ATHE_Transcript_Ep 575_Dr. Jenn Simmons
JJ Virgin: [00:00:00] I’m JJ Virgin, PhD dropout, sorry mom, turned four time New York Times bestselling author. Yes, I’m a certified nutrition specialist, fitness hall of famer, and I speak at health conferences and trainings around the globe, but I’m driven by my insatiable curiosity and love of science to keep asking questions, digging for answers, and sharing the information I uncover with as many people as I can, and that’s why I created the Well Beyond 40 podcast.
To synthesize and simplify the science of health into actionable strategies to help you thrive. In each episode, we’ll talk about what’s working in the world of wellness, from personalized nutrition and healing your metabolism to healthy aging and prescriptive fitness. Join me on the journey to better health so you can love how you look and feel right now and have the energy to play full out at 100.
So I knew this was going to be a good interview, but [00:01:00] I didn’t expect it to be like a spectacular out of this world interview. I am so excited to share this information with you today. One of the bombshells that Dr. Jen dropped for me was. She goes, you know, a disease doesn’t develop in a healthy body. And I was like, okay, say that 10 times.
So I’ve got Dr. Jen Simmons with me. She was Philadelphia’s top breast cancer surgeon for the first 17 years of her career. And then she ended up getting Graves disease.
And it just, she decided to go down the route of looking at other options and that changed everything. So, and now you’re going to hear what happened, what happened from that and how she’s now impacting thousands of women. I think we’ll be millions of women and it is super exciting. If you’ve been wondering, like, Should I get a mammogram?
What about hormone replacement therapy? [00:02:00] What really is creating the risk for breast cancer? How do I avoid breast cancer? These are all the answers that we are going to be sharing in this interview with Dr. Jen Simmons. So I will be right back with her. You are going to want to listen to this one a couple of times.
So Dr. Jenn, what I would love to start with, because boy, do you have a story is what made you decide to go into breast cancer? In the first place, I
Dr. Jenn Simmons: think breast cancer is something that definitely found me more than me finding it. I honestly don’t remember a time when breast cancer wasn’t a part of my life.
Growing up as a child, we had a singer songwriter in the family. It was a woman named Linda Creed. Linda wrote all the music for the spinners and the stylistics. She was this like. Beautiful bombshell of a brilliant person. She walked in the room and just lit up the place. She was [00:03:00] the queen of Motown sound in Philadelphia.
And, you know, she was my first cousin.
JJ Virgin: That is so fun. I can’t stand it. Like, what did you get to do?
Dr. Jenn Simmons: Cause of that, I literally have a first cousin that is a rock star. Like we, people use that term figuratively. I literally had a first cousin that was a rock star, right? So, you know, we get to hang out with these super famous people and be in these cool spots and these cool situations.
And I used to tell people like, my cousin’s backyard is the size of a football field. Like as a kid, this was amazing, amazing stuff. Her most famous song that she wrote was the greatest love of all. So she wrote that song in 1977 is the title track to the movie, the greatest starring Muhammad Ali. But it really received its acclaim in March of 1986 when Whitney Houston released it to the world and it spent 14 weeks at the top of the charts.
Only Linda would never know that [00:04:00] Linda died of metastatic breast cancer one month after Whitney released that song. And I was 16 years old at the time. I mean, we are talking about something that happened. 35 years ago, and I still can’t think about it without crying because the world suffered such a loss and she left behind a family, two beautiful young children.
And so here I am, I’m 16, my hero dies and so that Linda’s life, which already had so much purpose. But so that it would have a positive impact on the future so that no other family, no other woman had to suffer in the same way. I made her life and ultimately her death, my life’s purpose. And so I did the only thing I knew [00:05:00] how to do.
I became a doctor, I became a breast surgeon. I’m the first fellowship trained breast surgeon in Philadelphia and I dedicate my entire career to breast surgery because of the impact that Linda had on me. And
JJ Virgin: you were like the top breast surgeon, let’s be clear. Yeah, I know you don’t want to say it, but you know, you weren’t just just a doctor, just a surgeon, just about you were the top breast surgeon.
