Subscribe Now
Each year, $10 billion worth of perfectly good medications are destroyed or dumped in landfills. Hospitals alone throw out $3 billion in remedies. The medications sent to landfills create pharmaceutical pollution that humans are now repositories of due to it recirculating back into our bodies via water and soil, while tragically, one-in-four people can’t afford and – therefore go without – sometimes life-saving prescriptions.
My guest today really goes without introduction – pretty much all of you would recognize her if you saw her walking down the street.
Ellen Pompeo, who for 19 seasons has been in many of our living rooms – and hearts- as Dr. Meredith Grey, is on a mission to change the lack of access to pharmaceuticals that affects so many Americans through the company she co-founded, BETR Remedies. BETR Remedies is a socially-conscious, over-the-counter medicine brand, working to help fix a broken pharmaceutical industry by delivering curated, easy-to-shop over-the-counter medications with a buy-one, give-one component. Think Tom’s and Warby’s for your medication needs.
For every box of high-quality over the counter medicine they sell, BETR Remedies covers the cost of one month of prescription medications to someone who would otherwise have to go without. They do this as part of their Togethrâ„¢ Project and through their partnership with SIRUM, a national nonprofit that redistributes unused medications through charitable pharmacies in underserved communities across the country.By the year 2026, BETR Remedies’ goal is to donate 20 million prescriptions, covering almost $1 billion in prescription costs for people that otherwise wouldn’t get the help they need – and they are well on their way. In 2022, BETR Remedies contributions are projected to have facilitated the donation of 154,917 prescription medications, resulting in an estimated patient savings of over $6.9 million.
In our conversation Ellen & I explore:
- What Ellen has learned from fans and nurses about just how broken the healthcare system is
- Ellen's sense of personal social responsibility and her desire to be a role model to her own kids
- How she is using her recognition from playing a doctor-on-TV for good, with a focus on fixing the broken pharmaceutical industry through BETR Remedies
- Why health and social equity are so important to Ellen
- Ellen's non-negotiable wellness habits and finding balance as a working mother
- Navigating menopause, blood sugar, and more
- The confidence and wisdom that come with getting older
Join me for this insightful, candid, and thought-provoking episode and get ready to experience Ellen Pompeo like never before as we uncover her passion for healthcare, self-care, and her dedication to creating meaningful change.
Thank you so much for taking the time to tune in to your body, yourself, and this podcast! Please share the love by sending this to someone in your life who could benefit from the kinds of things we talk about in this space. Make sure to follow me on Instagram @dr.avivaromm to join the conversation. Follow Ellen Pompeo on Instagram @ellenpompeo and visit www.betrremedies.com
This conversation between Aviva Romm & Ellen Pompeo has been edited for clarity and length.
Aviva: Ellen, welcome to the show.
Ellen: Thank you so much. Thanks for having me.
Aviva: Okay, so I have to just say, I can't help it. I started watching Grey's in my second year of medical school. One of my classmates said, you got to watch it. The work you did and the way you evolved as a woman physician in the show has inspired so many of us. I think it was almost like an alternate reality: When you're in the hospital all day ,when you're in training all day, it almost gave a value check kind of reality feeling of like, okay, I'm slogging through this, and then the show was a reminder of the reason. So I want to thank you for all the hard work that you've done showing up for all of us and to congratulate you on this new phase of your work and your life.
Ellen: Thank you so much. It's interesting, right? The effect that the show had on patients as well. I mean, so many people have told me their stories about them laying for days and days and days in a hospital bed and watching Grey's was their favorite thing to do. So I always found that really strange. I thought, isn't that like hospital overload? But there was some sort of symbiotic thing that happened between an actual hospital in the show that did bring people comfort.
Aviva: Yeah, I think that happened for us as medical students and even physicians. It's the only show that I have watched – we didn't have a TV for the whole time we were raising our kids. So for me to watch a show continually was actually a big deal. But it did create some kind of, I think a symbiotic experience is a great way to put it. There was something reassuring, reconnecting and affirming. So over the years, Grey's has explored countless major social issues from racist police abuse to domestic violence to lack of access to medical care for undocumented something. Your character, Meredith Gray, had become a crusader for the undocumented in one episode. I mean, you put your license on the line for that and for affordable healthcare and healthcare reform. The show has also tackled many of the problems with the medical system – gender bias, burnout, systemic racism.
