Diet has a vital role to play in dealing with the menopause | Letters

While I applaud publicising and myth-busting the menopause (“I just coped, as others do: breaking the silence about the menopause”, In Focus), I am sorry that nowhere in the article did you mention diet as a means of dealing with menopausal side-effects.

The beginning of my menopause was a nightly sheet-wringing affair and daily having to pull over in the car to urgently strip off before I melted. About that time, I exchanged meat and dairy products for tofu and soya milk alternatives. Soon afterwards, the sweats subsided, then stopped. I thought I was one of the lucky ones, but I then learned that an oriental diet, low in meat and dairy and high in soya, which contains phytoestrogens, was the more likely reason. Menopause is not an illness, it’s a fact of life, and the reaction to administer drugs to treat the symptoms is sad.

In the early days of my transition, I found that suddenly stripping off in public places for an impending hot flush was best dealt with an: “Excuse me, I’m having a menopausal!” and laughing. Since laughing is infectious, everyone laughed with me (albeit sometimes nervously).
Stephanie Fuger
Matlock, Derbyshire

Nazis knew the BBC’s power

There has never been much doubt about the integrity and quality of the BBC’s wartime broadcasts to Nazi Germany. Their significance for that nebulous entity, “the German people”, is less certain (“How the BBC’s truth offensive beat Hitler’s propaganda machine”, News).

Nazi propaganda succeeded in seducing huge sections of the German population, especially among the young, while a draconian law passed at the outbreak of the war imposed such heavy penalties on listeners to foreign broadcasts, including capital punishment for passing on such information, that it was likely to discourage all but the most intrepid anti-Nazi.

Its most consistent and attentive listener was Hitler’s minister of information, Joseph Goebbels, who, sensing the potential danger, refused even high-ranking Nazi colleagues permission to listen to the BBC. Nazi terror ensured that even in the last stages of a clearly lost war “the German people” would stage no uprisings against their moribund overlords.

The BBC’s German Service failed in its mission to enlighten the misguided “German people”. The listeners to this splendid service were people like my Nazi-hating mother, who took huge comfort from the knowledge that beyond the confines of their now so deadly country was another world that cared and would fight to overcome the evil that gripped Germany.
Carla Wartenberg
London NW3

Heavy weather, Nick

It seems that whatever Nick Cohen writes about, he has set himself the task of inserting at least one gratuitous swipe at the left wing of the Labour party. If he was asked to write the Observer’s weather forecast, he’d probably find a way of blaming them for every approaching thunderstorm.

Last week, for instance, writing about George Soros and the Hungarian government, he managed to contrive a reference to what he described as “the Labour left’s claim that Hitler was a Zionist”. That’s quite a sweeping, damaging accusation, apparently aimed at the whole of the Labour left. Yet the recent crude, insensitive and provocative suggestion by Ken Livingstone that Hitler “was supporting Zionism” was widely condemned by Jeremy Corbyn, John McDonnell and most of that very same “Labour left”.
John Marais
Cambridge

MacKenzie is his own nemesis

I agree with Barbara Ellen’s piece “Read all about it. MacKenzie is no man of the people” (Comment). However, I would go further as Kelvin MacKenzie displays the classic symptoms of addictive behaviour, whereby someone has compulsive patterns of behaviour and cannot help themselves.

MacKenzie has made a few of these ill-advised stands, making ridiculous pronouncements since his terrible stance on Hillsborough and one has to have some compassion for the man who is on a self-destruct mission. These desperate attempts to keep himself in the frame are another form of attention-seeking. Of course, the management of the Sun should have put themselves, any sub-editors, the editor and any journalists party to the piece before publication on gardening leave immediately, without waiting to see the reaction.
Martin Sandaver
Hay-on-Wye

Enough of this codswallop

Your business leader column on corporate speak reminded me that it is not only the corporate world that suffers from meaningless jargon intended to fool the listener/reader into believing that something meaningful has been uttered.

Corporate speak is spoken by those who wish to exclude from their conversations those who are not deemed suitable to be admitted to their heady heights. Nowhere is this more manifest than in the corridors of government and civil administration. They are all talking codswallop to each other, but no one has the cojones to be the first to admit that they do not understand what has been said.
Paul F Faupel
Somersham, Cambridgeshire

Diet has a vital role to play in dealing with the menopause | Letters