I have the honor of reconnecting with Dr. Mindy Pelz today. She was with me before on podcasts 113 and 184.
Dr. Mindy Pelz, D.C is a bestselling author, keynote speaker, and nutrition and functional health expert who has spent over two decades helping thousands of people successfully reclaim their health. She is a recognized leader in the alternative health field and a pioneer in the fasting movement, teaching the principles of a fasting lifestyle, diet variation, detox, hormones, and more. Her popular YouTube channel (which just celebrated 23 million lifetime views) regularly updates followers on the latest science-backed tools and techniques to help them reset their health. She is the host of one of the leading science podcasts, The Resetter Podcast, and the author of three best-selling books; The Menopause Reset, The Reset Factor, and The Reset Kitchen, and her current book published with Hay House, Fast Like a Girl, is available for pre-order. Dr. Mindy has appeared on national shows like Extra TV and The Doctors and has been featured in Muscle & Fitness, Well + Good, SHEknows, Healthline, and more.
For this episode, I have a new format of ask me anything questions and answers. Dr. Mindy and I answer many of the questions women have sent in about nutrition, navigating fasting, electrolytes, and estrogen and progesterone-promoting foods. We discuss perimenopause, PMDD and hormonal fluctuations, carbohydrates, hormesis, the parasympathetic nervous system, and magnesium. We get into the impact of fasting on the liver, changes in our cycle, and the need for liver and gallbladder support. We also answer several questions about troubleshooting and talk about Dr. Mindy’s new book, Fast Like a Girl.
I hope you enjoy our new format and listening to today’s discussion with Dr. Mindy Pelz.
IN THIS EPISODE YOU WILL LEARN:
Should fermented foods (sauerkraut) be eaten first or at the end of a meal?
When indulging in something sweet from time to time, is it better to use organic sugar or honey than agave? Or is pure stevia preferable?
Which foods are beneficial for progesterone production?
Is there a way to prevent cravings for salty or sweet snacks after dinner?
Some tips to make losing five to ten pounds a bit easier.
Are products with zero carbs and zero sugars suitable for fasting if they have a sweet taste?
Some simple ways to relieve the symptoms of PMDD (Premenstrual Dysmorphic Disorder).
When is the best time for a perimenopausal woman who suffers from anxiety and irritability before getting her period to use progesterone cream?
Should a woman in perimenopause keep a twelve-hour fasting window until her period starts, even when her cycle is unpredictable? What happens if she skips a cycle?
Dr. Mindy and I share our opinions on Ozempic (semaglutide).
What nutritional information should people look at if they have high cholesterol that cannot be explained?
How can lifestyle changes allow people to avoid having to take statins?
What should you do if you become fatigued when fasting?
What does it mean if you start losing your hair when you fast?
“We have to look at estrogen and progesterone as like twin sisters with vastly different personalities.”
-Dr. Mindy Pelz
Connect with Cynthia Thurlow
Check out Cynthia’s website
Connect with Dr. Mindy Pelz
Get your copy of Dr. Mindy Pelz’s new book, Fast Like a Girl.
Transcript:
Cynthia Thurlow: Welcome to Everyday Wellness podcast. I'm your host, Nurse Practitioner Cynthia Thurlow. This podcast is designed to educate, empower and inspire you to achieve your health and wellness goals. My goal and intent, is to provide you with the best content and conversations from leaders in the health and wellness industry each week and impact over a million lives.
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Today, I had the honor of reconnecting with my good friend, Dr. Mindy Pelz. We have previously connected on podcasts 113 and 184 and today we went into a new format on Everyday Wellness. I hope that the listeners will enjoy this. It's a questions and answers or Ask Us Anything and we spoke about a lot of the questions that came in from women specific to nutrition, how to navigate fasting in a fasted state, the role of electrolytes, estrogen and progesterone-promoting foods. We spoke about perimenopause, PMDD and hormonal fluctuations, the role of carbs, hormesis, the parasympathetic nervous system and magnesium as well as fasting and the impact on the liver as well as changes in our cycle, the need for liver support, gallbladder support, and then several questions on troubleshooting.
We also spoke about her new book Fast Like a Girl. I hope you will enjoy our discussion and I hope this is the first of many of these Ask Me Anything formats which are becoming increasingly popular and is really a fun way to pick our brains.