There was a storyline some years ago where Dr. Bailey was having a heart attack and her doctor suggested it was probably just stress, missing an MI and instead bringing a psychiatrist in to evaluate her. She struggled to get the care she needed despite being a doctor herself. The racist, gender-based impact was very evident in the way the show was portrayed, and I think so many of my listeners bind that story in one way or another. Resonant women who have been misdiagnosed or had their symptoms downplayed by healthcare providers. Undoubtedly you get an enormous amount of fan mail, which I imagine is quite meaningful and moving. What have you learned from your fans who have come up to speak to you about their experiences?
Ellen: I mean, definitely aside from the compliments of the show and how comforting it was is how broken the system really is. There is just an exorbitant amount of inequities everywhere, and it's really heartbreaking. From speaking from patients to also the doctors, the doctors themselves, and the institutional racism that exists within the hospital structure, within the hierarchy and the management teams and the way nurses are treated is really crazy when you think about it. Because positive outcomes for hospital is ultimately you think a good thing. The more positive outcomes you have, the more business your hospital gets. I think it's pretty safe to say that most hospitals are businesses. They're owned as one piece of an investment that companies or super wealthy individuals buy as investments. So when it comes to the bottom line, you would think that happier nurses, better care and more positive outcomes would result in more profits for people.
But that really doesn't appear to be the way they look at it. They really just look at it as just the bottom line and the money. And if you are a nurse that causes problems or talks about inequities or wants to make noise or say things aren't accurate or you're tired, you've worked too many shifts, anything like that, it's really hard to fight that system and they'd just rather fire you and take their chances and have you try to sue them because they know they have a team of lawyers. That's what's most shocking to me. I mean, I think mistakes in hospitals are heartbreaking, and especially with women's health and the maternal mortality rate is shocking. The black maternal mortality rate is shocking, and that's all heartbreaking. But then also to hear that the people who are giving the care, these nurses who are working in the hospitals who are dealing with sick people, angry people, sad people, being a nurse is got to be the hardest job in the hospital. I mean, certainly surgeons and doctors, that's a tough job. I'm not saying it isn't, but they sort of do their specialty. They come in and they do their specialty and they leave, and the nurses are the ones who are with the patients all day long, or all night long. So I put that above the doctors because they're the ones who have to really deal with the suffering.
Aviva: I remember having a patient who came in late one night and lost his bowel control on the hospital room floor. I'm a mom of four kids. I've been a midwife. I've wiped up people's poop. It's just life, right? And I wasn't certainly the kind of person who was going to walk out and leave the nurse cleaning up the floor. So I started to clean up and the nurse came in and she saw what I was doing. She's like, oh, doctor, that's not your job. But just this part that I think we don't recognize of what nurses are doing is it's not just the caring, it's not just sort of being at the bottom of the totem pole in a sort of vertical trauma environment where this yelling or abuse ,of everyone being exhausted, and dropping it down to the person who's really kind of in some ways in the least position of power to speak out is also cleaning up body fluids off the floor or off the person. And I think there are so many assaults to the senses, which I imagine you had a taste of on the set of, just the constant beeping of noises, like the noise pollution, the sense and odors of sick people that are assaulting people's senses all the time as they're doing the caring. I'm really glad that you brought that up as a piece of what you have been exposed to.
You actually teamed up with a nurse during the pandemic and you hosted a Zoom series called Healing Healthcare, which is wonderful. And you held a lot of conversations with real-life medical workers on topics like health equity, black maternal mortality, which is that we've addressed many times on the show and we'll continue to, and LGBTQ+ health. What were some of the takeaways in addition to the nursing burnout that were important to you in healthcare?
Ellen: I think just bringing to light conversations that people might not ordinarily think about. I think one of the things that was infuriating to me about the pandemic was the denial of COVID. Like here you have all of these nurses, so many friends of mine, working with one mask all week long and rolling bodies, and by the way, nurses were working with COVID. The hospital couldn't have cared less if the nurses tested positive for COVID. They didn't want to know. They didn't test the nurses. Everywhere else and every other profession, you'd have to have a test before you went into that building. And the hospitals weren't testing the staff at all. They didn't want to know if they had COVID.
So I think just being able to have a platform and have conversations so people can hear about things they wouldn't ordinarily hear about or think about, and giving the healthcare professionals somewhere to come and feel a sense of community and hear conversations that they can relate to and just have them know that people are thinking about them and that we did care. That was really my main goal for that during COVID was to show the healthcare professionals that someone is thinking of you and we do want to hear your stories. There are people out here who care.
Aviva: I love that. In another interview that I read with you for a magazine, you didn't mince words about shaking up an industry and talking about unchecked corporate greed and irresponsibility in Pharma. What are the problems in the Pharma industry that you and your co-founders are trying to address with BETR?