I
Dr. Jenn Simmons: helped a lot of people in the very worst time of their lives. It was a tremendous, tremendous privilege to be able to do that. I mean, you think about the trust that someone has to have in you. For them to go to sleep and let you take care of it. You can imagine like how you are the most vulnerable that you could possibly be.
And so I spent over 17 [00:06:00] years. In that role, in that position, shuttling people through this horrible, horrible time in their lives and I’m a doctor and I’m running the cancer program and I’m a wife and I’m a mother and I’m an athlete and I have all these balls in the air and I think that I’m an expert juggler and then what felt like at the drop of a dime, everything fell to the ground.
So I’m an avid tennis player and I’m used to playing like two or three hours a day. I would go play before work. I would play after work. I would play on weekends and I’m on the tennis court and I’m warming up. So like doing nothing essentially. And all of a sudden I have chest pain and shortness of breath.
And all I can think of is Oh, this is what a heart attack feels like, like, I’ve learned to recognize these symptoms and other people, but I’ve [00:07:00] certainly never experienced them myself. And I’m like, oh, yeah, this is what they mean when they describe a heart attack and I go to the hospital and I have, like, 3 days of a workup and I’m sitting in the office of my friend and colleague.
And he’s telling me that I have to have surgery and chemo radiation and take lifelong hormone replacement. And I’m having like an out of body experience.
JJ Virgin: What was your diagnosis? I had
Dr. Jenn Simmons: Graves disease. And I had such severe Graves disease that Graves disease is the only non cancerous Diagnosis of the thyroid that’s treated exactly like cancer because it leads to heart attack and heart failure.
I’m hearing this and like, I know that these are things that are the standard of care. I [00:08:00] know that these are things that I recommend to people all day, every day without hesitation or reservation. And yet when the words are coming at me. It’s like I’m in Charlie Brown’s classroom. Like I’m underwater and I leave the office just totally bewildered.
And the only thing that I knew is that that wasn’t the answer for me. And I have no idea to this day why I felt that way, because I’m running an N I H certified cancer
JJ Virgin: program. Right. If anything, you should have been right in there with that treatment.
Dr. Jenn Simmons: Yeah. Like I’m the one that got them their N I H certification.
Like I am a rule follower. I operate, no pun intended by the standard of care. Like I’m way deep in the traditional medical space. And yet something said, like, Nope, not for you. And so I go like on this searching journey to heal myself. And as a [00:09:00] traditional medical doctor, we’re taught like almost nothing about nutrition.
Like we have 15 hours worth of nutritional training in our first year of medical school and then nothing again. So one week, our first year of medical school and then nothing again. And beyond that, like I did a lot of post medical school training, you know, I’m a surgeon and fellowship trained, like never again did we talk about nutrition! So I decide that that’s the place to start. So, I enroll in immediately
JJ Virgin: go back to school.
Dr. Jenn Simmons: Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, I, I’m definitely a lifelong learner. I’m always like more information is better because like it informs us. And so I enroll in Integrative Nutrition. Now I’m a physician for 20 years at this point, I’m a total snooty booty, like what could they possibly have to teach me?
So I’m sitting there and it’s like one of the first days. And a [00:10:00] man named Mark Hyman walks on the stage for anyone who doesn’t know who Mark Hyman is. And I did not know who he was at the time.
JJ Virgin: I think probably everybody listened to the podcast. No, he’s been on a bunch of times. It was just you who didn’t know who he was, right?
Dr. Jenn Simmons: It’s just me. And now in my defense, this was 2017. And so he walks on the stage and introduced himself as a functional medicine physician. Now, snooty booty. Been a doctor for 20 years at this point. And all I can think of is there’s no such thing as functional medicine. What is this quack talking about?
But I realized that like I’m there for a reason, check my ego at the door, listen up. This is an opportunity. And within five minutes of him speaking, my whole world makes sense. And I know that the reason that I got sick was so that I could be in that seat on that day, [00:11:00] listening to this man speak, because this is where my impact is going to come from.
Because as much as I was helping that 1 woman. Traverse this journey, I had no further impact than that. And in fact, I was not changing the trajectory of her life. Because most women that get breast cancer don’t die of breast cancer. Most women who get breast cancer, die of cardiac disease. And that’s because you never deal with why they got cancer in the 1st place.
