Effects of Stress and Trauma on the Body

00:00 And you’re listening to WMNF 88.5 on your dial WMNF Tampa and this is the ultrasound show on every Thursday night from 11 to 1. My name is Elav and tonight we have special guest we’re going to be speaking with Dr. Ray Pete who has a PhD in biology from the University of Oregon with specialization physiology he’s taught at several universities including the Uni of Oregon and Montana State University and also the National College of naturopathic medicine and Blake College he also conducts private nutritional counseling and today we’re speaking with him about the effects of stress and trauma on the body. Greetings and welcome to the ultrasound show. Okay so let’s dive in. Tonight’s theme is really about how the body reacts to 01:03 stress and trauma so let’s first talk about day-to-day stress and what happens to the body and the brain physiologically. The first thing is that if you’re really healthy you can meet challenges without experiencing something that on cell you would have called stress. For example if you are not very healthy just skipping a meal can put you in really serious stress but a healthy person stores something like seven or eight ounces of glucose in the form of glycogen in the liver and muscles and brain and since at rest the muscles can burn primarily fatty acids your brain is the main thing that consumes glucose so 02:04 if you’re at more or less inactive and relaxed you can easily go 12 to 15 hours without eating and without having any stress at all but if you’re not able to store that much glycogen and for example low thyroid people or people with a history of severe stress aren’t able to store very much glycogen and so when you run out of sugar whether it’s from going all day without eating or because your liver isn’t very efficient then your body tries to increase the available glucose normally just being awake makes enough adrenaline to mobilize as much of the glucose from your stores as you need but when you run 03:08 out of that stored sugar your brain still requires sugar to function properly and so instead of just increasing the adrenaline more and more when the adrenaline reaches a certain level and can’t get the blood sugar up out of your storage then you turn on the cortisol and that’s the classic stress that can be harmful because it the cortisol dissolves our first tissues like the assignments which are very fragile that starts turning to sugar just immediately when you run out of stored glycogen and when the thymus is gone in just two or three hours of intense stress that happens to be one of the reasons they think adults don’t have thymus glands because by the time 04:09 they’re dead and are analyzed the thymus has been eaten up by stress so they might have had a perfectly normal thymus until they were sick and dead but after the the thymus is consumed and turned to sugar then the cortisol starts breaking down your muscles and then the skin and the brain, lungs and heart are spared from stress partly because they are very saturated in a healthy person with androgens, testosterone and DHEA especially which block the breakdown function of cortisol and if your brain, lungs and heart are short of those protective steroids then that’s where the stress really starts causing severe deadly damage and the post-traumatic stress disorder is produced when someone 05:19 has had such terrible stress such as being tortured or being in terrific catastrophes they not only deplete their stored glycogen and break down the expendable tissues like thymus and liver but then the cortisol starts damaging the brain and heart and so on so they get very severe chronic symptoms and once the stress is completely resolved then the brain can massively regenerate itself for example they’ve seen MRIs of girls who had simply been in the anorexia for months their brain shrinks from the living on the cortisol breaking down their tissues but once they start eating then the brain can rebuild itself in 06:20 just a few weeks. Now how often does one have to eat or is it required or recommended for one to eat in order to not have this stress reaction happen? The famous Argentine biologist Bernardo Hussai in the 1940s I think he was the first one to show that if he fed his animals only once a day they not only tended to get fat on the same amount of calories but they had a high incidence of diabetes but if he fed them at least three times a day or more then they were very resistant to diabetes and were less fattened on a given number of calories so more or less nibbling all the time is the safest thing but if you have a 07:20 really good diet and aren’t under emotional pressure then the person can get along on one or two meals a day. Now let’s talk about a really good diet what is a really good diet for the optimal health of the body the brain the heart all of the organs there’s a lot of disputes and conversations about optimal diets does it differ with different people or is there an overall optimal and then there’s little bits and pieces that different people with different blood types can do? The blood type has almost no effect because you can see in even very different species of animal that have very different ways of living you can see the same processes so there’s a universal animal diet that is 08:26 optimal but the proportions vary with the type of activity and your body size and metabolic rate and personal history your previous stresses