn't it? Yeah, well, I love what I do. And I think the body is such a mysterious but beautiful, complex guardian. And if we treat it right, we will be rewarded with a long, healthy, vibrant life. But if we forget that we are guardians of our bodies, we have the flip side, which is if we're not supporting it with the things it needs and we're overburdening it with toxins or stress, then unfortunately we have to bear the consequences. Luckily, the body is wonderfully resilient and tapping into that resilience and showing people they have more power than they think and they can actually bring.

their bodies back online, back to balance to homeostasis, that's my raison debt. And also the body's very repairing as well. And, you know, so many of us, myself included, take our health for granted. And it's not until we're ill that we realize how fragile our health is. And I know that I've been ill. I've had pancreatitis. I've had sepsis. I've had migraines that I still have that I can't control. And, you know, sometimes if you do something that you know isn't right and you have a consequence that's fine but when you're otherwise healthy and something happens it's it can be really difficult but the other thing that frustrates me every day in my work is that when you're not listened to or you're told wrong information and so just tell us a bit

about your experience if you don't mind sure well at age 39 that's 21 years ago I was in the middle of my fifth round of IVF and I had been told that I was too old to use my onyx so I I had to use donor eggs, which is not easy. You're too old to use your own legs. At 39. So I had my third daughter at 40, so I would have been told the same. Well, there is a happy ending because I did bear a biological daughter at 43 with no help. But at 39 in the United States, I was told I had to go to donor eggs.

And it's not easy for someone who's half Asian, half Caucasian, like me, to find the right donor. And it was quite high stakes. at the same time I began to notice pain in my hands and I went to my doctor to investigate and got that call no one likes to get saying your results are in would you mind coming into the office so we can discuss them? So it wasn't no problem, everything's fine,

go about your daily business, it was obviously something. And when I came in, the doctor told me that I had rheumatoid arthritis and not to worry that I could be, put on these drugs, injectables, that would suppress my immune system. And when I asked about lifestyle changes that I could make, she said, no, there's really nothing you can do, but you should avoid large crowds of people. So things like the cinema, parties, church, and small children in particular, I should avoid because they carry germs. So that was my lifestyle tip. And the lifestyle

change I was told to make. And then she said, but your other results indicate that you have lupus, which I'd never heard of. And I said, well, what's the drug for that? And she said, unfortunately, there isn't a treatment to manage it. And there's no cure. This is 2004, so since then I think they have come up with something. But she said, unfortunately, you should expect it to just get worse over time. And at that point, the angry, entitled medical consumer in me appeared and said, wait a second, I'm the client here. I'm paying you money because we have a private system in the United States. You're the expert. You're the one with the framed diplomas behind you on the wall. Fix this. Make this right. And I think so many people, especially Americans, love this idea

that we can outsource our health. And then we don't have to take responsibility. Somebody else does it. Whether it's liposuction or cosmetic surgery, it's somebody else. They can fix it, right? And it doesn't work like that with your health. And she simply looked at me, shook her head, and said, because I told her I had the fifth IVF, and she said, I wouldn't do the IVF. Even if you're successful, you've only got a good five years left. Exactly. That was my response as well. She said that to you. Yeah. Yeah. And I have since heard from other patients who got the same. You've got a good five years left. And how old were you? 39. 39. So that was it. Game over at 44. That was it. Exactly. And I was gobsmacked. I walked out of there. It's a bit of a showstopper when somebody says that. I had no

response. And the more I thought about it, the more I felt it only stood to reason. that a patient who didn't smoke, didn't drink, slept better, moved better, ought to have a better outcome than a patient that did those things, right? And I thought, surely, I must be able to do something. Even though she says there's nothing I can do, I'm going to try and optimize myself to be the best patient possible. And if I meet her halfway, maybe then she'll meet me halfway and will cure me because I'm still looking for cure. And that, that's really all that patients want. We don't want to be managed.

We don't want to have these chronic conditions. We want cure. And I also went to the patient bulletin boards, which are a wonderful resource, right? The doctors tell you one thing, but patients will tell you their lived experience. And on the lupus boards, patients were saying there's been a study that was conducted four years ago in Germany with lupus patients. they did something called intravenous immunoglobulin therapy. This is a transfusion made up of antibodies donated by anywhere from 3 to 10,000 donors. And what they were noticing, although it was initially made to help people who didn't make antibodies,

they noticed that it was helping people like me. It was modulating our immune systems and bringing them back to homeostasis to balance. and every one of the 13 patients improved. This was contrary to what my doctor told me, and it was a bit of a light-bold moment, gave me hope. So I went back to my doctor and said, will you prescribe this for me? And she said, absolutely not.