You never deal with the inflammation. And so they just go on to have another manifestation of that inflammation. And it occurred to me in this moment, I can not only help these people who have breast cancer, reverse their disease. But I can prevent people from even having to get it because this is the answer.
I then enrolled in the Institute for [00:12:00] Functional Medicine in for a dime, in for a dollar, 3, 4, 5 years later, here
JJ Virgin: I am. And what happened with the Graves disease situation?
Dr. Jenn Simmons: Took me 3 years, but I healed. You know, I had a lot of learning to do. I had a lot of changing to do. I was a very typical surgeon or doctor at, you know, I was the cobbler that didn’t have any shoes.
Like, I gave it all to everyone else and did nothing for myself. So, you know. I would starve myself all day and then, like, eat graham crackers and peanut butter in the car on the way home. Like, I was burning my proverbial candle at both ends, for sure, for a really long time. And, you know, you gotta pay the price.
JJ Virgin: Well, you just said a big thing. You dropped a little bomb, then we went back. But your bomb was, I wanted to look at all of this so I could prevent it. And then you said, you know, the same thing that’s causing breast [00:13:00] cancer, which is not what I think people think, is also causing cardiovascular disease. So let’s Let’s like dig into what is it that actually causes breast cancer because they’re sure a lot of noise out there about
Dr. Jenn Simmons: this.
Yeah, for sure. So, you know, as it turns out, what, what are people coming to you for? Right? They’re coming to you because they want to figure out how to lose weight. Right. And they want to figure out how to do it permanently, not another fad diet. They want to kick the bad habits and form some good ones, right?
And as it turns out, after being a woman and growing older, the biggest risk factor, the biggest modifiable risk factor for the development of breast cancer is. Being overweight, right? So overweight and obese are the number one modifiable risk factor for breast cancer [00:14:00] when we are not of optimum weight.
And I don’t want to just pick on the overweight because it’s true of underweight to
JJ Virgin: well, it’s why we have to look at body composition.
Dr. Jenn Simmons: Yeah, these are inflammatory states. Being overweight and being underweight are inflammatory states. And when you are in that inflammatory state. You are going to manifest it as something.
So some people manifested as autoimmune disease. Some people manifested as cardiovascular disease and on and on and on down the line. And cancer is like the end of the road of those manifestations. Lots of people get more than 1. So at least 25% of people with autoimmune disease will go on to get breast cancer.
JJ Virgin: That is a staggering number. Holy smokes.
Dr. Jenn Simmons: I’ve never heard that before. And we’re not paying enough attention. And this [00:15:00] whole acute care model trying to treat chronic disease is a huge problem because we’re setting people up for this never ending game of whack a mole, right? Suppress this symptom.
Something else pops up, suppress that something else pops up and we’re just. In this endless loop, we can’t get off the hamster wheel because we’re not looking at the why we’re not looking at why we’re in flames.
JJ Virgin: To me when I look at weight and someone wants to lose weight. The reality is that I don’t believe you lose weight to get healthy.
I believe that you get metabolically healthy to lose weight that when you start doing the things that make you metabolically healthy, like dropping inflammation, like balancing blood sugar. Exercising all of those things that start to, to happen, you’ll lose weight
Dr. Jenn Simmons: for sure, or you’ll, you’ll optimize your weight because again, there is, there is the underweight side of it too, right?
JJ Virgin: And that’s why we really got to be pulling this apart. These [00:16:00] scales at doctor’s offices, like, we should never again, have someone stand on a scale and make an assumption of anything we have to be using some kind of an in body or bio impedance or Dexa. That is the only information because. We can’t look at that information and know where their VAT fat, where their visceral adipose tissue is, if they’ve got enough skeletal muscle, what’s going on with there, but there’s so much more information in there.
Absolutely. It drives me nuts that we’re, you know, and I understand people like, I don’t want to get on a scale. It triggers me. I go, but if you were getting on a scale and they were pulling apart the components, so it was useful information, it would be like looking at your blood pressure or. Your blood sugar and you wouldn’t go, I’m triggered, you go, that’s information I can take action on, you know.
