Menopause became mainstream. Then everyone started selling us something.

Menopause advice is everywhere. How do you know what to believe?

A decade ago, women struggled to find reliable information about menopause.

Now we are being told to eat more protein, lift heavy, take creatine, optimise our hormones and buy an ever-growing list of products designed for midlife.

More information should be a good thing.

So why does it feel harder than ever to know who to trust?

As recently as a decade ago, HRT still seemed to exist in a strange, shadowy corner of women’s health.

Doctors could be hesitant to prescribe it, women were often poorly informed about it, and many were left trying to manage significant menopause symptoms with supplements, natural remedies and sheer endurance.

Now the menopause landscape looks completely different.

The silence has gone, which is undoubtedly a good thing.

Women are talking about symptoms that were once dismissed or simply endured, and menopause has finally found its way into mainstream health conversations.

But in place of the silence has come an avalanche of advice.

And it is no longer just about HRT.

We are being told to eat more protein.

Much more protein.

Most of us are getting thoroughly sick of cottage cheese.

We should be lifting heavy, taking creatine, protecting our bones, preserving muscle, fixing our sleep and reconsidering almost everything we thought we knew about ageing.

There are supplements, programmes, powders, courses, coaches, weighted vests and an increasingly long list of things a woman in her 40s or 50s is apparently doing wrong.

Some of that advice is backed by good evidence.

Some appears to be an exaggerated version of good evidence.

And some is being delivered by people who also happen to have something to sell.

Once menopause became visible, it also became commercial.

The result is that women have gone from struggling to find information to trying to work out which information they can actually trust.

Christchurch-based gynaecological endocrinologist and menopause specialist Dr Anna Fenton agrees the pendulum has swung a very long way.

“We’ve gone from famine to feast,” she says.

“There’s a lot of information out there. It’s really good on one level that people are talking about this and women are getting access to information, but I don’t know how the average person navigates their way through the morass of information that’s out there and actually knows who to trust and who not to trust.”

When everyone is a menopause expert

Fenton recalls scrolling through social media recently and coming across a post naming the top 100 menopause influencers.

“There’s a lot of people out there from variable backgrounds, including some doctors, that are providing very variable information, and not all of it is evidence-based.”

Fenton says more clinicians and researchers with academic and evidence-based backgrounds are now joining those online conversations and challenging claims that move beyond the science.

That matters because qualifications alone do not necessarily make every piece of health advice reliable.

Nor does an idea have to be completely wrong to become misleading.

Something can begin with legitimate research and then be stretched into a much broader claim than the evidence supports.

And social media is particularly good at stripping away the boring bits of science: the qualifications, the uncertainty, the “this may help some people in these particular circumstances”.

“Do this” is simply more compelling.

Then there is the money.

Fenton had just returned from the Australasian Menopause Society Congress in Sydney when we spoke, where Canadian obstetrician-gynaecologist and author Dr Jen Gunter had addressed the commercialisation of menopause.

Fenton says Gunter described the monetisation of menopause as almost “a new form of medical misogyny”, with women at risk of being taken advantage of by people making money from their search for answers.

It is a confronting way to frame it, particularly after decades in which women arguably could not get enough attention paid to menopause.

Now that the attention has arrived, it is worth asking who benefits from some of the messages we are being given.

Do we really need to “lift heavy”?

Resistance exercise is a good example of how a sound health message can become more extreme by the time it reaches social media.

There is little argument over the importance of maintaining muscle and bone health as we age, and Fenton strongly supports resistance training.

What worries her is the increasingly emphatic instruction that midlife women must “lift heavy”.

“That really gives me the heebie-jeebies,” she says.

Fenton says an expert speaking at the AMS Congress specifically addressed the idea that very heavy weights are necessary to achieve cardiovascular or bone benefits.

“You don’t need to lift heavy weights to get the cardiovascular or bone benefits. We’ve seen it in our osteoporosis trials that you don’t need heavy weights.”

The danger comes when a previously inactive woman takes the message literally and jumps straight into lifting loads her body is not prepared for.

Fenton says she has seen patients new to resistance training start by deadlifting 50kg and suffer vertebral fractures.

Her message is not to avoid resistance training. It is to build up appropriately.

“For people who are not used to gym work and resistance exercise, yes, lift heavy, but build up from a light weight to begin with. The benefits are still there with weights that most of us can manage.”

And what about all that protein?

