The following is a transcript for this episode. It may have been edited for clarity.
Teaser (Maryann): If you’re anything like me, you love geeking out on science, especially science that pertains to women’s health. My next guest is an evolutionary geneticist who’s just written a book that explores the mysteries of the female body through an evolutionary lens. The book attempts to answer some very interesting questions such as, why do women go through menopause? Will we eventually evolve out of it? What species have the most in common with us in terms of reproduction and childrearing? Why do women in other cultures experience menopause differently than we do? And why can’t our genes keep up with our culture? This is going to be a very cool, very evolved conversation, so stick around.
Intro: Welcome to More Beautiful, the podcast for women rewriting the midlife playbook. I’m Maryann LoRusso, and I invite you to join me and a guest each week, as we strive for a life that’s more adventurous, more fulfilling and more beautiful than ever before.
Maryann: I am so happy to be here today with Deana Emera, an evolutionary geneticist and educator who’s dedicated much of her career to studying the evolution of female reproduction. Deena is a senior scientist at the Buck Institute Center for Reproductive Longevity and Equality. And she has just written an incredible book that draws on both her expertise as a biologist and her experience as a mom of four to explore the mysteries of the female body through an evolutionary lens. It’s called A Brief History of the Female Body: An Evolutionary Look at How and Why the Female Form Came to Be. It comes out in a few weeks, but I just finished devouring an advanced copy. And I can tell you that it’s so interesting and insightful, and I cannot wait to talk about it on the show today. Hi, Deena, welcome!
Deena: Hi, Maryann. Thank you so much for having me. I’m so excited to talk to you. And I’m so happy to have met you through our network of people.
Maryann: The ever-expanding network of women in this incredible space, right?
Deena: Yes, yes. It’s been awesome to meet so many women like you who are doing so much for women in midlife. It’s just it’s awesome. Happy to be here.
Maryann: So happy you’re here. And I found your book so interesting! I read it in one night, I stayed up so late. I devoured it. My husband’s like, shut the light off, please. The book was written for those who want a deeper understanding of the female body, and you took a really deep dive into our evolutionary past to explain the mysteries of our body. And boy, are there many! Tell us why you felt this book needed to be written and the story you wanted to tell with it.
Deena: Well, I’ll start with by saying that I think women want and deserve to know more about their bodies. And that’s really why I wrote the book. And I’m not talking about the basic physiological stuff, like what’s happening when you’re getting your period. I mean, that’s important for us to know, too. But my perspective is a little bit unique, where I’m really asking the deep, why questions: Why do we have periods in the first place? Why do we go through menopause? Why is pregnancy so difficult? These are questions that I think we all have. But you know, we don’t know the answers to them. And I think they’re fascinating. Obviously, I’m an evolutionary biologist so I’m fascinated by these questions. But I also think that understanding our history, like our deep history, gives us a better understanding of our own bodies and how we can live better How can we live a healthier life? How do we have healthier relationships with family and friends? How do we age better? The idea for the book came many years ago when I was getting my PhD on the evolution of pregnancy. So I studied the tissues in the uterus that had to change when pregnancy was evolving. And I was developing a project, I won’t get into what the project was, but I was developing my project. And when you get your PhD, you have to take this big exam, it’s called the qualifying exam. So you’re like diving deep in the literature. And as I was doing this, I was pregnant with my first kid. Anyone who’s been pregnant that that first pregnancy in particular, it’s your body’s going through this miraculous…crazy ride and you have a million questions. And so I was going through this experience, but also learning so much incredible information and sort of the context for a lot of what I was learning.
Maryann: When you are going through your first pregnancy, you feel like you are the only woman who’s ever been pregnant, right?
Deena: Absolutely. And you just you’re scared, you’re excited. You’re you have so many emotions. And so, you know, that was many times when I was studying for that exam, I was like, wow, people want women want to know this. So anyway, that was many years ago, my first son is almost 14 now. I haven’t been writing the book for 14 years—I had some time in the last three or four years to sit down and actually write it—but that was when the idea first came.
