Estrogen vs Progesterone

00:00 Need one more reason why your Safeway store is just better? How about free Cuisinart Classic Coloury or Elite Flatware? That’s right! For every $10 you spend, earn a free stamp saver you can redeem for Cuisinart items. Once you’ve collected between 30 and 60 stamps, you could start shopping for a variety of Cuisinart Coloury or Flatware, available at the in-store display. Present your items in stamp saver at checkout. It’s simple. Spend $10, get your free stamp saver, start collecting. Safeway, it’s just better! You’re listening to Holistic Living, brought to you by East-West Healing and Performance. And now, here are your hosts, Josh and Jeannie Rubin. What’s up, everyone? This is Josh and Jeannie Rubin. I think Jeannie is on the other lie right now. Are you there, Jeannie? 01:02 I’m here. Can you hear me? Already. We can hear you. It’s Holistic Living and from Wellness, Weight Loss, Pain Elimination and Relaxation. But, of course, this year we’ve been having repeat on every month. I’d like to say thank you to him, of course, and keep growing on that. And I guess before we introduce Ray and get him on the line, we wanted to say a couple things about ourselves and about Ray. And this is 100%!f(MISSING)rom our mouth and has nothing to do with Ray’s said or anything because he’s a super humble guy and he’s really said nothing but answer our questions and say yes to doing the shows. The thing is, check out our website at EastWestHealing.com. Tons of free resources. It’s a resource site, but we do work with clients nutritionally all over the world. It’s far away in Switzerland and Israel using the phone to help people with thyroid problems, GI problems, hormonal imbalances, adrenal burn issues, fatigue. You name it. So give us a call to set up your consultation. You can get all that information on our site. 02:03 As well, keep in tune with our website. It will be changing dramatically in the next three-plus months in regards to the look of it, the layout, what’s on it, store, resources. You name it. It’s going to be fresh and new. We’re really excited about it. With maybe some cheap downloadable videos to your desktop, of course, you have to pay for it, but they’ll be very inexpensive and educational at the same time. Enough about us. Oh, one more thing. Look us up on Facebook, Josh Rubin, Jeannie Rubin, YouTube, blog, blog talk. Check it out. The reason for us really doing this and Jeannie can chime in is, first of all, we’re human and we’re Americans, so we bastardize everything. I don’t care who you are. We bastardize it. What you have to understand is, from my perspective, and this is just my perception and maybe Jeannie wants to add something, raise approach is not an approach. It’s a philosophy. It’s a science. It’s a science on how the body works, how its biochemistry works, its biology works, its physiology works, everything. 03:05 It’s not about an outside-in type of diet like paleolithic dieting and all these different diets out there in vegetarianism. It’s really based on the science of how the body works, and unfortunately, you can’t argue against that. Now, you can, of course, because it can create fear. It can create fear, but at the same time, our goal is to educate people. It’s not to create conflict on Facebook. It’s not to create conflict on the show. We want to share what we’re learning, and that’s really the bottom line. So, you know, if you get pissed, you get two options. Shut us off and go somewhere else, or ease into it and learn just like we did. We’re not saying we’re know-it-alls. We just want to share this stuff, and that’s the bottom line. Second thing, it’s a prophet. His articles are technical. It’s like finding Waldo and piecing things together. And don’t bastardize it and think just because you eat gelatin, carrots, and broth that you’re going to become healthy and lose weight and healthy thyroid. Or just because you read an article that you know exactly what you’re doing. 04:08 We’re always learning, and realize that you might need to work with a practitioner or consult with someone in the industry that has studied his stuff, or, you know, has worked with him directly for, you know, 10, 15, 20 years, because there aren’t people out there besides us. So, just realize that. And the third thing is I know that we’re even beginning a lot more emails and phone calls. So, I’m making a huge assumption that Ray has. Now, Ray’s a humble person. From chatting with him, that’s what I feel, not on the show, just off the show. If you send him an email with 50 questions, he’ll probably answer it and never ask for money. Now, he doesn’t seem like a guy that’s attached to the dollar, but at the same time, he does research. Without his research, we wouldn’t have this great information. So, what I’m asking people, this has nothing to do with what he brought up. He’s never even brought this up. What I’m asking people is if you are emailing him, or you email him on a regular basis, that out of the kindness of your heart, you send him a check for a dollar. You send him a check for $5, $100. Whatever you feel is worth it. That’s really all we’re asking. 05:15 And you can do it anonymously. It’s up to you. So, that’s really all I’ve got to say about that. I just think it will be a kind thing to do since he takes time out of his day once a month to really educate us for free. And he’s answering all these emails. So, that’s really all I ask. Today, we’re talking about estrogen versus progesterone. Jeanne, are you still there? I don’t think she’s there. I don’t hear her. You can go to repeat site, R-A-Y-P-E-A-T dot com. He’s got tons of articles. He’s got books, a lot of great information. Of course, a little technical, but you know, you’ve got to work for it. A little bit about Ray. He’s got a PhD in biology from the University of Oregon, and he specializes in physiology. You’ve got to love it. He’s taught at many different schools, and you can check that out on your site from schools in Mexico, the U.S., Oregon, naturopathic schools. He also does private consulting in regards to nutrition counseling. 