Transcript #469 Top Tips for Preventative Breast Health and Estrogen Dominance with Dr. Magdalena Wszelaki

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1. Find out what’s in store for this Myers Detox Podcast with Dr. Magdalena Wszelaki, who joins the show to talk about the top tips for preventive breast health. Dr. Wszelaki discusses what fibrocystic breasts are, how to address fibrocystic breasts naturally, and the underlying root causes of cysts, tumors, tender swollen breasts, and issues with your period and PMS. Dr. Wszelaki also goes over estrogen dominance syndrome, top tips for addressing it, and her incredible book Overcoming Estrogen Dominance.
2. Find out why Dr. Wszelaki is so passionate about woman’s health and hormones.
3. Learn more about fibrocystic breasts and why it is important to be aware of.
4. Find out some of the best ways to discover if you have fibrocystic breasts.
5. Learn how you can address fibrocystic breast naturally, and a simple exercise that you can do at home.
6. Learn about the 3 major root causes of breast changes including estrogen dominance.
7. Find out about the best foods you can eat to address estrogen dominance and improve breast health.
8. Find out why it is important to detox for breast health.
9. Learn about Dr. Wszelaki’s amazing product she developed that helps woman address breast health called Happy Sisters.
10. Find out why Dr. Wszelaki developed Happy Sisters.
11. Learn about what information you will find in Dr. Wszelaki’s incredible book Overcoming Estrogen Dominance.
12. Find out where you can learn more about Dr. Wszelaki and her final recommendations.

Dr. Wendy Myers: Hi everyone. I’m Dr. Wendy Myers of myersdetox.com. Welcome to the Myers Detox Podcast. Today we have a great show with Magdalena Wszelaki, and she’s going to be talking about preventative breast health. We’ve got a great, just action-packed show for you today. We have so much good information on what fibrocystic breasts are, how to address fibrocystic breasts naturally, and what is the underlying root cause of cysts and benign tumors, cancerous tumors, tender swollen breasts, and issues with your period and PMS. We talk about estrogen dominance syndrome. We talk about different underlying root causes of this, like toxins, estrogenic chemicals like phthalates and plasticizers and pesticides, and things that are in our food and air and water and beauty products that we’re slathering on our body every single day. We talked a lot about some solutions that Magdalena has developed and also her amazing book called Overcoming Estrogen Dominance. Just so much good info on the show that every woman needs to listen to.

  And I know so many of you listening to this show are very concerned about your toxin load, about your body’s burden of toxins, so I created a quiz called heavymetalsquiz.com. It takes two minutes to take that quiz, and you can determine your relative body burden of toxins. And then, after you take the quiz, you get a free video series on how to detox, what that looks like, what are the next steps, and answer your frequently asked questions about detoxing your body because that’s why you’re listening to the show. So check it out at heavymetalsquiz.com.

  Our guest, Magdalena Wszelaki, is the founder of Hormones Balance Community and Wellena Products. These are supplements made by women for women. And her online platform and products are dedicated to helping women to balance their hormones naturally. She’s a published author of Cooking for Hormone Balance and Overcoming Estrogen Dominance, and Magdalena is an endocrine nutrition expert, a certified herbalist, a speaker, an educator, and a published author with a long history of her own hormonal challenges. And these challenges include Graves’ and Hashimoto’s disease, which are autoimmune conditions causing thyroid issues, and estrogen dominance. Today, she’s in full remission, and while sailing through perimenopause, she teaches women how to accomplish the same. So you can learn more about Magdalena and her work at hormonesbalance.com and her line of supplements and women’s health products at wellena.com.

  Magdalena, thanks so much for coming to the show.

Magdalena Wszelaki: Such a pleasure, Wendy. Always good to see you. You’re in the tropics, I’m in the middle of a Colorado winter, and look at us-

Dr. Wendy Myers: Yes, you are freezing right now. That’s why I’m here in Mexico. I like it warm and sweaty. But talk to us about why you’re so passionate about women’s health and about women’s hormones in particular.

Magdalena Wszelaki: I think women’s health, in general, is very underestimated in many ways. I posted the other day on our forum saying, “What’s the funniest thing your doctor has ever told you?” I didn’t want to say, “What’s the worst thing,” because I didn’t want to go the negative way. So I’m just like, “What’s the funniest thing?” And we had over 200 comments with the most outrageous commentary experience that women had with doctors. So I think that probably answers the question. When it comes to breast health specifically, that’s a big passion point of mine because I think that was the first thing that really got me thinking about what is going on here and was also the first time I got really, really scared.

I still remember, you know, how we have moments in our lives, like we all remember where we were when 9/11 happened, right? Most of us remember when Princess Diana died, where we were, and then I think when it comes to finding a breast lump, almost every woman remembers that experience as well, no matter how many years ago that was. I certainly remember finding mine in a car. My boyfriend was driving at that time, and I was sitting there, and everything was going so well in my life. I was just getting promoted to our corporate office, a regional office in Hong Kong, and I was going to start traveling and doing a lot more international work. I had this really loving boyfriend, and I was just going to get this raise, there was more money, and here I was, touching my breast and going, “Oh my God.”

I still remember it was on the left side here. It’s like, “I think it’s a lump.” And I had only had one. So you go to Google, and it tells you if it’s one and you don’t have another lump on the other side, that could have very much higher chances of being cancer. And then you go through the whole process of, how do I get it diagnosed? Then you go thermography, they tell you it’s not reliable, then they push you towards mammogram. If you talk to your regular OB/GYN, it has to be a mammogram. And if you don’t do it tomorrow, you’re going to die. You’re really running a higher risk of basically developing breast cancer much quicker, yadda yadda yadda, right?