Dr. Jenn Simmons: And it is comparable to set, you know, like, the people that don’t want to get on the scale and I get it.
But it’s like saying, well, I don’t want to know my blood pressure and I don’t want to know my heart rate and I don’t want to know my oxygen saturation like. We need this information because it informs us, [00:17:00] it informs us of what’s working and what’s not, and when we know what’s not working, we can fix it the way that the system is currently set up, right?
You’re either like in the line of fine, or you’ve failed. Right. And it’s all these people in the middle before they develop the disease. Those are the people that we need to talk to. Those are the people that we need to help because health is not the absence of disease. Health is optimal function.
JJ Virgin: So I’d assume those people in the middle, because we’re looking at what causes breast cancer and it’s really all of these metabolic health factors, especially inflammation.
And then you’ve got these people in the middle and traditional medical system, people in the middle, like, okay, everything’s, you know, looks okay. It’s in range and it’s not at a place where we’d medicate yet. So we’ll just watch. Until you get to that point, what sounds like you’re saying is the middle is the [00:18:00] opportunity.
Dr. Jenn Simmons: The middle is the opportunity. It is the opportunity to figure out how to have optimum health because disease doesn’t develop in a healthy body. Almost every conversation that I have with a new patient starts off with I’m healthy, except I have breast cancer. And it is this thinking that permeates everywhere that like.
If you don’t have a disease, you’re healthy and we really need to rethink that because that’s not true. Health is not the absence of disease and breast cancer doesn’t develop out of nowhere. And so you have to be in that inflamed state for quite a period of time for breast cancer develop because what breast cancer is, it’s a normal response.
To an abnormal environment. So what happens is we go from a homeostatic chemistry to the chemistry of stress. [00:19:00] And for sure, there are tons of things in this world to be stressed about for sure. You’re, you’re surrounded by it. Everywhere you look, there’s some shit going on, but we do have the ability to develop techniques.
In order to not allow those stressors to have the impact on us. So, it’s all about us being in control of our internal chemistry and that is. You know, driven by the relationships that we have the air that we breathe the food that we eat the water that we drink the alcohol that we drink. Like, there are so many inputs, and we just need to be conscious and aware of what those inputs are and the impact that they’re going to have on us.
Because 80% of breast cancer is preventable. At least [00:20:00] 80% of breast cancer is preventable. Wow. You have to be conscious of this.
JJ Virgin: I just did a podcast with Dr. Felice Gersh, and I think you were at the event when she stood up and she did a, you know, and here’s another, was a traditional doctor for years and did a future of health at MindShare and said about why she was no longer doing mammograms.
And I was like, that’s a bombshell. So I’d love to just explore that with you in that, like, as I’m hearing you talk about this. It seems like the screening for breast cancer is actually the screening for metabolic health is the screening for cardiovascular disease is more looking at inflammation than anything else.
That’s exactly right. Because you just dropped a bombshell disease doesn’t happen in a healthy body is a huge bombshell. And if that’s the case, just like what I believe that you have to get metabolically healthy in order for your body to let go of weight, you know, it’s like. Everything improves when you start to [00:21:00] fix all those markers.
So how are you screening them? Like, what are the things that you look at for me?
Dr. Jenn Simmons: Breast health is health. I am looking for optimum function and metabolic health. So I am also like Dr. Gersh, which we are writing a book together.
JJ Virgin: Are you? I didn’t know that. So that makes me ridiculously happy. It’s
Dr. Jenn Simmons: so funny that you brought her up.
JJ Virgin: I’ve known her forever.
Dr. Jenn Simmons: She is. A brilliant woman and we are very much kindred spirits where after she gave that talk at mindshare, we spent 2 hours just like existing in each other’s atmosphere because we’re such kindred spirits. Oh, that’s awesome. I’m not using mammogram because. Despite what we are being bombarded with.
It’s like, if you say it loud enough, it’ll make it true. Screening mammograms do not save lives. They don’t, and [00:22:00] we have used that as a tool to discover more cancers for sure. The number of those cancers that would have ever become clinically relevant, we’ll never know, but the majority wouldn’t. So we’re completely over treating and not to mention that.