That's only one study. There are only 13 people. It's not statistically significant. I said, but there's nothing else. She said, no. I then looked all over the U.S. I found a doctor in San Francisco who was willing to prescribe me two rounds of IVIG, which I think in the UK is only available to severe MS patients. And at the same time, I thought, if I'm resetting my immune system back to baseline, I need to remove the lifestyle triggers that might be causing inflammation, causing my immune system to overreact.

So that was dairy, gluten, eggs, poor sleep, poor movement, toxic thoughts, work stress. I got rid of everything. I also did trauma therapy. Honestly, I looked under every single rock. And when I went back to my doctor within six months, this was for a routine checkup and had all my bloods done, as you would routinely do, she opened my file and looked down in simple. said, well, look at that. You don't have lupus or R.A. anymore. Really?

What? You don't have lupus or R.A. All your blood levels have returned to normal. Do you want to know what I did? No, that's okay. And she didn't even look up. Because they're busy. There must be thousands of patients like me. But you learn from your patients. You know, every day I learn from my patients. because medicine is not just a science, it's an art, and individualization of care is so important.

But you know, you want to know what else people can do, how they can help themselves as well. But you're inquisitive as well. And I think that it's so much more work to be curious. Of course it is. Right? But it's more satisfying as a doctor. And that's what we all, we patients all look for in a doctor.

And I do say to other patients, if you are not getting this level of curiosity and interest from your doctor, fire them, right? So you didn't go back and see her again? No, no, never. And in fact, it was shortly after that that I moved to the United Kingdom. And ever since then, I have gone to a functional medicine doctor on Harley Street, and I have my bloods done privately just to make sure that I get everything done. and I'm looking at far more than just HSCRP, which is a marker of inflammation that most of us get tested for.

I'm looking for cytokines, TNF alpha. These are the markers that were sky high for me, and mine are quite low. And every year over the last, well, I moved here in 2006, every year since then, my CRP gets a little bit better so that now it's 0.3, which is great. Ideally, you'd want it under 0.5. And when I did my glycan age biological age test last year, it remarkably came back at age 21. Now, how is that possible? I was told I should be dead by 44. How can I have the biological age of a 21-year-old?

And that's where I say to patients, I'm living proof that you can do so much more than you have been led to believe. My colleague at the Oxford Longevity Project, Sir Muir Gray, who's one of the leaders in preventive medicine in the NHS for the last 50 years, he has always said that the patient is the biggest missing piece in modern medicine. We've got to empower patients so that they collaborate with their practitioners. And if we have more curious practitioners like you, then we have the opportunity to not just manage chronic conditions. but actually cure them. It's so important because often in medicine, it's guideline driven, it's treatment driven. You're waiting for the disease and then you treat the disease. And that's just the way we're taught even at medical school.

Yet often we're not taught enough about why a disease occurs. And I'm very fortunate, as you know, I've got a pathology degree. And I spent the whole year studying the macrophage. Fantastic. Yeah. Which is a cell that's really key for inflammation. And, you know, I didn't realize until then that, you know, we need to have these inflammatory cells to protect us. But if they're in the wrong microenvironment, they can become pro-inflammatory.

They can switch on inflammation and make it worse for us. So those cytokines like interleukin-6 and tumourin necrosis factor will get produced at the wrong amounts, the wrong levels, and damage our tissue and increase diseases. And it's quite simplistic at the time, I thought, oh, I'm not really that interested. in that. And then once you start to learn and you see people, I remember going back and reading my notes and thinking, actually, the root cause of so many diseases is inflammation. And also, you know, we've got inflammatory lives. We have inflammatory diets. We have inflammatory lifestyles. And some of the drugs that we prescribe now increase inflammation as well. And then if we're in the wrong microenvironment, i.e., obviously all I think about often are hormones. We've got low, east,