Maryann: It’s been 14 years in the making. So all the sweeter now…Deena, I would love to talk about the evolution of menopause. Because that, obviously, is what many of our listeners are going to be intrigued by. And not every species has menopause. Just how rare is this transition across the animal kingdom?
Deena: It’s very rare. But when I start talking about menopause, I like to pause for a second because [the trait in question really isn’t menopause, it’s why women are] living so long after menopause. So you know, all female mammals, including humans, we make all of our eggs when we’re developing as fetuses. So that sort of system sets up the possibility of menopause if a female is going to live long enough. When you make your supply up front, that’s what you’re stuck with for the rest of your life. So I mean, that’s not a big deal…Lots of very long-living species have probably evolved to make more eggs upfront, or, you know, tweaked other parts of their system so that they don’t go through menopause. Our species and a few others haven’t done that, for reasons that we don’t fully understand. But what are the other species that do have these long lives after menopause? Because that’s really the thing that’s puzzling. So Orcas…killer whales, short fins, pilot whales, beluga whales and narwhals. And what’s kind of interesting about that collection…is all the other species are toothed whales, they’re not all very closely related. So they’re in different parts of the family tree of whales
Maryann: That’s so interesting, because you would think it would be chimps or something, because chimps go through menopause when they’re around 50. But then they die shortly after, right?
Deena: Yes. And actually I’m glad you brought that up. Because…as we get into the evolution of menopause…what’s happening in chimps is really relevant. You know, they are our closest relatives in primates. And so people have speculated that we go through menopause at 50 simply because we inherited that from our ancestors, our primate ancestors. And what has evolved is how long we live beyond menopause.
Maryann: So if that’s the question, is there some controversy in the idea that we are living longer? As you mentioned to me, the numbers show [that the average life span is increasing], but…infant mortality rates may have skewed those numbers. Can you explain that to us?
Deena: Sure. A lot of people have tried to argue that menopause is a really recent thing, like the last 100 years. And, you know, they have used the statistic that life expectancy 200 years ago was, you know, 40 or 50 years. And, you know, that statistic is really misleading because…that number is an average. So basically, you’re taking the average lifespan of all of these people, and you’re coming up with an average. And, you know, before modern medicine and modern sanitation, lots of babies and very young kids used to die at a very young age. When you include all these very early deaths into an average it drives the average down. So it’s not that most people lived till 50 and then died. It’s that lots of really young babies and children were dying young. And you know, some people were probably dying around 50. But many people were living beyond that age, the average of all of that averages out to whatever they’re quoting 40 or 50, depending on the time.
Maryann: Yeah, I think I read that in 1500, the life expectancy was 50.
Deena: Yeah. So again, if you’re not really thinking about that number, you would immediately jump to the conclusion that people didn’t live after 50. That’s not true. And there’s lots of data suggesting that that’s not true. People have studied populations that don’t have modern sanitation and modern medicine. And the women in those populations, if they survive to adulthood, many of them are living in their 60s 70s. So it’s a very recent phenomenon.
Maryann: So if the big question is, why do we live so long beyond menopause? There’s one hypothesis called the grandmother hypothesis. And it’s based on the concept that women who stopped reproducing ended up with more descendants than women who didn’t, because I guess women who could no longer procreate were needed to look after the grandchildren, enabling their adult daughters to have more kids. So women who had the genetic makeup for longer living ultimately had more grandchildren carrying their longevity gene. Is that right?