If you are radiating someone every year, starting at 40 by the time that they’re 70 years old, you’re causing way more breast cancers than you’re saving. And it’s a huge issue. This system is like a little too big to fail. Everyone’s kind of like holding tight. This is the best thing we have. And we talk about it.
In under the umbrella of prevention, it has nothing to do with prevention. It’s early detection and if early detection really saved lives. That would [00:23:00] mean something, but as it turns out, the biology is so much more important than the size of the tumor. And so picking up an aggressive cancer early doesn’t change the behavior of that cancer and picking up an unaggressive cancer early doesn’t help that person because you’re essentially over treating and freaking them out and freaking them out.
Right? Yeah. And these bells. Are very hard to unring,
but if we could find that same person that maybe has had some steady weight gain or fatigue or not feeling like themselves and we could capture them then and get them metabolically healthy, they’re not going to go on to develop breast cancer or heart disease or dementia. [00:24:00] Right. And we, and so I have to find a better term than killing 2 birds with 1 stone, I’m going to find a better term.
But when we approach people from the, are you metabolically healthy or not perspective. And we don’t need to do much more than biometrics and some simple labs. We don’t have to radiate people and we can actually guide them towards health. And in the end, that’s what we need. Breast health is health.
JJ Virgin: Perfect statement. And now you look at less than 10% of the population is metabolically healthy. You can see the setup we’re in. We’re on the road to nowhere. And, and yet the biggest challenges you hear now are not let’s get you metabolically healthy. And one of the things that breaks my heart the most is the body positivity movement and what is it is doing to women’s [00:25:00] health.
No one’s saying, Hey, don’t love yourself at any size, but we’re saying love yourself enough wherever you are to, to get yourself as healthy as you humanly can be. Yeah. And otherwise you cannot be over fat, obese and healthy. It’s it just doesn’t happen.
Dr. Jenn Simmons: My son had a TikTok on yesterday or the day before.
And it was someone ranting about, she’s so sick of hearing people say that Lizzo isn’t healthy. Lizzo isn’t healthy, but we look at all these offensive linemen that are 300 and some pounds and we think of them as healthy. I want everyone to know we don’t think of them as healthy either. Like, it may be that you have to weigh 350 to be successful as an offensive lineman, but I’ll tell you what.
The guys, after they’re done playing football, the guys that don’t get thin again, that don’t get to a normal weight. They all have heart attacks in their forties and [00:26:00] fifties. That is not healthy. Right.
JJ Virgin: Well, pro football, there’s a whole lot of other issues,
Dr. Jenn Simmons: too. It may serve a purpose in that, in that moment, but no one is calling a 350 pound lineman healthy.
They may be good at their job, but their job is not health. I, I’m sorry, I, I, I totally agree with you, like, yes, you should love yourself, and this should not be about blame or shame, but you should love yourself enough. To get healthy, to want to live a normal full life, and that is not going to happen if you’re not metabolically healthy, it’s just not, and I, I hear from these.
These people that take care of cancer patients and they’re still, you know, saying you need sugar and that’s what your cells thrive on. And if all you can drink is insure or [00:27:00] boost, that’s good for you. And I’m like, I want to pull my hair out. Wow. Like, I can’t believe that I, that I share a position of authority with these people that are just.
Spreading misinformation.
JJ Virgin: I will tell you when my son Grant was in the hospital. And he finally was able to start eating food. One of the first words he said coming out of coma was disgusting, pointing at hospital food, which I brought him as food every day and made it. I had to have a big sign up that said, no Ensure, no crystal light.
They want to give him crystal light. I go, he has a brain injury. We cannot have aspartame with brain seizure activity, but, you know, Ensure I’m like, no, no, I’m making his own protein shakes. We are not doing this loaded garbage. It
Dr. Jenn Simmons: is like a combination of the doctors don’t know and are too busy to really, like, get involved in this space.
And the nutritionists are trained in this system, [00:28:00] like, here, this is what you use for this. And here, this is what you use for this. And they’re just like propagating this and it’s horrible and the amount of unlearning that I have to do with people so that they understand what is best for them. It’s astounding and it’s still it’s so pervasive.