will affect what you need. So let’s talk about someone who perhaps is not that healthy and that does have stress which is quite common what would be the recommended diet for them what some of the things that they can eat? One of the reasons that the single meal eaters tend to get fat and diabetic is that it triggers a great surge of insulin and the insulin then triggers cortisol and so if you can eat foods that don’t trigger insulin that’s the ideal thing and fruit happens to be the best single type of food for not triggering the stress reaction because 09:33 it combines very small amounts of protein with large amounts of sugar and the minerals potassium happens to handle sugar in place of insulin and the fructose component of fruit sugar doesn’t require insulin so eating a lot of fruit even in one meal a day produces a much smaller amount of insulin obesity and cortisol than eating for example just one big meal of meat and potatoes for example. Meat powerfully stimulates insulin and cortisol and starches are more stimulating to insulin than sugars. So it’s almost counter-intuitive when you’re 10:33 talking about taking in fructose in the form of fruit with people that are insulin sensitive. Well for about a hundred years fructose has been recognized as the ideal sugar for diabetics because they can metabolize it without needing insulin. It used to be sold in health food stores all across the country and you can still find it in most health food stores for diabetics. Now let’s talk about high fructose corn syrup and the difference between fructose from fruit. The funny thing about that is that if you look at the fructose and glucose content it seems to be not very different from any old sugar maybe 45-55%!r(MISSING)ather than an exact 50-50 balance fructose and glucose but 11:40 people actually thought to analyze what is in the stuff other than fructose and glucose and it turns out that the reason people get fat on a soft drinks that contain it is that it contains a huge amount of calories that are neither glucose nor fructose. It’s the syrupy component basically a type of corn starch or corn syrup which they don’t count it because it isn’t fructose or glucose but it’s there as calories. Now they’re using this in so many different things from salad dressings to soft drinks. Yeah it was a trick because of the boycott of Cuban sugar starting in the 60s. The price of sugar went up because they wouldn’t buy it from where it was cheap so the corn starch 12:45 producers learned how to produce something resembling sugar and it’s really like the old Kero syrup which was not a very appetizing way to sweeten things but during the Second World War the I think the Germans pioneered it but in the United States sugar was scarce and corn syrup started being used in canned things and even in homes as a substitute for sugar but the sweeter form more palatable form that they call high fructose corn syrup was developed in the 60s in response to the increased price of sugar. It’s amazing they’ve done similar things with oils too in using oils that are quite toxic in 13:49 our foods. Yeah the cotton seed industry was a major power behind that way back in the end of the 1800s the gin of to make cotton textiles more more economical they had machines to get the seeds out of the cotton and in proportion to the production of cotton they were accumulating seeds that were too toxic to feed to animals and they found that they could squeeze oil out of the cotton seed and by chemically hardening it they could sell it as artificial butter and the butter industry finally but they were I guess 14:51 about 20 years required to sell it in a colorless state and the person had to add color so that it wouldn’t ruin the butter industry but the seed industry seed oil industry gradually got powerful enough that they could convince people that it’s better than butter but in fact it has many toxic effects that butter doesn’t have. Is this the same as rapeseed oil? The first rapeseed oil happened to cause severe heart disease and the industry wanted to sell it for margarine and cooking oil and so on and there was a particular oil in that plant that they decided to blame the heart injury on but Han Selie did experiments 15:54 studying the type of lesion in the heart produced by rapeseed oil and he found that it was the linoleic acid in it which is still in it they took out the peculiar unusual fatty acid but the essential fatty acid linoleic acid is heart toxic and Han Selie showed that if you added cocoa butter a highly saturated stearic acid to the rapeseed oil it no longer caused death of the heart cells so it’s just the excess of polyunsaturated fat that made the rapeseed oil or canola or cottonseed oil all of those are actually toxic if you eat very much of it. What 16:56 about soybean oil because they’re all GMO now? Yeah it’s still the polyunsaturated component which is it turns into plastic landings which promote all kinds of inflammation and degenerative diseases as early as 1964 I think it was a Dutch researcher named Betcher sliced open the lesions in atherosclerotic arteries at all different stages of development and to analyze the fats in them and he saw that he called it a primitive idea that cholesterol got diffused out of the blood into the artery and damaged it he said that the situation is very different from that and many fats change at the beginning before the change 18:04 happens in the cholesterol and in the