ZOE Science & Nutrition - Recap: Davina McCall's menopause experience

Episode Date: August 26, 2025

For Davina, menopause wasn’t just a transition - it was a quiet crisis. She felt like a stranger in her own body, overwhelmed by symptoms she wasn’t prepared for and didn’t fully understand. But she didn’t stay silent. Her book ‘Menopausing’ has helped millions of women feel supported and seen during this transformative stage of life. In this episode, Davina joins us to share her personal journey, and we share ZOE research that shows how diet can be a powerful tool for managing menopause symptoms. 🌱 Try our new plant based wholefood supplement - Daily30+ *Naturally high in copper which contributes to normal energy yielding metabolism and the normal function of the immune system 📚 Books from our ZOE Scientists: The Food For Life Cookbook by Prof. Tim Spector Food For Life by Prof. Tim Spector Every Body Should Know This by Dr Federica Amati Free resources from ZOE: Live Healthier: Top 10 Tips From ZOE Science & Nutrition  Gut Guide - for a healthier microbiome in weeks Have feedback or a topic you'd like us to cover? Let us know here Listen to the full episode here

Hello and welcome to Zoe Recap, where each week we find the best bits from one of our podcast episodes to help you improve your health. Today we're talking about menopause. For Davina McColl, menopause wasn't just a transition. It was a quiet crisis. She felt like a stranger in her own body, overwhelmed by symptoms she wasn't prepared for and didn't fully understand. But Davina didn't stay silent. Her book, Menopausee, has helped millions of women, feel supported and seen during this transformative stage of life. In this episode, Davina joins us to share her personal journey, and we shared Zoe research that shows how diet can be a powerful tool for reducing menopause symptoms. Well, I think the first symptom that I had that really hit me was a night sweat,

and I would have been about 43 years old. I was on a job in Prague, and I was stayed the night in a home, hotel and I woke up in the middle of the night and I was drenched. My hair was wet. It wasn't like just you're a little bit hot in bed and you think, well, I must throw the blankets off. It was bottom sheet soaked right through, had to go and get a towel, duvet soaked right through, had to turn duvet over. And I thought, my God, I'm ill. I'm really ill. And I woke up the next morning. I looked at myself and I thought, God, you really are ill. I felt pale. I felt like my skin was kind of dry and I thought, God, I'm so dehydrated after sweating that much all

night. And I thought, well, hopefully it'll pass in a couple of days. It happened again the next night. And then it didn't happen for a while. And I thought, oh, I'm better. So what I've now realized is actually I had little non-physical symptoms, so psychological symptoms a little bit before that. So things like, I'm a very gung-ho person. Anybody that knows me as a television host in the UK would know I've chucked myself out of a helicopter on a bungee rope on a TV show. I see myself as a brave and kind of gregarious, outgoing, robust woman. And my life felt a bit overwhelming. And I thought, how come I can't get my kids ready in the morning? How come I'm crying quite a lot, not just through PMT, which was kind of normal, you know, for a couple of days,

but this felt I didn't know when it was coming or why it was coming. How come I didn't feel any joy anymore? How come I was kind of flatlining through life? I'd look at my daughters who would be having hysterics crying with laughter about something. And I think, I can't remember the last time I did that. I'd lost the joy. And now I hear women saying, I'd just lost myself. I didn't know myself anymore. And that was such a brilliant way of describing it. I thought that was exactly how I felt. But also this low level anxiety of I didn't want to drive to the supermarket if it meant that when I came out of the supermarket, it was dusk. I didn't want to drive in the dusk. I went to the opticians. Is there something wrong with my eyes? Should I get long-sighted lenses?

No, your eyesight's fine. It was such a weird fear for me, Mrs. Chuck yourself out of a helicopter. I also started forgetting things, which we, lots and lots of women can relate to at this age. And I went to my doctor. My dad had been recently diagnosed with Alzheimer's. And for me, I thought my dad was actually quite young. He was 68 when he was diagnosed. And I thought, my God, have I got early onset Alzheimer's?

And I became very paranoid about that. I went to the doctor. She asked me a bit about my life. I had three young children. I had a very, very busy career, but I was also a very hands-on mother because I felt guilty all the time. I was trying to be a wife to my husband, you know, running a home, put food on the table. You know, she said, you've got what we would call cognitive overload. And I thought, well, that's it.

