Hit the dreaded menopause — but don’t want to spend years taking off-putting chemicals? Now an intriguing new book reveals you can ditch the pills and instead ... GROW your own HRT

Five years ago, when Sally Duffell hit 50, she had her first hot flush. Before long, she was waking up in the night soaked with sweat.

Friends told her to try hormone replacement therapy (HRT), but back then, the most common kind prescribed by doctors contained pregnant horse urine, which she didn’t want to take. So, instead, she decided to grow her own HRT. it may sound unusual — and, indeed, there isn’t much that’s conventional about Sally, who gave up a career in the City to teach healthy eating and lead workshops on nutrition.

But as many women still question the perceived safety of some synthetic forms of HRT, Sally’s intriguing methods have been winning plenty of fans among the peri-menopausal. Now, after four years spent immersing herself in scientific research, she has published a book, Grow Your Own HRT. it promises to banish hot flushes, not with drugs or supplements, but with special nutrients contained in baby plants, lovingly tended in trays on your kitchen windowsill.

Sally’s interest in plant HRT was aroused at first by the Japanese, who famously do

not have a word for menopause and are said to suffer few, if any, symptoms. She claims the same is true for British women pre-20th century, though that’s difficult to prove — it’s entirely possible that they just didn’t talk about their own struggles with night sweats and aching joints.

But if our ancestors suffered in silence, they perhaps did not suffer as much.

Debilitating symptoms associated with menopause have today reached near-epidemic proportions, with more than 80 per cent of British middle- aged women experiencing hot flushes and night sweats, according to studies.

this begs the question: what are Japanese women doing now, and what did early Victorians apparently do then, that the modern Western woman simply isn’t? More specifically, what are they eating that we’re not?

the answer, according to Sally, is plants containing hormones. or, rather, plants containing compounds that our gut bacteria convert into hormones.

Few people know that oestrogen and progesterone can come from plants — from seaweed and mung bean sprouts, for example, which the Japanese still eat in abundance — and from peas, beans and brassicas that we used to consume in the UK in far greater quantities than we do today.

By contrast, claims Sally, our Western diet, full of processed and nutrient-free foods, effectively robs us of nature’s own hrt and leaves our bodies defenceless during the change.

Sally grew up in Surrey, and regularly ate healthy, fresh veg from the garden, grown by her father. yet her years in the City, with late nights and fast food, left her drained and burned-out. She decided to give it up to live by the sea, where she re-discovered fresh air and good food.

though Sally is not a scientist, her book includes painstaking references to more than 400 different scientific studies. According to her, the vast benefits of plant hormones aren’t widely known because ‘no one has a financial interest in it, not the hrt industry, and not the supplement makers’.

She says: ‘ Scientists have carried out a number of experiments on plant hormones in bean and seed sprouts so they can extract them and turn them into drugs,’ she says.

‘But they never mention that we can grow them and eat them ourselves. everything in my book has been proven by science, sometimes many times over. I’m not a scientist, so I have to be doubly sure of my facts.’

So, read on for Sally’s fascinating fix for the menopause . . . gardening gloves not included!

THE SCIENCE BIT

there are two ways in which we go into menopause. the first occurs when hormones in the brain start telling the ovaries to dial it down gently — to make fewer and fewer hormones until we no longer menstruate.

this is the gentle, natural and often asymptomatic way to do it.

Alternatively, the ovaries simply fail. they can’t respond to what the brain is asking them to do, so the brain sends more and more hormonal messages — effectively screaming at the ovaries — and instead, our unbalanced bodies give us hot flushes, exhaustion, dryness, lack of libido and all the myriad other horrid symptoms of a bad menopause.

Plants which contain compounds that we can convert into hormones are nature’s way of resetting the balance and letting us sail through the change.

It’s our gut bacteria — known as our microbiome — that makes the main sex hormones, oestrogen and progesterone, out of these compounds, but the plant hormones aren’t exactly the same as those we make in our ovaries.

Plant oestrogen is much weaker than human oestrogen, but it’s also very clever: it can exert different strengths in different parts of the body, and it can either calm our own production if we’ve too much, or stimulate and replenish it if we’re lacking. It really is nature’s hormone replacement therapy.

oestrogen is found in compounds called isoflavones, lignan and coumestrol, which come from plants including runner beans, green beans, mung beans, chickpeas, lentils, flaxseeds, alfalfa sprouts, chickpea sprouts, raw broccoli, dried dates and sweet potatoes.

Progesterone, meanwhile, is found in compounds called kaempferol and apigenin, which come from foods including sage, mustard cress, mustard greens, radish sprouts, garlic, strawberries, gooseberries and apricots.

If you’re wondering why sprouts are so amazing, it’s because they’re baby plants that you eat when they are just a few days old and at their peak of nutritional goodness. For menopausal women, a daily pinch or two of a week-old sprouting plant — used as a garnish, mixed with a salad, or strewn over a hearty vegetable dish — is truly a miraculous thing.

A PHARMACY ON YOUR WINDOWSILL

BEAN sprouts and baby greens are superfoods that you can grow yourself, all year round, in your house, with minimal effort. All you need is a windowsill; a tray, a jar or even a sieve; and a bit of commitment to watering.

the easiest option — mustard and cress — simply requires some food grade paper, which you can buy online (though an absorbent doily will do) and a plate — rather like you did when doing this project at school.