[music]
I'm super excited to bring you back, first of all to congratulate you on your new book, which is due out any day. By the time this podcast releases, it'll have been out for about a week. But I thought it might be fun because we've recorded together several times and do kind of a Q&A.
Mindy Pelz: Oh, let's do it.
Cynthia Thurlow: Some of these questions are really quite honestly are funny. I thought to myself, I was like, this is fantastic because I can't think of anyone else I would prefer discussing them with other than you.
Mindy Pelz: I love it.
Cynthia Thurlow: So, so good to have you back, my friend.
Mindy Pelz: Thank you.
Cynthia Thurlow: How is the pre-book launch phase going for you?
Mindy Pelz: Oh, God. Well, okay, so this is my fourth book. So, we have an idea of the game that needs to be played. We've been going strong for six months and I would say that we're a week out. This weekend I hit like a moment where I haven't had a day off. Starting in September, I think I maybe had four days off total where I just didn't do anything. So, as you know, it's a lot to launch a book of this magnitude out into the world. And it's not just you, right, it's your publisher, it's your agent, it's your team. It's a loaded question how I'm doing, other than we've done a lot and I'm excited to get it out into the world.
Cynthia Thurlow: Yeah, absolutely. I remind people. People think of it like it's just a sprint to the publication date. I remind them it's a marathon because it's not just the time leading up. You don't want to abandon your book. So, it's understanding. It's like this long process of publishing, and so my heart goes out to you. [Mindy laughs] I know that you've been through this process before. This was my first time and I can honestly tell you that it was very humbling. I would encourage you to find an opportunity, like set up a vacation or something in the distance so you can look forward to because that was one of the best decisions I made, was three and a half months after publication, I had a vacation with my family, and it was like, the first time I had exhaled in probably nine months and it felt really glorious.
Mindy Pelz: Okay, good. Yeah. We’re going to go. We have Hawaii on the calendar for March.
Cynthia Thurlow: Perfect. Well deserved.
Mindy Pelz: It’s hot but, like, to your point, after launch week, I look at January and February, it's all booked, but it's all good. I love writing. I love the process of writing. As you know women need all the resources they can get right now, so I'm excited to launch it.
Cynthia Thurlow: Absolutely. I'm so excited to have you on the podcast. We'll start with the nutrition questions because there were so many of them. In fact, my team was laughing last night when they shared things with me. They were saying it's heavily nutrition focused. And I said, that's not a problem.
Mindy Pelz: No, it's great.
Cynthia Thurlow: The typical perimenopause, menopause, miscellaneous, lots of miscellaneous, I was like, I don't even know where to put this. But let's start from the very beginning. Many listeners know that you are very keto, probiotics in general, fermented foods, how important they are. Someone asked when adding sauerkraut and I apologize to those that submitted questions, but my wonderful team did not add the person's name, so I can't say Lindsey asked. We'll just do this is question number three. [laughs] “Sauerkraut to a meal, is it best for gut health to eat at first or at the end of the meal and why?”
Mindy Pelz: Oh, that's a great question.
Cynthia Thurlow: Yeah.
Mindy Pelz: I've never gotten that question. You know what? I would say that you either eat it with the meal or before the meal because it's your microbes that help regulate blood sugar and break that food down and pull the nutrients out of it. I think that's the biggest thing that people don't realize, that we put so much focus. If we just even take the mitochondria, how many thousands of hours of conversation about the mitochondria have you had and how many hacks out there to hack the mitochondria. But really, it's your microbes that are going to determine what happens to your food, which is why sauerkraut is amazing. So, we typically do like we'll do a grass-fed steak with a sweet potato and then a cup of sauerkraut. That's a pretty common meal. And I just eat it all together. I don't know about you, but it's not my favorite, so I either eat it before or with the meal just to get it down.
Cynthia Thurlow: Yeah, it's interesting. There's a manufacturer of a locally grown crowd and they have all these more exotic crowds, things that have got curries in them and coriander. I usually will stand at the refrigerator with a fork and I'll take a couple of bites of my kraut as I'm like reheating, because usually I'm in reheating mode as I'm reheating something for lunch or I'm cooking dinner and I'll use it preemptively. But I agree with you, I think taking it with a meal or prior to a meal is the way to do it.