So then I went back and I told her about feeling like I've had a couple of bouts of illness. Does that mean I've got Alzheimer's? Is that another sign of it? No, no, no, no. it's just this cognitive overload your body's struggling to cope so I just thought I've got to start trying to relax but the problem was

all these symptoms and all of these things that were starting to happen my joints started aching I was tired I didn't want to exercise so much I was exercise lady why didn't I want to exercise why was I tired all the time then I thought oh is this just getting old

is this just something I had no one to talk to So my mother, my real mother, had had a full hysterectomy at 28 because she had ovarian cancer. So she was plunged straight into menopause. I had a very difficult relationship with my mother. She was an alcoholic and addict. And I have had such enormous sympathy towards her. She's dead, unfortunately.

But I've worked with my mother in heaven on trying to forgive myself and her for our relationship. because if I'd have known all of this when she was alive, I would have been a lot more understanding. When she was 28 and Sarah, you know what that's like for a young woman to be plunged into menopause. Anyway, I didn't have her to talk to. My stepmother had also had a full hysterectomy, but she'd been put on HRT, but nobody talked about it.

It was embarrassing. And I thought, I'm too young. I don't really want to talk about it because I feel like it's going to age me and aging in my business wasn't good. aging in terms of feeling like a sexy lady wasn't good just aging in general

you know I don't want to get older and so Davin is that mean that you didn't even want to sort of think about it for yourself never mind not telling other people like you didn't want to consider this could be happening to you because it's like this happens to like women when they get really old and that by definition it's taboo I don't want to think about it and I think another thing that I have really embraced

once I learned that it was Perry menopause was grieving not having any more children. I didn't want any more children, but I hated the fact that my body was telling me that I couldn't. And there is a thing you've got to go through. And when you step through the door to the other side and you've learned all of the things that hopefully we will be able to help you with today, some of them, a lot of them, that the other side is great. But it's a journey to get there, but the journey is what makes it worthwhile. Nothing brilliant is easy. You know, you've got to put the work in. I'd really like to talk about sort of diet and other lifestyle changes and whether these can impact symptoms, whether or not

you're on hormone therapy. I have to say that five years ago, so we were already into Zoe, I would have thought that reducing menopause symptoms with diet and what we're doing it, Zoe sounded like crazy. But Sarah, this is an area that's been a really big focus. An interest of you, so we've ended up doing all of this study, and you've just released this big new study. Can you tell us what you found and maybe explain what it is? Yeah, well, I would start by saying I would have agreed with you based on what little evidence there is about diet and menopause that, oh, diet can't. do anything, particularly because of all these crazy claims out there about supplements, about, you know, there's silver bullets, whatever, that it will cure all of this.

But we looked at this. We put it to the test in our Zoe Predict cohort. And so we followed 5,000 women over a period of up to about 20 weeks. And these were perimenopausal women who had signed up to take part in the Zohy membership program. So these are women who we did various tests to look at their metabolic health, their microbiome, and then deliver personalized advice to them based on some of these tests, but also based on their health history, where they are now with their diet, their lifestyle, etc.

And we asked them loads of questions about their health, the baseline, and their symptoms. And then we followed them up over this period of, you know, it was between about 18 to and beyond 20 weeks, and then we asked them at the end about their symptoms, about how many symptoms they had, about the severity of the symptoms. So Sarah, just to make sure this is really clear, because we talk a lot often about different sorts of studies on this podcast.

Is this a randomised control trial that you're talking about here? No, so this is what we call longitudinal data in the science world. And longitudinal data means that we collect data at various time points. So everyone was following the Zeri programs. Everyone was changing their diet, and we collected data at the beginning and at the end. And so we looked at how it changed over time. The gold standard of scientific research is to do a randomised control trial where we'd have had another group of people who would not be changing their diet

so that we can check that it really is the diet that's changing. I wasn't really expecting to see much in this, if I'm honest. But actually, even I was surprised, DeVina, to the extent that I asked the researcher to go back and redo the steps. No, seriously, that's so funny. And we've got a fantastic researcher, George, that's been doing. all of this research for us. And this is the research. Also, it's funded independently by the British Menopause Society. And I think it's always important to state that it is independent funding for this. And what we found was around a 34% reduction in overall menopause symptom

