Health Wanted: Cleanses

The Episode

New Year, new you, new opportunities to punish yourself for being human! This week on Health Wanted, we’re kicking off the new year by putting you on a cleanse to detox you from useless health morality. Then, host Laurel Bristow talks with health psychologist Charlotte Markey, PhD, about so-called “fresh starts” and the role of body image in weight loss.

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The Listener Questions

Is testosterone responsible for heightened emotions during women's periods?

In your period you have two phases: one that occurs within the ovary (where your eggs are stored and released) and one that occurs in the endometrium (your uterine lining). We’ll focus on the ovary, which has the follicular phase, ovulation, and the luteal phase.

Your follicular phase starts the first day of your cycle (which is the first day of menstrual bleeding) and goes up to ovulation, which is typically day 14. During this phase, an increase in follicle stimulating hormones and estrogen to do things like ready your ovaries to release an egg and thicken the endometrial lining.

Right before ovulation, there’s a big burst of the luteinizing hormone, which causes the egg to be released. This is the point when testosterone levels in women are the highest, because testosterone influences libido and your body is trying to get you to get a lil freaky and fertilize that egg (assuming you're not on hormonal birth control).

Then we enter the luteal phase, which goes from ovulation to right before menstrual bleeding. During this time the main hormone is progesterone. If there’s no baby making happening, the progesterone levels will suddenly drop, along with estrogen, and that triggers the shedding of the endometrium, which results in mentruation.

So this is all to say that in the early follicular stage, which is when menstrual bleeding happens, testosterone levels are higher than estrogen levels. But testosterone is not the most abundant hormone and that’s not the point in the cycle where testosterone levels peak.

Why do I get "Asian glow" when I drink?

You may have heard the myth that the reason the "Asian flush" or "Asian glow" (the technical term is alcohol flush reaction) happens is because Asian countries were drinking tea when European countries were drinking beer or ale, so Asian populations didn’t evolve to be able to process it. This is not true.

Alcohol flush reaction occurs in about 50% of people from the Asian Pacific Rim area—that’s places like Japan, Korea, Vietnam, China, and Taiwan. This is the result of a mutation in their aldehyde dehydrogenase (ALDH2) enzyme that prevents them from being able to appropriately break down acetaldehyde, the toxic byproduct of ethanol. People with this mutation are more susceptible to all of the ill effects of drinking, including the long-term issues we that can result from repeated or extended exposure to acetaldehyde.

This genetic variation is dominant, so you only need to inherit it from one parent to experience the outcome, though it’s more pronounced if you get it from both parents.

The prevailing theory is that European countries developed a taste for beer because it was safer than drinking polluted water (on account of the heating process of fermentation), and Asian countries drank tea for the same reason. But maybe Asian countries developed beer along the same timeline, but also developed crippling hangovers too, and decided to stick with tea instead.

There are things like Pepcid AC that you can take to prevent or reduce the glow, but those just impact physical symptoms, they don’t actually reduce the amount of acetaldehyde you’re exposed to. So if using them makes it more comfortable to drink, and you therefore drink more, you can be putting yourself at greater risk of health complications like liver disease.

Catch all the listener questions and Laurel’s answers on the full episode of Health Wanted by:

• Streaming at wabe.org or the WABE app
• Subscribing on Apple or Spotify
• Watching on WABE's YouTube channel