The other thing that's the kind of second part of this question was someone on social media underneath actually added, “Well, if your gut is healthy, why do you need probiotic rich foods?” Which I thought was-- this is a common perception. I think for a lot of people, they're like it's just not important if your gut is healthy, but I would probably argue that most if not all of us have gut health issues we need to work on, even if we're not aware of it presently.
Mindy Pelz: Oh, my God. Again, such a good conversation. I think what we have to realize is that we always talk about the trillions of bacteria in our gut, but if you look at species wise, how many species of bacteria are in there, the statistics I've seen have been anywhere from a couple thousand up to 7000 different types of bacteria. Each one of these bacteria are going to do something different, and they each have a food that they're going to resonate with that the other set of bacteria may not. My experience and I'd be curious your opinion on this as well, has been that people eat the same foods over and over and over again. Sauerkraut can be the same thing. You eat the same sauerkraut over and over and over again, and so you create a monoculture.
I think what we've got to get back to is understanding that the name of the game is to keep diversifying your foods so that you can keep neurotransmitter production up, you can keep your immune system up, so you can feed the bacteria that break estrogen down. Those become massively important whether you're trying to repair your gut or not. I don't have any gut problems, but feeding these microbes is on my mind every single day.
Cynthia Thurlow: I always jokingly say that monogamy is a good thing in relationships, but food monogamy is not.
Mindy Pelz: No.
Cynthia Thurlow: We want to try different things and I'm as guilty of it as the next person. Like, I love steak, I love bison, I love eggs. I incorporate them throughout the week, but I'm always trying different fermented foods because I'm dairy free. For me, it's really like leaning into those fermented vegetables. But I have fermented okra. I mean, I have kraut, I have multiple kinds of kraut. In fact, my husband told me the other day, he thinks we have science experiments going on in the top shelf. And I'm like, “No, no, they're all healthy.”
Mindy Pelz: Right.
Cynthia Thurlow: He's like, “Anyone wants to eat fermented okra,” he's like, “Only my wife.” I said, “No, but it's good to try different things every day” because I fervently believe and as someone who three and a half years ago, I was on six weeks of antifungals, antibiotics and then got another round of antibiotics when I had my appendix out. I remind people that just one dose of antibiotics can impact your gut microbiome, I think anywhere from 18 months to two years. So, for me, I'm still actively working diligently on my gut. You just think about the average person probably needs more fermented foods, beverages, etc., than they're probably consuming right now.
Mindy Pelz: On that point also, if you eat out, you're getting glyphosate. If you eat wheat, the wheat right now in America has Bt toxin in it, which is going to affect those microbes. We live in this world where there're so many things trying to deplete our microbial health, let's make a stand for always helping to grow it.
Cynthia Thurlow: Yeah, absolutely. I think and especially as we are getting older, understanding that as we have less hydrochloric acid production, as we could potentially be no longer making as vibrant digestive enzymes as we are exposed to more estrogen-mimicking chemicals in our food, environment, and personal care products just understanding that we diligently every day want to be doing even if it's small things that are going to benefit the gut microbiome. I would say I humbly bow at the temple that is the gut microbiome because the more I learn, the more I just kind of am fascinated that we humans bumble through life and don't even think about it.
Mindy Pelz: Yes, Amen to that.
Cynthia Thurlow: Next question is about, “If I indulge in something sweet from time to time, would organic sugar or maybe honey better than say, agave or should I use pure stevia?”
Mindy Pelz: Oh my gosh, these are good questions. I love it. Okay, well, I think A, you got to look at what personal preference. I personally do not like stevia, so I don't gravitate to stevia-type foods, so, there's that. You could look at the glycemic index and say, well, okay, stevia has got 0 supposedly, agave is I think under 10 on the glycemic index, it's a little bit lower. Honey is around a 30 or 40 and organic sugar even though it's organic, is up around a 70. The higher the glycemic number, the more of an insulin response you're going to have. So, you choose, you're going to have to think about that if you're concerned about your sugar addiction or craving.
Now, the nuance on that is, stevia sometimes can trigger that same desire for more sugar. It's a really tricky one, but I would say I choose mine off a personal preference and I choose it off glycemic index. I too I don't know about you, Cynthia, but I've spent a lot of years as a sugar addict and for me I know if I eat sugar like three days in a row, there becomes like a point of no return where now I have to really hunker down to make sure I don't have sugar again. So, I'm very careful to not have it too much for fear that will trigger that old pattern back.