And then even whatever path we decide on getting a diagnosis, then it’s a two-week wait time. And with this comes, I feel like it’s a volcano of emotions that starts surfacing. Everything from, “Oh, I shouldn’t have smoked. Oh, I should not have done this and that. I should have taken care of myself. Maybe it’s the universe’s way of punishing me that all these things are happening in my life, but something has to go.” Does it hit me on the head, imposter syndrome, right? I had all of that, and it’s almost every woman I discovered today; when there is an issue with the breast, we go through these kinds of emotions.

And I would just say the last thing when it comes to specifically breast health since we are talking about that today, it’s something that fibrocystic breast disease has been taken off the charter for doctors to even consider that a condition because it’s become so common for so many women. They’re like, “It’s so normal. Every woman has it.” Right? And it’s true that most of the lumps actually turn out to be benign; that’s a fact. But the larger question is, what are your breasts telling you what’s happening in the body when there are changes? And it could be a lump, it could be this horrendous swelling. There are women, for example, who can’t put on a T-shirt, they can’t put on a bra because their breasts swell so badly, they would stay away from sex, they don’t want to be intimate, they can’t do any sports because everything is so engorged and it’s so painful.

And we are told that it’s normal. And so that pisses me off big time because I can tell you right now, it commonly does not make it normal; it does not make it okay. It’s an early sign that your breasts are telling you there is something going on; I need your help. And it’s true that most breasts are not going to develop into breast issues and are not develop into breast cancers, but it’s a sign of estrogen dominance, inflammation, lymphatic stagnation, and other issues might show up in the uterus, for example, or in the ovaries, or in your thyroid. And so this is where I feel like early detection, and early care of our breasts is just so important because they tell us a story.

Dr. Wendy Myers: Yeah, because you want to listen to your body’s cries for help so you can prevent worse problems down the road. And it’s almost like for a fibrocystic breast, and we’ll talk about what that is exactly in a minute; if you present to your doctor with that, there’s no medication for that. So they’re like, “Oh, we’ll just keep an eye on it.” Do you know what I mean?.

Magdalena Wszelaki: Or they put you on a pill.

Dr. Wendy Myers: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so I want to be more proactive than that. So tell us, what are fibrocystic breasts exactly, and why do we need to be aware of this?

Magdalena Wszelaki: Yeah, so fibrocystic breasts, basically, so let’s just look at the anatomy of the breast. Everybody knows about the lymphatic system, and not many people really know what it is. Our body has a lymphatic system, which is like a highway for eliminating trash from the body. So think of it this way. And some parts of the body have more lymphatic systems as compared to others. So, for example, in a lot of us who have, for instance, had our tonsils removed, the tonsils start swelling up. That’s a huge lymphatic node right in here. But you also have nodes all over, and the breasts are actually high lymphocytes as well. A lot of the lymphatic movement happens in the breast.

So, one-way breast issues can happen if there are blockages in the lymphatic system, there are also a lot of ducts in the breast that basically start getting swollen, and there’s a lot of water retention that starts happening there. And this is when you become really swollen, and it becomes incredibly painful because there are no movements of fluids in the breast. We consider fibrocystic breasts as cyclical and non-cyclical. So cyclical, you might say, “Oh, I can feel my breasts changing around my period.” So a week before my period, my breasts become a lot more sensitive; they become engorged. And I mean, depending on the severity of it, meaning that is it so painful that you can’t put on your bra, you can’t touch your breast? That’s time to address that.

The worst one is with non-cyclical, meaning that there are women who constantly have engorged breasts and they’re swollen all the time, and that becomes, it’s not a hormonal issue, but it’s more of a stagnation and inflammation happens in the breast. So there are a lot of things that we can do in order to move the stagnation in the breast so that the water doesn’t get retained there. And then we support the ducts in terms of letting things go, and it’s also hugely detoxifying for the breast as well.

Dr. Wendy Myers: Yeah, because I mean, a lot of times people get massages, and they do different things to get their lymphatic going, but their breasts aren’t touched during a massage. This is a really important tissue that needs to be massaged and needs to let things flow. And for me, I have concerns because, like a lot of women, I’ve had breast implants in the past and had them put in and then replaced another time, then I had them removed, and so I have concerns I have with this scar tissue that may affect drainage and the tissue in that area. Luckily I don’t feel like I have any issues yet in that department, but there are a lot of women that have scar tissue and other things that can prevent flow and drainage as well.

Magdalena Wszelaki: Yeah. So the same thing happens when you have scar tissue; for example, if you had surgery and the place of incision, there’s always a lot of scar tissue, and it’s up to us whether we work through it and massage it, and the scar tissue improves or not. I had a double hip replacement done four years ago, and I can tell you, I had a lot of scar tissue, and then I started working on it, and right now, when I go for a massage and say, “Oh wow, you don’t have any scar tissue left around your incisions.” And I’m like, “Yeah, well, it took a lot of work, but it’s totally possible.” So yeah, massaging and touching and drainage can make a huge difference for sure.

Dr. Wendy Myers: Yes. And so, what exactly is the fibrocystic breast? What’s going on in the breast when maybe you can get that diagnosis or that label?

Magdalena Wszelaki: It’s not really a diagnosis, I mean, when a woman goes to see a doc and says, “Look doc, at the beginning of the month or in my follicular phase, I’m, let’s say, size A, and then when I go into my luteal phase just before my period, my breasts becomes, I’m wearing a B or C cup bra, so I have to wear” I mean, there are women who have two sets of bras because of that. And so what happens is in the breast, there are a lot of ducts. Let me just actually show you; I have a photo of a breast. So you can see how many ducts there are in the breast and what happens when a fibrocystic breast happens; there’s basically stagnation. Can you see all the ducts also right in here? There’s a cross-section of it. When there is no movement, when there is stagnation of the fluids, of the lymphatic fluids in the breast, this is when the pain starts happening. This is the reason why everything engorges and gets swollen.

