California Proposition 65 & Various Q&A

00:00 Well, once again, welcome and thank you for tuning into this month’s Ask Your Herb Doctor. My name’s Andrew Murray. For those of you who perhaps have never listened to the show before, we have a very special guest speaker with us, Dr. Raymond Peat. There is the odd occasion where people have called in, they’ve never heard him before, but I know a lot of people that listening to the show are listening purely to glimpse some of his insights, because I know he’s always got a different answer for things. The number here, if you’re in the area, 707-986-923-3911, or there’s an 800 number for people outside the area code, which is 1-800-KMUD-RAD. From 7.30 until the end of the show at 8 o’clock, you’re invited to call in with any questions either related or unrelated to this month’s topic of Cal Prop 65, California’s Proposition 65. I started very briefly towards the end of July’s show, saying I wanted to bring out 01:04 some inconsistencies or incongruencies with Prop 65 in the legislature in California. And we’ll be bringing Dr. Peat on here in probably 10 or 15 minutes. I wanted to outline some specific testing that we’ve done personally for products as part of GMP protocol for ICP-MS testing of metals, and specifically for the California Proposition 65 metals, which are arsenic, cadmium, lead, and mercury. So what I wanted to start with was the 1986 California Voters Approved Initiative to address the growing concerns about exposure to toxic chemicals, and that initiative became a Safe Drinking Water and Toxic Enforcement Act of 1986, better known by its original name of Prop 65. Prop 65 requires a state to publish a list of chemicals known to cause cancer, or birth defects or other reproductive harm. This list, which must be updated at least once a year, has grown to include approximately 02:08 800 chemicals since it was first published in 1987. And Prop 65 requires businesses to notify Californians about significant amounts of chemicals in the products they purchase, in their homes or workplaces, or that are released into the environment. By providing this information, Prop 65 enables Californians to make informed decisions about protecting themselves from exposure to these chemicals. And Prop 65 also prohibits California businesses from knowingly discharging significant amounts of listed chemicals into sources of drinking water, hooray you say. The Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment, the OEHHA, as only these acronyms can be so stupendously long, administers the Prop 65 program. OEHHA, which is part of the California Environmental Protection Agency, also evaluates all currently available scientific information on substances considered for placement on the Prop 65 list. Two months ago, and the month prior to that, it was made June and July, we did a program 03:11 with Dr. P on progesterone explaining how the marginalization and demonization, if you like, actually of progesterone is completely wrong and how the scientific evidence to put it on the Prop 65 list was completely erroneous. And there are very, very innocuous products that are on the Prop 65 list that you probably have never, never heard of or never imagined could be on there. Prop 65 labels are just becoming increasingly apparent in stores, especially in the supplement departments where you walk the aisles of the supplement departments and take a look at whatever products you’re looking at for alternative healthcare. And you’ll often find these small Prop 65 labels stuck on the bottles, just purely saying that the products may contain chemicals known to the state of California to cause reproductive harm or cancer. And as we’ll find out, it’s a lot of litigation, fear, it’s not really factual, and I’m going 04:17 to bring out some very striking incongruencies here. Now, a chemical can either be listed if either of two independent committees or scientists and health professionals find that the chemical has been clearly shown to cause cancer or birth defects or other reproductive harm. And these two committees, the Carcinogen Identification Committee, the CIC, and a Developmental and Reproductive Toxicant Identification, this is a DART, they’re part of OEHHAS’s Science Advisory Board. The committee members are appointed by the governor and are designated as the state’s qualified experts. And these are experts for evaluating chemicals under Prop 65. When determining whether a chemical should be placed on the list, the committees base their decision on the most current scientific information available, and the OEHHAS staff scientists compile all relevant scientific evidence on various chemicals for the committees to review. The committees also consider comments from the public before making their decisions. 05:20 So that’s the first way. The second way for a chemical to be listed is if an organization designated as an authoritative body by the CIC or DART, the Identification Committee, has identified it as causing cancer, birth defects or other reproductive harm. The following organizations have been designated as authoritative bodies, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, the National Toxicology Program, and the International Agency for Research on Cancer. A third way for a chemical to be listed is if an agency of the state or federal government requires that it be labeled or identified as causing cancer or birth defects or other reproductive harm. Now most chemicals listed in this manner are prescription drugs that are required by the U.S. FDA to contain warnings relating to cancer or birth defects or other reproductive harm. We’ve seen plenty of drugs like that. 06:20 Now the fourth way requires the listing of chemicals meeting certain scientific criteria and identified in the California Labor Code as causing cancer or birth defects or other reproductive harm. And this method established the initial chemical list following voter approval of Prop 65 in 1986 and continues to be used as the basis for listing as appropriate. Now how about this? Businesses with less than 10 employees and government agencies are exempt from Proposition 65 warning requirements and prohibition on discharges into water drinking sources. Okay, did you catch that? So if your business has less than 10 employees or you’re a government agency, you’re completely exempt from discharging waste into drinking water and the relevant Prop 65 warnings. So Proposition 65’s warning requirement has provided on the upside an incentive for manufacturers to remove listed chemicals from their products. 