06:19 He mainly started his work with progesterone in related hormones back in 1968, so he’s got tons of applicable knowledge in this realm. That’s what we’re talking about today. He’s done many papers on physiology and chemistry and physics, done dissertations, outlining progesterone and other hormones, and he’s closely related to it, and the list goes on and on and on. Of course, a lot of people know by now that he’s really big into hormones and regulating the thyroid and using foods that are beneficial to the body based on our physiology. So if you want to learn more about him, check out his website, r-a-y-p-e-a-t dot com, tons of articles and books. Let me grab Jeannie and Ray, because I think they’re on the other line. Just give me a second. We still got a… Yes, I’m here. All right. We can hear you now. Welcome. How are we doing, Ray? Very good. Thank you. Great. Thanks for coming back on. I know everyone’s excited. We’ve got tons and tons of listeners, so let’s get to it. 07:28 We’re going to be talking about estrogen and progesterone today, which, of course, is more hormones, and we’ll kind of intertwine this all together. It’s hard to get specific, but I guess it seems like you’ve been studying this for, you know, back since the 1960s. I guess our first question is, what sparked your interest in the whole estrogen, progesterone, et cetera, I guess, hormonal thing? Because you have lots of articles and a lot of your books are correlated with it. What kind of got you to go down that avenue? It really started just as a little kid growing up and noticing things. Whenever I would see a medical textbook, I would read that. They were generally more interesting than novels. And when I worked in the woods, one of the old timers pointed out that when they wanted a pine tree to bear seeds, they would chop it with an axe, and that made it bear fruit. 08:31 And I heard stories about how stress would bring on puberty prematurely, and those ideas started blending with what I was hearing and seeing from, like, a woman in the 50s who took a shot of estrogen immediately came down with rheumatoid arthritis, which got worse with each injection and completely cleared up when she stopped using it. And a classmate’s mother had a shot of estrogen for menopause, and within 30 minutes was psychotic and was committed to the state institution for several months. And the daughter, the classmate, began using contraceptives shortly after that and died of a stroke. And other young women who were using those first very high estrogen contraceptives were being disabled by hemorrhaging and such. 09:39 And so it was in the culture by the time I decided to go to graduate school in biology. But my intention was to study brain biology, nerve biology, and that grew out of my interest in psychology and linguistics. But it turned out that the real science was being done in the endocrinology department rather than in the very ideological nerve biology area. And the fact that I had moved from Mexico to Oregon at about the time I started graduate school, I started noticing my own health was changing with the dark rainy winters in Oregon. And I started hearing stories from girls that came to go to graduate school and would get a cheap basement apartment and would spend all winter with PMS. 10:51 And so that, even though I hadn’t yet started studying endocrinology, I was seeing more things that were coalescing into the interactions of the environment with the hormones. And I had been reading, I taught school, I was assigned a course in physics for biology majors, and in reading widely to know how to orient. And that I ran across on Celia’s early work. And in the 40s, he had already very well characterized the functions of all of the steroid hormones. He wrote a thing called the encyclopedia of steroid hormones. 11:52 And he demonstrated that a large dose of estrogen created a shock condition. It had all of the features of shock. And progesterone imitated all of the features of the stress-protecting hormones so that animals didn’t need their adrenal glands if they had a steady supply of progesterone or if they were pregnant. So the first reaction from a big dose of estrogen was known to be shock-like. And so when I shifted over in graduate school to the endocrine department, my project was reproductive aging just because that happened to be what the university had in the field of endocrine research. 12:53 And my thesis advisor had demonstrated that estrogen causes a miscarriage, basically infertility. But if you give the right dose at any stage of pregnancy, it will cause abortion. And he had demonstrated that vitamin E in large doses would delay age-related infertility. And my project was studying the oxidative changes in the uterus that occurred during aging. And I found that the changes of the uterus with aging were the same as those produced by estrogen treatment, but also by a deficiency of vitamin E and also by radiation treatment. 13:57 And I started seeing how relevant Han Selje’s work was showing the stress or shock imitating effect of estrogen. And that, in fact, any kind of shock or stress has estrogenic effects, so you can make an animal go into estrus by irradiating it, not just its head or ovaries, but any part of the body, something is produced that has an estrogenic effect. If you put a plastic bag over a rat’s head, it goes into estrus. Suffocation activates the so-called estrogen receptors and will actually increase the production of estrogen and the sensitivity to estrogen. And even without estrogen, those stress situations will imitate the functions of estrogen. 15:07 Interesting. A lot of people probably haven’t. Some people haven’t read about Han Selje. And he was someone back in the day that kind of, I would say, if I could be incorrect or correct, coined the term stress to develop the general adaptation syndrome. When we talk about estrogen, I guess we’ll get into the whole radiation thing and we can talk about where it comes from. But I guess I want your take on this because so many people, because of synthetic estrogens and our environment with estrogens and the stress reaction with estrogen, I think a lot of people make the misconception that it’s essentially bad. If I’m wrong, I mean, essentially, you know, it’s really not a female hormone because men and women both have it correct. But also, we actually need it to survive. It’s a problem when it becomes more of an excess that it’s a problem. Yeah, it’s really the essential masculinizing hormone. The females can have it at the crucial developmental stage, but they have a lot of a protein called alpha-phetoprotein that inactivates estrogen. 16:25 So at that stage, estrogen will create a male functioning organism while it won’t affect the female fetus or infant because the female is simply protected against estrogen by that special protein. So its basic early function is as a masculine hormone. And the estrogen industry really is where the idea came from that it’s a female hormone. It was identified in the ovary, but the main ovarian hormone, which is the feminizing hormone, is progesterone. And men have quite a bit of progesterone, but women, probably the reason women live longer than men is that they are able to produce much more progesterone than men since men produce it mainly in their adrenal glands. 