So that’s one type of problem with breasts. The other one that is quite common and very unfortunate is women developing lumps on their breasts. So there are different types of lumps. It could be a lump that develops as a form of a cyst where there’s actually a lot of water in one of the ducts that just gets stuck. But there are also lumps that are just purely tissue and, most of the time, are not malignant, so it’s totally benign tissue that starts growing. The major cause behind it is estrogen dominance, which causes the growth of that tissue in the breast. And it’s not uncommon for women to have fibrocystic breasts, and they also have a lump on their breasts.

So to get that diagnosed, I mean, it’s pretty straightforward. My preferred way of doing it is to definitely get a sonogram done. That’s a fast and easy way of doing it. Thermography, and let me just maybe mention that thermography and mammograms are two completely different technologies. I feel like it’s not one or the other; it’s like comparing apples to oranges. Thermography shows you what’s happening in your breast way, way before it becomes a problem. Women who have, for example, you don’t develop breast cancer just like that. It’s like one day you wake up, you have a lump; it’s breast cancer. It’s a change in the breast that happens months or years, a lot of the time, prior to actually manifesting as breast cancer. Thermography can pick up all of that. There are changes in color, and there’s inflammation that’s already showing in the breast. And so doing that on a yearly basis is really important because you can catch things really, really early.

A really good, and I’ll say one more thing about the thermography, which I have learned, and I think this is so important, is a lot of women say, “Oh, I went to get my thermography done, but didn’t show anything. Three years later, I have breast cancer.” One of the issues to address is that not all thermography centers are really good. If you go into a place that does Botox, and also by thermography, most likely it’s going to be a shyster business, okay? So go to a person who is really specialized in thermography, which uses high-definition, high-resolution cameras; they cool down the room, and they cool you down before they do anything. They really specialize in that. They don’t do anything else. They’re truly passionate about it. And really, a great giveaway for thermography is when you do, make sure they do contrast, but also do black and white on a grayscale.

Because it is really fascinating, I’ve seen photos in thermography when a person had a cup of coffee and got a thermogram, and it shows patches almost like a panther kind of patches, which is an indication of estrogen dominance. And then, they take the photo again three hours later after the coffee has been metabolized out of the body and the patches are almost gone. But that’s a high-resolution, good-quality thermography center that can do things like that. So quality is really, really important.

A mammogram is a different story. If you already have a history of breast cancer in the family, I think it’s a personal choice. It might not be a bad idea to get a mammogram at that point, but it’s a very different purpose; it’s diagnostic versus prevention and observation of the changes. So, for example, when it comes to a lump, you can see that on thermography really quickly because it’s going to start having changes in color. There tends to be more blood coming into that space, there is inflammation in that space, and it doesn’t have to be cancer. And there are so many things that we can do, for example, addressing estrogen dominance and massaging their breasts with specific oils; they can resolve that pretty quickly.

Dr. Wendy Myers: Okay, great. Yeah. And so, can you talk about that, about ways you can address fibrocystic breasts naturally?

Magdalena Wszelaki: Yeah, sure. So I always like to do things that give instant relief because then women are like, “Oh, something is working here.” But also looking at it from a long-term perspective and saying, “I don’t want this to happen again. I don’t want to deal with another lump again.” But in order to do that, we need to address the root cause of what is causing that. So let me talk about the instant relief maybe first, and then let’s talk about the root causes.

So one of the easiest things to do when it comes to when you have any changes in your breast, whether it’s fibrocystic breast, whether you’ve got already a lump on your breast, you feel like just some women, after having, for example, two, three kids feel like there is always a sensitive area that always hurts and it’s just like something is just stuck there. So one of the things that we can do is massage the breast and activate the lymphatic system. Do you want me to show you how to do that?

Dr. Wendy Myers: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. We want a demo.

Magdalena Wszelaki: Okay. All right. Let’s do a demo. So here’s a demo of how to, and do you want me to talk this through as well so people who are not watching the video.

Dr. Wendy Myers: Yes, absolutely.

Magdalena Wszelaki: Also, get it? Okay, so I’m going to do some prompters. So basically, what you do is, I’m lifting up my left arm, putting it behind your head, and so we’re going to be massaging the left breast using my right hand. So think of the exit point of all the gunk that you want out of your breast right up here, and I’m pointing at the place right above my armpit where my collarbone is. Okay? Think of what’s your exit point; that’s where you want everything to be directed towards. So what we are going to start off with, you are always going to start off from the nipple, so in my case, my nipple’s right here, and I’m pointing at 12 o’clock, and I’m just going to gently be moving the breast tissue out to the exit point.

And then I’m going to move to two o’clock, right? So just slightly to the right and do the same thing. You don’t want to press too hard because if you press too hard, things get stuck too. So it’s good enough pressure, think of it this way like you’re moving honey through a pipe, through a plastic pipe or so, and then I’m moving over to six o’clock and then moving it out. And then, so down below, it’s a little tricky. So when you’re down on the breast, so right now I’m on like, say this is six o’clock, I’m going to move it down and then up here this way. So again, it goes out to the exit. And then I’m moving over slightly a few degrees to the left, and so on and so forth. So basically, by that time, you do your breast massage and then go back to 12 o’clock, right? Switch sides; you do this exact same thing on the other breast.