07:22 For example, trichloroethylene which causes cancer is no longer used in most correction fluids for wiping out type. And paint strippers do not contain the carcinogen, methylene chloride and toluene which causes birth defects or other reproductive harm has been removed from many nail care products. In addition, the Prop 65 enforcement action prompted manufacturers to decrease the lead content in ceramic tableware and wineries to eliminate the use of lead containing foil caps on wine bottles. So whilst the Prop has some very positive benefits, it drastically needs reframing within a realistic criteria. How can a business with fewer than 10 employees be exempt from a legislation that would sue a larger company producing the same product? And how is it that commonly available foodstuffs are far over the maximum available daily limit currently in place and legislated for by Prop 65? It seems the only winners from Proposition 65 are the attorneys who bring the lawsuits 08:27 and there are some additional facts that are not so commonly known. And the chief amongst these are, since Californians have been warned of possible carcinogens for the past 27 years, one would expect to see a decline in cancer rates compared to those states that didn’t adopt similar right to no laws, in fact no such decline exists. There isn’t a single medical study that demonstrates any public health benefits of Proposition 65 and there is no evidence that Prop 65 has lowered cancer incidence amongst Californians, no startling. Proposition 65 has been a bonanza for the bounty hunter law firms that drive such lawsuits using paid plaintiffs. Between 2000 and 2011, there were 2,381 settlements that cost targets nearly 180 million, exclusive of plaintiffs’ legal costs and court costs. Sadly, the systematic legalized abuses surrounding Prop 65 have resulted in all too real economic 09:29 effects on individuals as well as their employers. Workers suffer lower income or job security in affected businesses and the California government has had to spend taxpayer money for administrative and court costs relating to the law. So let’s look at some real-world examples of actual values for some Prop 65 chemicals that I have personal experience working with and being GMP compliant, we have to periodically test our products for the so-called California Big Four and these are, as I said, arsenic, cadmium, lead and mercury. So how do we do this? The most common process now is called ICPMS, as the inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry and one of the most sophisticated technologies to date to quantify components to detect levels down to three parts per billion. So typically a PPB, a part per billion, quantification is what’s used and typically that detection 10:29 limit is about four parts per billion, as bad as low as it can go. It may well change as time goes on and technology improves but certainly much more sophisticated than the previous calibrations for it. Now Prop 65 components of natural medicinal herbs which are tested by ICPMS include, as I said, arsenic, cadmium, lead and mercury. Now for above ground foliage, the analysis shows typical ranges in the low teens to 60s of the parts per billion, not of mercury typically but for cadmium, arsenic and lead. Root analysis, typical ranges mid-20s to hundreds depending on the location grown and the species. Now I’ll just give you a quote here from some before and after extraction results that we’ve done personally. We purchased a product, we would spot check it for confirmation of a vendor certificate, send it off and get an ICPMS analysis for it. 11:30 Once the product’s cleared QC and has been produced, that extract is also then sent off for ICPMS analysis and then we can see what kind of product we’ve produced or what the extraction process has done for the metals that may have been present in the raw material. So turmeric root, have a think about that will you, lots of people eat turmeric for its health benefits, its documented anti-inflammatory and anti-cancer activity are published and have been known for some time especially in Ayurvedic medicine. Now the quantity, typical quantity in raw root were as follows, arsenic 395 parts per billion, cadmium 41.9, lead 646, unfortunately mercury was undetected. So after extraction the liquid extract was retested and came back with the following report, arsenic 68.1, cadmium undetected, lead 6.6, mercury undetected. 