Welcome to the libido lounge where we focus on all things love, lust, and libido. We believe that fabulous sex is important to health as exercise and good food. Hey everybody. Doctor. Diane, your libido doc here. Welcome to another episode on the libido lounge. I am so, so, so excited about who I am featuring today, doctor Betsy Greenleaf. She's a great friend of mine, and we are throwing a really cool upcoming sexual health and libido summit together.
So I wanted to make sure we feature her before that. We're gonna be talking about the link today between the brain, the vagina, and your sexual health. So welcome to the libido lounge. Oh my goodness. Thank you so much, doctor Diane. I love the libido lounge. I think that's awesome. So fun. We're gonna have the best time, and someday, we're gonna start filming these in a much more lounge y place, and that's gonna be incredible. So can't wait for that. But let's jump in.
Like, just tell everybody briefly about yourself, about the work you do, about why you love this topic for for me? Yeah. So I'm the first board certified female urogynecologist, and I basically went into that field because, you know, first, many of us, especially in the health and wellness world, I was having my own struggles with my feminine and intimate health.
And what better way to, you know, figure it out was like you know, most people just go to doctors and practitioners and and pay, and I spent, like, hundreds of thousands of dollars in a medical education business by itself. But, you know, in the end, it gives me really a a better understanding of what my patients are going through and, and can relate and and figuring out things that that wasn't being presented to me in medical school. So yeah. Beautiful. Beautiful. Thank you.
And let's jump right into the topic today. It's a really unique thing that I think a lot of people probably don't have that awareness around around the the brain, vagina, microbiome, sexual health kinda link. And so can you set big picture of those those links for us? Yeah. So, you know, it's really interesting because we especially in Western medicine, we tend to compartmentalize our body. You know, you go to the cardiologist for your heart. You go to an endocrinologist for your diabetes.
You go to a podiatrist for your foot. When a lot of the processes that are affecting your heart and your diabetes and your foot and your bladder and are all connected. So it's funny that, like, now we're kind of taking a step back and we're going, wait a minute. There are connections. There's a lot of, of the in the integrative and functional wellness world, we're talking about the gut brain connection, where we're really finding out that there are so many more interactions.
And in my field, there is like a vagina gut brain connection. And so really through the microbes that are on and within our body, this is affecting our thought processes, affecting our sex drive, it's affecting our fertility, It's affecting our down there comfort. So itching, burning, discharge, recurrent urinary tract infections, recurrent vaginal infections.
You know, a lot of times, we're just slapping medicines and pills and trying to fix it that way when if we don't really get to the root cause and find the connection between all these areas, we're just kinda spinning our wheels. And so then how is that really you know, it's like, obviously, if somebody is having, say, pain and discomfort, like, nobody with, like that's having any sort of itching or any pain or any other vaginal issues is obviously gonna be motivated typically to have sex. Right?
Because they don't feel very, very great. But besides that, like, what are other some of the, like, the deeper links there that are really driving those types of abnormalities you're talking about with, like, gosh. I just really I'm just not in the mood. Yeah. Well, you know, how the the gut and the vagina and the brain are connected when it comes to libido, I always tell patients, first of all, number one, your brain is your most important sex organ.
If your brain is not there, nothing's gonna happen. But then it depends on where we, you know, where we start and where we focus. There's also tons of research that shows if the microbiome so the microbes in our gut or the microbes in our vagina, if they're off, these are creating low level inflammation that the body's sensing. And the body is incredibly, incredibly smart, and it goes, wait a minute. If things are not quite right or quite optimal, maybe it isn't the time to be reproducing.
Maybe isn't a time to be having babies. And so the body is sensing this without us even knowing, and so it's really kinda miraculous. And, and there's but frustrating at the same time because we you know, if we're looking at, like, well, we don't have a sex drive or we're suffering with fertility issues, and we're like, you know, what's wrong with me? What how do I fix it? And we're not consciously, you know, sensing it.
We kinda need to look at these areas, but what the body is doing is it goes, alright. It's not an ideal time. We're not in a a current position where things are balanced. And so we're gonna shut down the processes of reproduction. And I always say your your brain doesn't know the difference between you just wanna have some sexy fun versus you're actually trying to make it another human being, And so the brain just goes, okay. You know what? Things aren't right in the gut.
Things aren't right in the vagina. There's inflammation in the body. We need to hold on to all our resources to fight whatever's happening, and we don't have any extra to put into sex drive, fertility, libido, you know, periods. You know, sometimes even, like, the period being thrown off may be a sign that something like this is going on. In men, it could be erectile dysfunction. Like, all these processes start going away because the body goes, you know what? Those are extra.
Those I don't need necessarily right today in this moment to give birth to survive. And but I do need to survive. So the body's going, let's put all our resources into whatever I gotta do to survive, and it's gonna take, you know, take away from the sex. And I always kinda connect that sex and stress can't coexist. So when the body's under stress, whether that's emotional stress or physical stress from a disease state, and then the microbiome, I don't like to use the word disease.
