Last Saturday I bought a full slab of ribs from Buckhorn’s.

I had a long Saturday at the office ahead of me. Packing lunch wasn’t happening. Buckhorn’s was.

I ordered a full rack and a salad. You know. Balance. The plan was to portion out Saturday’s lunch and save the rest for Sunday. Sensible in theory.

What I did not plan for was two days of hot flashes that didn’t stop until Monday.​

I’m learning to pay attention to my body. This got my attention.

The week before the ribs I was eating mostly chicken. Fried, grilled, rotisserie — whatever was convenient. Just the typical occasional warming. Nothing worth paying attention to.

Saturday night in bed: hot flashes. Sunday during the day as I finished off the remaining ribs at lunch: more flashes. Sunday evening: still going. It wasn’t until Monday or Tuesday that I noticed things had quieted down. And when I backtracked to find the variable, the answer was sitting right there.

The ribs.

Normally when I have ribs it’s 3 or 4 and I’m done. This time I ate a full rack of ribs across two days. A meaningful difference in quantity. And they were really good — which made the portion control situation worse.

I’ll admit — for approximately thirty seconds I wondered whether ribs might be a useful strategy on cold nights. Built-in warmth. Then I remembered the sleep. The tossing. The turning.

I didn’t connect food to hot flashes in any specific way before this. I knew inflammation was real — cheese taught me that years ago, though I haven’t traced that one upstream yet. But pork and hot flashes? That connection wasn’t on my radar.

I mentioned it to a friend. Then I did what engineers do. I went looking for the root cause.

Here’s what I found.

Pork — especially in the quantity I consumed — is one of the highest dietary sources of something called arachidonic acid. I never heard of it before. Now I can’t stop seeing it everywhere.

Think of it as kindling. Your body actually needs some of it — it plays a role in muscle repair and normal immune response. But when you consume a large amount in a short window, you’re handing your body a pile of kindling all at once. The inflammatory response that follows is proportional to the load you gave it.

Here’s where it gets personal. Estrogen has anti-inflammatory properties. As estrogen declines during perimenopause, your inflammatory baseline is already running higher than it used to. The fire is already more reactive. I didn’t know that before. But it explains a lot — not just the hot flashes. It reframes how I think about food, recovery, joint discomfort, even mood on hard days. Inflammation isn’t one thing happening in one place. It’s a system. And I was feeding that system without knowing it.

Chicken has dramatically lower arachidonic acid than pork. Same protein category. Very different input to the same system. Different output.

That’s not a coincidence. That’s data.
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I didn’t eat beef that week so I couldn’t draw any conclusions from this observation. But beef sits in an interesting middle position. Its arachidonic acid content is lower than pork but higher than chicken — and from what I’ve since learned, that range varies significantly depending on whether it’s grass-fed or grain-fed.

Grass-fed beef apparently has a much better omega-3 to omega-6 ratio than grain-fed. That ratio matters because it directly influences how much arachidonic acid gets produced in your body after eating. Two steaks from different sources may not be the same inflammatory input at all.

So the next step is an actual experiment. Beef — in a quantity worth measuring — tracked intentionally against my baseline. Grass-fed versus conventional if I can source both.

I’ll report back when I have data worth sharing.

I’m not telling you to stop eating pork. I’m not telling you that ribs cause hot flashes. I’m telling you what happened in my body when I ate a full rack across two days — and what I found when I traced it upstream.

Your body may respond completely differently. Or it may not. The only way to know is to start paying attention in a way that’s systematic enough to actually tell you something.

Here’s the simplest version of what that looks like.

You’re not looking for perfection. You’re looking for patterns. Patterns are navigable. Surprises are not.

This is what Women’s Time Out is built on. Not telling you what your body will do. Helping you build the framework to figure it out yourself.

Educational only. Not medical advice. Supplements are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. Consult your healthcare provider.