most advanced lesions the farthest advanced atherosclerosis he found that the content of linoleic acid was highest the worst the lesion and after that many other people demonstrated that the oxidation products of these unstable highly unsaturated fats are found increasingly in the atherosclerosis. It’s very interesting to me that things like these different seed oils canola oil soybean oil high fructose corn syrup butter substitutes all of these things are being advertised as better for your health and it’s really about the consumers self-educating themselves and looking beyond the advertising. They have to think of some excuse for claiming 19:13 that people should buy them because they don’t taste good and so the idea that if they are essential in some sense then the more you eat the better they are but in fact it’s very questionable whether they’re essential as a nutrient at all animals can live more or less indefinitely you can grow cells forever in the dish without any of those which I think that alone proves that they’re not essential nutrients and the more you increase in the diet there’s a direct relationship with the incidence of spontaneous cancer in proportion to the essential fatty acids so-called and that was first demonstrated in 1927 and over and over but the industry keeps publicizing them 20:19 as health foods. Well that’s that’s the way it’s been for a many many years and it’ll probably continue although I think people are becoming more aware and being more conscious and really trying to seek out different dietary options and going back to the roots there’s been a big surgeons of grass-fed beef for example. Yeah the beyond fruits in the ideal diet the ruminants are able to detoxify the polyunsaturated fats in grains or grasses and it happens to be vitamin E in the grass which enables them to convert polyunsaturated linoleic acid into the trans fatty acids and the there’s one of the components of butter 21:23 or beef fat that is being sold as a drug or a health food because it counteracts the toxic effects of the polyunsaturated fats that’s called the conjugated linoleic acid and you get some of that in beef, butter, cheese and milk. And the high ratio of calcium to phosphate in butter and cheese comes from the fact that green leaves if the cow is allowed to eat at least some hay and and grass the leaves contain a low amount of phosphate and a high amount of magnesium, calcium and other safe minerals. Too much phosphate which you would get on a 22:27 grain-based and meat-based diet mostly. The phosphate becomes toxic when it isn’t balanced by at least as much calcium and other minerals including magnesium. And so milk and fruit and cheese give you the main nutrients and that are just the regionally deficient things such as iodine and selenium that if you eat some kind of seafood then you’re getting the basic things for anti-stress foods. So for vegetarians would you say that it’s a little more difficult because they’re not eating these products? Yeah, if you concentrate on well-cooked greens the protein and mineral balance in cooked green leafy vegetables those are 23:33 essentially the same as in milk it’s just less concentrated because of the high cellulose diluting it. But if you can cook away or wash away or skim away the anti-nutrients for example too much spinach contains oxalic acid that tends to take the calcium out of your teeth and some leafy vegetables have chemicals that block your stomach digestive enzymes but a variety of cooked greens will provide the same type of protein that milk provides as well as the very favorable balance of magnesium, potassium and calcium in relation to phosphate. 24:36 So aside from the spinach what other vegetables would be better off cooked as opposed to raw and do you advocate any raw foods or raw salads in the mix? The very juicy fruits are best raw but if they’re starchy like bananas or plantains they should be cooked by preference because the starches can enter the bloodstream and trigger allergic reactions and too much under cooked starch it’s called persorption. The particles enter the bloodstream and can block capillaries and arterioles causing cells to die until the particle can be broken down but it can stay in place long enough to kill cells in the heart and brain and lungs. Feeding mice on a very high raw starch diet a 25:46 biologist in Germany found that they were very prematurely aged because of the death of cells in all of their organs that were blocked by starch greens. So starch like potatoes are almost a perfect food if they’re very well cooked because you want to break down the starch and the non-starch ingredients of a potato have almost a perfect balance of nutrients, B vitamins, the essential amino acids, carbohydrate in the right proportion and the only things lacking in a pure potato diet would be vitamin A and vitamin B12 otherwise they’re a very balanced food. Are you speaking about sweet potatoes or 26:50 white potatoes? Some white potatoes so-called contain enough keratin that could provide the requirement of vitamin A but sweet potatoes often contain so much keratin that it interferes with digestion and too much keratin has anti-hormonal effects that can slow down your production of thyroid hormones, progesterone, adrenal hormones and so on. If it accumulates to the point that it’s making your palms turn orange. Which it does with some people who are juicing carrots a lot? Yeah I constantly warn