- Hello, my name is Sandro Graca
and I'm a licensed acupuncturist.
I'm a lecturer at the Northern
College of Acupuncture
in the UK and I'm a Fellow of the ABORM,
the American Board of Oriental
Reproductive Medicine.
Welcome to another video on
this short series of advice
for women who have been
diagnosed with PCOS
and what they can do to
help with their prognosis.
Basically what we are
doing with these videos
is framing it in a way
that will be easy for you
to just take some of the
advice, pick what works for you,
try a few different things as well
and there's already two
bits of advice there
on that Video One as well
so I'll leave the link below
so that you can watch that one,
just to give you a little
bit of context for this one.
Today, we're going to
go into more specifics
of advice of things that you can do,
we're going to give you some
of the dos and don'ts as well.
But to help me out,
I have someone on the
other side of the line
so let's go and check it out.
- Hi, I'm Maya.
I'm a Naturopath.
I have a private practice
where I take patients,
both in-clinic and online,
and I also work in an
integrative medicine practice.
- Thank you so much for being here, Maya.
It's really, really
cool to do this together
because I just want people to
get a little bit of a sense of
how you can do so much
and sometimes integrating
different approaches as well.
So, today specifically,
can you please give us
your top dietary advice
for someone who's just
been diagnosed with PCOS?
- Okay, well, like
you've already explained,
the main issue with PCOS
is hormonal imbalance
as well as the increase
in risk for conditions
such as hypertension,
high cholesterol levels,
blood glucose imbalances, which
lead to Type Two diabetes,
and heart conditions.
So while the cause for
PCOS isn't 100% clear yet,
what we can say is that being overweight
or having an imbalanced diet,
such as one that is high in
sugars and saturated fats,
it increases the cell's
insulin resistance.
And if you have high levels
of insulin in the blood,
that can cause an imbalance
in female hormone activity,
and an increase of androgynous hormones
which could be part of
the cause for the PCOS.
So if we take this into consideration,
then the course of
treatment has to include
reducing the risk factors
for PCOS development
which are, like I said,
high levels of sugars
and fats in the blood,
as well as stress reduction
because the stress response
increases adrenal hormone secretion
which will then raise the
levels of sugars in the blood.
And also we want to
reduce the risk factors
for developing any of the conditions
PCOS increases the risk of.
So, if we're talking about
specific dietary advice,
then it's to increase
your intake of vegetables,
whole grains, legumes which
are beans and lentils.
Increasing your intake of
omega three fatty acids
and making sure that you're
getting plenty of fiber.
You want to be reducing
the consumption of foods
with high glycemic indexes
such as foods including
white flour, sugars,
white sugars and such.
We want to avoid whenever possible
saturated and trans fatty
acids, processed foods
and I would also recommend
reducing intake of animal based products
because they contain hormones
that could exacerbate hormonal imbalance
that is already present.
- I really like that approach
and I really like two words that you use
because I mentioned
this on the first video
and I said, "What we're trying to do here
"is not the silver bullet that
is going to cure something."
It's just as you said,
it's going to help reduce the risk factors
and ultimately with time,
it might even, you know, reverse it
as we could see from that book
that I showed on Video One.
- There is no one food
that is the magical cure for
anything, that doesn't exist.
But what I will say is that
if there are a few things that you can do,
you can eat fruit and vegetables
because they have all the antioxidants,
they just give you this
huge variety of color
and nutrient-dense foods
in the easiest, simplest way
and they're delicious, which is a bonus.
Particularly broccoli sprouts,
if I had to go for one, then
broccoli sprouts are yummy,
they have this peppery taste
so you can just literally eat them raw
or in a salad or in a sandwich,
they pretty much go with
everything and they are yummy.
- So let's go with the
other side of this then.
Give me your top don'ts.
- Top don'ts would be
highly processed foods.
So anything that has a list of
ingredients that is (laughs),
probably anything more
than five ingredients
you should try to avoid.
Anything that you, I
mean, but let's be honest,
most people know what are the things
that are terrible for them that they eat.
Like I think everybody can say,
like the worst thing that I
will eat is probably cookies,
like, mass quantities of cookies.
But I realized that this is
like the weakest part of my nutrition
and I am able to say to myself,
"Okay well, you know,
"don't have all the Tim
Tams in the pack." (laughs)
- I love those and (laughs).
But I remember we recorded
something a while back
and we had, what was it,
if there's something on
the list of ingredients
that you can't read,
don't eat it. (laughs)
- Yeah, if you can't pronounce it,
you probably don't wanna be eating it.
I think it's Jamie Oliver
who has that advice,
if your grandma couldn't
recognize the ingredient,
you shouldn't be eating it.
That's pretty good advice.
- Thank you so much for that,
that's great advice and simple
ideas for people to follow.
What I'm going to do is
I'm going to put a short
summary on the screen now
so that people can have a
look, and even if they want to,
just pause here and they
can even just write it down.
But thank you so much
for that to start with
and we're going to break this video in two
and we're going to go to the next video
where we're going to be
talking a little bit more
about lifestyle advice,
if that's okay with you.
So please join us for the next video
for some lifestyle advice.
Thank you so much for watching.