17:42 So I think for everyone listening, it’s super important to hear that, you know, in rate correctly if I’m wrong, but when it comes to estrogen progesterone, there’s no such thing as a male hormone or a female hormone because we both have them. That’s how they’re labeled based on maybe whoever the research, whoever’s doing them. And they both do a huge role in how our physiology works, how our hormonal system works. So it’s really not that we, you know, men have this and women have that. We both have them. And we actually need them. It’s one becomes very deficient or excessive in a sense that it creates an imbalance. So I think that’s an important part. And remember that men and women, women produce them. It’s not just a female thing. Yeah, it’s an excitatory sensor and its effect in females is the main effects are to cause the pituitary to produce prolactin, to cause the breasts to develop, produce more tubules and keep growing 18:59 where progesterone stops the growth and differentiates them and to cause the uterus to expand greatly in preparation for pregnancy. But those effects, there’s a great surge of estrogen right around the time of ovulation that lasts for about 12 hours. And that releases histamine in many tissues that activates a great surge of cell division. Both histamine and serotonin are released by estrogen. And pregnancy requires that only in the sense that the uterus is activated and made sensitive to the contact of the fertilized ovum. And that preparatory activation is what estrogen is needed for. But you can substitute many other irritants. You can cause implantation to happen just with histamine in the absence of estrogen. 20:13 So estrogen isn’t really essential for reproduction by the female in that sense that you can substitute other things. So in regards to estrogen and progesterone, you could have already mentioned this, but beside the menstrual cycle and fertility, we talk about these hormones. And I know you talk about estrogen being excitatory. And I do want to talk about histamine and prolactin and all these other hormones because I think it’s important for people to understand them as well as serotonin, which is your newest newsletter, which is fabulous, by the way. But what are the roles that these things play in our lives besides the menstrual cycle? I should say women’s menstrual cycle. I mean, you talk about how estrogen regulates blood sugar, right? Yeah, it excites. If you have too much of it, it will cause insulin to be over-secreted and can lower blood sugar that way. 21:21 But even though it doesn’t need an estrogen receptor to activate a cell, just about every cell in the body contains estrogen receptors and they tend to be increased by stress. But there are other hormones that can imitate estrogen’s excitatory effects on the uterus and breast, for example. The pituitary is the source of many excitatory hormones. And so in great stress, you get estrogenic influences from even the ACTH, prolactin, FSH, and so on. In the pituitary, these act on many tissues in the same way that estrogen does. The thyroid-stimulating hormone itself has some factors, some effects very similar to estrogen’s. 22:27 I was going to say, going a little bit off topic and we can come back, you’re talking about estrogen and progesterones. There’s so many people getting tested for these and now there’s so many new ways because you hear all these people saying, well, blood is inaccurate because in blood, estrogen and progesterone are bound to proteins like albumin and sex hormone and globulin. But in saliva, they’re not, so saliva is more accurate. Now, I go back and forth, I keep bouncing back and forth, and I know there’s a lot of people out there that don’t know what to do. And it’s hard because you see these people that are suffering, they go to their doctor, they do a blood lab, everything’s fine, and then they go to a saliva lab with someone and they see that something’s deficient like progesterone and they have their estrogen dominant. Can you give us your philosophy or thoughts on A, which when you feel is a little more accurate, and why we see this? Why we see this difference? 23:31 One of the problems with lab tests is that each lab tends to have its own standard and there are practically no studies in which healthy people have been sought out for blood tests to establish the normal. They usually use people who are sick with something else to establish the normal for a given blood test result. So it’s really kind of irrational to pay much attention to what they call normal unless you have someone really healthy that you want to consider as your model. But the idea of protein-bound hormones versus free hormones, if you try to dissolve estrogen or progesterone, especially in water, you can hardly dissolve progesterone in oil. 24:40 It’s very hard to dissolve. It does bind nicely to albumin and several other kinds of protein. But one of the assumptions is that what you’re measuring in the saliva is free in some sense, but they simply are not significantly soluble in water. So what is it bound to when you’re measuring it? The tests done in the lab that are called free progesterone or free estrogen are really done by dialysis, which means that the hormone which is bound to a protein is able to pass through a membrane, which is usually a protein membrane and is picked up on the other side by something which also is not in the watery phase, an antibody, for example, or other protein. So freedom is purely a metaphysical idea. 25:54 Everything is moving along on the microscopic level, a solid phase. So there’s no real meaning to outside of the laboratory, this distinction. So the saliva, if the hormones are associated with something, but it just isn’t well-defined what they’re associated with. And several people have done tests. They’ve attached the hormone covalently to albumin so that it can’t possibly get loose. So it’s absolutely a protein-bound hormone, and they find that it works. It goes right into the cell. Albumin has no trouble getting into the cytoplasm, into the mitochondrion, into the nucleus, taking its hormone with it. And they’ve even attached hormones to the surface of red blood cells, and that way they can tell whether the cell is sensing it at the surface, 27:04 or whether it has to travel into the cell on its terrier