Now, you can do this early first thing in the morning. You can do it before going to bed. The idea is to get some traction but not through clothing. So I’m doing this through clothes, obviously because we are doing a podcast, but if I was doing this in my private time, I do this in my bathroom. Obviously, you want to be naked. You can either do this when you’re taking a shower, and you’re fully, nicely lathered up with some nice clean soap, so some nice castile soap and not any soaps that have any perfumes and phthalates in them, and that’s when you can do it. Some women prefer to do it once they’re showered, and they rather use a cream or oil. So you can really pretty much use any cream, oil, anything that gives you that kind of slippery motion that I was showing, that I’m referring to.

But there are a few oils that have a special efficacy for breasts. One of them is poke root. So poke root is something. For those of you who are from the south, you probably know poke wheat and poke salad. So the root itself is something that’s harvested in the fall, and it’s then infused into the oil. You can buy that on Etsy, and you can probably get it from some medicinal herbal shops. The beauty of it is that in traditional herbal medicine, poke root infused into oil has been used for mastalgia, so any kind of women’s breast stagnation, but also poke root has this special affinity for women’s parts, including the uterus. So women who have, for example, a lot of uterus problems, so very heavy periods, very scanty periods, or have just delivered a baby, and the uterus is a bit of a prolapse of the uterus, there’s a lot of pain in the uterus, poke root has got this incredible affinity of supporting women’s health.

Interestingly, if you go to PubMed and if you ask me what’s the science behind it, I can tell you right now it hasn’t been studied. But it doesn’t mean it doesn’t work. It’s been used for centuries with amazing results. So anyway, so poke root, if you can get your hands on that, that’s a wonderful one. Castor oil is another really great one because it goes deep into the tissue. Not necessarily the best-smelling oil, but it’s totally doable. One that I also like is if you have evening primrose oil or borage, I personally borage oil is very high in gamma-linolenic acid, GLA. So if you have them as a supplement at home, just open up a couple of capsules. You probably need one capsule per breast. Open it up, put it in your hand and use that oil to massage your breast as well. The reason why evening primrose oil is the PMS resolver is that it is highly anti-inflammatory; it stimulates and activates the anti-inflammatory prostaglandins. And so it’s the same way as when your uterus is inflamed, your breasts are inflamed, it’s the same mechanism. It is going to work as well.

So these are just some really simple solutions, and if you have none of these, it’s really just taking any cream that is nice, that doesn’t have any chemicals in it, because your breast tissue really absorbs everything. Everything goes into your boobs; you want to use as clean of a product as possible. So that will give you some pretty instant relief on the breast. And then if you talk about the long term, I’m saying, you know what? I just don’t want to have another breast lump again because it was so scary that the diagnostic thing was just so terrible; then one thing to consider is then addressing the root causes. And there are really three major root causes for breast changes.

The first one is estrogen dominance. So that’s a hormonal issue. Estrogen dominance, how do you know you have estrogen dominance? There are a couple of other symptoms that typically occur together with not just breast changes. If you’ve been having difficult periods, very heavy periods, if you’re spotting in the middle of your period, if you still have a period and you see clumps in the blood, blood clumps when you’re urinating, and it comes out, and you see it in the toilet, that is classical estrogen dominance. But also having women with thyroid nodules. Women who have horrible mood swings before their periods. Actually, PMS itself, just having horrendous PMS, in the past when you had terrible PMS as a woman, that’s classical estrogen dominance.

What else? Fibroids. That’s a 101 of estrogen dominance. And then you talk about more.  Actually, let me talk about the visual side of things. So, women who tend to put on a lot of weight around the hips and thighs tend to be very estrogenic. So if I put on weight, it all goes in my butt. I’m a typical pair. And so women like that will go and exercise and do all these workouts on the butt and legs, and the cellulite doesn’t want to go down, but you just can’t tone up as much as you want to, and that’s because estrogen dominance if you don’t resolve estrogen dominance, it’s going to be really hard to lose weight down there. So that’s one.

But more serious, on the most serious side of things, estrogenic cancers. So estrogen receptor-positive cancers will be things like breast cancer, of course, which is the majority of cancers, and by the way, for those of you who have maybe progesterone receptor-positive breast cancer, that’s actually also caused by estrogen dominance because excessive estrogen or dirty estrogen, certain metabolites of estrogens is what upregulates your progesterone receptor and that receptor becomes then malignant. And so the growth happens there. So again, breast cancer, ovarian cancer, uterine cancer, and lung cancer ,non-smokers, in women are very much related to estrogen dominance and thyroid cancer and thyroid nodules also. So, Wendy, you tell me, who do you know who doesn’t have any of those?

Dr. Wendy Myers: Yeah, I mean, and it’s just amazing all of the estrogen chemicals that we have in our body that are acting on our estrogen receptors. I mean, it’s just amazing, in our beauty products, plasticizers that get into our food, phthalates, the perfumes, just all of the pesticides used on the food. There are so many things that are acting like estrogens in our bodies today.

Magdalena Wszelaki: Absolutely. And I mean that’s why you do the work that you do, and I do the work that I do, and I think the good news about all of this is that there is a plethora now of shops and options of shopping enabling us to shop for clean products. You walk into certain health food stores, co-ops, and Whole Foods, but I don’t think they have the cleanest products unless you know how to choose. There are a lot of online solutions for people really doing clean products. And so there are a lot of options these days; you just have to be somewhat educated on it. But it’s not; I still remember 10 years ago, you had to have a hippie friend go and make you cream because everything else was just kind of crazy strong.

