Nutrition brand ZOE launches 'MenoScale' calculator
Nutrition brand ZOE launches 'MenoScale' calculator
MenoScale is a free online resource to help make sense of menopause symptoms
Nutrition brand Zoe has signalled its intention to enter the menopause space, launching a free online resource to assess symptoms.
Best known for its at-home tests that measure blood sugar and blood fat levels, Zoe has designed a calculator to help evaluate menopause symptoms in order to effectively support them through nutrition.
The calculator uses data from thousands of participants, modern accessible language and is available for free online. Notably, the calculator measures the ‘burden’ of menopause symptoms - in other words how the symptoms impact life.
Writing on the Zoe blog, the start-up explains:
“This new calculator may help clinicians and academics learn more about menopause. Importantly, it may also empower individuals by helping them understand their symptoms and how they impact their lives.
“MenoScale can help you make sense of your symptoms and understand how different interventions — like dietary changes — affect your symptoms.”
Designing the calculator using research
The design of the calculator was informed with data from 27,932 people who were perimenopausal and 42,480 people who were postmenopausal.
They rated the frequency and impact on quality of life of 20 common symptoms from 0 (not at all) to 5 (extremely). After adding up the score from each symptom, they got a score out of 100, where 0 is no symptoms at all, and a higher score means a greater symptom burden.
Symptoms were then split into four domains: vasomotor, sexual, psychological and somatic.
Research found that 99.8% of perimenopausal participants had one or more symptoms. Weight gain and slowed metabolism (30.7%), low libido (26.2%) and fatigue (24.3%) were rated the most severe during perimenopause.
The nutrition connection
The research also found links between symptom scores and diet quality.
By improving diet quality, and depending on the symptoms, the likelihood of experiencing a symptom decreased by 6% to 37% for those in perimenopause and 12% to 43% for those in postmenopause. Findings from this work were recently presented at the Nutrition Society Congress 2024.
ZOE then recruited participants to a testing phase to follow ZOE during menopause. On average, after following ZOE, participants’ MenoScale scores dropped significantly:
By 8.7 points in the perimenopausal group.
By 6.6 points in the postmenopausal group.
Despite these positive results, ZOE does issue caution on the findings:
“These results are exciting: On average, in this study, a healthier diet was associated with reduced menopause symptom scores in these participants.
“But we need to do more research; this is just the start. Importantly, this study didn’t have a control group, so we don’t know whether the symptoms improved because people were excited to try ZOE or because they made other changes to their health, like stopping smoking, sleeping better, or generally improving their lifestyle.
“We hope to build on this research in the future. Still, it’s becoming clearer that diet quality may be linked to menopause symptoms.”