Cynthia Thurlow: Yeah, and it's interesting because I would imagine most, if not all of us are actually at least mildly addicted to sugar because it just proliferates, it's in our condiments, it's in our ketchup, it's in our salad dressings. I would agree with you that for each one of us, we have to decide, can we tolerate one square of high-quality dark chocolate? Can we tolerate some of these items, like, I really don't use honey. I mean, maybe in the past I might have used honey, but I really try to avoid using a lot of sugars personally because, as you mentioned, you start getting this dopamine hit, it feels good, you want more. Obviously, we're heading into Christmas at my house and New Year’s, we'll have family here in a couple of days. I was actually saying to my kids, for me, I have to plan, like, if I'm going to indulge in something, I know what the net impact will be the following day.
So, it's finding I tolerate a little bit. Personally, I find that a lot of the artificial or the contrived sugars, monk fruit erythritol tend to be perhaps a little bit better tolerated. People can tolerate some of the sugar alcohols like erythritol. My 15-year-old has been experimenting with Swerve, which has been interesting to watch. With that being said, I generally say agave is a no go because agave is straight fructose and it's metabolized very differently.
I know a lot of people still think of it as being very benign. I watched a friend pouring it all over her pancakes and I kind of just cringed [laughs] watching it thinking that this is not going to have a good end result. I've talked quite a bit and I'm sure you probably have seen that paper about nonnutritive sweeteners that came out probably two months ago that was talking about the net impact of sucralose, NutraSweet, saccharin, which I don't know where anyone is using any saccharin at this point in time. And then looking at stevia in just for a 28-day period using those sweeteners again, some are artificial, depending on what type of stevia it wasn't identified, change the gut microbiome as well as impact oral glucose tolerance. I think it really speaks to the fact that all of us need to examine our relationship with sugar.
Mindy Pelz: Yeah. Again, if we can get to sugar that has more fiber in it, like an apple, it's going to have a different blood sugar spike. One of my favorite things, I know this is going to come out in January, but one of my favorite holiday things is I make a wicked pumpkin pie and I use coconut sugar and I use so much full fat in it. If you pair and it's so good, it fills me up and it's not like I'm craving sugar the next day. I think pairing a fat with your favorite sugar is also a trick that seems to not for me as an extra addict, it doesn't seem to cause me to crave it the next day.
Cynthia Thurlow: That's a really good point. It's interesting. I really like dark chocolate.
Mindy Pelz: Me too.
Cynthia Thurlow: That's like my one vice left. What I've been trying is doing some dark chocolate with maybe a teaspoon of MCT oil because then I'm satiated because I think that's part of the problem is that when we eat some of these foods, if there's not enough fat associated with it that it can trigger these desires to continue eating it. If I'm eating a piece of dark chocolate, sometimes I'll have a scoop of high-quality nut butter and that's usually what I will pair together that I find is really impactful. I agree with you about the fruit. Fruit in its whole form, whether it's an orange or some berries or if you have an apple, preferably not one of the ones that's engineered to be super sweet.
I was trying to explain to my kids when I was talking about how modern-day farming has really continued to evolve and to "mature," this sugar desire because Honeycrisp apples, Gala, Fuji apples are apples that tend to be a bit sweeter. It's not like the McIntosh that I'm sure you and I had when we were kids, [laughs] [crosstalk] but there weren't a lot of options. Maybe there was like a Golden Delicious. There were very few options back then in the 70s and 80s, but now there's this proliferation of very sweet apples and understanding that further is that desire to eat more sugar. We just don't recognize it as such.
Mindy Pelz: Yeah, well said. Isn’t that fascinating. I was sitting there thinking as you were talking, like if we look at the trends in nutrition, we jumped all into the low-fat movement back when you and I were growing up in the 70s and the 80s, and then we had to course correct by adding sugar because nothing's really good without fat. So, we changed everybody's tastebuds to the point that we're now even highlighting the more sweet fruits out there because everybody's tastebud is so conditioned for that.
Over time, I would say the majority of my diet is meat and vegetables. I love sweet potatoes, probably because of what it does to my hormones. I love me some good dark chocolate for the same reason. But I think as you change your food habits and you're using foods that are more nutrient dense and they are feeding your hormones, they're feeding the cells in such an efficient way, you start to see that sweetness is not really something you crave. And I know that's impossible for people to think about if that's all they can think of want is sugar. But I promise you over time it just all of a sudden goes away. I say that as an ex-sugar addict.