people about that there are good chemicals in the juice good nutrition but unless your thyroid is pretty active it’s going to accumulate the 27:53 keratin because you convert keratin to vitamin A if you have vitamin B12 in proportion to how active your thyroid hormone is and if for some reason you’re getting more keratin than your vitamin B12 from thyroid can handle then it turns off the thyroid function. I experienced that myself about 40 years ago eating so many carrots that I suppressed my thyroid but if your thyroid is good then having a whole carrot every day has some very important anti-stress functions. Yesterday I heard from a woman who said that she had started a daily carrot salad and had almost immediate relief from all of her 28:53 premenstrual and digestive problems and we’ve measured the blood hormones in a few people after they started a daily whole carrot and it’s the stimulating effect on the intestine. The fiber in the carrot isn’t digestible and so the excretion of the bile into the liver carries all kinds of detoxified chemicals and hormones that if you have fiber in your intestine these toxins that the liver has got rid of will be carried out bound to the carrot fiber but without enough fiber they can be reabsorbed and recycled and so your estrogen tends to go up as the fiber in your diet goes down and that in turn turns off your 29:59 thyroid and progesterone so it can cause all the symptoms of estrogen and cortisol excess and in just three or four days we’ve seen the cortisol and estrogen level in the blood drop as the progesterone comes up just for needing a daily carrot. It’s so interesting how the food that we eat influences everything about our body. Yeah lots of people partly because of a bad industrialized diet I think lots of Americans are now going around in a chronically stressed condition it’s sort of like learned helplessness or post-traumatic stress syndrome. The diet keeps people in a high cortisol high estrogen state and that’s something that if you’re going to have any stress you 31:09 should well before you have to do any important work you should make sure that your diet isn’t creating the stress day by day and for example checking your thyroid function just by measuring your temperature and pulse rate when you wake up and then in the middle of the day you’re they should rise so that your pulses maybe 80 per minute at rest and your temperature should be around 98.6 at rest. In the morning it’s okay for them to be about 10%!l(MISSING)ower pulse rate and maybe 97.8 degrees or so. Now this can also be influencing the fact that men are having hormonal issues as well correct? Who having? In other words the 32:16 food that both men and women are eating men are also having hormonal issues it’s not only women. Yeah when a man is on a very bad diet or is under stress or has an accident the estrogen level rises sharply and in the old age with any of the degenerative diseases men tend to have a sharp increase in estrogen. So they can avoid this or monitor this by their diet? Yeah and your temperature is the quickest way because estrogen lowers your temperature thyroid and progesterone and DHEA help to maintain a good steady high metabolic rate even at rest. So when people get cold when they’re sitting there in front of their 33:18 desk or at home then that may indicate that the hormones have changed and the thyroid is dropping? Yeah and one of the tricks of the body through increasing the adrenaline can compensate for hypothyroidism and so some people are hyper alert and anxious and have a high heart rate even though their thyroid is is really low and their temperature can be held up and look normal except that it’s likely to be higher when you first wake up in the morning and then decrease when you eat something. So it switches? Yeah because the nighttime is when you aren’t eating and your adrenaline and cortisol rise those can tear down your tissues at such a rate that they keep your temperature up then when you eat 34:22 something and lower the stress you see that your metabolism is really not so high and when the adrenaline is very high even though your oral temperature might seem normal your hands and feet will be cold and maybe the tip of your nose even because the body is directing the energy so that your brain lungs and heart aren’t deprived or chilled but your body can consider your hands and feet somewhat expendable and let them get very cold. So if we up the stress levels and we’ve been speaking mostly about general stress and someone does have a particular experience or if they have a surgery then there’s additional chemical changes or there’s more severe chemical changes some of the symptoms in 35:24 post-surgery can include low energy or weight gain or hormonal changes or even depression and sleep disorders. And even dementia it’s lately they’ve been measuring mental function after major surgery and for months even years after major surgery people’s mental function is often slowed down that’s because of the chronic effect of cortisol which slows nerve conduction it protects your some of your tissues from inflammation but it progressively damages your immune system and your nervous system. So what would be the best way for recovery and what are some of the things that people can do for recovery specifically 36:28 you know in terms of general diet specific things or your advice in general? The thing about surgery as opposed to a car accident or or