diar, progesterone, testosterone, we've got more inflammation. But we have to be looking at all of those things. We can't just look at exercise or just look at sleep. And I know you being such an inquisitive patient as well, you're taking responsibility for as much as you can by yourself as well, but by asking the right questions. And that's so important, isn't it? It's 100%. A lot of it is down to us, because if we simply accept the practitioner that we are paired with on the NHS, it's the luck of the draw. It's a lottery, right? And you might have an inspired practitioner, but you might not. And for instance, with BHRT, something I'm passionate about, it's so hard for women to get access to this, but absolutely crucial. And also for thyroid

health, which is another one of my pet peeves, is thyroid support in the UK. But also in the United States, a lot of women don't get the support they need. And they're just told, it's the menopause, the brain fog, the extra weight, the hair loss. This is how it is, honey, right? Yeah. But it's not. And I feel like this chapter from 60 onwards or from 50 onwards, when we enter menopause, it's a magical time. And I want all other women to tap into their inner magic.

But sometimes the way to do it is by having BHRT, getting the right thyroid support, making sure there's not inflammation there. And once you have a holistic program in place for the patient and they do their part, then a whole new life unfolds for them, right? It's after children, after the career, then they can contribute back to society, really. I just want to remind you that I'm the founder of the free balance app which you should all be downloading so you can learn so much more about your hormones from and also monitor symptoms if you're having them so just head to the app store or Google Play and download Balance app. I was sitting on the train yesterday coming down to London

and I was quietly working on my laptop and there were two women talking who work for the trained service and they'd recognised each other. And they were probably my age. They looked menopausal. They didn't look like they were taking hormones. And they were both talking about how tired they were. And they said, well, and they were talking. And I have my head down because I don't think they recognise me.

And they said, well, it's just that time of life, isn't it? She goes, oh, yeah, well, you will get tired now, won't you? And she said, yeah, I have my tea at 6 o'clock, and then I went to sleep on the sofa. And then I woke up at one in the morning, and then I just got to bed. and then I woke up and she said but I often really sleep so early she goes normally my bedtime's 8 o'clock and the other one says yeah mine's about half 8 and I was like what yeah I have so much I need to do in the evening I don't want to go to bed then and it's I just made me realize you know we know women become invisible when they're menopausal but actually they're becoming invisible in their own homes yeah and they're sort of just accepting that you know they're both a bit overweight they're both struggling when they because they got off at themington so they were hobbly a little bit. And it was just like

that's their lot. Do you know what I mean? They're sort of because people talk about this menopause sort of transition. This is how you're going to feel and you're sort of expected to be a second class citizen because you don't have hormones. And there's no other area of medicine where we have an

evidence-based treatment that we know has important biological effects in the body yet we're saying, oh no, you can just see how you are without it. It's terrible because this whole group of society actually withdraw into themselves, into their homes, because they don't have the energy. Now, if I talk to these women, they always say, oh, I don't have time to take part.

Oh, I don't have the energy. And I think, if I gave you the opportunity to have the time and energy back, would you take it? And I want everybody listening to know that they can get the energy and the time back. because not only can you get the energy through, say, BHRT, but BHRT will help you become biologically younger, hence giving you more time to live your life. You will have a longer health span. And more time to spend with your family,

more time to give back to your community, more time to do all the things you wanted to do. And that's what I'm doing with my life at 60. Which is so important. And, you know, it talks me a little bit about, the Oxford Longevity Project because it was just so wonderful to be part of it and I'm still so grateful that you invited me to be a speaker because longevity means different things to different people. Right. But you've also mentioned health span. So just elaborate a bit because that's so

crucial people understand. So your longevity is really how long you will actually live. But we know many people who live in very poor health. So health span is really how long you will live in a healthy state. And that is much more important than how long you live. I don't think any of us want to be in pain like those women were hobbling off the train at Leamington or a feeling exhausted, like they can't cook for themselves, they can't cook for their families, they can't shift the weight, they're brain fogged, right? We want to live in full vitality. We want to feel vibrant. And once you do things like replace your lost hormones, your bioidentical, with bioidentical hormones, that helps. So that's really the difference between health span and longevity.

And if we look at countries like Japan, they're doing a good job at lengthening the years of healthy life. And the more years of healthy life you have, the more years you can work, the more years you You can pay taxes, so I hope the Strummer government is paying attention. I know Layla Moran in Parliament is going to be having Mew or Gray speak in a few weeks' time about this. But this whole cohort of people in their 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s, like Sir Christopher Ball, they can give back. And they want to give back. And they have so much experience. So in the East, older people are seen as elders.