12:33 Another fairly common herb, lobelia, arsenic was 43.9, cadmium 79.6, lead 357 and mercury 10.2. Now after extraction the liquid extract was retested and came back with the following report where all the tested elements were actually below the detection limit and then echinacea root, people are very familiar with echinacea, the arsenic there was 115 and the cadmium came back at 20.5, the lead was 17.3 and mercury in that sample was undetected and then after extraction the liquid extract was retested and came back with the following report arsenic 5.9, cadmium lead and mercury undetected. In fact in all of the ICPMS testing that we’ve done which is extensive, extraction produces a 5 to 10 fold and above removal of any existing raw material components listed by Prop 65 and resulting in the maximum allowable daily limits which are well within Prop 65’s legislatively 13:37 directed values. In many cases the raw material would fall outside the allowable exposure but what I really want to point out was the food stuffs we had tested. So crab, we had crab tested and this is local crab here on the Pacific coast here, so crab, arsenic came back at 12,400. So previous herbs would be things like 395, 43 and 115, the crab was 12,400. Now when I spoke to the scientist at the lab that tested this they did offer the consolation that this arsenic was not potentially a toxic product and that they could do specific speciation for this to find out whether or not the actual amount of toxic arsenic was as high as it looked like. So anyway the cadmium was 10.4, the lead was 10.3 and mercury was 109, 109 parts per billion mercury. 14:39 Now this vastly exceeds the maximum allowable daily limit set by Prop 65 given you’d conceivably consume 8 to 10 ounces of crab in one serving compared with a half teaspoon dose of extract taken one to three times per day. Now how about this cod, we tested cod and the cod came back with an arsenic count of 115, actually the cadmium was less than 9.4. The lead came back at 30.3 and the mercury was 473 parts per billion. So eating a 12 ounce portion of this would give you way higher exposure to methylmercury and those toxic and abundant oceanic form that we’d get exposed to. OK, but it gets worse, halibut, we tested some halibut, arsenic was 602, cadmium it was down to 9.2, the lead was 23 and the mercury was 794 parts per billion, again with a serving amount typically of 8 to 10 ounces folks. 15:42 So the last thing I did for seafood was salmon, it was a young fish, it was about a 9 pound fish so it was quite a small one and obviously we’ll get into the whole predation thing and the food chain accumulation etc which became pretty evident. So this 9 pound fish came in slightly better with these values, arsenic was 428, cadmium 10.1, lead was less than 10.1, mercury was 72. So still with a much higher MADL set by Prop 65, whichever way you cut it, so legislation for dietary supplement manufacturers imposes stringent maximum allowable daily limits set by Prop 65 values which pale into insignificance when compared to seafood for example. Now we also tested some elk meat, it had been hunted and it was not surprising that it was very clean. Now the only detectable component was arsenic and it had a value of 64.7 but lead, mercury and cadmium were undetected. So I just wanted to say that terrestrial roots and foliage crops naturally sequester minerals 16:45 found in a rock which form the soil and which they grow and pollution. In industrial countries that’s airborne finds its way back to the soil by being washed out in rains or as fallout from airborne particulates heavier than air characterizing Asian or Indian farm products subjected to the conditions reminiscent of the era of industrialization in Europe. The products I mentioned were all certified organic by the way. Now terrestrial and oceanic life grazing on foliage or consuming other animals sequestered these accumulated products and the higher up the food chain the higher the value in the animal as seen from our experiments. Now the whole point is the meaning of any initiative like Prop 65 to save us from harm has to be weighed both by the freedoms lost as a result of government being in charge to look after us rather than we the people as a self governing body with practical and reasonable jurisprudence not dictated by either control for higher bounty hunters but 17:45 by common sense which seems to have gone the way the dinosaurs. Now I know when I’d spoken to Dr Pete preparing some of the material for two months ago looking at progesterone that progesterone was on the Prop 65 list and we went through the science and the committee papers that were used as quote unquote evidence for suspecting progesterone as a mythogen or as a cancer promoter when actually Dr Pete is very familiar with the whole progesterone debacle having studied hormones and especially progesterone as one of his thesis past his PhD. So Dr Pete are you on there? Yes. Okay well sorry to have blathered on here for 20 minutes with what I was first talking about but in terms of Proposition 65 and its actual effects to the consumer don’t you 18:47 think that some of this is a little bit out of control in terms of writing laws for it and giving amounts which they clearly say that they’re using a 1000 times safety factor. So I know for progesterone that you’re very aware of how maligned it was and there was absolutely no real evidence for it because the test they did on the beagles etc was really pretty poor scientific process but in terms of Prop 65 do you have any thoughts on it in terms of how it affects people or what you think the government are doing? Well the way the committee is set up Dr Pete could you speak up a bit? The people in charge of choosing the evidence are appointed and they are basically able 19:54 to lobby for products that they are associated with. When I was in contact with the agency 10 years ago three of the members were from a single university these three all had conflicts of interest. That woman was a representative of a company developing transdermal products including hormones two of the people were connected with the development of a new approach to birth