burdens. This is taking into account the number of symptoms and also the severity of the symptoms by following a healthier diet. And actually, when we looked into the details of the dietary changes. We weren't actually looking at seeing huge, huge changes in people's diet quality. And I think that, to me, Jonathan, is what's most important. We are actually seeing relatively small shifts, but very meaningful shifts. And even just when people are having small shifts, we still saw a huge impact. And we saw it across so many different symptoms. There are other people doing research in this area. It's not only us. You know, I'm very proud of what we're doing because we have the resources to do it at a scale that allows us to look at an individual level what's

going on. But there's many other studies that are also being run now, and, you know, although it, you know, it's slower than it should have been. And collectively, what this research is showing is that following an overall healthier dietary pattern, a Mediterranean-style pattern, as we often call it, can improve, reduce your symptoms, as well as it will help improve some of these risk factors, you know, that we talked about, sociocid disease, your blood lipid, your blood pressure, etc. So the kind of fundamental principles that here are reducing your heavily processed unhealthy foods, so these ultra-processed style of food. So you're very heavily processed red meats, for example, reducing refined carbohydrates, you know, your pasta, your rice, your white bread.

But as though we were always about what can you add in rather than what you have to take away. And so the great news is that where we see the biggest benefit is actually by what you're adding in. So adding in unprocessed plant-based food. So fruits, vegetable, pulses, whole grains, oily fish, if you're not vegetarian, having a decent amount of healthy oils, because we know that will help with many of these disease risk factors, but also, you know, could help with the symptoms as part of this overall healthier diet. I do think, Jonathan, it's important just to mention that there is a place for some people for a particular supplement.

Now, it's always important to say, look, I can only, what I'm saying now is based on the evidence we have. Who knows, you know, the evidence is evolving week on week. So it might be in years' time that actually I'm wrong and I'm always happy to say when I'm wrong. One area where I think there is good evidence is around soy isoflavones. So soyazoflavones have a particular property which is what we call a phytoestrogen. So it behaves a little bit like estrogen. And it actually can stick to the estrogen receptors and therefore mimic the effect of estrogen. Now, in countries that have a high level of soyazoflavones. So this is particularly in East Asia, so Japan, China, etc. They have about 70 times the amount of soyazaflavone intake compared to the

UK. They have actually significantly lower menopausal symptoms, which is really interesting because we see a population that has lower symptoms who have a higher intake of this particular nutrient or chemical found in foods. And we also know there's this very plausible mechanism. So what we do know, if you look at all of the controlled trials that have been run on this, if you take a supplement that contains a particular amount, and it's above about 15 milligrams of a particular soyazaflavone called genocene, that that has a significant impact on reducing symptoms. I'm really sticking my neck out here because I am quite skeptical often about supplements,

but I have to lead with the evidence, and the evidence is supportive of this particular supplement. Davina, it's incredibly rare for say, I think to ever say anything positive about a supplement, so I agree that is really interesting. And I'm sure we will be doing some studies around this in the future, am I right? We are because even more interesting is your response to soy isoflovones is determined by your microbiome. And this is fascinating. And this is a really interesting area of research that we're also looking at. So we looked at people's microbiome pre-perry and postmenopause. So we looked at the composition of all of these trillions of bugs that are in our gut that we know are linked with health. And what we found was that the composition of the

microbiome periom periopause was actually quite different to premenopause. And another researcher has also found this. But when we looked at how the composition was different, what was really interesting is we could build on previous research that we'd published. And we found that there was a greater amount of bugs, species, that are associated with higher inflammation, higher fat around the belly, and some other unfavorable health effects. And if you're a peri or postmenopause, you had higher levels of these particular species associated with these unfavorable health effects. And this is really exciting because if we can target that, it might be that we can

partially reduce some of those unfavorable side effects. I'll end this recap with something I think you'll like, a free gut health guide created by our team of scientists here at Zoe. Many of us aren't sure how to best support our gut, so we developed an easy-to-follow guide, complete with tips, recipes and shopping lists, designed to help you look after your gut. The guide is delivered straight to your inbox, along with ongoing nutrition insights from Zoe, the science and nutrition company on a mission to transform the health of millions. To get your free gut health guide, just visit zoe.com slash gut guide. Thanks for listening.