| Today’s letter |
| The half cup that cooled her hot flashes |
| A reader wrote to me last week. She had been standing in a pharmacy aisle, phone in one hand, a box of Allegra and a box of Pepcid in the other, because a video told her the two together would stop her hot flashes. At 47, she had already watched close to a hundred of those videos, most of them after midnight, when the sweating woke her and she could not fall back to sleep. |
| She wasn’t asking me whether the pills work… she was asking me something else. Her letter put it this way: |
| “What happened to me?” |
| She ran a department of forty people for eleven years, and she raised two kids mostly on her own. When she told me she could not think straight anymore, could not sleep, could not get through a meeting without her face going hot and red, she said it like a confession. Like the fault was hers. This is a woman who never once missed a deadline, now apologizing to me for falling apart. |
| Her doctor gave her eight minutes and told her to try to relax more. So she did what the rest of us do now: she went looking online, and the internet told her it was stress, or her diet, or that she lacked discipline. She believed all of it, and she started keeping a list of everything she thought she was doing wrong. |
| Here’s what gets me. |
| None of it was her fault. Not the sweating, not the fog, not the midnight pharmacy runs. |
| Let me show you how I know. Not with my opinion, but with a study. There is one, and it points to something she could actually eat. |
| Researchers ran a trial with a group of postmenopausal women. Every one of them was having at least two hot flashes a day, and most were having far more. Half the women changed nothing about how they ate. The other half made two small changes. |
| They leaned toward whole plant foods, and they added half a cup of cooked soybeans to their day, every day. That was the whole intervention. No drugs, no hormones, no cutting calories. Twelve weeks. |
| What they found |
| WAVS trial, 2021. Barnard et al., Menopause. |
| The women who changed nothing (still burning up) |
| Their hot flashes barely budged across the twelve weeks. The nights stayed the same. Whatever they tried on their own was not touching it. |
| The women who added soybeans (cooled down) |
| Their moderate to severe hot flashes fell by 84 percent. Nearly 6 in 10 stopped having those hot flashes altogether. Twelve weeks, from food. |
| Half a cup of soybeans a day, linked to far fewer hot flashes. From the grocery store, not the pharmacy. |
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| In other words, what helped these women was not willpower, and it was not a stranger’s video. It was a food. |
| Her willpower had nothing to do with it. Neither does yours. |
| So what is it about a soybean that a hundred midnight videos could never give her? |
| When estrogen drops in perimenopause and menopause, the part of your brain that runs body temperature gets thrown off, and it starts sounding heat alarms over nothing. That is the hot flash. Soybeans are full of compounds called isoflavones, and in many women the gut turns those into something that behaves like a gentle, plant version of estrogen. It gives that overheated thermostat something to settle against. The women eating soybeans every day were feeding that process on a schedule, one meal at a time. |
| She never stood a chance against that with a list of things she was doing wrong. Neither did you, I would bet. |
| That is the part no one says out loud… her body changed, and no one handed her a single thing that worked. |