control which involved the suppression of progesterone and the articles that were chosen supposedly all relevant evidence relating to the carcinogenicity of a substance are to be considered fewer than one percent of the articles relating to progesterone and cancer 21:01 were even listed and of those two of them were about a totally different substance a carcinogenic synthetic progesterone and one of the articles that they cited as evidence of the carcinogenicity of the actual substance progesterone was actually someone’s attempt to refute a famous publication showing that progesterone prevents and cures cancer and this publication was used explicitly a method that the one who were trying to refute a method that they said previously didn’t work at all so they used a known false method to supposedly invalidate the evidence showing that progesterone cures cancer and that was listed by the committee 22:07 as evidence that progesterone causes cancer was like the people were basically drunk when we were choosing the papers and I asked the chairman of the committee for the names of the people who made those crazy choices of the evidence and though she said they were too busy to give me that information and my impression was that it was not really a regulatory agency in public interest it was promoting products on a pay-for-view basis yeah and the university that these people worked for I looked at their research support I forget the number of many there were dozens of 23:08 grants of promoting arguments research gave the impression that estrogen was therapeutic for many different things and I looked for how much they had on progesterone they had two or three research grants which were aimed to show that progesterone was harmful and this was ten years ago just three years after the women’s international health study showed that the the combination of estrogen and synthetic progesterone caused cancer strokes dementia heart disease blood clots and with would you be able to get a little closer to the mic to the microphone or the phone I think the engineers trying to tell me that you’re coming in very quietly okay the the result of that study women’s international health study showed that the 24:22 those negative results resulted in an extreme rejection by women of the use of that combination of synthetic progesterone and estrogen and the there was an eighty percent decrease in the use of that particular prescription form of progesterone plus estrogen with the loss to one company lost billions in sales every everyone invested in in promoting estrogen especially with a synthetic progesterone saw that their main profit-making product being becoming very unpopular and suddenly at that same time when estrogen sales were falling progesterone sales 25:26 had the increased a hundred fold and suddenly money became available to research progesterone as a toxic substance and and since that time since the early years right after the study came out there has been just a flood of people researching progesterone as a brain toxin or carcinogen and so on and when you examine each one of these they’re doing things known previously to produce the results that look bad for example for progesterone it’s known to reverse a brain tumor they were using about a hundred times smaller dose and claiming that it caused the tumor and finding changes in breast tissue that they said was associated with breast cancer 26:37 to distract attention from the studies that showed that it reversed and prevented breast cancer okay you’re listening to ask your doctor on k-medigarable 91.1 FM from 730 that’s now until the end of the show 8 o’clock you’re invited to call him with any questions related or unrelated to this month’s discussion here of cow prop 65 and its effects and also will be like I said opening up for questions that then have to be surrounding that and I do have some questions that have been previously written that I want to ask dr. Pete about for his feedback so dr. Pete I guess not to labour the cow prop 65 thing any more other than to just explain that there certainly is a isn’t it the way always in government no there’s certainly interested parties for and against certain things happening and obviously collusion between companies especially when there’s plenty 27:40 of money involved to protect vested interests but I think if people ever wanted to find out more about this and I mentioned this on the last radio show that dr. Carla Rottenberg’s PhD dissertation was basically exposing all of the bad evidence all the bad scientific supposedly scientific reasons for which were given that progesterone was to be deemed a fit for the list was actually very inconsistent and she clearly outlines the mistakes that were made but like anything else in big government I think it’s just extremely difficult to get it to change this is like trying to change the direction of an oil tanker once it’s moving in a certain direction it takes a long time it’s taken how many years here to get people to stop in well hopefully stop consuming liquid oils and recognize the fact that the brainwashing surrounding saturated fats is actually very wrong and that people are actually much better off using saturated 28:41 fats probably taken 50 or 60 years um but anyway we have a caller on the on the air so let’s take this first caller call away from and watch the question hi there um my name’s Ali I’m from Calgary Alberta okay hi my question is well basically a few years ago I developed symptoms of androgen okay such as like hercitism and I my voice actually like got a lot lower and then about a year after the onset of these traits I decided to supplement with progesterone after reading Ray Pete’s um writing okay well this hormone like