It's, you know, I like the disease better, you know, that pronunciation because it's not like you're diseased. But when things are just not right, the body's gonna go, okay. Well, we're just gonna we're just gonna put things on the side. We'll table that for right now. So Yeah. Yeah. It's, like, so amazing to me. I think it's so easy to forget, right, in our modern day society. We feel like we're so far away from, like, the hunter gatherer days.
So it's very easy, I think, for people to just forget that despite the fact that we have running water and electricity and AI now and all these, like, you know, cool new technological advances, we are still functioning like we are in many ways. Like, we're still in those hunter gatherer types of days. Like, a lot of this the way the body responds is is so similar. So it's such those are such good points.
And I I wanna make sure we get to the pH and because I know that's a huge part of what you do in your work too around just, like, one way of keeping the vagina healthy, of keeping the microbiome healthy, which is, of course, as you're saying, relate it to sex drive, relate it to that desire, relate it to all of that. And so many people have these, like, slightly dysfunctional vaginal pHs. So can you talk about, like, why that's so important and and how that plays into this whole picture?
Sure. The the pH, so that's the acid base balance of a solution. And the pH of the vagina is directly related to vaginal health. So what happens is the vagina is very acidic. And when we look at pH, so pH of water is seven, and that's in the right in the middle of the pH scale, which is zero from zero to 14. But the vagina is around three point three to three to three point, I'm sorry, three to four, three to four and a half.
So if it's and and why it's that is because it's a direct measurement that there's health the presence of healthy bacteria. And so what ends up happening is when there's healthy bacteria that is present, the healthy bacteria as it's kinda living off of our tissue, which sounds kinda gross, but we've we've, you know, bacteria all over. We're covered. It's on our bodies. It's in our body. We could actually not live if it wasn't for bacteria. We need it.
Like, some of us are like, ew, germs, and I was the mom who ran behind my kids with the hand sanitizer. It was probably the worst thing I ever did for their immunity because we need these bacteria. And so it's the presence of this bacteria living off ourselves that produces something called hydrogen peroxide in the vagina. And hydrogen peroxide the presence of hydrogen peroxide in the vagina makes the vagina more acidic, and that in turn chases away the bad guys.
So bad guys don't wanna come in if it's too acidic. It's like, you know, I don't like it. It's not a good situation for me. But once we lose that back that healthy bacteria, now we start seeing shifts in the pH. And once we see shifts in the pH, the bad guys are like, alright. Now I can move in. You know? And once I move in, they invite all their friends. And so it's usually not one bacteria. It's usually a whole host, and the neighborhood goes down from there. So Give the best analogies.
Yeah. Yeah. So and and there's you know, people are like, well, what changes the pH? There's so many different things that can change the pH. Some of it is hormonal related. So some of it we don't have a lot of control, like pregnancy, breastfeeding, birth control. And birth control also affects the microbiome of the gut, so it's got it's got two bad things. It's messing up the vagina, and it's messing up the gut.
Nice not to get pregnant, but hormonal birth control is gonna scrub those other areas. And menopause. Unfortunately, menopause is really, a problem. And going back evolutionarily, we probably were not meant to live past our reproductive years, but now we're only spending I mean, if you think about the lifespan of humans, especially women, we're living into our eighties and nineties. And our reproductive years are really only from our early teens to, like, 30, 40, 50 ish.
So out of our whole lifespan, we're spending very little time in that hormonally, you know, abundant time period. So as we get older, we're gonna see more problems related to, to this. But thank goodness, because of modern medicine, we can extend our lives and be using hormones, and there's regenerative therapies for the vagina that can keep the pH per balance. But the pH is actually a quick and easy way to directly measure the health of the vagina.
And, interesting enough, I I do have, there's some amazing courses out there, wink, wink, on how to reboot that pH. So And information about doctor Betsy's courses, you guys, we'll make sure that those are in her show notes here. And so you're using you're actually using pH, like like, strips right into the for people as well as a way for there's a home way of measuring this. Right? Yeah. And you know what? I do caution people.
Just like I caution people when it comes to buying supplements, I know a lot of people love Amazon. I joke joke with my husband all the time that Amazon is my new boyfriend because they're here every single day. I have a very intimate relationship with Amazon.
But I will highly recommend not to buy personal products, vitamins, you know, testing strips, all these kind of things off of Amazon because they know for a fact, that there are counterfeits, and you might not be getting exactly what you're buying. So I would look at these things from some trusted sources. You know, I know that we carry some pH paper as part of our vaginal reboot kit on the pelvic floor store. So and that's, you know, pH paper that I, like, searched out that I know is reliable.