Ellen: There's a couple, and you mentioned them in your intro, which is the pharmaceutical waste – for two reasons – because it's so many medications that could be helping people that people are struggling to afford, and they just get thrown into the landfill. So we're trying to address people's actual need for medications and not having to decide between food or rent and the medications they need, and then also trying to avoid it going into the landfill. The pharmaceutical waste goes into the landfills, it goes into the earth and it goes into the water, but the other place that goes is incinerators and it gets burned. So it also goes into our air supply. T he pollution is everywhere from all of these medications. I mean, if you think about every pharmacy in the country, every hospital, every nursing home, if you think about all of these places, and they all carry medications, when those medications expire, if they don't sell every single bottle, it just gets thrown away.
There's no special system for it. It doesn't get handled in a particular way. It just gets thrown in the plastic packaging into the trash and either gets burnt or dumped in a landfill. And so we're trying to take that medicine just before it expires. Everybody sort of orders what they're going to order, and they know they're not going to sell it all or whatever if they have a slow month. So there are charitable pharmacies, which I didn't even realize. That's another really important thing for people to understand is that there are these charitable pharmacies out there. Before I had started this project, I didn't know anything about charitable pharmacies, and I didn't know that there were people out there really trying to address these inequities with charitable pharmacies, which is a great idea. So, what we do is try to supply the charitable pharmacies and try to help people supply the charitable pharmacies. There's pharmacy deserts, just like there's food deserts. In the middle of the country people don't necessarily have access to a drug store, a Target or a Walmart, something like that, really close to them. So these charitable pharmacies really do help people who need it the most.
Aviva: There's so much coming up for me. One is that I remember reading, oh, maybe about five or eight years ago, there was a study being done on salmon in Puget Sound, and the researchers were looking at contamination. Just in the salmon that was going upstream, that would've ended up on our dinner tables potentially, they found over 80 contaminants. There were herbicides, pesticides, but largely it was pharmaceuticals. Everything from contraceptives to opioids to antidepressants that are destined for us to get exposed to. So there's this real irony, kind of a bizarre almost sci-fi level irony to me where on the one hand, we're getting through our food, air and water, these pharmaceuticals that we don't want in our bodies, and yet people who need them for life sustaining reasons are not accessing them.
Ellen: It makes absolutely no sense. And then you know, you can't even get into how much the actual pharmaceuticals cost, what they actually cost to make and then what they sell for. And why is that allowed?
Aviva: Let's talk about that because it is really shocking. Having worked in hospitals, we used to tell patients to bring their own pharmaceuticals from home. We would drop them into the hospital pharmacy and let their own home medications be dispensed to them because we're talking about pennies for a pill to tens or hundreds of dollars for a pill if it's dispensed from the hospital pharmacy. That's just allowed and tolerated. So if the patient came in and they had a hypertensive episode and they brought their anti-hypertensive from home, we could give them that. But obviously if they needed a medication that they weren't already on, the costs were astronomical.
Ellen: There's this great Instagram, I'm going to forget her name right now. Her Instagram, I think is ThatSpitfireNurse. I absolutely love her. She's great. Forgive me for not knowing her name right now, but she does these fantastic videos where she's literally on the phone trying to order medication for cancer patients, and the insurance company is giving her a really hard time and just like this nonsensical conversation about why they can't approve the medicine. And she's just like, it's the same thing. What you're asking for is the same thing. It's just we call it this. Yeah, her Instagram is fantastic, and there's so much idiocy surrounding the whole pharmaceutical industry. And have you ever heard the story about the Chase family, the Morgan family and the Rockefeller family all coming together in the twenties (1920s) to form the American Medical Association and the Pharmaceutical Association? I don't know if it's actually true or not, but some conspiracy theorist that I came across one day was telling me this story about those three families.
Aviva: It's really wild. What can sound like conspiracy that turns out to be true? I'm not saying we should be a conspiracy theorist, but when it comes to medicine, if you look at the Flexner Report that was actually commissioned by Carnegie in the early 1900s, the result of the Flexner Report was the systematic closure of all medical schools that trained Black, First Nations, and women. And then medical schools were basically only open to white Protestant males at the time. That was the dominant population. So it can sound like conspiracy, but the data is there. You can read the Flexner Report still and the upshot of what happened to it. Nothing surprises me these days when I read about things like that.
Ellen: And there's also no many to be made from well people; people have to be sick to make money.