Then there is protein.

If your social media algorithm has identified you as a woman over 40, it can sometimes feel as though you are only ever one scroll away from someone explaining why you need another 30 grams of it.

Protein matters, particularly for maintaining muscle, but Fenton says the message that everyone needs to dramatically increase their intake deserves more scrutiny.

At the AMS Congress, she attended a presentation by Professor Robin Daly that covered exercise and nutrition.

“His take-home message is that most people don’t need to eat extra protein because we’re already getting enough in our diet,” she says.

Fenton says Daly also cautioned about very high protein intakes and their potential effects on bone health.

For most people already eating adequate protein, she says the message was that simply adding more is unlikely to make a dramatic difference.

Which may come as something of a relief to anyone staring down another bowl of cottage cheese.

Creatine: useful, but not magic

Creatine is another supplement that has moved rapidly into the midlife conversation.

Here, Fenton’s position is more nuanced than either “everyone should take it” or “it’s nonsense”.

Used alongside resistance exercise, she says creatine “probably helps to improve muscle function further”.

But the exercise part matters.

“It does absolutely nothing by itself if you’re not undertaking resistance exercise.”

She is also unconvinced by claims increasingly made online that creatine improves brain fog or mental clarity in menopausal women.

The broader pattern is becoming familiar.

A substance or intervention may have evidence supporting a particular benefit. Online, that benefit can quickly expand into a much longer list.

Where the evidence ends and the promise begins is not always obvious.

The gaps are where the noise gets in

None of this means women should stop asking questions, distrust every new development or dismiss anything that has not yet accumulated decades of research.

Women’s health has genuine research gaps. That is part of the problem.

Fenton says Gunter made this point at the Sydney congress.

“There are holes in terms of our research in women’s health and no one debates that.”

But where evidence is incomplete, certainty has a habit of rushing in.

“What is happening is that people are moving in to fill those gaps with their own spin on things,” Fenton says.

“There’s a lot of vulnerable women who are looking for answers out there. That’s my concern.”

That vulnerability is understandable.

If you are exhausted, anxious, not sleeping, struggling with your weight, losing confidence in your body or simply feeling unlike yourself, someone confidently telling you they know the missing piece can be enormously persuasive.

Particularly when the medical system has not always provided satisfactory answers.

How do you know who to trust?

There is no perfect shortcut, but Fenton says there are some useful checks.

Be aware of whether the person making a health claim is also selling the solution.

Look at whether the advice reflects recognised evidence and whether it aligns with reputable professional organisations rather than relying on one individual’s interpretation.

And use expert organisations to check what you are hearing elsewhere.

Fenton particularly recommends the Australasian Menopause Society, which provides patient information designed to be accessible rather than written in medical jargon.

The point is not that everything on social media is wrong. Far from it.

The problem is that accurate information, emerging research, personal experience, commercial marketing and outright overstatement can all arrive in exactly the same Instagram feed, looking remarkably similar.

And even health professionals can find it difficult to separate solid evidence from claims that sound plausible.

Fenton says doctors can come across information from people who appear reputable and still need to check whether what is being said is actually supported by the evidence.

“If they can’t figure it out, how can the average Joan Kiwi out there?” she says.

“The average Joan Kiwi is really up against it.”

Maybe we are simply at the noisy part

When I last interviewed Fenton years ago, menopause was barely part of the mainstream conversation.

Now, sometimes, it feels as though we cannot escape it.

Fenton compares the way new health information develops to the shape of an ECG trace: a small movement followed by a dramatic spike before things eventually settle again.

“I think we’re probably on that really steep rise at the moment,” she says.

“And it will kind of even out.”

Perhaps that is where menopause sits in 2026.

We needed more conversation, more research and better treatment. We still do.

But women also deserve something beyond a constantly expanding list of things to buy, eat, lift, take and optimise.

More information is not necessarily better information.

And somewhere between the silence we had before and the noise we have now, there has to be room for something considerably more useful: good evidence, sensible context and the freedom to ignore the cottage cheese if you really cannot face another spoonful.

About Dr Anna Fenton

Dr Anna Fenton is a Christchurch-based gynaecological endocrinologist and menopause specialist.

A note about medical information

This article is for general information and education only. It is not personalised medical advice and is not a substitute for advice from your own health professional. Individual health needs vary, and dietary, exercise, supplement and menopause treatment decisions should take your own circumstances into account.