Because that's the thing. It's such a small window. I mean, it's not like going and testing your pool water. Where did I do the pool? And I don't do this, so forgive me if if I get it wrong. I know my husband does this. But, you know, I think there's a bigger range of that test paper. I think it's, like, zero to 10. So the bigger the range of the test paper, the less accurate it is. So you wanna get paper that's in a smaller range in the range that you're looking for.
And even then, there can be slight difference if the paper is old or if the paper has been exposed to moisture, or, because I like, a lot of people wanna store this stuff in the bathroom. I'm like, not ideal to store the pH paper in the bathroom because it's exposed to moisture and it affects the pH, the the paper itself. If the pH of the paper is too old, you know, these these papers are very sensitive, so you wanna make sure you have quality paper, the right paper, the right range.
So Yeah. Yeah. I tell people all the time that it's, like, really, like, supplements in these in lab tests on all of it that we do in our world. Right? It's, like, really comes down to the quality, but also comes down to the interpretation. Right? And so understanding that as well is is super important. And we just have a little bit of time left, so I want to make sure to also connect the microbiome and the brain as far as, like, a little bit more on, like, neurotransmitters and and the drive.
Because we obviously know if, like, the brain's healthy and happy, like, that was gonna impact sex drive. Right? And when, like, we're going to the grass, and we see that, of course, with, like, with, anything when we're throwing the brain chemistry off, whether it's through depression or also whether trying to fix depression with things like serotonin drugs like SSRIs that brain chemistry can really throw off our drive.
So connect us a little more with brain chemistry, microbiome, and sexuality, if you would. Yeah. So it's so interesting. Like, they're finding out the different microbes in the intestines that, that are like, affect our different they're actually, like, looking at them as they're our puppet masters. And so combination of a whole bunch of things. Like, we know our neurotransmitters are made in our gut.
They're actually saying that like, I've heard in the past them referring to the gut as a second brain, but now people are starting to say, no. It's the first brain, and it's actually our brain that's perceiving what the gut is doing. Because 90 to 95% of our happy hormones, serotonin is made as in the gut. So I see time and time again women who are on, medications for depression and anxiety, which unfortunately drastically affects sex drive.
But I see a lot of them where they don't it's not really helping with anxiety and depression because that's not where the source is. We need to be getting a better gut diversity of microbes and the right microbes in the gut and getting rid of the bad microbes. So we have that. We have that affecting our other neurotransmitters, like our pain receptors, which can add to pelvic pain.
And we see pelvic pain conditions like, interstitial cystitis and vulvodynia drastically being associated with gut health. And people in the past, you know, didn't really make that connection. So there's so many things, and even hormones. A lot of times we blame it on hormones, and we're like, oh, I'll just take more hormones. Well, if the gut is off, our hormones aren't gonna balance.
And also we need healthy gut for processing of our hormones because we do excrete estrogen specifically in our in our stool. And if we're constipated because our microbiome is off, we could be reabsorbing some of our estrogen and recirculating, and now we get a whole host of you know, if estrogen's too high, we're more prone to mood issues or even, you know, sexual dysfunction and and also pain conditions. So it's so just amazing how everything is so intertwined. It is.
And I think that's I'm hoping that's one of the biggest things that everybody's really taking away from this talk is, like, we really need to when we're talking about sexuality, when we're talking about things like vaginal health, we really need to stop looking just in these areas. Right? Because everywhere in the body can be connected.
And in the show notes from today's episode, you guys, you're gonna see something that is super exciting that I said at the beginning of this interview, which is doctor Betsy and I are putting together this the summit. It's totally free. And you're gonna we're going gonna go into this topic with doctor Betsy even more.
She's gonna talk a lot about the gut and how that's in interplayed with this, how to get more lab testing to see if these are the problems because if everything's connected, we don't know what the problem is unless we test. So we're gonna go into that and so much more in the sexual health summit, totally free. Sign up in the show notes. And just to make sure we're wrapping this up nicely, tell everybody how they get a hold of you, which we will also put in the show notes.
Yeah. Well, first of all, I definitely highly encourage you guys because we've been working on this summit, and the interviews are I'm even blown away with the experts that we've been interviewing, and I've been learning so much. So other places you can find me, social media anywhere and everywhere. Like, especially if you like funny videos. I have a quirky sense of humor. So if you have a quirky sense of humor, come along. Other places are the Pelvic Floor Store.
I'll have a discount too for 10% off. It'll be Lubido Lounge ten. I'll get you that link. And then we have Femversity. We're horses, and there's and you can go to doctorbetsygreenleaf.com to see links to podcast and Internet shows that I have done so that are really informative also. So Perfect. Perfect. Well, thank you so much for your time today, and thank you everybody. We'll see you next time for our next libido lounge episode. Bye bye. Thank you for listening to the libido lounge.
Please don't keep me a secret. Please share this with your friends. You can find me on YouTube, on Instagram, as well as how to work with me at mylibidodoc.com.