being tortured or something is that you can prepare for it and even standard medical sources are now saying that you should check thyroid function before you schedule someone for surgery because a hypothyroid person doesn’t do well in surgery because their cortisol is already high. Before Han Selye made stress famous an American surgeon George Kryl in Cleveland a hundred over a hundred years ago was studying shock from surgery and what you had to do to minimize the shock and 37:35 shock as he understood it came to be part of shock and stress as Han Selye interpreted it and for Selye an excess of estrogen was enough to create the whole shock syndrome and George Kryl in the hospital in Cleveland that he worked at in 1980 mortality rate from all their surgeries was 4.4%!a(MISSING)nd after he devised a way to reduce stress in five years of application it had cut the mortality to 1.8%!a(MISSING)nd his basic procedure was to convince the brain that nothing had happened he called it and no see association and meaning getting the 38:43 brain to not notice the the Noxus event and he found that histamine was released by morphine when it was used to control pain that histamine brought on all of these other stress hormone changes so he added an antihistamine an herbal drug called scopolamine basically an antihistamine anti-stress preparation to go with the anesthesia and then he used a local anesthetic to stop at first he would anesthetize the skin then as the skin was cut each layer would get a local anesthetic so that he was not letting the brain receive any of those 39:45 harmful signals but on careless quick surgery nowadays often is very rough and the patient wakes up with changes in the brain from that powerful Noxus stimulation of the surgery and so if you can get the doctor to reduce the trauma of the surgery that’s a very important part of recovering and like the hypothyroid person doesn’t recover very well because their metabolic rate is slow their temperature is also very low and since the surgery is turning on the the stress hormones turns off the thyroid function temperature tends to drop drastically during and following surgery and in proportion to how the 40:46 temperature falls the person’s recovery is impaired so everything that will keep your your temperature up during and after surgery preparing with at least two weeks of adjusting thyroid so that you’re not hypothyroid that makes the recovery a lot faster the study in Mississippi I think it was found that if the emergent the intensive care people would check the patients vitamin D levels as they came in they found that out of 278 cases only three people had normal vitamin D partly that means that deficient people get sick more often or 41:50 that sickness lowers your vitamin D but some of them had as as low as eight or ten nano nanograms per milliliter where it should be 50 or 55 that’s the normal range and the when he got the dietician to check their vitamin D levels and supplement vitamin D the length of stay in intensive care was cut in half survival increased and the expenses it saved the hospital more than half of the expenses just by that one vitamin it’s amazing you mentioned a vitamin it’s amazing you mentioned a herbal antihistamine earlier what was that again that was copalamin and that is sometimes available if a person is nauseated after surgery that’s a very safe anti-nausea drug which does several 42:58 things that helps to hold up the body temperature besides stopping the nausea and can it be used with anesthetics um yeah it was part of the anesthesia that was pioneered by George Crial and it’s still occasionally in use but since it’s a generic herbal chemical the drug companies aren’t very keen on having it promoted but it is available both as part of the anesthetic and part of the recovery program and what can people do as far as specific diet for post surgery recovery to help their brain and their body recover the same foods that are generally good but emphasizing the things that are lost specifically by high stress which are protein zinc some of the D vitamins are turned over very 44:04 fast in stress so foods like liver and oysters and eggs which are rich in the trace minerals and protein are as long as you’re getting adequate carbohydrate and calcium these happen to be high phosphate foods along with the protein but they have the highest concentration of the healing minerals and vitamins you’re listening to WMNF Tampa 88.5 on your dial and we’re speaking with Dr. Ray Pete and we spoke a little bit earlier about cheeses and I wanted to ask you a question relating to pasteurization you mentioned that there’s beneficial nutrients does this get discounted once the milks or cheeses are pasteurized? No it’s such a tiny amount they pasteurize it now in I 45:08 think it’s something like three seconds at a high temperature and then drops immediately so there’s very little oxidative damage done now by pasteurizing so it’s a quick flash pasteurization yeah beautiful it might lower the vitamin A content three or four percent something like that but since it’s such a good rich source of all these nutrients no one is going to suffer deficiency if they’re eating pasteurized milk and cheese. And what’s your feeling about exercise during that recovery time for people that have gone through surgery? To I think a better just to regain flexibility and mobility in a gentle 46:08 way not to worry about muscle building exercise