Review By Gabrielle
A fascinating deep dive into how our hormones impact pretty much every aspect of our lives.
Favourite Quote:
“Our current impression of the menopause is a rather negative one. It mainly entails problems: you become infertile, cranky, fat, hairy and forgetful. Only one in five women don’t experience any symptoms at all, but almost a third have so many symptoms that their work and social lives suffer.”
Goodreads Synopsis:
Our hormones shape us at every stage of our lives, from the second we are conceived to the moment we breathe our last breath. They are essential to our immune system, sleep, digestion, hunger, stress levels and so much more. When our hormone systems derail this can wreak havoc on our health and our wellbeing – and yet most of us know very little about the far-reaching power of our chemical messengers.
Professor Max Nieuwdorp, an international authority on hormones, sets out to change this. He explores the role our hormones play from our early years through to puberty, pregnancy and old age, combining stories from his day-to-day life treating his patients with the amazing, cutting-edge new science of hormones. These discoveries are changing the way that we understand our bodies, from the decline in male hormones during andropause to the new science on how gut bacteria impact on our hormone balance.
This eye-opening, myth-busting book shines a light on the incredible and under-explored role of hormones, which are essential not only to our health but to our moods, our relationships, and so much of what makes us who we are.
I love learning and I don’t think I’ll ever get enough of reading non-fiction. Lately, I’ve been especially interested in books about health and the way our bodies work. I find it endlessly interesting to learn about the complex and integrated systems we carry around each day.
This book was a great read. If you are interested in learning about hormones, this book is a great choice. It is easy to follow, Max breaks down complex ideas into easy to understand language. I learned so much. Did you know that we experience a surge of hormones as babies that is similar to what we experience as teenagers?
I particularly enjoyed the chapter on gender and hormones. Max breaks down a lot of myths about what is happening in our bodies biologically that impacts how we experience gender. And the chapter on hunger and hormones gave me great insight into how our digestive system works and why obesity is such a problem. Perhaps my favourite chapter though, was the one on menopause and ADAM (the newer term for male menopause that stands for androgen deficiency in the aging male; and yes, it’s a thing). Our knowledge on this process has come a long way, enabling us to do many incredible things like fertility treatments, but it poses some interesting moral questions. How old is too old to receive such treatments? And of course, like with any scientific research, there is still so much we don’t know. Why has the age of menopause in women remained largely unchanged for all of human history?
The book is written in such a neat way. Each chapter tackles a different topic and Max fills us in on the history of medical discovery with that topic, tells us a story about a patient from his own practice and what that taught him about the topic, and then breaks down the latest knowledge and research. This format makes the book much more entertaining to read.
If you are interested in learning more about how our hormones impact all of our systems and our everyday lives, give this book a try.
Thank you, Simon & Schuster for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.