Buy aduki, mung beans, lentils, flaxseeds and alfalfa seeds from a whole food store. red clover, broccoli, cress and fenugreek are rarely available on the high Street, so it’s best to get them from specialist sprouting websites such as skysprouts.co.uk or wheatgrass-uk.com. the cress salad you can buy

in supermarkets, ready-grown, is not the same thing Victorians ate. In fact, it’s 85 per cent modern rapeseed, which has fewer plant hormones and no rich bounty of vitamin C.

Which is why it’s worth growing the proper stuff instead.

WHAT TO PLANT TO BEAT Hot flushes

WHETHER it’s a sudden warmth during a meeting at work or a nightly soaking of the bedsheets, the hot flush is just about the commonest and most debilitating peri- menopausal and menopausal complaint.

The absolutely best sprout for it is red clover, but make sure the seeds you buy are meant for sprouting not gardening! Order from specialist websites if you can’t find them in your local health food store and follow the growing instructions, including washing off the husks on the sprouts when they’re grown.

Not only has red clover been used for thousands of years to cure all sorts of menstrual problems, but the science behind it is stunning. red clover gives us all of the different plant oestrogens, including coumestrol, which helps calm down those brain hormones, and plant progesterone. Its plant cousin, good old alfalfa (sold ready-sprouted in health food stores, if you don’t have time to sprout it yourself) has a similar chemical content, in slightly smaller amounts.

Headaches

A LESS obvious sign of perimenopause is increased headaches or migraines. They happen because an oestrogen imbalance causes our blood vessels to dilate, and water retention just before we menstruate exacerbates the issue. Mung beans, red clover and alfalfa are all HRT for headaches.

Some doctors think that progesterone helps fight migraines, too. Try radish, mustard cress and broccoli sprouts, all of which are high in progesteronic compounds.

Lack of libido

A DECLINE in a desire for sex often goes together with depression, tiredness and memory lapses. firstly, get your iron and thyroid levels checked. If these are OK, it could be that you have too little testosterone.

Experts say testosterone is important for women because it’s good for our sex lives and our joie de vivre.

This is where fenugreek steps into the limelight. Two recent studies on fenugreek supplements showed it can increase levels of testosterone in the body and sexual desire in women.

But you don’t have to take it in supplement form: you can grow it in the kitchen. Again, buy the seeds from a specialist website — they can be eaten whole or sprouted in a tray.

for a little plant, fenugreek packs a powerful punch.

Brittle bones

OESTROGEN and progesterone play a huge role in what is called bone turnover and renewal. Oestrogen is in charge of finding weak points in our bones and removing them, leaving little tiny holes. Progesterone comes along and fills those in with new bone.

Osteoporosis develops when the two hormones get out of balance and you have too many holes left unfilled. The bones eventually get so porous, they become fragile and break easily.

Ask your doctor for a bone density test if you think you’re at risk of osteoporosis. Bear in mind that the best sprouted foods for bone renewal and mineralisation are red clover and all the brassicas, including cress and radish. So many studies showed cress is good for fracture-healing and bone turnover that it prompted a promising clinical trial in 2009 looking at its potential to heal osteoarthritis — 30 per cent of 98 patients given six grams of powdered cress daily went into complete remission and 37.5 per cent showed marked improvements.

Hairy chins!

WE ALL get a bit hairier as we get older, and it is generally accepted that it could be linked to too much testosterone.

In a healthy person, levels are kept down by compounds such as the sex hormone binding globulin (SHBG), which stops testosterone attaching to our hormone receptors and escorts it from our bodies.

Increasing SHBG naturally is a good idea, and phytoestrogens, such as those in sprouted mung beans and lentils, will help the liver to do the job. Eating flaxseeds also reduce hormone levels in patients with hirsutism.

GET PLANT HORMONES INTO YOUR DIET

THE 18th- century British had the right idea with old-fashioned pease pudding, packed with hormone-rich legumes. But with a few tweaks, we can boost even the most modern diet . . .

GARLIC is a great oestrogenic food, meaning it contains plenty of compounds we can convert into the hormone, so eat homemade garlic bread or add garlic to dressings.

GARDEN and mushy peas contain lots of good isoflavone, as do bean burgers, bean dips and even sugar-free baked beans.

TO GET more oestrogenic coumestrol in your diet, treat yourself to a Chinese takeaway with plenty of bean sprouts.

CAPERS burst with the progesteronic compound kaempferol, so make sure you have some on your pizza or in your pasta sauce.

THE biggest source of apigenin, another progesterone compound, is parsley. Parsley was often added as a garnish to many dishes, but it’s fallen out of favour. Bring it back.

EGG and cress sandwiches are wonderfully British, but spicy, hormone-rich cress goes nicely with pretty much any sandwich filling, especially salmon.

HORSERADISH is also very high in kaempferol, so horseradish sauce is a must if you can take the heat!

AVOCADOS are rich in plant hormones — eat mashed on toast or with a little cider vinegar.

ADAPTED by Alison Roberts from Grow Your Own hRt, by sally J duffell (£12.99 Findhorn press) © sally J duffell 2017. to order a copy for £10.39, visit mailshop. co.uk/books or call 0844 571 0640, p&p is free on orders over £15. Offer valid until december 14, 2017.