it it did work wonders for many symptoms however my voice never went back to normal and a few other things never went back to normal okay and it actually also caused extreme irritability um but anyway my question is basically do you think it’s possible to get my singing voice back to where I can sing high notes easily again how old are you first did you say I’m so I’m 23 23 okay so where is possible to get your high notes back again uh because that’s one of the main things that have been uh troubling you that hasn’t 29:46 returned is your you say your voice is um deepened yeah but and my singing teacher actually told me that too like my voice dropped like eight notes or something like that even my singing voice or my speaking voice sorry okay talks Pete um well her her speaking voice doesn’t sound as masculinized as many women that I’ve I’ve known who used androgen by prescription or just two who had an ovarian problem with excess androgen production they very often get voices almost as low as that’s my normal male pitch but what happens under the influence of androgens the way they change the hair follicle involves um re reorganization of the whole structure of the hair follicle but since the the hair follicle 30:54 has a finite lifespan if you interrupt that stimulation consistently like there was a study in France showing women who applied topical progesterone to um sideburns and mustache and chest hair that had developed under androgen stimulation they stayed with it through the expected lifespan of the of these hair follicles and re feminized their facial and chest hair but in in the case of vocal cords if they actually develop a male pitch that’s because they have grown and enlarged and it isn’t the whole voice box enlarges and and generally you can’t see a woman’s adam’s apple like a man’s sticks out in proportion to how 32:02 bass their voices and if the whole cartilage voice box is enlarged the vocal cords have to adapt and they simply don’t have any way to to get smaller without the framework that’s holding them changing how long how long did you say that um you were um under the influence of this androgenic excess that gave the hair suitism and um it’s actually kind of interesting um looking back because um i you know i it was only for a period of a few months but um i was living a very toxic lifestyle um my job had me working eight hours basically walking doing from tables i was a waitress and i never got a break i didn’t get a chance to eat um and so i was like exercising 33:03 for eight eight sometimes 12 hours a day for about three months um four days a week and it’s you know i don’t know why it caused that in me because clearly a lot of waitresses don’t have that problem but um i i was a girl who you know i could sing very very very high notes before and i had almost um i’m sorry this is too much information i had almost no body hair at all and then after waitressing you know both of those plus other changes happened um and i would you know call it virilization and then um it also happened again a few years later when i was waitressing again and those were the only times that that’s ever happened to me since your voice doesn’t really have a masculine quality it’s possible that um some of the uh loss of the high notes it is the result of uh swelling or edema 34:05 and um often something that suppresses thyroid function will cause edema of the vocal cords and just by correcting the thyroid ideally the the water can quickly have be extruded uh even the cartilage can change shape a little bit by by losing some of its excess water and so it would be a good idea to have your thyroid carefully checked check your waking temperature and pulse rate and your midday temperature and pulse rate and the pure tsh is um not in the lower end of the normal range then it’s possible that just a thyroid supplement would raise your range a little bit that’s excellent thank you so much for your time yeah but by the way did you get your 35:06 estrogen dial to progesterone measured did you did you ever have that value looked at well uh i i actually didn’t i so i had my estrogen measured um and i have like the whole panel with me but it was measured a while ago um and um you know i didn’t really pay too much attention to it the estrogen said it was like 60 or something on the blood test but i know from reading raised writing at least this is how i interpreted i was under the impression that um you can’t actually measure estrogen in the blood and like it’s not the good reflections but correct me if i’m wrong yeah well the blood test for estrogen dial is certainly very relative in terms of uh it’s a subjective amount and when your progesterone is measured there is a very definite ratio between the two uh which is very yeah and he didn’t he did not measure progesterone okay all right all right well thank you for your call i uh thank you so so much yeah you’re very welcome okay so we do actually have three callers on the line so let’s uh let’s take this next 36:07 caller on the way from what’s your question yeah my name’s jeff and i actually have two questions i’m from new york you’re from new york okay cool and uh first one is um i’ve actually been doing the dr p diet i’ve listened to all the shows and what i’m finding is that um taken 90 milligrams of uh natural desiccated thyroid twice a day it’s about three grains a day but the pulse um in the am is always right around 60 and the temperature is anywhere between 97.2 and 97.8 so then if you go to midday it’s gotten up a little bit to like 70 sorry to 68 69 but it never gets you know 75 or 80 ever and the the temperature never gets above 98.2 maybe rarely maybe if i run so i’m in good shape let’s just say i follow the diet um