protein. But the whole idea that a hormone has to be free from a protein to get into the cell derives from the idea that there’s a barrier at the surface of the cell. It’s really a distinction between a proteinaceous, oil-loving system, which is the cell, and the relatively wetter, less oil-loving, external fluids, and bloodstream. So I guess, and if I heard you correctly, and I could be wrong, that when it comes to a lab, it’s not that one or the other is better, but it’s more accurate. But in your eyes, the blood test would be more accurate when it comes to the hormones. There’s a very good base of information, even though their definition of what might be normal can be hard to interpret, but still you have a big base of information about how the measurements are made. 28:24 And people vary tremendously in the amount of saliva they produce, and even in the chemical composition and protein content of the saliva, depending on what’s causing you to salivate, the protein content of the saliva is variable, and also the hormone content. Okay, so it’s really that blood tests are accurate. The problem is we have so many norms, so the problem is people might have all this symptomatology, but whoever they do the lab with, they’re coming back within the norms, so they’re being seen as okay, the problem is they’re okay. When you look at the functional outcomes of manipulating the steroids, as they’ve done in vitro fertilization and fertility clinics, they see that the results in humans are almost exactly the same as had been established for about 50 years in animals. 29:35 Fertility requires from 50 to 100 times as much progesterone as estrogen, and that goes back to the fact that estrogen creates stress, mystery, and abortion, and progesterone is really the progestational hormone. It really antagonizes the mystery producing effect of estrogen, and so the more you have, the better it is for pregnancy, and the person who is fertile is also resistant to stress in general, and shock, and so on. I think that’s the kind of somewhere I want to go right now as far as discussing estrogen and its role in stress, and how that all kind of comes together, because even speaking about infertility and all these clinics that have popped up, and how much more infertility we’re seeing with people and miscarriages and whatnot, 30:38 and again, estrogen’s role in stress, and how that all kind of comes together, because I think it’s a huge problem when we’re seeing such a huge, whether it’s an estrogen dominance or a progesterone deficiency, kind of what are some of the environmental components that are contributing to this? Because when people think stress, they think emotional or this or that, but it’s really more looking out around the environment to see what’s creating this imbalance in women, because I mean, I know I’m probably not the only one that’s seeing this huge imbalance. Anything stressful in the environment tends to increase estrogen. This research goes back to about 1940. The Biscons showed that malnutrition, after the Second World War they tested it on humans, but they had been testing it on rats, showing that malnutrition and other stresses would increase the estrogen. 31:44 Primarily, in their studies, malnutrition caused the liver to be unable to destroy estrogen, which normally 100%!o(MISSING)f the estrogen that gets to the liver is prepared for excretion by the kidneys or into the bile. And if the liver is underactive because of, for example, a protein or vitamin B deficiency or a thyroid deficiency, 100%!o(MISSING)f the estrogen reaching the liver can pass right through it back into the bloodstream. And that recirculating estrogen then turns on the adrenal stress hormones directly by acting on the adrenal cortex and by blocking the ability of the thyroid gland to secrete the thyroid hormone which is needed by the liver to inactivate estrogen. 32:51 So a protein deficiency or a B vitamin deficiency is one of the things that can turn on absolute estrogen control and infertility. And thyroid used to be in 1940s and before was recognized as the basic fertility drug. And as progesterone came to be understood, it was seen that thyroid is needed to turn cholesterol into progesterone to maintain a healthy pregnancy. And increasingly, one of the environmental factors that impairs liver function increases estrogen activity and inhibits thyroid function is the unsaturated oil, polyunsaturated so-called essential fatty acids. 33:52 These are all anti-thyroid and proestrogen and anti-progesterone. And some French researchers who had been hearing the propaganda about fish oil being good for the brain decided that they would demonstrate that fetuses are smarter when the mother is getting a fish oil supplement by doing a sound and response test on the woman’s abdomen getting the fetus. The fetus reaction to a sound and they found that the women who were getting the fish oil supplement, the fetuses had retarded learning reactions and when the babies were born they found that not only were they smaller overall but their brains were smaller. 34:53 And if they had been paying attention to the animal research in the preceding 50 years, they would have seen that this is very predictable that polyunsaturated fatty acids by increasing estrogen lowering thyroid and progesterone retard the development of the brain of the fetus. So anti-stress alone obviously like you said can mimic the estrogen reaction but you’re saying that foods in itself can actually like foods that are high on unsaturated fats or fish oils can actually mimic that reaction which can downregulate the thyroid as well as what’s the word I’m looking for. Not back up the liver but creating liver toxicity problems as well as you know gut issues and information and things like that correct? Yeah, the intestine is a very important factor because the liver excretes part of the estrogen through the kidneys by making it water soluble but part of it which isn’t that water soluble goes into the bile and is excreted with the feces assuming everything is working right. 36:13 But if the wrong bacteria are present and the bowel is sluggish which always happens in hypothyroidism, that estrogen tends to be reabsorbed adding stress to the liver and raising the systemic estrogen level. So sometimes just an antibiotic will drastically and immediately lower your estrogen and stress hormones and increase the progesterone just by limiting that reabsorption from the intestine and that’s what got me interested in the raw carrot effect. You see the same effect lower estrogen and cortisol and higher progesterone within about three days of eating a raw carrot every day. So everyone that’s listening, he talked about this last show, he uses just a one raw carrot to help prevent reabsorption of this estrogen or toxins in the intestine so he uses the food as a source of almost like charcoal in a sense to help prevent toxicity in the liver. 