They're wise. and they're there to help share. And you've heard of Ikigai, this Japanese idea that each one of us has a unique purpose, a reason why we've been put on this planet. And when you step into your wisdom, when you were older, you embrace that ikigai and you share it with everyone else in your community. And I think it's a wonderful way to give back, but it gives this sense of purpose to older individuals. And so that's why I'm so passionate, and my co-founders of the Oxford Longevity

project are so passionate about helping empower people to really get actively involved in authoring their own health span. And the Longevity Project is really there to bring the latest scientific breakthroughs around healthy aging, but also science, whether it's Nobel Prizes, like the 2016 Nobel Prize around autophagy or cell renewal, or like the T-Regs Nobel that was just announced yesterday around the immune system. We want to explain these things to people so they understand them and think, oh, autophagy, cell renewal, I can do that if I fast, or if I eat certain compounds that will activate this for me.

I didn't know I could do that. No doctor is going to explain that to them because they don't have the time and they've got their prescription pad. It's so much faster to use the prescription pad, right? No, I don't want to throw shade on doctors because we need them and I have benefited from them. And you're a wonderful doctor, case in point, right? But a prescription pad is a quick way to get your patient through your office

in what doctors get six minutes on the NHS now. We do need to think differently because, you know, the last few years when I was a GP, it was a revolving door. People were just coming back and back and getting sicker and sicker. And it's a two-way thing, you know, some women and men are not taking responsibility

for their health, but more so, doctors, and not just in the UK, but globally, are not able, but they're not trained to take responsibility for preventing disease. And even my husband, he just, he works in the NHS and he said, but we can't, we're swamped, we're drowning. But then I said to him, do you ever, give vitamin D to your patients, Paul.

And he said, well, no, because why would I? I said, would you have a test? And he said, no, because they'll all be low. It's like, well, you know, but when I was a GP, they'd stopped us, they wouldn't allow us to prescribe vitamin D because they said it's so cheap, people can just buy it. But I worked in a very deprived area and people don't prioritize their health over their cigarettes and their alcohol and whatever else.

And that's just fact, you know? Whereas if it's a free prescription, they're entitled to free prescription, they would take it. And more importantly, they would give it to their children. So just a simple, cheap thing. I know on a big scale, it gets expensive. But, you know, just look at how vitamin D works, you know. It's very important.

It's very basic. It's not very sexy. It's not a big farmer. But actually, it's still really important. And that's just one example. You know, there's lots of things. And you can't really eat enough vitamin D. In living in the UK, you can't get enough sunshine to be still vitamin D.

That's right. But think about it. It's anti-inflammatory. It's good for the immune system. It helps prevent a mass. at least some studies indicate that. And I think that if we look at how much we could save, you know, there was a study that people have talked about for a long time, Andrew Scott at London Business School, Martin Ellison at

Oxford and David Sinclair at Harvard co-authored this paper in nature. And they said if they could just slow down the aging process in all Americans by just one year, that it would save the American government. something like $38 billion a year. It was a huge amount. And over, you know, 10 years, it was something like $3.8 trillion. So there is a, they call it the longevity dividend. This is Andrew Scott's work. And I think we really need to pay attention to this. If we can prevent, we have a financial gain as a society. But governments also stand to gain from people who stay in the workforce for longer. Communities gain because people are contributing for longer.

And all that suffering and pain that I'm sure every single person listening to this has known or knows somebody who's been touched by this, we could shorten that period of pain. And the goal is really to compress the number of years that we have ill health, make them small as small as possible. And I think that's my goal. I certainly hope that the wheels fall off simultaneously and I'm gone like that, right? because I hope I'm working right up to the last minute but we can't do that if we don't focus on preventive medicine

absolutely and it's just as a no-brainer I mean even taking the conversation back to hormones if I may Philip Sorrell who's a professor of psychiatry and gynecology in Yale University he did a study a while ago now looking at the cost

of women who've had a hysterectomy not giving back their hormones and you know it's it's millions of dollars because hysterectomy is a very common operation, lots of young women are still not given hormones we know over here a study. We did show that only 5% of women are prescribed hormones after having their ovaries removed when they're young with a benign cause, 0% testosterone. It's just like madness and it's draining on health care systems but also economic systems because these women are less likely to work. They're less likely to be

promoted at work if they do work. They're more likely to have a divorce. You know, know, so much is stacked against them. And it's very simple and very straightforward, actually, to think about the most obvious things first. Yeah, I think, I think it really is going to take advocacy work, like the work that you do and some of the work that we do or say Newark-ray does in order to really show government that this is worth investing in. Prevention is, well, they say it right, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. So it seems so obvious. Yeah.