Deena: Yes, this is the best known explanation for menopause. And really, it’s not an explanation for why we have menopause at 50. So the, the scientists that sort of came up with the idea [assumed that] we were having menopause at 50. Because we inherited that, like, we just talked about, from chimps had menopause at 50. So this is something we inherited. The grandmother hypothesis is really an explanation for why we live so long after menopause. The idea is that maybe 2 million years ago, maybe 200,000 years ago, maybe 20,000 years ago, human behaviors were changing. And grandmothers were starting to play a much greater role in family life, and in particular, in helping feed and raise their grandchildren. And the grandmothers who were engaging in these behaviors were having more grandchildren survive. They were boosting their reproductive success through their grandchildren. Their daughters and sons were having more kids, and their kids were having more kids, all because of these new behaviors. And as this was happening, the traits—longer lives and helpful behaviors by grandmothers—were becoming more established in humans, and even becoming elaborated on…These traits don’t involve evolve all at once; it’s like, you know, slightly longer lives, and then, you know, a little bit longer and then a little bit longer. If you ask my personal opinion, I think [the grandmother hypothesis] is probably part of the answer. I don’t think it’s the whole answer. Because it doesn’t explain, for example, why the age of menopause didn’t change as our lifespans were getting longer [as it did with elephants]…Why didn’t we start making more eggs? So I again, I think it’s probably part of the story. I don’t think it’s the whole story. And obviously, now, it’s pretty—I don’t want to say irrelevant, but we now have other ways of raising our children. For instance, it’s not a requirement that we have a grandparent nearby. We have schools, we have daycare, we have babysitters, we have an expanded support network.
Maryann: Right. You could live across the country from your mother, or she could be in Boca half the year.
Deena: Exactly. I don’t know how involved your mother and mother in law were in raising your children. But I live in the same town as both my mom and my mother in law and although they don’t want to be saddled with [childcare] every day, all day long…they love helping. They love swooping in and buying things for my kids…And I do think that joy exists because of what we were just talking about. I think that for grandmothers to evolve, it had to feel good to grandmothers. So some of these changes involve changes in the brain that make it rewarding to engage in those behaviors. And I think grandmothers today do have that feeling of pleasure and reward when they’re involved in grandparenting.
Maryann: Now, does that hold up from a hormonal standpoint, because I know that as we lose estrogen, we get less mushy and gooey, and more about the big picture.
Deena: Yes, but there are other hormones involved in these behaviors. Oxytocin is a big one. It’s not all and only about estrogen
Maryann: That’s the quote of the year, thank you for saying that!
Deena: I mean, yeah, estrogen is a great hormone. But there’s lots of other things that affect our health. It’s not all about estrogen.
Maryann: No one’s ever said that before on the show. I love it….So what about another related hypothesis, the Mother Hypothesis—these [theories] are all about the women, right?Can you tell us about that one?
Deena: Yeah, this one’s really interesting because it’s the only hypothesis that considers something that’s unique to human women. And that is difficult childbirth…We have very large brains and babies have large heads, so childbirth is really difficult for us. It is difficult in some other species, like hyenas, I won’t get into that. But you know, among the mammals, we have a hard time having our babies. And so the mother hypothesis is basically this idea that we go through menopause when we do to make sure that as mothers, we’re living long enough to sort of raise our last child. Part of the this hypothesis, is this observation that as you get older, childbirth does become a little bit more dangerous, the risk of maternal death, the risk of fetal death goes up. The problem with this theory is that for it to explain menopause all on its own, I think the risk of death would need to go way, way, way up. And it doesn’t. It does jump up a bit, but it’s not like 50% of women who give birth at 45 die, that’s just not true. And so I think, for this hypothesis to explain menopause all on its own, it just can’t. So there had to have been other things that were happening, but I do think it could be part of the story.
Maryann: So it’s kind of like a built-in safety mechanism, but overly active.
Deena: That’s the idea. It’s just that, on its own [this hypothesis] probably can’t explain menopause at 50.
Maryann: So why do you think we go through menopause? Is it a combination of some of these theories? Why don’t produce enough eggs to last longer?