37:35 Yeah, as well as absorbing the estrogen like charcoal it reduces the absorption of endotoxin and serotonin. The intestine is a constant source of stress from endotoxin according to how irritated it is and how poorly digested the starch and fiber are and so on. And once it gets irritated then it can produce massive amounts of serotonin that disturb the whole system. Right, now we’re talking about estrogen but there’s other hormones that are correlated with it so maybe we could touch upon kind of rewind a little and talk about prolactin and what it can do to the body. In their correlation maybe with osteoporosis and cortisol and adrenaline and even histamine because we’re talking about them I think it’s important for people to know it’s not just estrogen, it’s how it can actually cause a hormonal cascade of all these other hormones including serotonin. 38:41 Yeah, the brain, many people have been taught that mast cells or basophils are the only cells that produce histamine but any cell in the body seems to be able to produce it. Cancer cells can produce it. Brain cells, there’s a network in the lower part of the brain that specializes in histamine signaling to the rest of the brain and it seems to be a stress organizing influence. And serotonin is the other general stress signaling system in the brain. When anything goes wrong your brain activates the histamine and serotonin system and prolactin is one of the stress reacting hormones, ACTH and thyroid stimulating hormone or others. 39:45 But the prolactin can be used as an indicator of many bad conditions. It tends to increase steadily with aging in both men and women. And the normal range for prolactin about 30 years ago was lowered because they saw that people with the, I forget the units but the standard number, the top had been 20 but they started seeing that that was really, the top number was increased because of the large number of women who were using birth control pills and there was an epidemic of prolactin secreting pituitary tumors resulting from the contraceptive estrogen exposure. And so 30 years ago the healthy normal range for prolactin was set back to 2 to 12 and with age that’s a healthy person will rise in old age maybe 8 or 10 or something like that. 41:04 But just a few years ago the top number was raised in some labs to 25 or 30 because the average person is now in a stressed hyperprolactinemic condition. So if you don’t feel reassured if your prolactin is only 18 or 20 on the test because everything is under stress when it’s that high. It’s been known for many years that prolactin is a major factor in bone loss. A long time editor of the yearbook of endocrinology in one of, I think it might have been the very last volume he edited, he said it’s interesting that prolactin causes osteoporosis that estrogen increases prolactin but people are being told that estrogen will prevent osteoporosis. 42:19 And that was his last year as the editor of that book and it’s, men develop osteoporosis progressively with age and with increasing prolactin. So men also have a tendency for the estrogen to creep up with age pushing the prolactin and stress hormones up so it isn’t strictly a female thing. But when progesterone falls at the first missed period around menopause that’s when bone loss really picks up and prolactin becomes active under the unopposed influence of estrogen. Right, that was kind of my next question, the correlation between that because you read a lot out there like I know I studied Dr. John Lealot and Dr. McCormick and they talk a lot about that how prolactin is increased with estrogen production because a lot of people don’t know that estrogen and 43:29 progesterone actually play a part in osteoclast and osteoblast production in regards to bone kind of building up in bone loss and prolactin as well. Go ahead. In the textbook we used in my endocrinology course, Constance Martin pointed out that people had been looking for an effect of estrogen on the bones in various animals and humans. But at that time in 1970 there had been no evidence that estrogen increased bone calcium retention although it did increase the soft tissue calcification that was very well established in animal research by the late 1960s. But the first model for estrogen’s effect on the bone they tried was the beagle dog and in them estrogen caused many problems including bone loss but they found that rats were a good model. 44:45 It turns out that cortisol also increases bone density in rats. Their endocrine systems are very different because they live at night and are very short-lived. It just turned out that rats were a good model for selling estrogen as a way to prevent bone loss but the effect they could see that estrogen was immediately doing was reducing osteoclast activity. Therefore they said it stops bone turnover. If you stop breaking down the bone that’s what you need to slow the bone loss and that was the whole basis. Interestingly the animal research was the whole basis for selling estrogen for preventing bone loss. 45:49 But human research was the basis for getting FDA approval for DES and other estrogens in the first place because animal research had shown estrogen to be almost across the board toxic and carcinogenic. So they can use clinical reports in humans which are very subjective when they want to sell a product but if they can find an animal model where they don’t have any data in humans they’ll use the animal model. So it’s important to look at what the salesmen are referring to. Is it a clinical or an animal model and how relevant and how valid are they? Right. Ray did a lot of good stuff out there guys as well as Dr. John Lee. 46:52 There’s another gentleman named Dr. McCormick who did a radio show on osteoporosis so you can read more about that. We’ll talk a little bit more about estrogen than I want to talk about progesterone because we’re getting carried over with estrogen which is important. A lot of people that are listening in their practitioners but a lot of lay people so some of the stuff goes over their head. You know what kind of explains, I know you talked about one of your books, there’s kind of four ways you can be estrogen dominant. Maybe talk about some of the symptoms per se like you talk about puffy skin and hypothyroidism and things like that. Maybe talk more about some of the symptoms that people might see if they are estrogen dominant or progesterone deficient. Since it’s excitatory it can temporarily increase alertness. It acts on the same enzymes that cocaine acts on to increase the adrenaline action in the brain and increases verbal activity so that women can talk twice as fast as men under the influence of estrogen. 