well, i find debra waterhouse interesting, tho i'm not sure how much i believe in her "science". she has a lot of good info and advice, but most of her books were written ten years ago and she seems to be more interested in the sound byte than solid fact.
i found this line on another pseudo-science site: "did you know that with the help of an aromatase enzyme estrogen is also produced in your fat and muscle cells both before and after menopause?" i don't know anything about aromatase so i checked out
wikipedia. i followed a few of the links in the further reading section, but didn't really come across much that relates to estrogen production in women and a google search brought up mostly aromatase supplements and meds. the best i could find was an abstract to a study i couldn't access:
▪ Abstract There is growing awareness that androgens and estrogens have general metabolic roles that are not directly involved in reproductive processes. These include actions on vascular function, lipid and carbohydrate metabolism, as well as bone mineralization and epiphyseal closure in both sexes. In postmenopausal women, as in men, estrogen is no longer solely an endocrine factor but instead is produced in a number of extragonadal sites and acts locally at these sites in a paracrine and intracrine fashion. These sites include breast, bone, vasculature, and brain. Within these sites, aromatase action can generate high levels of estradiol locally without significantly affecting circulating levels. Circulating C19 steroid precursors are essential substrates for extragonadal estrogen synthesis. The levels of these androgenic precursors decline markedly with advancing age in women, possible from the mid-to-late reproductive years. This may be a fundamental reason why women are at increased risk for bone mineral loss and fracture, and possibly decline of cognitive function, compared with men. Aromatase expression in these various sites is under the control of tissue-specific promotors regulated by different cohorts of transcription factors. Thus in principle, it should be possible to develop selective aromatase modulators (SAMs) that block aromatase expression, for example, in breast, but allow unimpaired estrogen synthesis in other tissues such as bone.
and here are a few more interesting links:
Dwindling estrogen in menopause could make women fat: study - 2007 - Lower estrogen levels in the brain, a drop that occurs during menopause, could lead to weight gain in older women
Weight Gain in Menopause - 2006 - weight gain does happen in menopause, but that's not to say that it happens because of menopause
Estrogen 101: The Basics of Estrogen and Your Hormones - no date -
But did you know that with the help of an aromatase enzyme estrogen is also produced in your fat and muscle cells both before and after menopause?
So your Estrogen levels are not totally dependent on your ovaries, there are a lot of other factors that come into play, like your diet and body composition.
There is so much variability in estrogen levels from woman to woman that in a study featured in the American Journal of Epidemiology on the Epidemiology of Serum Sex Hormones in Post Menopausal Women, it was demonstrated that the concentration of hormones in the blood had so much inconsistency that it was clear that neither age nor menopause had a clear cut correlation on hormone levels.
This study also revealed that the amount of body fat and lean muscle tone a woman has will affect the blood levels of estrogen, specifically estrone. And this makes sense since fat and muscle cells are key players in the production of estrogen - remember? There's that armoatase enzyme that helps convert the small amount of male sex hormones your body has to estrogens.
Now whether that conversion to estrogen happens in your fat cells or muscle cells may play a big role in the production of good or bad estrogen metabolites - more on this in the next part of this article, Estrogen 102. (estrogen 102 does not appear to have been written yet, unfortunately!)
Is Estrogen Really Making Your Belly FAT? - no date and same site as above
there is enough info out there to make your head spin. i am 43, so i am very interested in what is in my near future. my mom and her mother and sisters all had hysterectomies, so my mom had a medical menopause at 27, so i really don't know what to expect. and like my husband said, menopause has really only been a medical issue for about the last fifty years since before then women didn't live long enough. and it's only been the last twenty or so years that women have become proactive and started dialogs and demanded information. i didn't look here too much, but i'm sure the
North American Menopause Society would be a good source of info, as would similar societies in other countries. karen