Deena: Yes, I absolutely think that it was a combination of things. You know, none of these hypotheses are mutually exclusive. I think they all could have played their own role. I think grand mothering was probably involved. I think the mother hypothesis was probably part of the story. Because, you know, like we just said, risk of maternal death does go up. I think we have some basic constraints on our reproductive systems, like, just the fact that we build our supply of eggs up front sets you up for menopause. So that’s, you know, part of the story. So I don’t think there’s like a silver bullet answer, I think, you know, it was probably a combination of things, which is not a satisfying answer. But I, you know, I believe it to be the answer, I believe, we lived in a very unique set of circumstances, when these traits were evolving that drove these traits, right. So even if we don’t evolve out of menopause, do you think we’ll at least evolve enough so that the average menopause age with a, which I think now is 51 that will increase? Yeah, that’s a really good question, because I think a lot of people assume that evolution has stopped. Because, you know, I mean, the argument tends to go well, modern medicine is keeping all of us healthier for longer, like, you know, not none of those kids are dying at a young age, or fewer kids, very few kids die at a young age. We’re live, we are living longer, we are being kept alive longer than we would under natural conditions. But evolution is not just about survival. It’s really about who is having more kids, right? And actually a really cool study done, I don’t know, I want to say 15 years ago, by one of my mentors at Yale, looked at this very question. So he and his colleagues looked to see like in a modern population, they like had all this data on multiple generations of women. And, you know, using all these fancy tools that we have, they asked the question, is natural selection actually happening in this population? And the answer was, yes. And they looked at a number of traits. And one of you know, one of them was the age at puberty, one of them was the age at menopause, there were other traits, like blood pressure, cholesterol levels, and they found very, very small, but significant changes in these traits in this population. And, you know, they predicted in like the next 10 generations, that the age of menopause would increase, and the age at puberty would be reduced. So you know, evolution hasn’t stopped. And it is possible, but it creeps up a little bit, it’s just super slow. These are not big changes that are happening in our lifetime. And of course, there are probably environmental aspects to that too.
Maryann: Like the puberty age lowering.
Deena: Absolutely, and they measured that in the study that I’m referring to. And I think it was like, 5% of the variation they saw was due to genetics, and the rest was environment, so 95…They still saw evidence of natural selection. So small, slow change is was the prediction.
Maryann: One of the many interesting parts of your book is when you point out that we may experience menopause differently than women in other parts of the world. That’s so interesting. Do lifestyle behaviors make a significant impact on the symptoms we experienced during menopause on the age and all that? Can you give us a couple examples?
Deena: Yes. Genetics plays a big role, but lifestyle also is importance, I think it’s much harder to tease apart lifestyle factors. I think the best understood is smoking; we know that smokers have menopause earlier, and that they have more severe hot flashes. I think diet and lifestyle, how active you are, for example, probably also play a role in how you experience menopause and even when you go through menopause, but I don’t think that we have a good understanding of that. One of the coolest studies I came across as a study on Mayan women. So these women are living more like you would have expected our ancestors to live. And so they study these Mayan women after menopause. And, you know, just like, we have a dramatic drop in estrogen levels they did to their bone mineral density was also lower than before menopause. But they don’t, they don’t seem to get more fractures than pre menopause. And I think one of the ideas behind that is, well, they’re still living a very active lifestyle after they go through menopause. And so, you know, having a drop in estrogen and even in bone mineral density does not mean that we have to break more bones. Right, right. Right. I think that’s a clear case of lifestyle influencing our experience of menopause or really post menopause.
Maryann: So do your resistance training ladies!
Deena: Yeah, that’s that’s the message here.
Maryann: So in the book, you also point out that menopause may be experienced differently today than it did in the past, like our ancestors did. They had a different experience when it came to all those symptoms as well?
Deena: We don’t know how they experienced menopause but we can guess based on some of these populations that don’t have lifestyles like we do. They’re better approximations of sort of the hunter gatherers of the past. And so, when you look at women across the globe, women in the West definitely experience worse symptoms. You know, we just spoke about this were symptoms during the transition, more fractures, you know, after the transition as an example. And, you know, women that are living more of a hunter gatherer lifestyle, you know, not, in these Western cultures, don’t report menopause symptoms, as they’re going through the transition as as, you know, as we report them there. They don’t seem to be suffering as much. And so we guess that women in the past were not suffering quite like we are today, because of diet because of lifestyle, levels of physical activity.
Maryann: Another big point in the book is that our gene pools evolve much more slowly than our culture does. Aside from all the menopause stuff, can you give us an example of that?
