Men used to shape Spain’s official menopause advice in extraordinary research blunder

Iron and vitamin C guidance meant for women going through menopause turned out to rest on studies of men’s bodies alone. Spain’s food safety agency has now pulled the report entirely and ordered its scientists to start again from scratch.

Recommendations built entirely on data from men’s bodies 

AESAN, Spain’s food safety and nutrition agency, published the report in April 2026. It set out nutritional risks for women during menopause, perimenopause and postmenopause, three stages that between them can span decades of a woman’s life.

Its reference table for iron and vitamin C intake, though, was drawn entirely from European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) data collected from men. Those figures were extrapolated by body weight to apply to women aged 40 and above, without the report making that limitation clear to anyone using it for guidance. 

EFSA’s own research had repeatedly noted that no equivalent data existed for women. AESAN’s version, however, left that caveat out. 

A researcher spotted the gap while studying vitamin C herself

The problem surfaced when Sonia de Pascual-Teresa, a food science researcher at Spain’s National Research Council (CSIC), went looking for the source data behind AESAN’s figures while working on her own project into vitamin C and perimenopause.

“No hay datos en mujeres, son datos de hombres” (there is no data on women, it’s data on men), she said, once she had traced the numbers back to their origin. She added that it was simply easier to study men, which is why so much of the underlying research leaned male in the first place.

The Spanish Association of Women Researchers and Technologists (AMIT) took up the case publicly, and elDiario first reported the discrepancy on Wednesday August 26.

AESAN scraps the report rather than issue a correction

AESAN initially suggested a straightforward fix, but by Thursday September 17 it had gone further, withdrawing the report altogether and asking its scientific committee to produce an entirely new version.

The agency acknowledged what it called an “absence of research with specific recommendations from data obtained in women,” rather than treating the male-only figures as an acceptable stand-in. The replacement will again cover menopause, perimenopause and postmenopause, this time built around whatever female-specific evidence actually exists. 

Equality Minister Ana Redondo said publicly that it was about time women appeared in health research and agendas, adding that the male body needed to stop being treated as the universal reference point. 

Why women were left out of the data for so long

The gap is not unique to this one report either. Women were routinely excluded from clinical and nutritional research for decades because their hormonal cycles were considered an inconvenient variable, one that made results harder to standardise than a more uniform group of male subjects.

That non-inclusive preference for simplicity left large areas of medicine, including menopause itself, built on evidence gathered almost entirely from men, then applied to women by assumption rather than by testing. 

Spain’s €18 million pledge to catch up

Spain had already put money behind closing that gap. In June, Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez announced the government would triple its dedicated research funding for women’s health to €18 million a year, under a programme covering endometriosis, autoimmune disease, hormonal disorders, heart health and mental health.

Science Minister Diana Morant said research had to look at what it had previously ignored, warning that conditions science does not study cannot properly be understood or treated.