And I think it is becoming more obvious. People are more prepared to take responsibility. I look at my older children as 23 and 22. Already their lifestyles are completely better. So much better than I was when I was 21, 22. But they're looking. They're more aware of nutrition. They're more aware of things.

You know, they want to exercise. You know, I got to them yesterday, my 21-year-old was going to a gym class. You know, it's really good that they are looking at that for the future as well. because I think also, you know, they know the impact on their physical health, but also their mental health, and the two are so closely intertwined, as you know. Very true. And I think that programs where GPs automatically prescribe things like exercise to patients, if, for instance, they're being prescribed metformin or Prozac, these are great things.

And, in fact, that's starting with NHS Hertfordshire. So that's another initiative of some. word, Greg. Yeah, absolutely, but also you've got to do as you, you know, practice as you preach. There's absolutely no point, me sitting and saying to my patience, you need to exercise regularly if I don't exercise regularly, or to say you mustn't have, or you should reduce your processed foods and I'm going to McDonald's twice a day. Yeah, of course. So we've got, but it's, it takes a while and it does take generations, but I do think things are moving in some ways, but then, you know, I've been in Norway recently and I was in Amsterdam a couple of weekends ago and people are definitely a lot leaner, a lot healthier in those countries than over here.

And I just look at the inflammatory diets that we're poisoning people with and I feel really sad. I agree with you. One interesting thing is people here always say, I can't go outside to exercise. It's too cold. And I'm thinking, have you seen the Norwegians? Yeah, I know. There's really no excuse. But that's where I'm hoping that government will do things, like, why did they get rid of the sugar tax?

That should have been a, that's a no-brainer, really. And at the same time, we get these social prescriptions in, again, like Muir Gray was saying. And if we have community initiatives that are fun, like what Angela Rippen is doing with Let's Dance, and I know you've had her on this program, then it's, it makes it much more compelling because the doctors are saying you should get active your friends are saying we're going to do the let's dance program we're doing salsa down at the dance studio want to come and it's a fun night out that doesn't necessarily involve alcohol or you know going down to the chip shop and they get a benefit they get that social oxytocin boost the dopamine hits away from their phone. They're not eating the bad things. They're not drinking or smoking the bad things. And they're

actively investing in their health. That's another thing I always say is everybody's so good and takes it so far so for granted that we should all invest in a pension. Right? But we don't think of investing in our health and going to that salsa class or making the choice not to have the fried food, but to have the salad or the vegetables or the stew is better than the chippy. Every time you do that, you were making an investment in your health pension, and you should think about it like that. Absolutely. It's so important. We have to take responsibility. So I'm really grateful for you coming. You can't go without me asking for three take-home tips, though.

Sure. So three things that anybody who's listening could do to improve their health span. Number one is walk and there's a new Japanese walking phenomenon that you can do, which is you walk briskly for three minutes and then you sort of go to leisurely pace, then you speed up again for three minutes and you do this until you hit 30 minutes. And not only will you get your steps in, but you'll find it's kind of like it's the easy equivalent of sprint training, only you're not sprinting. So that's one. another one is make sure you get strong legs and muscle tissue releases something called myokines. They're anti-inflammatory components. So we have to start thinking of our muscle as actually an organ.

The easiest way, I know everybody is sedentary and working in front of a desk, but try every hour to get up and do 10 squats. And at least in my company, we do it in meetings and just to normalize it, right? So that's one thing. Do 10 squats. If you can then move from every hour to every 20 minutes, then that's better. Strengthen those legs. Finally, I would say make sure you do some kind of physical activity that is social. And you're getting your steps in and you're doing in a social way, which boost oxytocin,

which is not just for bonding, but is itself an anti-inflammatory and you're getting your dopamine hits. brilliant so but really good easy and not expensive advice as well so all free thank you ever so much coming you're very welcome thank you