Deena: I love this topic, because I think, understanding why our bodies evolved the way they did sort of the context in which they evolved, really explains many of the health challenges that we’re facing now. So I think the most intuitive example, is food. So when our lineage was evolving, I mean, you can imagine this, we were walking around, we were gathering our food, we were hunting when we could, and when we encountered that, you know, Berry, that was sort of sweets, or when we were able to hunt that, you know, animal, whatever it was, those things were good for our body. And our brains actually evolved this attraction to sweet things, attraction to fatty food, because those things were good for us. One of the things I’m so interested in is the phenomenon of pleasure. You know, basically, our brains had to evolve to think that certain activities and certain, you know, foods were pleasurable. And, you know, that’s what motivates us to go find those things to engage in those activities. That’s really why sex feels good. That’s why food tastes good. And but now, with people producing our food, packed with sugar and packed with fat, these nutrients that were found in very low quantities before now, they’re, they’re all over the place. And, you know, but our brains have not changed what we find delicious and what we want interesting. Yeah. And so we’re food manufacturers basically are manipulating, you know, these desires, these pleasures that, you know, used to be really important for our health. But now, it’s really a liability. Right? And we’re losing the seasonal aspect of it, too, when the nutrients are at their peak, right? Absolutely. You know, so it’d be wonderful if our brains just didn’t think that chocolate cake was wishes. But our brains evolved at a time when you know, that sweet things were encountered very, very rarely. And so we evolved in attraction to it. And it was good for us in small amounts. The nutrients in a berry were good for our bodies.
Maryann: On that note, let’s talk about sex. [laughs]…Actually, before we talk about sex, there was one more thing I wanted to ask you about the evolutionary aspect of all this: a mother’s survival versus her offspring’s survival. I didn’t realize that was a thing. There’s so much conflict between mother and child, even in the uterus. Can you give us an example of how this sort of reproductive conflict comes into play?
Deena: Yes… I mentioned the story about being pregnant with my first kid. And I think it’s the conflicts that really blew my mind, you know, so, traditionally, I think, intuitively and like traditionally, in evolutionary science, people assumed that mothers and their children had identical interests, right. I mean, it makes sense. We, we have a genetic and evolutionary interest in our babies surviving, right, that’s the way we pass on our genes. And that is true to an extent it is true to a certain point, but we’re not genetically identical, identical to our children. And so, what that means is that babies are going to evolve to take more from mothers than what is in a mother’s best evolutionary interest to give that baby yeah, it is mind blowing. And I think probably the easiest place to observe this is during pregnancy. So, you know, obviously a mom and her fetus, you know, we had to evolve a cooperative relationship for pregnancy to work, tissues in the mom had to evolve tissues in the baby had to evolve. And we came from mammals that lay eggs. So obviously, we had to, you know, as we were evolving, and it’s not just the evolution of one individual, it’s this coevolution, between mom and baby. So there is this required cooperation. But there’s this also this inherent conflict, conflict of interest, where babies are evolving during pregnancy, they’ve evolved to take more from mothers more and more and more. And so I think one of the easiest ways to see this is in hormones. In a human pregnancy, a baby’s placenta latches into the mother’s uterus, it basically digs in there. And the main goal is to gain access to her blood, essentially, you know, the baby’s getting all of its nutrients through the mother’s blood. And one of the most fascinating things and you don’t think about this when you’re pregnant, or just, you know, this isn’t a level of detail that you go into when you’re thinking about what’s happening in your body during a pregnancy. But one of the things the baby is doing is dumping hormones into…your blood. And those hormones. So one big class of hormones are have to do with glucose. So you know, a mom has got all this glucose that she is getting from her food, you know, the mom needs nutrients from her blood from her food, and sodas the baby. And so the baby is dumping hormones into the mom’s blood that is basically keeping her glucose levels elevated in the blood for as long as possible. The mom is dumping hormones that is trying to take the glucose out of the blood as quickly as possible. So it’s this like struggle over glucose. Wow. And what you see in the levels of these hormones is that they are incredibly high. So mom’s insulin levels. So Insulin is the hormone that’s basically trying to remove the glucose from the blood into the moms tissues.
Her insulin levels are like way higher than when she’s not pregnant, I mean, super, super, super high. And the hormones that the baby’s making to keep blood glucose levels elevated are also super, super high. So what you’re observing in a human pregnancy, is these really high levels. And it’s like that this was no results of this push and pull between mom and baby over time. It’s like, Mom is making more insulin, babies making more of placental laka lactogen and some of these other hormones.