So estrogen dominance, lymphatic stagnation, and inflammation, you’re just overall inflamed. I mean, inflammation is obviously a huge topic. I’m sure you talk a lot about that in your resources. I mean everything from an inflammatory diet, stress, past trauma, and lack of sleep. I mean medications that you’re taking, toxic relationships. I mean, all of those things can contribute to breast health. I’ve had women tell us that in spite of a clean diet, taking supplements to address estrogen dominance, and making all these changes, the breasts just were not budging. And until they got a divorce, this particular person got a divorce from her husband and walked away, and with that, the whole stress and inflammation and all toxicity from her life diminished to some degree. And this is when her breasts started healing. So I think we all have a little bit of different triggers.

And then lymphatic movement is like what I showed, this is a mechanical way of activating your lymphatic system, but also just rebounding, being on a rebounder or even when you’re standing in a line waiting to pay or shopping somewhere, just stand up on your feet and then just do on the tippy toes and bounce down and do this. And that itself just activates, in a very gentle way, your lymphatic system, right?

Dr. Wendy Myers: Yes. And exercise, walking and exercising and things like that stimulate circulation. Yeah. And what about diet? So a lot of people, their diets are a mess. So how does diet affect your breast health?

Magdalena Wszelaki: Yeah, so definitely is an inflammatory response. So I’m a big proponent of really starting off the diet by doing something highly anti-inflammatory because I think we could talk about adding things but also removing things. So let’s talk about removing things first. I’m a big proponent of doing a full elimination diet, which means you take out gluten, dairy, soy, corn, eggs, and anything processed and packaged and reduce sugar as much as possible during this time. And there are so many cookbooks these days that are based on the elimination diet. I’ve written two of them, and they’re both available on Amazon. All the recipes are based on the elimination diet, which can make a huge difference in a woman’s life.

On the other hand, especially when it comes to breast health and addressing estrogen dominance, we want to surround ourselves with a lot of cruciferous vegetables, so the brassica family, which is your cabbage family. So it’ll be all your cabbages and kale and collard greens and arugula and radishes and turnips and watercress, and what am I missing? Bok choy, those are some of the wonderful ones. Forget the goddamn lettuce; throw the lettuce away. It has no nutritional value. It requires all these dressings and stuff in order to make it taste palatable. You’re just totally wasting your time with lettuce. Use collard greens, sorry, use arugula instead, or use mustard greens as a substitute for a really good salad.

The other thing I love adding to a protocol for specifically estrogen dominance is anything that is bitter; it’s got a bitter profile because that’s going to activate the liver. And the liver is where estrogens get metabolized. So I just want to clarify one thing with just a little insert here. When I say estrogen dominance, I think it’s a great thing that we have a term for it these days that encompasses all these symptoms and gives them a name. The bad side of it is that it has created a lot of bad names for estrogen. So a lot of women, ever since they know they have estrogen dominance, they’re like flaxseed, no, all the green vegetables, no. And any kind of even good quality soy, no. And so it doesn’t quite work that way. In fact, you would not be able to sit here and listen to this podcast and sit up straight and for your mind to work, for your skin to function, for your bones to be strong if you had no estrogen. So estrogen is needed. That’s what gives us cognitive functions, strong bones, beautiful skin, moist vaginas, and decent hair. I mean, all of that is estrogen and quality of sleep; it makes us a woman.

The problem is how we break down estrogens into what I like to call clean estrogens, which are protective and helpful for us to function, and dirty estrogens, which are the problematic ones, the pathogenic ones that create the symptoms we talked about. A lot of that happens in the liver. And so if you can support your liver by doing so, by incorporating some digestive, like digestive bitters before a meal, have tea after having a meal like dandelion root or burdock root, there is one herb called Andrographis, it’s called the Bitter Queen in Ayurvedic medicine, it is unpleasantly better. However, the more unpleasantly bitter something is, the more your liver’s going to love it. So in the form of a tincture, a few drops, starting off with that, is just something that your liver is going to be so thankful for. Just simple things like that you can just make tea with those herbs that I mentioned and have that before or after a meal just to activate your liver.

Dr. Wendy Myers: Yeah, I mean the bitter part of people’s diet; it’s largely absent, at least in the American diet. I mean, a part of a lot of culture’s diet is the bitter foods, but a lot of people don’t like bitter foods, or they’re super tasters, and they avoid bitter foods like the plague. But you need to incorporate that, and as you said, it’s amazing for your liver, your number one detox organ. And let’s talk about detoxification and breast health. So, do you advise people to detox to help their breast health?

Magdalena Wszelaki: Yeah, indirectly, for sure. I mean, the detoxes that you run, and so many different forms of them, I believe that every one of them is going to be, obviously, going to help in a consequential way is going to get to the breast, right? Because let’s not forget that the breast and any kind of hormonal changes, hormones don’t just go out of whack just like that. It’s a sequence of events that happens prior to hormones going out of whack. That’s why, for example, when I recommend testing for women, hormone testing is actually kind of the last thing that I recommend. Test a lot of other things prior to that. How toxic are you? What are your levels of different vitamins and minerals? How is your liver functioning? How are your kidneys functioning? How are your magnesium levels? All of those things play a huge role. So correcting all of those, so detoxing and correcting a lot of the deficiencies, it definitely helps breast health for sure, any hormonal imbalance for that matter.

Dr. Wendy Myers: Yeah, I mean you’re detoxing, you’re getting rid of estrogen, the chemicals that can contribute to problems, and just mineralizing your body, taking magnesium which is super, super important, and optimizing liver health as well. And so you came up with an amazing, brilliant set for women. It’s called Happy Sisters. Can you talk a little about that?