Cynthia Thurlow: Yeah. I think that transparency is super helpful. It was interesting. I was stuck in a very long delay at Chicago O'Hare Airport on Saturday, coming back from LA. Ironically, my gate was across from McDonald's. I was watching this group of people. They were going over McDonald's and getting a meal, and they would come back and then getting ice cream. It was so bad that [unintelligible [00:17:15] have rolled out a cart essentially to apologize for all these lengthy delays, a seven-hour delay. I just watched this crowd of people, no judgment, but everyone like, woofed down all the Cheez-Its and the Goldfish crackers and the Fig Newtons and all the other things that were there. I walked over, grabbed a bottle of water, and sat back down and someone said to me, “Well, it's been so many hours since you last ate, you must be starving.” And I was like, “Nope.”
Mindy Pelz: Nope. Oh, my gosh. Every time I'm in an airport, I am so grateful that I've trained myself to fast because I watch the people or even like I recently got off coffee watching the people in the lines. It's like, “Wow, it's hard.” I say this with love and compassion, but I also say it as you can do it yourself as well, but there's nothing worse than waiting in line for food or coffee in the airport, especially if you have to catch a plane. So that was yeah, totally get it.
Cynthia Thurlow: Yeah. Yet another benefit of fasting is that if you need to fast, you can effortlessly do that. Now, because you were just speaking about balancing hormones, we got questions specific to progesterone as well as estrogen, and you do a really nice job in your book talking about this. Let's unpack which foods, because there are a lot of questions around this. What foods are beneficial for progesterone production and the body, and for many people that are in perimenopause, understanding physiologically what's going on in the body and why this can be very helpful.
Mindy Pelz: Yeah. So, here's in the book, I have a line. It's probably my favorite line in the book, where I say that, “We have to look at estrogen and progesterone as like twin sisters with vastly different personalities.” We need to feed them something different. I would say, just the basics, when you look at estrogen, in general when estrogen is coming in, the lower glycemic, the lower glucose foods are going to be great. This is where your meats and your vegetables, oh, my God, estrogen, if she could talk to you, she would say, “Feed me more leafy greens than you could possibly handle.” I think also some of your beneficial oils, like flaxseed oil, she really thrives with those healthy oils. A little more of a ketogenic diet is really what estrogen needs.
Progesterone is completely the other way. She's like, "Don't give me low glycemic foods. I need glucose to be higher to be able to show up and be produced." Again, the sweet potato, I feel like is the hero of the progesterone day. I have sweet potatoes all the time. By the way, I do back to the microbe thing. We do variety of sweet potatoes. Have you ever wondered when you're at the market, we call them all sweet potatoes and yams, but what are they really, because some of them are purple on the inside, some of them are white, some of them are yellow, some of them are orange. The skin color is different, but they're all in the same section.
We did some research a couple of years back and found out that the purple ones actually have a specific, well, purpose, not that anybody really knows this, but to feed the bacteria in your large intestine down deep into the large intestine. Whereas the other vegetable, other sweet potatoes tend to go in not the small intestine, but more entry point in the large intestine. I never looked at different foods feeding different microbes along the transit process, which is really interesting. Sweet potatoes are great. Chocolate, dark chocolate, I don't think we should fear chocolate, but I'm not saying go out and Hershey's chocolate. You got to be really smart about your super, super dark chocolate is incredible. The other thing progesterone that in the keto world everybody's scared of, and I've actually brought this back in is bananas, tropical fruits, mangoes, bananas, great for progesterone. Citrus fruits, great for progesterone. Grass-fed meats are still really good. Quinoa, rice, it's very much when we want to bring progesterone up, we got to bring glucose up. Do it with nature's carbs, don't do it with other carbs.
Cynthia Thurlow: That's such a good point, and it's interesting. I have always been a just green banana person. It's whenever we buy bananas and they come home, I will enjoy on a day that I've lifted, I'm like, I'll have half of a small, like, just green banana, but it's literally just turned from green to yellow. It has a very different flavor profile, a lot less sugar than the brown bananas that my husband loves to eat, which I think is a byproduct of the fact that no one else will touch them. I'm glad to hear you say that, you know leaning into some of those tropical fruits.
