A video has been going around in which Dr Eric Berg makes a claim most women have never heard: that it is not normal to have any symptoms during menopause, and that the reason you do comes down to your adrenal glands.
It is worth taking seriously enough to actually look at, because the underlying biology he is pointing at is real, and because the question he raises is one almost nobody else is asking out loud.
Here is what he says, where the established science agrees with him, and where it goes further or disagrees.
Who is making the claim
Dr Eric Berg, DC. He is a chiropractor rather than a medical doctor or an endocrinologist, which he states himself in his own video description. He has built an audience of several million people over many years, largely on low carb and ketogenic nutrition, and a lot of women trust him more than they trust the last GP who told them it was stress.
We are quoting his argument, not endorsing it. Read it the way you would read any confident voice on the internet, including this one: as something to take to a professional, not as instructions.
His argument, in his words
He opens with the frustration a lot of women will recognise:
"It's very strange to me that someone going through menopause would have to suffer with hot flashes, night sweats, vaginal dryness, decreased libido, anxiety, depression. And we're told that these symptoms are normal. It's part of life. We just have to cope with it and accept it."
His answer to whether that is true:
"No, it's absolutely false information. When you go through menopause, you have two backup organs. They're called the adrenals. And the adrenals make all of the hormones that the ovaries make."
From there he builds a chain. Every adrenal hormone is manufactured from cholesterol as its raw material. Cholesterol is therefore not a villain but a required input. Most cholesterol is made by your own body rather than eaten, and dietary cholesterol comes only from animal products, never from plants or plant oils. So, he argues, a low fat diet or cholesterol lowering medication starves the adrenals of the raw material they need, and menopausal symptoms are one of the results.
His practical suggestion is to add animal fats back, with grass fed butter as his number one, plus fatty cheese, cream, egg yolks, seafood and organ meats. He pairs it with a warning to keep carbohydrates low at the same time, and suggests vitamin D and bile salts to help with digestion and absorption.
Where he is on solid ground
The adrenals really do make sex hormones. This part is straightforward endocrinology and it is not fringe. Your adrenal glands produce DHEA and androstenedione, which are precursor hormones. After the ovaries wind down, these precursors get converted into oestrogen and testosterone in peripheral tissues, including fat tissue. For a post-menopausal woman, this pathway becomes a meaningful source of the sex hormones she still has.
All steroid hormones are built from cholesterol. Also true, and not controversial. Oestrogen, progesterone, testosterone, cortisol, aldosterone and DHEA are all downstream of cholesterol. So is vitamin D. So are the bile salts you need to digest fat.
Most of your cholesterol is self-manufactured. Your body produces the large majority of its own cholesterol rather than absorbing it from food, which is one reason dietary cholesterol turned out to have far less effect on blood cholesterol than was assumed for decades.
Adrenal health genuinely matters in this transition. The idea that chronic stress in midlife interacts badly with a hormonal transition is not quackery. It is one of the more sensible framings around.
Where it goes further than the evidence
Being straight with you, because you deserve the whole picture rather than the half that is more fun to share.
"It is not normal to have any symptoms" does not hold. Symptoms during the menopause transition are close to universal across populations, cultures and body types. Saying they are not normal implies that every woman with hot flushes has done something wrong, and that is both unsupported and unkind. The more useful framing is the one this whole site is built on: symptoms are common, and being dismissed about them is not acceptable. Common does not mean you have to suffer through them without help.
The adrenals do not fully replace the ovaries. They contribute, and that contribution matters. But adrenal output is a fraction of what functioning ovaries produced, and it is not designed to be a like for like substitute. That is the difference between a real backup and a full replacement.
"Add butter and symptoms magically disappear" is not established. There is no clinical evidence that increasing dietary cholesterol resolves menopausal symptoms. It is a mechanistic story, meaning it sounds coherent because each individual link is true, but a chain of true links does not by itself prove the outcome. That step needs trials and they have not been done.
His statin claims run against the evidence base. He states that statins increase cancer risk. That is contrary to the weight of the research. Statins do have real side effects worth discussing honestly with a doctor, and muscle symptoms are a genuine reason some people stop them. But nobody should stop a prescribed medication based on a video, including this one.
One practical note. He mentions using raw cream from a local farm. Unpasteurised dairy carries a real infection risk, and it is a risk worth knowing about before copying that specific habit.
The useful question underneath all of it
Strip out the butter and what remains is a good question, and one very few women get asked: what else is loading your system during this transition?
If you are under sustained stress, undereating, chronically under-slept, or on a very low fat diet, you are asking a body already managing a major hormonal shift to do it with less. That is a reasonable thing to look at with a professional. It sits alongside the conversation about hormone therapy rather than replacing it.
What is not reasonable is the version of this that circulates online, where a nutritional fix becomes a reason to skip the appointment. The women who lose the most years to this transition are the ones who kept trying the next thing on the internet instead of walking in with a record and being taken seriously.
What to actually do with this
Take the question, not the prescription. If you want to raise it, these are answerable:
Could my thyroid, iron, B12 or vitamin D be contributing? Is there anything in my diet or stress load making this harder than it needs to be? What are my options, including hormone therapy, and what are the trade-offs for someone with my history?
Those are questions a good clinician can work with. They are also considerably harder to wave away when you arrive with a dated record of what your body has actually been doing, which is the entire point of tracking it.
Ember provides educational information and personal tracking. It does not provide medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Quotes above are attributed to Dr Eric Berg, DC, and are reproduced for discussion, not as recommendations. Never start or stop a medication based on anything you read online. Always talk to a qualified health professional about your symptoms.
Ember tracks your symptoms in sixty seconds a night, finds your pattern, and turns it into a dated report you can hand across the desk. Everything stays on your phone.
Coming to the App StoreOur goal for 2026 is to help one million women understand what their own body is doing. One million women who stopped being told it was just stress.