Aviva: Absolutely. And there are so many ways this plays out in the hospital.
When I was in medical school, we were incentivized and the incentive was ridiculous. If you think about it, we were given something called a two bucks, and this was at a major Ivy League medical school. The two bucks was a $2 gift certificate to use at the cafeteria or the cafe if we got a patient out of their bed and discharged by 10 in the morning. Because the bed turnover, that first admission cost, is a much higher intake of funds for the hospital compared to the longer stay. So we were incentivized to turn over the bed for a new admission, but then the readmission for somebody who was sent home prematurely with high blood pressure or pneumonia that wasn't quite resolved. And especially somebody who is from a socioeconomic situation where the social determinants of health aren't optimal anyway, the readmission for those patients was even more costly for them in their personal lives and the system. So there's so many built-in ways that this just feeds itself,
Ellen: And everyone's just so used to doing things the way they do them. I mean, one of our problems with BETR is to get people to actually change what they buy for their over-the-counter medicine. I mean, when brand names are so famous. I mean, Tylenol isn't the actual name of the medication. It's just the brand name. And I could name 10 of them right now. That's not the medication, that's just the brand name, but people know it almost as if it's the medication. So, one of the challenges we face is getting people to care. People have to really care that these alternative solutions are out there, that there are business models out there trying to address systemic issues – pollution, waste, medical inequities. You really have to get people to care enough to make that purchase and change what they're so used to and what they trust, which is, when I talk about corporate responsibility, it's like we're trusting these monolith giant companies who could give two shits about anybody at all, or the pollution they create or whatever, the plastic, they use all of it.
They just don't care about it, and they really have the money to be able to care, but yet they don't. And a startup, which has no money, we care so much. That's one of our biggest obstacles is to try to convey to people the inequities out there and to get people to try to wake up and make some changes in their daily habits to address some of these issues. I mean, climate change will continue to get worse. Our waters will continue to get dirtier. Our food supply will continue to be more contaminated. There's no sort of person that's going to come along and fix all of these problems for us. We have to actively go out there and look for ways to make little changes that address these problems that ultimately cause suffering.
Aviva: What was it that drew you? I mean, you could clearly do anything, and you've got a lot of knowledge, a lot of education, a lot of opportunity. What was it about the pharmaceutical issue specifically that caught your attention to say, I really want to use this as my entry point for change?
Ellen: Well, I was approached by these two founders. They already had this idea. And so they approached me and let me know what they were doing. And I thought, this is fantastic. And it makes sense because I've played a doctor for 19 years, so people associate me with healthcare. And this seemed like it checked all the boxes for me. It addressed inequities, it addressed climate and pollution and our water supply.
I have three young children. I really want them to see me doing something other than just getting recognized at Disneyland. It is important that my kids see me do some type of work that isn't just for sort of fame, not that there's anything wrong with being an actor, being famous, that's great, especially for things like this. But I wanted them to see that I took this platform and I took all these fans. And I'm also trying to do some good with it as well, other than just tell stories.
Aviva: I love that. I feel like being on a mission gives so much meaning to our lives too.
Ellen: I agree.
Aviva: It's such a beautiful thing to role model to our kids is being on a mission. Being in television, obviously advertising is really an important part of what keeps television shows on the air, yet we're one of the only two countries in the world that allow pharmaceutical advertising. And I know from myself and many physicians and studies that have been done, pharmaceutical advertising on television is sometimes what drives the patient in. So I have patients who come in and they don't say, I want acetaminophen. They say I want Tylenol, but they're using another pharmaceutical in that name that they've seen on television. What do you think the influence is there in terms of shifting people from these brand names to generics that are just as effective or medications that you're able to provide through BETR?
Ellen: Well, I think, and the truth is, it's all made in the same factories. It's like lipsticks or sunglasses. They're all made in the same couple of factories. So it's all the power of advertising. And pharmaceutical companies have so much money. They're like the alcohol business. They have so much money for advertising. It really works. I can tell you what the top three over-the-counter allergy medicines are. I know their names. Those commercials are sort of embedded in my head. I can tell you what the commercials, who's on the commercials, what the commercial is, if there's a jingle or not. I mean it. It's really effective.
Aviva: Let's talk about how BETR works.
Ellen: Yes. So we are in 2,000 Walmart stores currently, and we are going to also be on Amazon and also in CVS.
Aviva: Amazing.
Ellen: And of course through our website.
Aviva: And so folks buy their pharmaceuticals. They're just, they're generics, whatever they're using. And I think that you identified some of the most common medications that people are using. So there's a set of types of pharmaceuticals that you have available.
