Who’s telling us what to do on our periods – and why does it matter?
Thanks to the onward march of feminism, many of us know that healthcare was often not designed with women in mind. Although we have come a long way from dismissing women’s health concerns as wandering wombs or penis envy, issues with research gaps, health inequalities, and misdiagnoses remain.
Nowhere has this confusion found a better home than our periods. Although a recent promise to fund further menstrual education for girls in school in the UK is a step in the right direction, for a long time periods have been dismissed as messy, dirty, or simply a confounder that messes up a perfectly balanced clinical trial.
Over the millennia, this has led to women passing down health advice as stories, fables, words of caution: an often oral history flowing underneath the written record of male medical progress. For example, we know that working class women in medieval France met in secret to discuss their knowledge of pregnancy and childbirth, due to surviving texts.
Fast forward to 2026, where this tradition has run smack bang into the information age. If you’re a young woman, your Instagram and TikTok feeds are likely rife with ‘women’s health’ advice, telling you what and more importantly what you must not do, 24/7: you must do this many handstands in the luteal phase, eat 67g of fibrous grains a day in the menstrual phase, and make sure you unleash your business potential in the follicular phase. Oh, and definitely don’t make any big decisions while the moon is full!
I jest, but it’s understandable that we should gravitate towards shared knowledge; periods can be confusing, overwhelming, and in some cases, scary. Furthermore, navigating health information can quickly become a full-time job (and for many people, it is!). But all women have a right to accessible, transparent, and accurate health information.
So, faced with a bombardment of unregulated content, where do we even start? How do we find the balance between respecting the informal oral traditions of our foremothers, and wanting some rock solid Nature-worthy evidence? How many of social media’s recommendations help promote our health, and how much do they over-measure, over-regiment; the by-product of a hustle and clean-girl culture, aiming for an elusive and sterile perfection? And what happens when health information collides with commercial aims and self promotion?
How credible is menstrual health content?
The research in this area is in its infancy, due to the youth of social media and its fast-moving nature, but a couple of studies can start to give us an indication.
Olsson and colleagues, at Texan Christian University, explored menstrual health content on TikTok. They noted how in theory, short-form video’s features have the potential to easily produce accessible, taboo-breaking content. In actuality, they noted how in the 140 videos they explored, 36% gave ‘hacks’ or tips, but their credibility was low: only around 9% were created by registered health professionals.
At Coventry University, Marks and Jones focused specifically on nutrition in an exploration of menstrual health content on Instagram. Upon analysing 52 posts, they observed how posts often oversimplified biological mechanisms and made menstrual health difficulties appear ‘solvable’ via self-management. The authors noted how posts tended to promote a prescriptive tailoring of diet to each phase of the menstrual cycle, which has a weak evidence base. They describe how in reality, only broader and longer-term dietary strategies’ impact on menstrual symptoms is strongly supported.
It is illuminating to consider these posts in the context of today’s society. Marks and Jones point to research at Rutgers University which found women’s health self-help books consistently promoted unachievable ideals of ‘hormonal balance’. The books encouraged intensive and inflexible lifestyle practices, requiring excesses of time, money, and mental effort. The study’s authors describe a vicious cycle of fast-paced life, where women’s health is damaged from modern stresses and strains, and yet we are pushed to ‘cure’ this damage via relentless self-perfection. Endless optimisation, not health, has seemed to become the goal.
“an
MacKendrick & Troxel (2022)
illusion or fantasy…[perfect] hormone balance reflects the desires of a narrow slice
of society that holds considerable social and economic privilege”
It’s also important to question the ‘who’. Marks and Jones observed more professional authors than Olsson, coming in at 67%, but they also observed how 95% of accounts creating menstrual content were involved in product promotion. When we add this commercial intent to the perfectionistic regimens being pushed, the atmosphere starts to look a lot more sinister.
So…now what?
Menstrual health is confusing. Its clinical research base is contradictory, and symptoms vary greatly between individuals: what’s right for one of us isn’t right for another. Many women may also have an underlying distrust of clinicians in this area, due to experiences where valid concerns were dismissed. Historically, knowledge sharing has helped women tackle these barriers, and social media has the potential to make support even more accessible.
However, these factors also make menstrual health content highly vulnerable to misinformation. This combined with social media’s tendency to promote perfection, the trend for constant health monitoring, and the pervasiveness of product promotion, means we have to keep our wits about us. In the context of rising misogyny, too, we have to be wary of anyone who portrays women’s decisions or work as less reliable at different times of the month.
Although they might be heavy or slow us down, we have to keep our critical hats on: who is telling us what to believe, and why? And take time to consider what, for us – not for the influencers we see – does good menstrual health actually look like?