and i’m 60 and i’m just wondering um i know the range is you talk about sort of pulse and but specifically i know there 37:10 was a show that questioned gave you questions about what if the pulse goes up and the temp goes down all that but this is pretty basic it’s like in the morning what should it be and at midday what should it be relative to what i just gave you and what would you do to change that that’s the first question okay the second question and part of the other thing is i found through this process a lot of things have gotten better mental clarity all physical symptoms except i’m actually i think there has been an increase in male pattern baldness on the very top of the head um ironically so i’m just wondering if that uh and this is the only the only thing i’m taking is these three grains of um of a natural glandular that’s right okay i didn’t i don’t want to mess with the other because given all i’ve heard i just feel let the body decide what it needs and i think dr pete said that on other radio programs the body will decide it’s much safer way to do it it may not be directly immediately as effective but i prefer doing that for the reason i mentioned right dr so what was that question clear yeah have you ever had a blood test for tsh 38:15 yeah i have it was about 1.8 um i haven’t had it in a while at that same time i had a cholesterol total cholesterol of 330 i wanted to put me on satin drugs and i i brought his attention to the psu mentioned uh i have a copy of that shows there’s no correlation between cholesterol and uh to me that was an indication at heart attacks um but this is an indication that clearly that my thyroid was underactive which has kind of got me well you were you taking this glandular when you got your tsh of 1.8 i started taking that right so you got a tsh of 1.8 and then you decided to start using a natural glandular yeah 1.8’s high yeah so and my my t3 level was on the low end of the scale that’s their scale which may or may not be useful um and the t4 was sort of on the average end so and it they didn’t take reverse t3 so i don’t know that but have they measured the cholesterol since you’ve been taking thyroid no i’m due for another blood test but i’m my guess 39:20 is it’ll go down but i’ll um you know my my real question related to the temperature i think i can answer those questions after the next blood test my guess is it’ll go down dramatically because i am in very good physical shape i know you guys say don’t jog but i i do do you know under two miles three times a week mostly with sprints so i feel that like no activity is like not useful but obviously as you pointed out jogging is um you know repeatedly running marathons etc is long-term detrimental but i don’t think you go to the other end and literally do nothing but ride a bike you know i think you gotta do more than that at least in my case so and i think you said that sprinting is okay in some of your write-ups in other words doing like five six sprints for 20 yards etc after sort of warming up and that’s have your muscles and large notice of place since taking the thyroid not at all i have the same weight my weight goes from 172 to 178 it’s sort of centered around 175 it’s been my weight for a long time um i do find it drops though 40:24 from in the evening i mean from to sleep to the next morning but it’s usually in that range um mental clarity is so much better but um that’s really the key that’s why i’m i’m used to this and i definitely i thought you’re definitely right about the bufa there’s no doubt about it yeah folks in the world in in animal experiments it takes about four years for a complete exchange when you stop eating pufa um it’s just a random exchange of what’s in your present diet and what’s in your body and that that takes four years to be complete so it takes about two years to to get a good 50 percent reduction in it where you’ll start feeling your thyroid more consistently because for taking for taking three grains your ulcers and temperatures do seem to be low is uh overweight it would take four years but um on the lean side more muscular and more 41:31 active um perhaps that accelerates the process but but by the way there’s no chance that you can eliminate pufa i mean the notion of getting five milligrams per day is like a fantasy you just can’t do that it’s like possible for anybody even on even you talk to pete there’s no way you can limit it to five milligrams right because you add up the milk you drink and the eggs etc it’s no five grams i think was sorry five grams not milligrams five grams the unison was was the limit uh yeah it’s possible to get it down to a couple grams a day which is uh the the the inflection point where you you see cancer uh correlating very closely to um the amount of pufa in your diet is around four grams per day and and so if you’re pretty safe if you keep it under four grams per day which you can do just by um low fat milk or skim to milk uh fruit and um low fat cheese and eggs and such yeah i do i do all that the only thing i do take is is cooked vegetables 42:36 i’ve been doing that like twice a day ironically i was thinking to myself sometimes i i can’t sleep at night i’m thinking if you cook food you’re killing the enzymes and if your body if your stomach’s not generating those enzymes you can have trouble breaking down that food even even if there’s less pufa in it i’m wondering whether a digestive enzyme you know leta lee talks about that i know you know her is that something that ultimately is useful recognizing you have to worry about additives um no i i think if you’re going to eat vegetables they should be thoroughly cooked otherwise um you partly the problem is that you can’t extract all the nutrients