48:03 And that’s sold as a cognitive virtue except that that carried on for a long time is excitotoxic to the nerves and causes loss of nerve cell function. And the more acute effects of estrogen dominance in the brain can include Korea, sort of uncontrolled unexpected movements of the arms and legs and such, and epilepsy or seizures are promoted by estrogen. Water retention is really the first action of estrogen on the cell in exciting it, causes it to take up water, anything that if you block the oxygen delivery to a cell it’ll take up water too. 49:08 So the excitation moves the cell’s requirements to a level that can’t be sustained so the oxygen becomes deficient. It takes up water and shifts its pH and electrical charge and that same shift of water into the cell makes the walls of the blood vessels leaky to water. And so the water shifts letting sodium and water both go into the tissues causing the feet to swell up while you’re standing up or during the night your face will share the water burden. But the estrogen, that immediate water logging effect can be compensated by the adrenal, the cortex and the renin, angiotensin, aldosterone effect which is to try to compensate for that leakiness by increasing the sodium retention 50:24 at first sodium falls in estrogen dominance as it goes out of the bloodstream into the tissue, but then activating this blood pressure regulating system you can shift from low blood pressure and swollen feet to high blood pressure and all of the stress related cortisol dominant syndrome with even at an extreme you can get gangrene constriction of the blood vessels of the extremities and the calcification of soft tissues that the old endocrine textbooks used to mention. That was another thing that Hans Selje investigated in great depth. He called it calcifilaxis and calcurgi in which the excited blood vessels first constrict and load up on calcium. 51:38 Estrogen releasing histamine and serotonin precedes that but calcification and then these injured areas tend to load up with iron in most cases and the iron increases the breakdown free radical production in these tissues. So it can lead to such things as gangrene of the fingers and toes and scleroderma heartening of the skin in various areas that are stressed and I’ve seen people recover in just a couple of weeks from scleroderma when they stopped using an estrogen supplement. Yeah. And Katie remember I want to speak for Ray you know because I understand a lot of stuff but of course a lot of stuff is just over my head too but you know there’s many ways you can be quote unquote estrogen dominant. You know your body can have difficulty detoxing it in the liver. 52:40 It could be excess because of stress or synthetic you know prescription you’re taking. It could be from your body over synthesizing progesterone because of a stress or you could just be progesterone deficient. So I think it’s person dependent wouldn’t you say or is it always the same? Oh it’s always different. Okay. Yeah. Keep those different factors in mind. It’s possible to figure it out because the same it’s a balance between a quick emergency stress reactions and then a long term decompensation of the reactions and progesterone and thyroid are the things that give you the basic long term protection. Right. And I think listeners need to hear that you know just because you’re not taking a synthetic or you might be which is important to research because I find most people are taking stuff and you know nothing about but we both men and women have estrogen so you can still have these effects. 53:46 Men can you know so this can be just physiological as well. So it’s not just from taking something. We talk a lot about estrogen. Go ahead Jeanne I’m sorry. Well I was just going to say in regards to that as far as how people become estrogen dominant we’ve touched on a few different factors but when you just mentioned Josh is that in a stress response and in relation to the hormonal pathway we’ve talked so much about estrogen but how do we become again so estrogen dominant and so progesterone deficiency and I think that’s a huge point in a stress reaction. The body is going to almost bypass the production of progesterone or use that for the production of cortisol in order to maintain or be able to respond in a sense. I guess under stress it’s not important that we procreate or that we go to the bathroom or whatever the case maybe or digest our foods or whatever it is. 54:47 The more important thing is that we have enough cortisol on hand to keep the brain working and everything else are made organ functioning. So I think you know when it comes to progesterone what is the role that progesterone plays with estrogen. They clearly work together. Yeah the stress will if you just look at the protein that they call the estrogen receptor and the progesterone receptor each one acts outside of that system but those are useful places to focus your attention. Stress activates the estrogen receptor and estrogen activates and maintains the estrogen receptor in most systems but once the estrogen is acting that turns on the cells production of the progesterone receptor that binds progesterone 55:52 and when progesterone is available and fills that protein receptor that destroys the estrogen receptor so progesterone is an anti-estrogen in a very absolute sense. It knocks out the protein that keeps it in the cell. It knocks out the sulfatase and glucuronidase enzymes that allow it to condense in the cell and it activates positively the enzymes that eliminate estrogen from the cell and inhibits aromatase which makes new estrogen and so on. So there are seven or eight specific mechanisms by which progesterone neutralizes and destroys and eliminates estrogen. So many people have wanted to say that it synergizes with estrogen but it destroys estrogen in a very thorough manner. 