Ellen: We're over the counter. So we have pain relief, we have gas relief, we have a sleep aid, which people absolutely love the sleep aid. We have stool softener, allergy medicine, and I believe on the website, I think we have hydration packages.
Aviva: The common things for fever, digestive discomfort, sleep, the human things that we go through all the time.
Ellen: Well, this category is challenging because if you go to the store when you're not feeling well, you're going to just automatically go for what you know. And this is an impulse by category. It makes it a little bit more challenging. You have to make a conscious decision that you want to make better choices. You want to buy products that are actually trying to address some problems that we have here in the United States and sort of go to the drugstore and pick it up. If you go to Walmart and pick it up ahead of time and just stock your pantry so that you have it in your pantry, because if you wait until you're sick, you're going to go to what you know, and that's understandable. But we need to try to make little incremental changes in our habits in order to make a big collective shift toward having a cleaner planet.
Aviva: How are you educating people to understand that pharmaceuticals are pharmaceuticals are pharmaceutical? You don't have to buy the brand name; you can get these and here's where you find them.
Ellen: Yeah, I mean, well, it's challenging, but I do podcasts like this. We talk about it. We talk about it on our website. When I get opportunities to go out and talk about it. But it's challenging because it's not the sexiest category.
Aviva: It seems to me that there's a transparency that as women, that if we risk and have in certain communities or with our work and platform, we could push the conversation so that there is greater equity. And I know you've mentioned that those of us who can speak up should speak up also on behalf of women of color who face an even greater equity gap in all settings.
Ellen: And Latino women suffer more than that. They're below. I think the latest studies, I haven't looked at the studies recently, but I stay away from the money conversation. I'm more interested in who sits on your board, who's in charge, who makes decisions, who's in the room, who's in the writer's room, these kind of things, equity in that way. I'm involved in several businesses, and it's always a conversation of bringing people of color to the table. I'm constantly having the same conversation in every meeting that I'm in. You would think people by now would start to see, but they look around and they don't see the obvious – who is not at the table. So I, I'm focusing these days more on that and these businesses that I've invested in and am a part of to make sure that the people making the decisions and that the people who are listening too, that there's a more inclusive group of people making the decisions.
Aviva: Has equity always been a theme for you in your adult life? Or did it evolve in your relationship to seeing what was happening in the stories in Grey's or personal factors?
Ellen: I grew up in Massachusetts, which is a very blue Democratic state. And I remember coming out to Los Angeles and seeing all these people having fundraisers, big public fundraisers with celebrities. And I never sort of understood it because I always thought, well, in Boston growing up, people, they volunteer at the church or they volunteer at homeless shelters. And people do all these things. They don't talk about it. You don't see it. You don't hear about it. Everyone just sort of volunteers and does their part in silence. They don't sort of wear a big ball gown and announce it. And I thought, okay, well, yes, they're giving away lots of money, and that's beautiful, but they're having a party for themselves because they're charitable. And that was the first time that I was introduced to the idea of that. And I thought, well, that's rather odd to have a giant party for yourself to celebrate how charitable you are. So I think my background and how I grew up has a little bit of something to do with it. But then, just growing up and being a working person and being able to have success and seeing that not everybody is able to have success. Not everybody is lucky enough to be born into certain circumstances. And when I say that I'm not lucky. I've worked very hard and I took advantage of my opportunities. But I am lucky in the way that I was born in the United States.
Certainly I wasn't born in a super impoverished place where there's absolutely no way out, where women are meant to have babies at 14 years old or whatever it is. So when I say that luck has a lot to do with a lot of people's success. It's not that you got lucky because you're not talented. You could have been talented and you could have been born in South Sudan and all the talent in the world doesn't matter if you're born there. So I think when I say I'm lucky, I'm lucky in that way. Been born and raised in a country where opportunities were available to me and I worked my ass off and created something out of my opportunities.
Aviva: That's brilliant. Yeah, I grew up in a housing project in New York, but even for me being a white intelligent woman, I still was able to get out of that environment because teachers saw me differently than they saw this young boy named Kelly who was the darkest skinned African-American child in the classroom, the teacher always called him out. It could be anyone making a disruption in the class, and it was Kelly that got called out. And I think just those sort of circumstantial privileges that we have. I agree with you on the hard work and using the opportunities we have, but I really honor that you acknowledge that and it's really important.