if they aren’t thoroughly cooked and some of the um carbohydrate complexes are are going to feed bacteria if they aren’t thoroughly cooked um i think measuring your cholesterol again and having your vitamin d level checked sometimes an efficiency of vitamin d interferes with the way your body is handling 43:44 the thyroid it probably leads to more reverse t3 production but the vitamin d level in the blood should be around the middle of the range 50 nanograms per milliliter and the um the healthiest population for having a no thyroid disease essentially they were in the um below 0.4 on the tsh scale and cholesterol is a pretty good indication of how you’re responding to thyroid it should be around 200 or a little less and in the 1930s cholesterol was recognized as a good diagnostic indicator of thyroid function someone published a study showing that when you removed 44:45 someone’s thyroid plant immediately as the metabolic rate went down the cholesterol went up and when you supplemented uh uh thyroid the uh cholesterol came down as an exact mirror image of the metabolic rate so i think that’s exactly what’s going to happen here because before i started your program for years my total cholesterol was 200 and i had very good levels according to modern medicine when i started your diet i started eating a lot of ice cream i didn’t used to eat that and a lot of milk and i ended up that’s when it skyrocketed to 330 but i think when you make a change like this it’s a shock to your body and to your point i think i need to go through another blood test and see whether that the impact on the on the the thyroid supplement and the vitamin d level by the way which is in the 40s but i i’m trying to get that up a little bit um it’s it’s below 50 but it’s not dangerously low it’s it’s on the low at some between 40 and 50 um so but but the the real question 45:48 was a temperature and pulse if if my how low if your symptoms are not there what is it reasonable to have a pulse that sort of you know ranges between 60 and 70 throughout the day if you’re athletic and and and a temperature that really never gets above 98.2 i wouldn’t worry about it some people have a big heart that pumps efficiently and does fine at 65 beats per minute yeah you’re right in fact i was told i had someone when i was a younger kid they said i had a larger heart like a you know i think that exactly might be correct um you’ve been very kind with your time there’s one last question though this is a real quick one there’s another guy named laurence wilson if you ever heard of him he’s a very prolific writer um he deviates from you on a couple of points no fruits um but he says take uh i’ll make a freeze um but he’s it’s very good but the one thing he does say and i know you’re big on coffee is he’s picking coffee too um but not 46:53 orally um he’s a big on coffee enemas now i know in the past you came up once and you mentioned that that can be stressful but the bigger problem for people over 50 one of the biggest problems as you’ve mentioned is iron toxicity is a real problem if you do a coffee enemas on a regular basis is that a way other than bloodletting to ultimately reduce the toxicity of iron in your body oh well just drinking coffee every time you eat an iron containing food i always have coffee with oysters or eggs or beans uh right because it drastically limits your absorption of iron okay but the but my question is um you maybe don’t have not a position to answer that i mean you may may not know i just i mean you know a lot but maybe this you don’t have experience in this area or do you have a view on the coffee enemas in terms of its not not whether it’s stressful or not because it’s like running if you run the first time you’re you’re going to be stressed but if you do the same running you know 10 weeks in a row you’re it’s not going to be a 47:58 stressful because your body got used to it so um i yeah um i i know there’s a lot of benefit some people have from the coffee enemas but i i think you can get the same benefit probably more by having it with food so that you don’t give yourself a sudden jolt of stimulation that’s that’s where the stress is it can make you burn fuel so fast that you get hypoglycemia okay well i appreciate the calls caller i don’t want to catch you too short but we do have two more callers who are waiting to get some questions in so let’s take this next caller caller where you from and what’s your question we lost this one it had to do with endometriosis and iud is a relation in the health of that dr p do you think iud’s could be responsible for endometriosis from an irritation point of view or um yeah it’s been well established that endometriosis is from the prolonged 49:04 excessive exposure to estrogen without interruption from a progesterone and the the mechanism of the uh just a plain plastic or out of copper iud is to send a signal to the ovary that the the uterus isn’t ready for pregnancy because there’s a foreign object in it that the uh uterus perceives this injury and the signal travels up the fallopian tube and tells the ovary not to make progesterone so it’s a very specific interruption of your hormone ratio of the same way that the birth control pill is right so just constant stimulation extra in excess with no relief from a progesterogenic part of the cycle right yeah okay very good uh next caller 50:04 you’re on the air away from what’s your question hi this is alex i’m from southern humble okay alex what’s your question yeah hey my question is just i went through testicular cancer treatment last year i ended up having uh my left testicle removed and then went through chemotherapy and then after that had a surgery called an rp lnd where they removed a section of