57:06 But estrogen if your body can respond, if it has thyroid, vitamin A and cholesterol which are the materials needed to convert cholesterol to progesterone, given an estrogen stimulation your body will make a massive amount of progesterone. Get rid of the estrogen and go on to differentiate the functioning for example of the breast and the uterus for lactation and pregnancy. And the progesterone counters the effect on all of the peripheral effects, for example estrogen activates the adrenal cortex to produce aldosterone and cortisol and progesterone not only counteracts that effect in the adrenal gland but even if you’re injected with aldosterone and cortisol, if you have adequate progesterone the peripheral effects of those hormones are blocked. 58:20 Progesterone will serve in place of cortisol or aldosterone if you don’t have either of those because the adrenals are removed so it will let the kidneys function properly and take care of most inflammation and so on. But if you have an excess of aldosterone and cortisol, progesterone also prevents the toxic effects of those hormones the way it protects against toxic effects of estrogen. So progesterone feels in for a deficiency of many hormones and protects against an excess of those same hormones. And you talk about too, what role does it play with magnesium because you talk about a lot in your book, what’s it called like the fourth molecular progesterone book that you’ve written that’s great once you get it. Can you elaborate on its role with magnesium? 59:24 Well partly Jerry Aikawa was a magnesium specialist who wrote at least one good book on magnesium. He showed that the cell which needs magnesium for many functions but for example ATP is stabilized in the presence of magnesium. And if magnesium is deficient, you’re energy deficient and that contributes to cell swelling. If the mast cell is magnesium deficient it can’t retain histamine and serotonin and other inflammatory things. And so whatever holds magnesium inside the cell prevents inflammation and allows differentiation and good function. And Jerry Aikawa showed that thyroid, the T3 especially, is what is needed by the cell to retain magnesium. 01:00:32 And I think the production of ATP and carbon dioxide is the mechanism by which the thyroid regulates the retention of magnesium. And the reduction of histamine, serotonin and other inflammatory things by magnesium and its association with high energy cell metabolism and production of carbon dioxide antagonize the improper actions of calcium. When the cell is inflamed or de-energized in the absence of thyroid and magnesium it takes up calcium. And the reason it takes it up is partly because the calcium should be held in suspension in the blood as an ion combined with carbon dioxide or bicarbonate. 01:01:42 If you lose the bicarbonate then the calcium goes into the cell and keeps it in an excited inflamed state. And so the proper condition of the calcium goes with the availability of magnesium and the magnesium keeps the platelet as well as the mast cell from de-granulating and putting out serotonin and other inflammatory and clot-promoting agents. Guys, the name of his book is Progesterone in Ortho Molecular Medicine and have it in front of me, but it’s a great book. It looks like a small book, but it’s packed with great info. Mine’s basically, I should have just dipped it in red ink, but it’s a great book and he talks about the benefits of progesterone and how it works to basically restrain blood clotting and help balance blood sugar and help with kidney function and down-regulate histamine. 01:02:45 So it’s got a lot of different functions in the body, so it’s definitely worth reading whether you’re in the industry or not. If you have progesterone in your body, you should be reading it. That’s my opinion on it. Our last chat, we talked a lot about the thyroid, and you kind of mentioned a little bit in how estrogen in itself, I guess we could say down-regulates the thyroid. And we could say that progesterone would stimulate the thyroid, but you talked about how we also need vitamin A and cholesterol to produce progesterone. Without medications, how one might do that with nutrition? And I’m not looking for, you know, of course we don’t have to have the plan. Just some basic recommendations. The factor of polyunsaturated fats that in the last 50 years, this has been probably the main thing interfering with thyroid function. 01:03:48 And you can block that very quickly with coconut oil because of the quick availability of the short and medium chain saturated fats. They compete against the polyunsaturated fats for producing oxygen in the mitochondria. The short chain saturated fats are anti-inflammatory and have many indirect helpful functions, but they provide energy so quickly that they block many of the actions of the polyunsaturated fats. And the thyroid is, and the mitochondrial energy production are constantly under a breaking influence of the polyunsaturated fats. When you’re under stress, you free fatty acids to circulate. 01:04:51 So every time you’re under stress, your thyroid function is blocked a little bit, and your cellular ability to use sugar is blocked a little bit. Coconut oil gives you a temporary reprieve while it’s being digested for a couple hours after eating it. It interferes with that blocking system of the polyunsaturated fats. Sugar does the same thing, only it doesn’t have the same competitive power against the fatty acids. And when you’re having enough sugar and saturated fatty acids to interrupt the anti-metabolic effect of the polyunsaturated fats, your blood sugar is stable and more available to be used and stored in the liver. 01:05:52 And the liver senses the availability of fuel, especially glucose, to govern your thyroid function. And the way it does that is local rather than acting through your pituitary or thyroid gland. Your thyroid gland puts out about three parts of thyroxin for every part of active T3 hormone. And your liver, when it senses that you have enough fuel as glucose or short fatty acids, will allow the thyroxin to be turned into the active T3 and will provide a very high-end, adequate thyroid hormone. The thyroid gland itself directly contributes about 30%!o(MISSING)f the active stuff. 01:06:53 So it takes a little while for a change in the thyroid gland to affect the metabolism where the liver is instantly monitoring the amount of fuel and adjusting accordingly. So as long as your liver has enough glucose stored as glycogen to keep your blood sugar steady for eight hours or so, your metabolic rate will stay the same. As soon as your liver runs out of glucose, if you’re not getting a steady supply from your food, then your T3 production falls immediately by about 60%!o(MISSING)r 70%!.(MISSING) And then your thyroid and pituitary sense those changes and will adjust slightly later than your liver. So the one reason I like Ray’s philosophy guys is it’s super unconventional, but it’s really how the body works. 