It’s still going on today, even when you look at the, the American diabetes association and their recommended diet. And these are for people that have problems with. Sugar metabolism, and they’re being told to eat, like, mostly grains.
JJ Virgin: Why? I know. I was working I was a spokesperson for Subway way back when.
And so I was looking at their stuff and I was trying to figure out, you know, at the time I was trying to help them get lower carbs, et cetera. And they were like, okay, well just follow the American Diabetic Association [00:29:00] guidelines. That’s how we can work this. And I look at them and I go, this would give someone diabetes.
Yes. Yes. I did a lot of work with a doc, Dr. Diana Schwartzbein, the Schwartzbein principle. And what she discovered, what led to this principle that she created, was the people who were not following the diet she was putting them on, which was the American Diabetic Association diet, the people who were cheating were getting better.
The people who are following the diet weren’t. And so she started to go, well, how are you cheating? And she felt they were cheating by like lowering the carbs. And, you know, it’s like, oh, so that like led her to scratch her head and actually ask the questions and it changed everything. So it’s really, it’s really fascinating.
The other thing that I am amazed about because the mammograms just keep coming, but the other one that still has all this misinformation around it is estrogen and whether, you know, does estrogen cause breast cancer? Can you take estrogen, you know, bioidentical hormones if you’ve had breast cancer?
Like, and [00:30:00] I asked Felice this too, because I had a girlfriend just go through breast cancer. She’s miserable. And they’re like, no estrogen going, she’s going to have a heart attack any, any moment now. Let’s unpack that. I
Dr. Jenn Simmons: have no idea why we started down this estrogen causes breast cancer pathway, because when you look at women in their life cycle, the times that they have the most estrogen are certainly premenopausal.
And pregnancy,
JJ Virgin: so they should be getting lots of breast cancer when they’re pregnant, right? By those statistics. It’s like, it’s like prostate cancer in men and they don’t want to give them testosterone therapy yet. They don’t get prostate cancer till their testosterone goes down. It’s like same craziness.
Dr. Jenn Simmons: Everyone bought into it hook line and sinker. I can’t imagine why, but let’s, let’s unpack it a little bit and think about it. We see so many more breast cancers in the postmenopausal state than we do in the premenopausal state or pregnancy, [00:31:00] right? So we know it’s not estrogen. We are surrounded by things in our society.
In our universe that act like estrogen, but let’s take when estrogen comes and sits on the estrogen receptor. It does what it’s supposed to do, and it dissociates and goes away, right? We, we detoxify it and it goes away. But all of those things that act like estrogen, and I’m talking about, like. Plastics fragrance, PBAs, PBBs, phthalates.
All of those things that are toxic forms of estrogen, they sit on the estrogen receptor and they don’t let go. It is not our estrogen that is causing the problem. It is all of these environmental estrogens and the more of them that we’re exposed to, the more that we take in, the more that our body is [00:32:00] Is charged with getting rid of them.
It’s like a washing machine. It only goes so fast. If you keep piling on laundry, the laundry just going to build up because the washing machine only works so fast. And so that’s really what we’re dealing with. We are dealing with Xeno estrogens, things that sit on the estrogen receptor, but they’re not estrogen.
We have like created this whole thinking around estrogen is bad. And then to top it off, we have the women’s health initiative, which halts after two years. For some non statistical increase in breast cancer in the hormone replacement population. So they stopped the study and they tell everyone that estrogen and hormone replacement is bad.
And what happens 2 generations of physicians. I think [00:33:00] hormone replacement is bad and they won’t even have the conversation. And so two generations, at least of women have to suffer and have to suffer in silence because their doctors won’t even have a conversation with them about it. And in October of 2022, when they print a retraction, no one reads it.
No one reads it. No one cares. When you look at how we treat breast cancer, we do surgery and then we do chemotherapy, which takes away all circulating estrogen. We then either give women tamoxifen, which is an estrogen, or we put people on an aromatase inhibitor, which takes away all of their estrogen. So these people are miserable.