Obviously, portions are important, so it doesn't mean that you eat five mangoes and a pineapple and a bunch of bananas. But leaning into and kind of intuitively eating, I think this is important. I know not everyone is necessarily at a point where they're able to intuitively eat or intuitively fast, but if you are at that point, you're metabolically healthy. I do encourage people, if it's a higher carb day, lean into those starches that you talked about, just being mindful of portions, depending on where you are in the metabolic flexibility spectrum.
Mindy Pelz: Yeah, I was on a podcast interview a week ago, it was a sugar addict podcast, and the woman told me that she had been for 90 days eating for her cycle and fasting for her cycle and that she came in heavier with the carbs. I just talked about the week before her period, which would be appropriate for progesterone. What she noticed was the rest of her cycle, she actually craved carbs less. I actually have, outside of the microbe idea, my actual gut sense, no pun intended, is that when we actually feed our hormones appropriately, oftentimes the craving goes away.
So, we definitely have to look at the microbial issue. If you have a candida or something like that, it's going to make you crave it more. This is our message that we're trying to get out, is eat and fast according to your cycle. You'd be amazed how some of the things that we have said are genetic or they're normal or I never can get over this hurdle are just because you're living out of accordance with your hormones.
Cynthia Thurlow: I think that's such a good point. I remind people all the time when you're craving certain types of food, it's your body's way of telling you you're missing something in your diet. As the example, there're a lot of us in this low-carb ketogenic space and I have women that will say, “Well, I'm not supposed to have more than X number of carbs a day” and I'm like, listen, “If you allow yourself to have more discretionary carbohydrate in that luteal phase, especially the week before your menstrual cycle, and you adjust your fasting schedule, you are going to have much greater success rather than white knuckling it,” which is what I see a lot of women doing.
I always say we don't want to be rigidly dogmatic about anything. I think that is one of the things that I find personally can be confusing. You and I are both clinicians, but for the lay public, when people are looking us for information, we are not rigidly dogmatic. We encourage our patients and clients not to be rigidly dogmatic because you may go through a period of time where you're doing carnivore-ish then you may go back to low carb or ketogenic, you may do paleo. I mean, just understanding that our kind of preferences for nutrition can evolve throughout our lifetime, you stay in one lane and you never deviate.
Mindy Pelz: Yeah. I have come to this conclusion that one of the things we need to embrace as women is that we are rhythmic. We have cycles. As I am starting to enter more into my menopausal time, I'm actually looking at the moon cycle and timing a lot to the moon cycle. When I go back and I research that there's a lot of history showing that women, if we didn't have all this blue light, that we would actually all sync up menstrually, our cycles would all sync up with each other, and it would be synced to the moon.
We have a natural ebb and flow. If you look at our personalities in a month period when you're menstruating, you're going to have times where you're supercharged. Your brain feels incredible, and you feel very social. There are other parts of the cycle where you're like, I'm going to sit on the couch here with my sweet potato and my box of few chocolates and I'm going to watch a Netflix series because that you might shame yourself or say that you shouldn't be doing that, but certain hormones demand that you do that. I love this idea of letting go of the rigidity. We as women are meant to be in flow and we're meant to be in rhythm. It's just that it's a little harder to find that. Once you start to practice the principles that you and I are teaching, you find your natural flow and it gets much easier.
Cynthia Thurlow: And I think that's really important. This is one of the things that I value so much, is that we're both committed to the same population of individuals and women and helping empower them. I jokingly always say I know more about the menstrual cycle now-
Mindy Pelz: Right. [laughs]
Cynthia Thurlow: -than I ever did when I was still getting a menstrual cycle, which is really sad and really speaks to the fact that we aren't taught enough about our cycles. I'm not even sure I have friends who are GYNs. I'm not even sure they feel like they understand. They understand the textbook, conceptualization of menstruation, follicular phase, luteal phase, ovulation, etc., but on a level that is in essence that they're trying to control, like, oh, if you have short cycles, then we lean in this direction. You have heavy cycles we lean in this direction without even really understanding that there's likely an imbalance that is driving some of the symptoms that their patients are experiencing. So, I'm grateful that we're talking more about it so that younger generations will be more empowered. They won't feel like there's such a mystery about their evolution through peak fertility, perimen