And you are a busy mama. You've been doing this show for 19 seasons. Maybe you have a little bit of a break now. Now you're doing businesses and equity and diversity in boards. Just for the listeners who are mamas, which we have a lot of mamas, how do you do it? How do you take care of yourself, show up at your work the way you want to?
Ellen: Well, I think that I try to have a schedule. I love to be scheduled, and I'm someone who… I like to be busy. Not everyone loves to be busy. Some people love to lay around and take naps and watch TV shows. I am someone who I really need to feel super productive every day. I'm just a busy person. I think that's why working on a show for 19 years wasn't that hard for me. I mean, it was hard, but I like to get up and go to work every day.
So I have a schedule that really helps. I'm very, very disciplined about all of my routines. I wake up at 5:30 in the morning if I'm feeling really good. If not, I'll wake up at 6:30. However I'm feeling.
However, my sleep, if my sleep doesn't get interrupted the night before, I have a routine. I work out. I intermittent fast. I'm obsessed with the cold plunge. I told you. It's really changed my life. I love it. I love sauna. I do cryotherapy twice a week. I go to a place and stand in a refrigerator that's 166 below. That feels incredible and has given me an incredible amount of energy. And I just have a lot of discipline with respect to my schedule. I just try to do all of my stuff when the kids are at school. As soon as they come home, we all sit down to have dinner as a family. And then bath time and story time and all that. I do get a little cranky at night when the kids want me to read three books to them at night. I do get a little bitchy and I'm like, no, you're getting one book and then it slides out. Or I'll read a book and you read a book on your own and then it slides out. Sometimes at night, I find the older I get, I'm getting a little cranky at night. Eight o'clock comes and I'm just sometimes not the nicest person.
Aviva: We're close to the same age.
Ellen: Yeah. I'm 53.
Aviva: So have you gone through or into menopause?
Ellen: Yes.
Aviva: And have you found changes in your desire to be busy, your drive, metabolism, any of the things that have led you to shift how you do your life?
Ellen: Well, I haven't had any changes in my drive at all. But I definitely have changes in my metabolism for sure. I've always been a super thin person. I've never ever had to worry about anything I ate ever. I mean, quite the opposite. When I was younger, I used to eat in excess to try to gain weight because everyone thought I had an eating disorder. So now all of a sudden I can't eat anything. And the cold therapy really helps with that. So I intermittent fast and then I'm very specific about what I eat and then I really stop eating at 7:00.
Aviva: Any dos and don'ts willing to share of your what Ellen Pompeo does and does not eat in menopause?
Ellen: Well, so I will say that I'm super into also all these scans. I just went and had my heart scan. I always have my mammograms and my ultrasound, and I just had a heart scan, which I'd never had before. Coronary calcium score, which was perfect. I had absolutely none, which was great. Which I was actually kind of surprised by because I do eat a lot of meat. A nd I had all my blood work done and I did my colonoscopy, don't have to do another one for seven years. So I'm really big on all my appointments and I'm disciplined that way. My heavy metals were low, which was pretty amazing. But I would say, oh, I know I started taking berberine supplement. It's helped me with my sugar cravings. Cause I definitely have a sweet tooth. So I take a thousand milligrams of berberine every night before I go to bed. And I'm a little less on the sugar. That's my weakness – the sugar.
Aviva: Yeah, I think the cold therapy is really interesting. It helps increase brown fat, which is the good metabolic fat, decreases the inflammatory white fat. There's some really nice data around it. Good for sleep, I'm a fan also. I think intermittent fasting can work for a lot of women. And certainly in my practice, I haven't used berberin e interestingly for sugar cravings, but certainly when people have blood sugar dysregulation or high cholesterol, it's one of my go-tos. I love that you're just super health conscious in your life. That's wonderful.
Ellen: Yeah, I'm kind of obsessed with it. Another business that I invested in is Glucose Monitor. I really absolutely love being able to see on my phone in real time what's happening because I started gaining weight when I got older and I really didn't understand what was happening. And I put the glucose monitor on and I was like, oh yeah, duh. Of course you can't eat spaghetti and drink a glass of red wine at 7:00 at night and then go lay on the couch. I would always do that. I did it for years. And you know what, I feel like sort of empowered once I have a handle on it. So if I want to eat the pasta and have the glass of red wine at dinner, then I will just watch an hour show, go on the treadmill for an hour, and I just killed two birds with one stone. I watched a show and I worked off all that.
