# 165. Cynthia Thurlow: The Menopause Gut - Why Healing Your Hormones Starts With Healing Your Gut

Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/extend-podcast-with-darshan-shah-md-7064213/165-cynthia-thurlow-the-menopause-gut-why-healing-your-hormones-starts-with-healing-your-gut
Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/extend-podcast-with-darshan-shah-md-7064213/165-cynthia-thurlow-the-menopause-gut-why-healing-your-hormones-starts-with-healing-your-gut.md
Podcast: [Extend Podcast with Darshan Shah, MD](https://stenobird.com/podcast/extend-podcast-with-darshan-shah-md-7064213)
Published: 2026-05-19T08:00:00+00:00
Episode link: https://03add746-5496-41d9-bcc9-511a526491e9.libsyn.com/165-cynthia-thurlow-the-menopause-gut-why-healing-your-hormones-starts-with-healing-your-gut
Audio file: https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/03add746-5496-41d9-bcc9-511a526491e9/Extend_-_Cynthia_Turlow.mp3?dest-id=4758622
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JSON: https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/extend-podcast-with-darshan-shah-md-7064213/episodes/165-cynthia-thurlow-the-menopause-gut-why-healing-your-hormones-starts-with-healing-your-gut
Duration seconds: 3876

## Resource

The gut and hormones have always been treated as two completely separate conversations in medicine, and that disconnect is quietly behind some of the most frustrating symptoms women experience in midlife. From bloating and brain fog to autoimmune conditions and weight that will not move, the answers have been there all along, hiding in a connection nobody thought to make. We dive deeper into this in the Extend Podcast with Cynthia Thurlow. We also talk about why perimenopause is the ultimate litmus test of how well you have been living your life, why every woman deserves a conversation about hormone replacement therapy regardless of her age, and why the gut microbiome may be the missing link behind why so many women start HRT and still do not feel better. Cynthia Thurlow is a nurse practitioner, internationally recognized speaker, and host of the Everyday Wellness podcast, with over 25 years of experience in health and wellness specializing in perimenopause, menopause, and intermittent fasting. Her second TEDx talk on intermittent fasting has garnered over 15 million views, and she has been featured on ABC, FOX 5, KTLA, Medium, Entrepreneur, and The Megyn Kelly Show. She is the author of Intermittent Fasting Transformation and the upcoming book The Menopause Gut, one of the most important and underexplored conversations in women's health today. What's Discussed: (4:27) What the gut microbiome actually is and why perimenopause changes everything about how it functions. (9:40) How accumulated childhood stress and trauma ages the ovaries faster and pushes women into menopause earlier. (20:05) How to assess where you stand with your nervous system and the simplest ways to start improving it. (31:59) What the estrobolome is and why it may be the missing link behind every pe…

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