Maryann: So gestational diabetes is a is evidence of that, right?
Deena: Absolutely. So you know, many of the complications that humans experienced during pregnancy, are, there’s just so many instabilities in a human pregnancy, because of this conflict, if everything works as it should, all as well. But if the mom isn’t making height, quite enough of the insulin, or the baby’s making too much, you know, there’s just so many things that can go wrong, that are not stable. Because of this conflict, this escalating complex that you really can see with hormones. It doesn’t make any sense why you’d have to make such high levels of these hormones, you really could just make a tiny amount and it would be sufficient to do its job. But this conflict has basically ratcheted everything up.
Maryann: It’s so fascinating.
Deena: It really is, yeah.
Maryann: OK, now we’re gonna talk about sex…I was interested to read in your book that the research points to that during our reproductive years, we are most interested in sex in the days leading up to ovulation. What does that say about postmenopausal women who no longer ovulate, but still have a sex drive. What’s that all about?
Deena: Yes, I think it is fantastic that there are women who still have strong sex drives after menopause. I think a lot of women don’t. I think for many their desire for sex, their comfort during sex, their ability to have an orgasm. I think for many women, their desire goes down.
Maryann: Not all women though.
Deena: Absolutely…But I will say so, you know, humans are different from other mammals in that we have sex throughout our cycles, right? So in many mammals, you know, estrogen levels go up, that’s when a female has, you know, will copulate with a male and she will not engage in intercourse or copulation at any other time during her cycle. Humans are different. We’re having sex throughout our cycle. And so obviously, in humans, there are other things besides estrogen that are involved in arousal, right. It’s not only about estrogen. And so I think the the observation that you were that you mentioned that we have more interest in sex, I think that is true. But I think humans are much more flexible about what brings them pleasure, and what gets them excited about having sex.
Maryann: Good news. And you posted on your Instagram recently an interesting fact: that scientists just discovered how to move drugs across the blood bone barrier in mice. Does that mean we’re closer to being able to treat osteoporosis, which I think affects one in five women over 50?
Deena: Yes, osteoporosis is a big problem for postmenopausal women. And this was a study in mice. Most of these, most treatments need to be studied in animals before they ever, you know, are tested in humans. That takes a long time. So I think we’re closer. I don’t think we’re there yet. Until then, the resistance training is really important. I mentioned that Mayan study. Just because your bone mineral density is declining, just because estrogen is declining, does not mean that you’re going to break your bones. I think the resistance training here is really important.
Maryann: So, Deena, I talked about this so much on the show already. And I written about it this lack of females being part of medical studies. It wasn’t until 1993, you point out in the book, that the National Institutes of Health required for the inclusion of women in clinical trials, and then for years after that studies continue to exclude women. What do you make of that? And do you think that neglect has had an impact on women’s health? And is it changing?
Deena: I think it’s definitely changing. In the last five years or so, we’re hearing about this in the press, which I think is fantastic. Women are talking about it…In the past there have been two major consequences of the neglect. So I would say first, for diseases or, you know, conditions that affect mainly women. We’re suffering. I mean, I think it’s like 10% of women have endometriosis. And we really have no idea how to help these women. So for disorders, conditions that affect women, mainly autoimmune diseases, autoimmune disorders, we are suffering. And we are really behind where we should be in helping women who are going through these things that affect mainly women, because they just weren’t being studied.
Maryann: Yes.
Deena: I think the other consequence of that neglect, for disorders and conditions that affect both men and women, well, you know, these things don’t affect men and women in the same way, right? Obviously, we now know that stroke and heart attack manifests differently in women than in men, and the way that we treat these things, and women and men are going to differ. So I think we’re really lagging behind. But I’m, I’m excited and hopeful that, you know, we’re talking about this openly. Now. Women are demanding more research, more studies, obviously, being included in in these clinical trials. And these animal studies, you know, all of this suggests to me that we’re headed in the right direction. We’re just lagging behind where we should be right.