Magdalena Wszelaki: Yeah, so this is Happy Sisters; it comes in a box. By the way, the instructions on how to massage your breast are right here. It’s actually a standee; you can put that in your bathroom and learn how to do it. It comes with an educational booklet, what’s in it and why. And it basically consists of a cream and a supplement. So the cream is to really give you instant relief. We are using some really nice things there. So poke root is definitely a big part of that. We are also using St John’s-wort; as you can see, it’s light pink; I know the light here is not the best, but it’s actually the color of my top. So we kind of wanted to make it breast color, nipple color sort of a thing. And it’s really between a cream and a gel. And so it absorbs really quickly. Within two, or three minutes, it’s going to be gone. So you can then put on your bra and start your day right away.

So I was just saying, so we’ve got poke root here that I was talking about. We’ve got St John’s-wort, which is highly anti-inflammatory. A lot of people know St John’s-wort for depression; it actually lowers the inflammation in the brain. We are using it just topically, so it’s not going to counter-interact with any medications, but it’s just hugely anti-inflammatory. Using black seeded oil, Nigella sativa, which in the Middle East is called the oil that fixes everything but death. We’ve got castor oil in here and some really nice gentle essential oil, so it doesn’t have a very strong aroma.

So we’ve been having amazing results with women telling us that after childbirth, there is this sensitive area that’s been there for years, women who have had mastectomies or partial mastectomies and there were parts of their breasts that feel very stuck, they feel very protective over it. Finally, things are beginning to move. They feel like they can be intimate again on both breasts and not be just like, “Oh, but don’t touch the side here.” So yeah, I’m very pleased. And we also have GLA, gamma-linolenic acids, from borage oil here. So when you put so many magical things in one, I think that’s when the results really start happening quickly.

The supplement addresses the root causes of the issue. So we’ve got stuff in here that addresses estrogen dominance, we have calcium gluconate in here, we’ve got sulforaphane in here, but also some herbs that work specifically on the liver. So we have Andrographis in here that actually helps too. You know how we talked about the estrogen being metabolized into the good estrogen or the bad estrogen, right? So it upregulates the body to skew the estrogen metabolism towards the good protective estrogen and away from the bad one. So Andrographis plays a role here.

We also have Hierba Santa , which is another herb that we have found to be having exactly the same function on the liver, just a different pathway that also helps to metabolize estrogen that way. We’re using red root, which is a fabulous herb that helps to improve lymphatic movement in the body. So you have a double benefit: you move the lymphatic system mechanically using your hand using the cream, and then, on the other hand, you’re supporting your body on the inside with the movement of the lymphatic system. And we’ve got magnesium in here as well; I mentioned that. Magnesium as you mentioned, you just can’t go wrong with magnesium. And we do have borage oil, so it is similar; it’s actually better than evening primrose oil and has got more gamma-linolenic acid in it, which lowers the inflammation. So really, it’s like these three strategies put into one bottle, estrogen dominance, lowering inflammation, and moving your lymphatic system all in one.

And I just want to make it really super clear that if you combine that with a clean diet, meaning when you have breast problems, just lay off alcohol for a while, reduce your sugar, just enjoy the abundance of good vegetables, learn to cook amazing meals with really fresh produce, organic produce. For some women, coffee can make a huge impact on their breast health. Surprisingly, we’ve had women say, “I’ve tried it all, and then the last thing.” Because caffeine is a great drug, right?

Dr. Wendy Myers: It is, it really is.

Magdalena Wszelaki: It’s kind of hard to get off it. And I’m totally guilty. I can’t drink coffee, but I drink tea, and that’s my first thing in the morning, and I don’t want to.  Anyway, it makes me happy. But caffeine itself, I haven’t found that to be that much of a problem; it’s coffee specifically that women report that their breast and their PMS, actually as well the pain during PMS, it has significantly reduced when they switch caffeine from coffee to some other caffeinated drink, like something like a matcha tea or black tea, white tea, et cetera. 

Dr. Wendy Myers: Or green tea. I have some green tea right here I’m drinking.

Magdalena Wszelaki: You do. Nice.

Dr. Wendy Myers: I call it my liquid brain.

Magdalena Wszelaki: Yeah, so, I mean, I think, and I’ll just say one thing, I mean, I think sleep is also very underestimated in this whole equation, especially, and the problem also starts for women when we turn 45; there are a lot of things that are just not the same anymore. Our sleep is not the same. And so find resources to really help you through sleep other than taking just a whole bunch of herbs just to knock yourself out because typically that doesn’t work very well. You wake up two or three hours later with a problem again. So, yeah, anyway, so once you do, I think the clean diet and support that with lymphatic massage and a good supplement that can help you address the estrogen component, lymphatic tissue, and inflammation, you’re in a pretty good place.

Dr. Wendy Myers: Yeah. And I love that you became a certified herbalist. I think you got your Master’s in herbalism, I believe. But I was following you when you were doing that, and you have really educated yourself about herbs. So I love that you came up with this Happy Sisters Kit because I mean so many women, there’s a lot of that have wake-up calls and a lot of women that it’s like one in three women, I believe, that suffer from breast cancer or they have some sort of benign tumor, or they have cysts. I mean, a lot of women are dealing with issues with their breasts, with their hormones, with fibrocystic breasts, and things of that nature. So having a kit like this, using herbs of this nature, can really, really help kind of change. And, of course, lifestyle factors as well, as you talked about, can really help change the game for so many women.

