Broadcaster and menopause campaigner Mariella Frostrup thinks HRT has had “a very bad rap”. Speaking about her new midlife cookbook Menolicous, she talks about her own experience with menopause.
“I thought I was losing the plot,” she says of visiting various doctors and having blood tests but being given no answers. She was eventually prescribed HRT by London-based Northern Irish gynecologist Sara Matthews which led to her symptoms being alleviated.
“I am a great proselytiser for HRT, and I think it has had a very bad rap ... any GP who tells you they don’t rate it, find another GP ... anything you can do to make yourself feel better is really important.”
A leading voice in Britain in terms of opening up the debate around women’s health in midlife, Frostrup has recently turned her attention to the importance of nutrition in perimenopause, menopause and beyond.
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“Diet is something that you can take control of,” she says. To this end, the broadcaster joined forces with Belles Berry, the only daughter of Great British Bakeoff’s Mary Berry to create Menolicious, a cookbook of nutritionist-approved menopause friendly recipes. The idea for the book began three years ago when they met protesting outside the British Houses of Parliament to introduce a single one-off prescription charge for HRT.
Berry says that while she was “blown away” by the speakers at the protest something was niggling at her about the lack of information around nutrition and menopause. “I was wondering where the food knowledge was,” she says.
Frostrup says of that first encounter that “this very sunny bundle of energy arrived in front of my eyes and within moments had said the magic words, ‘Why don’t we do a cookbook?’”.
While cooking is not something Frostrup is known for, a cookbook had been on the broadcaster’s mind since attending a wellness retreat in Devon where she “experienced the difference that five days of eating properly could have”. The retreat, however, had a full-time cook, “which most of us don’t have the luxury of,” Frostrup points out.
The retreat experience gave her the idea for creating a book of easy, everyday recipes “for women who at this point in life are busier, I would say, than at almost any other stage”.
The book includes dishes such as tahini pancakes, coconut chicken stew and Irish-inspired porridge bread. Frostrup spent her childhood in Ireland and is writing a memoir based on this period of her life.
In this wide-ranging conversation Berry also shares her personal experience of taking HRT. She says she was “extremely lucky” that she was immediately put on the drug by her local GP when she first started experiencing symptoms.
“But this is a very small percentage [of women] ... I hear stories every day of how one third of people are still being prescribed antidepressants instead of HRT ... there’s a lot of work to be done”.
You can listen back to this conversation in the player above or wherever you get your podcasts. Menolicous by Mariella Frostrup and Belles Berry is out now