Maryann: Thank you for bringing up the autoimmune diseases, because you’ve written the book that 8% of humans suffer from an auto immune illness and 80% are women. Why are these diseases even on the rise and you bring up an interesting correlation? You talked about worms, can you can you tell our listeners about that? I found that so interesting.
Deena: Me too. I’m fascinated with this intellectually, but also personally, because I suffer from a couple of audience autoimmune things myself. So, you know, what is an autoimmune disorder, it’s basically when our immune systems attack our own bodies inappropriately. And if you look at populations around the world, that don’t have modern medicine and modern sanitation, you don’t see auto immune disorders there. So you only see them in places like, you know, the US and, you know, places with, like I just said, modern medicine, modern sanitation. And so the hypothesis is, somehow that when we cleaned up our environments, and sort of cleaned up our bodies, our immune system started freaking out. And people have studied this, they’ve, you know, not just sort of correlative work, but people have started doing experiments on this. And it seems that the missing suspects is parasitic worms. So, you know, most of us unless we’re going someplace where you know, there are still parasitic worms out on the grass or wherever are most of us are not going to get a worm infection. And in places where there are still, you know, very high rates of worm infections, people don’t have autoimmune diseases. We’ve been, we’ve started studying how we can sort of harness this information to better treat autoimmune systems. I won’t go to go into all the details, but I think it’s kind of promising. I think we’re figuring out, you know, because imagine you’re a human 100,000 years ago, and you were always living with a worm infection. And so our immune systems when they were evolving, they were basically they basically evolved to be constantly fighting this worm infection. And now we’ve removed the worms. And so our immune systems are like, Okay, well, what else should I fight? You know, what else should I be trying to control? What else should I be attacking? And so the answer for some people, unfortunately, and it’s often women, and I’ll talk about that in a second is, you know, your own body’s tissues, why women more than men, we now know that women just have more robust immune systems to begin with. And so it would make sense that we would suffer more from these disorders than men because our immune systems are already like really active and fast and ready to attack.
Maryann: Yeah, that’s how we were protected more than men during COVID. Right?
Deena: Exactly.
Maryann: So estrogen is not only important for our immune systems, but you point out in the book that it’s so important in protecting us against diabetes, heart disease, Alzheimer’s, all that stuff. So how concerned should we be when estrogen leaves the building with menopause? Because we are constantly told that we are going to deteriorate the minute we hit menopause and that’s not the way I want younger women to feel about the second half of their life that there has to be some good news there.
Deena: I think estrogens a wonderful hormone that does many things for our body, but my goodness, there are so many other things that are good for our health. Like getting enough sleep, eating a healthy diet, getting outside getting exercise, you know, all of those things are also you know, very important for our health. And we also have the option of hormone therapy if if we need it so I certainly hope that younger women are not frightened. I’m 45 I am not quite there yet, but I’m not frightened. I’m kind of curious like what’s going to happen.
Maryann: Maybe because you’re a scientist.
Deena; Yes, maybe. But you know, I’m someone who tends to I shy away from intervention unless I absolutely need it. And so I’m ready to go into this with just dietary lifestyle, things in mind sort of I’m doing my strength training I’m getting outside walking I get eight hours of sleep a night if you can imagine. So I’m going into this hoping that those things will be enough.
Maryann: I’m right there with you. I got my Oura ring on right now tracking my every move and my sleep and I guess I can hold out without [HRT]. I mean, if I need them, I’ll take them, but right now, I’m trying to stick to the lifestyle stuff….OK, so these last few generations have seen so much change during their lifetime: technology, AI, all this stuff. What do you think the long-term implications are going to be, from an evolutionary standpoint?
Deena: That’s an excellent question. I don’t know that I have an answer for it. I think, you know, first, it depends on what technology you’re talking about. I mean, I am obsessed these days with just our time on screens. Part of it is, I see my kids, I see my kids addicted to their phones, while my only my oldest kid has a phone. But you know, my other kids have iPads, and they’re, they’re addicted. And they would always choose sitting in front of a screen versus going outside. I mean, I have never tested it out, maybe at some point, they’d say, this is boring, I want to go outside. But you know, these, these devices, this technology is really made to be addictive.