And what are we doing? We’re accelerating all these other disease states. So we’re accelerating heart disease. We’re accelerating cardiovascular disease. [00:34:00] We’re accelerating stroke. We’re accelerating dementia and we’re accelerating osteoporosis. So these women, okay, so they don’t die of breast cancer. They die of heart disease.
They die of stroke. They die of dementia. They die of fractures. Have we helped them? Not at all. And in the meantime, they suffer. They had brain fog. They gained weight. They felt awful. They have no libido. Their relationship is in the toilet because they can’t relate to their spouse anymore. They can’t relate to their significant other.
It’s awful. We are harming these women. We are harming them. We are not doing them any favors here. And in the end hormone replacement doesn’t cause cancer. So what are we doing? What is it for? And so I, when I work with my women and we’re in that, we’re in that position, I inform them and they decide. [00:35:00] But I have no hesitancy putting someone who had breast cancer on hormone replacement.
Because we know that it has tremendous benefit. And it doesn’t cause breast cancer,
JJ Virgin: I, I’m on a mission to like, I, I was just fortunate when I was in the hospital with grant. I was 49. and of course, you go through a traumatic situation where you nearly lose your son and guess what happens. But a bunch of my friends for hormone docs, they all came to the hospital and hooked me up and I, like, I never missed a beat and I’m just so grateful and thankful that I never had to go through any of that stuff because and we shouldn’t suffer.
And most women die of heart disease. Anyway, yeah, so, and boy, when I used
Dr. Jenn Simmons: to see twice the rate of breast cancer,
JJ Virgin: yeah, I, I was doing, it was interesting early on. I was working out of a plastic surgeon’s office and seeing a lot of people would come in with their labs and before I even talked to him, I’d know if they were on hormone [00:36:00] replacement therapy or not.
You could tell. You could just tell by their laps. It’s like all their cardiovascular risk factors go up. They’re not on estrogen. It was just like, it was crazy. They, I mean, you can tell by their skin as well. Like you could tell by everything.
Dr. Jenn Simmons: Yeah. So, and you know, there are estrogen receptors everywhere in the body.
That’s how important it is. And we need to, you know, we have the opportunity and the ability to make this right for people. Why aren’t we doing it? Why aren’t we doing it? It’s just, it’s crazy to me. And I know that there are, there are physicians that are afraid that, you know, their license will be at stake if they do this, but there are drugs used off label.
All day, every day, and, and it, it just shocks me that this is, this is where they draw the line. Right. And as a result, so many people [00:37:00] suffer, they just suffer.
JJ Virgin: Well, you’re helping turn it around and you also have a checklist. So I love this idea. We were talking about before you came on is that you have a checklist because there are so many things that, that we really want to do for self care throughout the week.
Right. And, you know, how do you make sure you get them all done? And literally, at the beginning of the year, when I was like, okay, I’m gonna make sure I get my red light, my sauna, my cold plunge, right? Right. You’re all of a sudden, I’m like, we just need like a big board that we can check all this off. So it sounds like you’ve created something just like that, which we’ll put at jjvirgin.com/checklist. Easy enough to grab, but tell people what, what they’ll get there.
Dr. Jenn Simmons: Yeah. So, you know, it’s just a reminder of how to get it all in over the course of a week, because we do want to make sure that we’re eating with we’re eating nutrient dense food with diversity. Right. And so sometimes we get stuck in the same old thing because like, I don’t even think about, Oh, I could have had this and, Oh, I could have, right.
[00:38:00] That commercial, Oh, I could have had a V8. Right. Don’t drink V8. A nd so it is just a reminder of the things that you should be thinking about in the course of a week in order to drive that metabolic health forward.
JJ Virgin: Awesome. All right. So that will be at jjvirgin.com/checklist. I knew this was going to be good, but I didn’t know it was going to be this good.
Thank you so much. Like what great info.
Dr. Jenn Simmons: It is my pleasure.
JJ Virgin: Be sure to join me next time for more tools, tips, and techniques you can incorporate into everyday life to ensure you look and feel great. And more importantly, that you’re built to last and check me out on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and my website, jjvirgin.Com. And make sure to follow my podcast. So you don’t miss a single episode at subscribetoJJ.Com. See you next time.[00:39:00]

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