Magdalena Wszelaki: Yeah, for sure. It’s totally doable. And one of the things I like about our breasts is that it’s information for us. The way period can be information, information about our overall health. The breasts are one of the tissues that really tell us a story. It’s like, your sisters are talking to you, saying, “Hey, I need some help here.” And the likelihood is that when you improve your breast health, a lot of other things improve as well. You suddenly start sleeping better because, I mean, in order to fix your breasts, you need to detox to some extent, whether it’s detoxing your lymphatic system, detoxing the ability of metabolizing estrogen, and then suddenly everything else starts feeling better. Your mood swings are not the same, and your period might not be the same as your hot flush; I forgot to mention hot flushes are one of the symptoms of estrogen dominance. Suddenly your hot flushes are not that bad anymore or are completely gone, and you’re sleeping better. So it’s not just the breast; everything else is probably going to get an uplift.

Dr. Wendy Myers: Yeah. And your breasts, because they are sensitive tissue, maybe they’re some of the first tissues to give you that cry for help that there’s a systemic issue going on. And so you have to pay attention to that and pay attention early, don’t wait and just ignore your body and ignore the breast tenderness and all these things that are going on until there’s this domino effect. Can you tell us a little bit about why you developed the Happy Sisters Kit?

Magdalena Wszelaki: Because I felt like there was nothing like that in the market and there was, if I look for a breast solution, when I was in private practice, I’ll be like, “Oh, where do I get you that cream?” Because not everybody wants to go and infuse poke root into the oil, and it’s just a lot of women don’t have time and patience for that kind of stuff. So then I’ll go on Etsy, but then I don’t know where this person got the poke root from. Is it from the side of a highway? Or is it truly organic that she says it’s organic? It just wasn’t clear. And then, on breast health, I felt the supplements were just pounding on one thing, and that’s estrogen clearance, but they were not addressing the lymphatic side of things; they were not addressing the inflammation components. So this is the reason why I thought there was nothing and nothing that really addressed all three reasons at the same time.

But lastly, I would also say that in herbalism, we have a saying that if you want to heal faster and you get a better result, use something internally and externally at the same time. It doesn’t have to be the same herb, but just address the issue from inside and outside, and you get this exponential healing happening. So in herbalism, we call it one plus one equals five.

Dr. Wendy Myers: Yes.

Magdalena Wszelaki: So you do two things, and you get the results of being a five. Or sometimes, it’s also when you combine certain herbs together; you do one herb, it does something, do another herb, and later on, it does something. When you put these two herbs together, you have these exponential results that the body’s just like, “Ah.” Certain herbs really synergistically work together. In our case, for example, poke root and St John’s-wort, they’re best buddies, and so that’s why we get so many great results with pain right away. We are playing around with a PMS formula right now, and it’s, again, the poke root and St. John’s that makes a big difference. When I add other things, they make a little bit of a difference here and there, but it’s really the holy duo, not a trio, but the duo, in this case, is these two. So yeah, that’s a reason why I want to do something comprehensive, something that just generates results for women really quickly.

Dr. Wendy Myers: Yeah. I mean, I’ve been following your work for at least 12 years because you were talking about hormones and really focusing on hormones and estrogen dominance a long time ago. And when you came out with your book, Overcoming Estrogen Dominance, I was like, yes, because it’s a big issue, and I think just it’s not being addressed holistically, or it’s not really being looked at or taken seriously by a lot of conventional medical doctors, or they’re just doing the right testing, or there are so many holistic natural ways that you can address these things without just doing bioidentical hormone replacement, which is something been recommended to me, but that’s not really what I, that was recommended to me at 37, and I thought, well, that just doesn’t make any sense to me at all. Well, how do I just get my body working naturally and producing the hormones at the levels that it’s supposed to be producing? For me, that’s a more logical approach, and that’s the route I took. I loved when you wrote this book. Can you tell us a little bit more about it?

Magdalena Wszelaki: Yeah, I have it somewhere here. Yeah, you can get it on Amazon, Overcoming Estrogen Dominance. So half of the book is really explaining different conditions, and then the rest of it, I’ll show you, there are recipes at the back here. There are like 50-something recipes. So the book is written for women with fibroids, lumpy fibrocystic breasts, period problems, hot flushes, thyroid nodules, endometriosis, miscarriages, breast cancer, cellulite, and stubborn hip fat.

Dr. Wendy Myers: Well, tell us about it, what we can expect. I mean it’s a gorgeous book too. It’s beautiful.

Magdalena Wszelaki: Thank you. Yeah. I mean, we try to make it fun too and do quite a lot of illustrations and photography and stuff like that so that it doesn’t read super heavy. I’ve divided the book into specific protocols, but I always talk about the foundation of the protocol. So the foundation is really about fixing your gut and liver and balancing your blood sugar levels. It might sound like a lot of work, but we’ve developed the recipes and organized them in a way that you don’t have to think about it; we’ve done the work for you. Meaning that when you look at your meal plan in the book, it takes care of your liver, and it sets you up for good blood sugar balance.

So, for example, one thing that we do is we do only savory breakfasts, no sugar for breakfast. That sets you up for really nice balanced blood sugar levels throughout the day. Women in our community would say, in order to fix my nights, I had to change my mornings. And so what I refer to is just by changing their breakfast, they can sleep again, which is like, you would’ve never thought that breakfast is going to make a difference in how you sleep, but it actually can. And then the book is an anti-inflammatory, so in many ways, it helps restore gut health in women. Of course, if you have some serious infections going on, then it’s a different thing. You’re going to go and see a doctor, but I feel like this is really a laser foundation for really, really good health.