And the glucose monitors are amazing. The glucose monitor is actually a great way to see what's hitting your bloodstream. See when you're in weight gain mode and you can go for a walk, get on your treadmill, you can even literally just lay the floor and do pushups. As long as you move, you're going to burn off any sugar that you eat. I also, I really stopped drinking red wine. I used to love red wine. I grew up in a very Italian house and it was always something that was a part of every meal. But then I realized that I can't really drink it because that sugar from the red wine hits my bloodstream at two in the morning. The alcohol makes me tired, sugar hits my blood at two in the morning, and then I'm up wide awake, can't sleep. So I've had to kind of eliminate that piece.
Aviva: Yeah, I talk with my women patients in menopause and I say, if there's one thing that you're going to do for your sleep, and I always preface it and say, I'm not going to be your favorite person when I say this, but I promise you if you 86 the red wine at night, and it's even half a glass for so many women who hit that age threshold, you'll sleep so much better. Same here. So I don't enjoy it because the experience of drinking it in the immediate, it's just the payback with lack of sleep doesn't feel worth it.
Ellen, thank you so much for joining me. I want to ask you one question before we go that I love to ask all my guests. If you could tell your younger self anything, how old would she be and what would you tell her?
Ellen: Ooh, that's a tough one. I don't know, a 19-year old, maybe if my 19-year old self, I would say to value myself more, I tell my daughter who's 13, you know, how smart she is, how funny she is, how strong she is. I constantly reaffirm all the wonderful things about her because I didn't really have anybody doing that for me. And I think it's so important for young people to hear from everywhere, that they're smart, that they matter, that they're important. I definitely would value myself more and not think everything I said was stupid. A lot of things I said were stupid. A lot of things I say when I'm an adult are stupid.
Aviva: But well, we have to give ourselves some grace.
Ellen: My confidence was so low when I was young. Really interesting. Well, I think maybe when you're young you have sort of fake confidence because you're, you're really young and hot, right? You're gorgeous and you're skinny and you have this fake confidence that your physical appearance gives you. But there's no real foundation of true confidence. It's just surface confidence based on your hot factor and you have to go through life.
Aviva: It's more like validation in some ways, right? It's a cultural external validation.
Ellen: You get a sexual validation for sure. I think so. It's maybe masked as confidence that all these guys think I'm hot and so I must be amazing. But then that's just based on sort of one thing. And then so many women get mistreated by men regardless.
Aviva: Do you remember a point where you're like, okay, now I have real confidence. And I'm also curious too, with shifting into menopause. I hear from a lot of women I take care of, but also friends of mine. There's changes to our bodies or appearance that then sort of forces them to go into an even deeper confidence that's not just based on appearance. So how has confidence evolved for you?
Ellen: Well, I think that happens naturally. I think so, so much of it. Just because you've lived so much life at 20, you haven't lived enough life. At 30 you've started to live a little bit. You start to figure some things out. And then at 40 you've lived pretty much half your life and you really feel like some shit. At 50, you know, you just think you know everything. Cause you've lived, because you've had so many experiences because you've lived a long time. So that just naturally comes with the confidence comes with, I've been in this situation before. I've seen this before. I know this is going to happen. I say it all to all the times to my daughter, this is what's going to happen in this situation. I know this seems terrible right now, but in two days this will happen. And then it's just lived experience gives you the confidence that you know what's coming as opposed to in your 20s and 30s when you're experiencing things for the first time, really don't know really what's coming because it's the first time you've experienced it. In your 50s, you've pretty much experienced everything there is to experience.
Aviva: Is there anything next for you that you're just really excited about? You've got this CGI product that you're working on, you've got your kids, and it sounds like you're really reveling in time for self-care right now too, and self-nursing.
Ellen: I am. Do you grow your own food?
Aviva: I grow a lot of my own food. If I could move my computer, I would show you my garden. I have a 2,500 square foot garden, you know Massachusetts, so I'm all the way out in the Berkshires. I'm the last exit to New York State, and we live on seven acres. We grow, like I haven't bought garlic, this will be my fourth year. I grow most of my own culinary herbs. And then between, so we have a shorter growing season here in the northeast, but between I would say May and late September, we don't really buy any produce other than maybe if there's a fruit that we want in the summer that we can't get locally. And if we do, we go to the farmer's market.
Ellen: Have you seen those indoor, my friends in New York City have these amazing indoor, they grow all the greens.