Maryann: It’s like the food.
Deena: It’s like the processed food. So I don’t know about long-term implications, but there are short-term ones. I mean, you see kids with high levels of anxiety, because we’re basically living our lives in a very different way than our bodies evolved to live. We’re not going outside as much were, we’re not engaging in social interactions the way we should be. So I think there are serious short-term consequences of that. The technologies that could affect longer-term evolutionary impacts, the ones that I’m interested in are the reproductive technologies, you know, because today, what’s going to affect evolution the most is fertility. So we’re doing a better job with survival. And survival is a factor that influences evolution. You have to survive long enough to have babies. But fertility now, I think, is a bigger issue. There are so many technologies available to people now, whether it’s IVF or [other technologies] in the pipeline that could enable people to have their babies in just a very different way than before, and many people who, in the past would not have been able to have a child or children are able to know. I’m really interested in that, although I don’t have a prediction on how that’s going to affect our species evolution. It could, right, because it’s affecting who is having babies, and how many babies we’re able to have.
Maryann: So interesting. That intersection with technology and medicine, you know, you just made me think of the fact that my one of my uncles was born in New York in a taxi cab; his mother went into labor in a taxi many years ago, and the cab driver had to deliver babies. The other day I was thinking about that and the fact that we now have all these self-driving cars running around in San Francisco, and it occurred to me that [there soon will be no taxi drivers to deliver a baby if needed]. [Laughs]
Deena: [Laughs]: So many things to think about!
Maryann: Deena, is there any exciting research that’s kind of coming down the pipeline that you’re looking at or waiting for?
Deena: Yes, and I can tell you the research that I’m about to start and am very excited about. You know, I’m at the Buck Institute, we’re, we’re interested in aging, and part of a center that’s really focused on aging, the female reproductive system. So I’ve studied many aspects of the female reproductive system. Right now I’m focused on aging. And as an evolutionary biologist, I’m very interested in what other species can tell us about improving our own health. So I think I mentioned you know, there are some mammals that live a very long time. And they don’t go through menopause. You know, there are this the toothed whales, I mentioned that do go through menopause. I’m actually less interested in them. I mean, I think they’re really cool. And, you know, I’m, I’m interested in sort of the, the demographics of those species and you know, why they go through menopause and what that can tell us about human menopause. But from a health perspective, from a, how can we improve our own sort of reproductive health, reproductive longevity? I’m really interested in bowhead whales. I’m really interested in elephants, because these species, unlike humans, well, like humans, they have long lifespans. Unlike humans, they can reproduce until the end of their lives. bowhead whales. I’m like, so fascinated by these guys, they can reproduce. I don’t, as far as we know, you know, they’re still having babies when they’re like 100. So I’m starting a project to understand this, how is it that some of these females and some of these species are able to maintain their reproductive longevity? And, you know, is there anything we can learn from them about our, you know, maybe improving our own reproductive longevity? Well, I can’t wait to find out what you uncover.
Maryann: Are you going to be swimming with the whales?
Deena: So this this project is strictly about genetics and gene expression. So I will be hopefully be getting tissues from these whales, but I won’t be swimming with them.
Maryann: Well, Deena, your job is so fascinating. And your research is fascinating. And the book is a must-read for anyone who was interested in women’s bodies, and how has a woman’s body? So it’s coming out in August? Is that correct?
Deena: Yes, it’s coming out August 15, the brief history of the female body I’m so excited for women and just anyone interested in these topics to read it. I really, I think it’s fascinating. And I also think, I also think that studying our past gives us some perspective on how to live our lives better. So it’s not just a fascinating topic, but I think it gives us the context that we need to sort of live a healthier, more vibrant life.
Maryann: Couldn’t agree more. And Deena, tell everybody out there where they can find you online.
Deena: Yes, you can find me at my website, deenaemera.com. And you can find me on Twitter and Instagram and LinkedIn, all those places. And you can preorder my book on Amazon or wherever you want to buy books. I
Maryann: Fantastic. And I will put links to all that good stuff in the show notes. Thank you so much for joining us, Deena.
Deena: Thank you for having me; it was a lot of fun.
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