I have a feeling you probably live this way; I certainly live this way. I don’t feel in any way deprived in my life, then it’s like, “Oh, I really wish I had a croissant, or I wish I had this and that and some sugary sugar-dripping whatever bagel.” I just don’t care about that stuff anymore. I feel like when you feel good, you get addicted to feeling really good. So I talk about the foundation in the book, and then by doing the foundation, a lot of women start feeling better right away, meaning their breasts start changing, get a lot healthier, their sex drive returns, their periods start getting regulated, and the hot flushes disappear. But for some women, it’s not enough.

So, for example, if you talk about breast health, if you follow the protocol for two months, because that’s the length of the elimination diet, and you feel like something still isn’t really happening. I still feel like my breasts have some issues and ebbs and flow with my period, then there is a whole protocol for breast health; what else you can do. And then, we have specific supplements, specific herbs that you can add on. Wendy, let me give you an example. I have a dear friend who is a climber. We’re in Colorado, so a lot of women climb here, and she’s a master herbalist. She actually knows a lot more about herbs than I do. She’s been doing this for decades. Her mum was an herbalist, so she’s very plugged into that world. And as a climber, she had horrendously tender breasts. You’re talking about, like, “Don’t touch me, I can’t put on a bra,” kind of a thing for two weeks out of a month.

So as a climber, it’s a problem because you are so close to the wall, you’re lifting your arms, you are close to the wall. I’m not a climber, but you can just see when they do it; you just cannot climb when you have that kind of pain. She went to see a numerous number of functional practitioners, naturopaths, et cetera. And I think everybody has a blind spot, and she’s done all the whole diet thing. In fact, she’s on AIP, so that’s paleo for autoimmunity, a very restricted diet. She’s got some autoimmunity going on too. And she’s done DIM, she’s done all the magnesium, she’s done a lot of self [inaudible 00:40:59], NAC, right? I mean, do it all, right? Nothing. And then, so she’s telling me about this one day, and I said to her, “What about calcium D-glucarate?” She’s like, “What? I’ve got no bone problems.” I’m like, “No, no. It’s different.”

So that one supplement, with her resistance, I ended up actually giving it to her from my house because she wouldn’t buy it, she just thought it was just such a silly name, calcium D-glucarate, and it was just literally within two weeks all her breast pain was gone. So it was just that one thing that was missing. And the reason why this was missing, just to explain, is that there are a number of different pathways in the liver to clear estrogen, and one of the pathways is the glucuronidation pathway. And the supplement that works really well on binding up estrogens in that pathway is calcium D-glucarate or glucuronic acid. The supplement is called calcium D-glucarate because glucuronic acid needs to be connected to something as a carrier, so calcium just happens to be the carrier. So it’s really not; you’re not taking that for bone health by any means. This is just purely to support your glucuronidation pathway in the lever to support your estrogen dominance.

So this is where, I mean this is what years of work and research have gone into this book to make sure that, as far as I know, no leave goes unturned, and it’s pretty comprehensive. So if somebody has done it all and they still have issues, whether it’s fibroids, whether it is breast health, whether it’s thyroid nodules, hopefully, you can get an answer in the book here.

Dr. Wendy Myers: Yeah, I highly recommend it. If you have any hormone imbalance issues and just can’t get a handle on them, go check out that book. I mean, this is the best book on this subject, for sure.

Magdalena Wszelaki: Oh, thank you.

Dr. Wendy Myers: Yeah. So Magdalena, tell us where we can learn more about your work. You have amazing blog posts on your website, on hormonesbalance.com, but tell us more about where we can find you, your book, the Happy Sisters Kit, et cetera.

Magdalena Wszelaki: Yeah, so a lot of information is on hormones within hormonesbalance.com. And then, if you’re looking for the book, it’s on Amazon; if you just enter Magdalena hormones on Amazon, I’m going to show up. And then the supplements that we were showing, Happy Sisters, that’s on Wellena, that’s our supplement brand, wellena.com. So it’s like wellness and Magdalena basically put together; my team came up with that name. Yeah. So that’s where the products are available. And calcium D-glucarate is there too.

Dr. Wendy Myers: Okay, fantastic. Fantastic. Well, Magdalena, thanks so much for coming to the show. Is there anything we left out that you want to mention?

Magdalena Wszelaki: Thank you so much for having me and creating awareness about breast health not to be ignored. I would just say your sisters are speaking up to you, speaking out and asking for help; just do something early, as early as possible. That’s just really my message.

Dr. Wendy Myers: Yeah, because I agree. I don’t think just doing your yearly mammogram is enough. I think if you’re having any kind of symptoms, be proactive, and you’re listening to the show, so you are proactive, but yeah, there’s a lot of.

Magdalena Wszelaki: We’re already probably preaching to the choir. I have a-

Dr. Wendy Myers: Yeah, we’re preaching to the choir, but there’s a lot of things that you can do.

Magdalena Wszelaki: Absolutely. I mean, we just came out of the time we are recording this; we’re just coming out of October, the whole pink ribbons, breast cancer awareness month, which just makes my stomach turn. And so we renamed it to October, the Breast Health Awareness month, because you’re going to be aware of how important your breast health is, and are we not aware that breast cancer already is an issue? I think we well are, and really what they’re doing during that month is pushing mammograms, so I think there’s a lot more as women we can do than just be told to do a mammogram every year.

Dr. Wendy Myers: Yeah, there’s a lot more that we can do for sure. And it’s a systemic thing. We want to be working on our hormones, not just for our breasts, but for our whole system as well. But Magdalena, thanks so much for coming on the show. Really love your wisdom and expertise on the subject and on hormones. So everyone, thanks so much for tuning in to this week’s Myers Detox Podcast. I’m Dr. Wendy Myers and I will talk to you guys next week.