Aviva: We have a cold frame that allows us, so a cold frame is a almost like a mini greenhouse close to the ground. And that allows us to extend our growing season so we can grow spinach, arugula, some of the hardy greens in that outdoors. And then we live in such a place where there's abundant local farmers who have greenhouses. So we just try to support local farmers in the seasons that we're not gardening. And honestly, gardening is a lot of work. It's a daily job. So I love my garden. To me, I was like, say, it's better than therapy. It's just the most amazing place to be. And then also when the first snow or heavy frost comes, I'm like, okay, we can rest from the constant attention to what's going on there, especially, or we grow organically. So we really have to be mindful of what's happening out there.
Ellen: Gardening is definitely a full-time job. And the bugs, it's true.
Aviva: So my husband is a brilliant gardener, and he's the one who just keeps up with the daily stuff. He's like, okay, it's time to water twice a day if you know we're in a drought here. Or get out and pick the Japanese beetles off by hand. And I'm more, oh, let's grow this and let's make it beautiful this way, and let's companion plant this. So I'm kind of innovating what we're growing and how we grow things together. And then he's really keeping up with making sure things stay alive.
Ellen: Good team.
Aviva: It's a good team.
Ellen: Yeah.
Aviva: It's such a pleasure to talk with you. I feel like there's so many directions we can go as women who are in our 50s and know it all.
Ellen: Yeah, I mean, I was reading an article on a plane recently that said that menopause is like a $60 billion a year business, something like that. And it's largely untapped because it's unsexy. There's a couple of actresses out there doing things, though. I know Naomi Watts is doing some exciting things. I think she's got a great skincare line.
Aviva: Yeah, she does. It's an interesting area because on the one hand, there are so many needs that women have at this phase of our life as we're just going through these natural hormone shifts. Then we live in an environmental, in kind of an ecosystem that often, between people's diets and lifestyles and stressors and social determinants of health and genes, all the things can really make their menopause a lot more difficult, in which case, supplements and lifestyle and hormones can all be helpful. And then we are a $60 billion, at least, industry, which makes us kind of a vulnerable cash cow for a lot of companies that will capitalize on our suffering.
So, with the weight gain in menopause, I think it's really interesting because a lot of us who really never struggled with our weight will gain 6, 8, 10 pounds in that time period. What I find really fascinating is that from a hormonal perspective, your ovaries aren't making estrogen really anymore. So where is your estrogen being made? In your fat tissue. So I'm not psyched about gaining eight or 10 pounds at all. I do find it fascinating that nature kind of pushes us in that direction, which ups our estrogen production and protects our brains and our bones, etc., our heart. So I want us to also do all the things that we can do as women as you're doing, as I'm trying to do for healthy metabolism. But I worry about, for example, the spate of books or the products, the supplements, the pharmaceuticals that are targeted at us to achieve and have bodies that we might have had naturally in our 20s, 30s, and even early mid 40s, or even into our menopause years. And then that shifts. So I'm looking at ways through my platform to educate and provide answers and solutions, but not just jump on this bandwagon of, oh, we have to fix all of these things.
Ellen: That's an interesting perspective. Yeah, I didn't know that about the estrogen.
Aviva: Yeah. Yeah, it is. It's interesting. It's not really talked about a lot, but why is it happening? Because it's happening to all of us when we're not necessarily eating more or exercising less. And yes, our sleep might get disturbed, but not necessarily enough to cause that shift. So I'm very interested in how do we explore being in the bodies and the lives and the minds and the sleep and all the things that we want to be, and also embracing this phase of life. And similarly with the sort of pressures that I think a lot of us feel to do things to alter our faces or our bodies. It's natural because we're living in a world that drives what we should look like at a certain age. So if we don't, then we look older than our peers even who are doing all those things. But how does our culture pressure us to kind of defy what nature is trying to do? It's just interesting explorations I'm going through at this phase of my life and as a women's physician trying to answer questions for women who are asking me these things.
Ellen: Right, right. For sure. Yeah. Well, it's great that podcasts are out there so women can get this information because again, access to doctors, access to good care isn't something that everybody has. I would say most people don't have access exactly to quality healthcare.
Aviva: I love that we're both doing our own part to democratize healthcare, democratize pharmaceuticals, and I so appreciate in your busy life taking the time to join me in this conversation. I hope we have more onscreen and offscreen over the years and check-ins and see what's next.
Ellen: I hope so. Yeah, I definitely have enjoyed this. This has been super fun. And we'll talk soon.
Aviva: I would love that. Thank you everyone for joining us, and I know that so many of us will continue to follow what you're doing, and I hope that everyone will also support BETR in every way that you can. We'll put all of the links to all the things with the show notes. And Ellen, thank you again so much.
Ellen: Thank you so much. Thank you for everything you're doing too. It's really important stuff to talk about. So thank you,