lymph nodes um and i’m just interested in generic advice you’d have for somebody who’s gone through that and gone through uh you know a few months of chemotherapy i haven’t had anything crop back up but i’m just interested in general health advice for somebody who’s been through a treatment like that how old were you at the time i’m 34 years old i was 32 just about to be 33 at the time of the diagnosis yeah was was there an undescended testicle or anything like that or was it lady no no yeah none none of the kind of the classic things that would have really elevated my wrist um i didn’t have an undescended testicle or anything like that they were both like normal testicles as far as i had none up till 51:05 that point okay all right dr p uh did you hear the question to begin with um yeah when experimenters have removed for example one adrenal gland or one ovary i don’t remember any experiments with removing one testicle but the removal of some of the steroid forming tissue in those other situations causes the pituitary to drive the remaining gland twice as hard basically to keep up the systemic level of the of the steroid production and so i think it’s important to watch your uh lh and fsh levels and um to um there are ways you can without necessarily supplementing an androgen but you can reduce the stress keeping your thyroid hormone level up 52:08 vitamin d level up regulating your your protein and sugar intake carefully and possibly supplementing uh uh pregnant nylon which will feed into the the system suppressing the exaggerated stress reactions that are more likely uh if your androgen is low uh testosterone works closely with progesterone and pregnant nylon uh to make it less necessary to produce the stress hormone such as cortisol uh so it yeah my testosterone levels are actually up because the one testicle that’s left is working double time so i’m at like the upper range i’ve been going to ucsf and going to the ocean do you know what your value is is it six seven hundred um i think it’s up seven seven seven fifty okay good um i i think it’s good to um 53:11 concentrate on the whole anti stress process because the the androgen is is probably compensating for the the need for all of the uh stabilizing quieting hormones of dha and pregnant nylon and progesterone uh have a stabilizing effect uh pregnant nylon is is the most neutral of those and it will hold down the uh the need to produce cortisol and help to restrain lh and the fsh production by the pituitary okay is there anything dietarily they’ve got me on vitamin d definitely they want me to have elevated vitamin d levels they have me taking like mushroom capsules from uh fungi perfect diet and then it’s like fish oil vitamin d fungi perfect i mushroom capsules and you want to stop the fish oil i think that’s about it 54:12 yeah fish oil you want to cut the fish oil out cut it out oh definitely yeah that’s that’s been the main stay of uh dr pete’s research in the last 40 years is the toxic effects of uh polyunsaturates and fish oil is probably the worst of them all oh yeah i mean i’m well versed i’ve listened to your program a million times and i know i know the polyunsaturates are a problem i didn’t i was i guess i was oblivious to the fact that uh fish oil was was included in that category yeah very much so yeah okay so um yeah diet is definitely not essential i mean i i the science i’ll go back and listen to the actual like chemicals or uh reactions that you’re speaking about but is there anything dietarily or whatever that you’d recommend just generically would be kind of a soft approach to try to try to achieve the the aims you’re speaking you’re talking about uh supporting the anti-stress effect vitamin d a high ratio of calcium to phosphorus is very helpful so cut down 55:13 your meat okay cut down your meat intake compared to your dairy intake or have a good ratio of dairy to meat and just eat small amounts yeah not a lot of muscle meat if you’re going to eat meat you’re better off consuming the bone broths the knuckle broths and the shanks and and a little liver once or twice a month yeah definitely i like all the nasty bits so i’ve been good about eating all that and i’ve been on that kind of a thing like sally balance type diet for a while all right but thank you thank you for your call we’re going to have to close it out here because it’s three minutes three minutes to eight o’clock and i just want to let people know about dr pete’s details so thanks so much for dr people joining us there’s a whole bunch of questions we didn’t get to but great i’m glad people were listening and coming from all over the globe here so thanks so much dr pete okay good night okay so for those people who have listened to the show they want to find out more about dr pete and his work and the publications that he’s produced with books or his newsletters or his research articles it’s www.repeat.com lots of articles 56:19 fully referenced our website is western botanicalmedicine.com under the resources tab we’ve just uploaded all of the shows including the 2016 and 2017 shows and yeah big fans of dr pete he’s taught us a lot and it’s how we live so for those people that are called in i’m glad you joined i hope you got good answers for those people who want to listen to the archive that can also be listened to on kmud.org under audio archives under friday night talk and it’s seven till eight p.m on the third friday of every month um gosh i’ll be driving home in the dark here folks it was just like yesterday we were at the solstice and now we’re already winding forward to the autumn of fall here it comes so thanks for listening our number here is 1888 WBM erb we can be reached monday through friday business hours good night