the time to think about that is before surgery because in one study of old people they found that the pattern they were the better their long-range survival was in the six months following the surgery the death rate was much higher in the lean low-body mass people and the survival went up directly in proportion to the body mass and the in aging or stress the muscles are frontum and it isn’t just the fat that is a buffered against stress but it’s mainly the mass of the muscles and exercises such as deep knee bends, wild weight lifting with dumbbells, 47:15 just a few minutes a day of a mild resistance exercise event sort can keep your muscles sound and relatively massive and muscles are themselves a hormone source they can produce testosterone instead of cortisol when you’re doing these resistant exercises so they are the muscle building is protecting your heart and brain as well as building up the reserves of tissue that are part of your resistance against stress. You mentioned that the cortisol damages the brain once the trauma has happened is that reversible over time if someone is following a protocol that would support their greater health? Yeah it’s probably just the same as the following anorexia that they’ve 48:20 seen that young women can have a great and quick regrowth of the mass of the brain substance just by stopping the stress and starting to eat well and I think that would happen with old people who are partially demanded by the stress of very serious surgery. And lastly I wanted to chat a little bit about adrenals as many many people these days seem to be suffering from low adrenals or adrenal fatigue. I mentioned that the muscles are an important source of steroid synthesis our biggest endocrine gland is our brain and the brain stabilizes all of the organs and if your brain is experiencing stress that 49:26 shifts the adrenal function to cortisol rather than DHEA and progesterone and the androgens and the adrenals shouldn’t produce simply the stress promoting hormones they should be putting out some of the defensive protective progesterone DHEA and pregnant alone as well but when your brain gives them super stress signals then they will over over act and the at Hansel you defined the adrenal failure as when the adrenal gland begins bleeding and the cells die that make steroids but the adrenal cortex is 50:31 extremely able to regenerate as fast as the thymus and thyroid gland the cortex of the adrenal if you’re well fed and if you stop the stress signals it can regenerate so what Hansel you was was talking about was an acute stress causes immediate bleeding of your stomach and intestines and that’s because of the high cortisol production among other stress hormones and if you continue that too long without feeding some of the curative nutrients sugars zinc magnesium calcium and so on vitamin D then the adrenal glands can’t keep up the intense work and they start bleeding and tissue dies too much 51:34 estrogen is one of the things that can contribute to overacting of the adrenal cortex in animal experience experiments we saw that just injecting a big dose of estrogen would cause adrenal enlargement in a moderate case or bleeding and death in an extreme dose of estrogen absolutely amazing how everything is so connected and reactive of what we’re doing both with our diet and our exercise and our lifestyle choices I should mention that cholesterol and thyroid and vitamin a are the important things for keeping the adrenal cortex from getting stressed to death because the cortisol of the cholesterol is the raw material for making cortisol and the other stress adaptive hormones 52:41 and without enough cholesterol and thyroid and vitamin a these cells are simulated but can’t can’t work and so they just give up on that trophy what sources of cholesterol would you recommend I’m a good diet plenty of fruit and milk in the diet will allow your tissues especially the liver and brain to make as much cortisol as much cholesterol as they need and speaking of liver would you recommend for people to eat liver if they do eat meat to eat liver or heart or kidneys from grass-fed beef for example is that a helpful thing to yeah the liver except for the ratio of calcium to phosphate the liver 53:41 has the highest concentration of the anti-stress nutrients and so at least twice a month there should be a good meal of liver for stress resistance maybe once a week for for instance a week is a safe and effective amount good old liver and onions a dr. Ray Pete thank you so so much for joining us tonight on the ultrasound show it is always such a delight to have you on and we very very much appreciate your time and fountain of information if people would like to get in touch with you and find out more about your own services where do they go well my website is repeat comm and you also have a YouTube page correct I don’t know you 54:44 are up on YouTube and people can listen to some of your interviews and I have on my website radiant soul comm one of our past interviews where we spoke about good fats and coconut oil and that was very informative and we had many many people commenting and writing back about that so thank you so so much okay thank you many many blessings much love sweetheart thank you and we’ve been speaking with dr. Ray Pete and if you are just tuned in halfway through you can always listen to this show again for the next six or seven days until it gets replaced and you can go to W