01:07:58 The thing with the thyroid is if you’re eating, if you take away the foods that are creating inflammation and creating that stress response that he’s talked about like the cortisol gland, which downregulate the thyroid. And you eat the foods that allow for the conversion of thyroid and allow for the liver to work properly. And a lot of them, of course, are anti-inflammatory proteins. You know, maybe we’ll do some shows on that. But eating the right types of vegetables, obviously you’ve seen on his site, he advocates sugar. So it’s a huge part, along with everything else, the coconut oil in regards to stimulating the thyroid and pushing you into that anti-inflammatory state. So it can be done with food. It doesn’t always have to be herbs, plant-based supplements and things like that. So I think that’s an important thing to take away. Maybe a couple more questions and then we’ll just kind of maybe take some calls if we have them and kind of wrap it up. I actually kind of want to ask or touch on or have Ray kind of explain. 01:09:02 You know, there’s a lot of women out there who are, you know, upon menopause, went to the doctor and got put on different HRT, you know, hormone therapy, or women who are on the pill. So can you kind of talk about that a little bit and what some alternative methods may be for women who want to protect themselves against these estrogens or increased estrogens or even, you know, young women on the pill who are altering their hormonal balances through being on the pill? The consumption of the menopausal hormones decreased drastically after the 2002 Women’s Health Initiative results came out, showing that estrogen causes strokes and heart attacks and dementia and cancer, the things that they were selling it to prevent. But the industry always comes back with propaganda pieces in all the medical journals. 01:10:09 And so a lot of women are again being indoctrinated to take it. The short-term benefit is that it’s very much like cocaine. It peps you up. But if a person wants to withdraw from it, there’s often a time of depression and low energy. And while adjusting the thyroid and progesterone and diet functions, sometimes it just helps to supplement coffee to keep the mental energy up. And the hot flashes are really, it’s a complex set of reactions. But I experienced hot flashes when I traveled to Mexico and was exerting too much too fast for not being adapted to the altitude. 01:11:11 And every time I would stop and rest, I would have a hot flash. And that started me looking around and I noticed young women who were working very hard were suffering hot flashes in their 20s. It isn’t just a menopausal thing, but it’s a stress, adrenaline, cortisol, very complex set of reactions. And the simplest, safest way to respond to them is, for example, if you have night sweats and hot flashes during the night, having a lot of carbohydrate at bedtime will normally be enough to stop them. And having a snack of a glass of orange juice and milk several times through the day will usually stop them. Some salty food to steady the blood sugar and adrenaline will very often be all it takes to stop the hot flashing. 01:12:24 No, Ray, I just want to clarify something because a lot of people listen and they hear what you’re saying. And I know what you’re saying, but I know some people just hear high carbohydrate meals. And people are always looking for a way to push someone down and people can run with that and go, well, Ray Pete advocates eating a high carbohydrate meal. And I want to clarify that my perception of what you’re saying is you’re talking more of the right types of carbohydrates in regards to your tropical fruits, your root vegetables, milk and sugar, orange juice, you’re not talking about, you know, pots and pots and things like that. No, there are many problems with the starchy foods. I’m strongly against all of the grainy starches in particular. If you’re going to have to eat starch just to get by, it should be cooked for maybe 40 minutes as a minimum and then eating with cream, butter or coconut oil. 01:13:32 Because the starch grains very easily find their way into the bloodstream of other body fluids where they, in the bloodstream, they clog small arterioles and cause systemic injury. Chronically, they’ve demonstrated that in mice as well as people. So cooking the starch much more than normal and eating it with quite a bit of fat is protective. But still, people keep sending me studies showing that in a study of five weeks or so, they argue that there’s a great benefit from feeding a high starch diet rather than a high sugar diet. But when you look at the long range effects, if they continued, you’d see a super obese, stressed, older animal if it lived on that same high starch diet where the sugar helps to regulate the adrenal and the thyroid hormones 01:14:48 and to moderate the insulin and other adaptive hormones. And I don’t advocate eating, although I think a person should have at least 80 to 100 grams of good protein every day and more is okay. But it’s important not to eat too much protein by itself. I had the experience of almost fainting after eating just eggs for breakfast when I was in a hurry in a cold climate and I heard that it was fairly common for women on a diet if they just ate eggs to faint about an hour later because the egg protein is very high quality and stimulates insulin secretion which lowers the blood sugar and that falls for a very intense cortisol reaction. And it often can produce a fainting reaction but it always produces the insulin cortisol reaction which has chronic cumulative effects aging your brain cells and immune system and so on. 01:16:07 So it’s very important to not burn the protein for energy. You want the protein to be used as protein not as a substitute for sugar and fat. So having it with sugar and fat. I’d love to do a show on macromicronutrients. I just wanted to clarify that because I know some people could easily take that out of context. The one thing we found that works great with us and a lot of our clients when it comes to regulating body temperature and downregulating adrenaline especially at bed is airy in sugar. It’s with gelatin as well. It’s great to help downregulate adrenaline and help with people’s sleep patterns. And of course there’s many other pieces of the puzzle but it’s one thing we found that’s definitely helped. So we’ll do a show at some point I guess if you don’t mind and we can talk about macromicronutrients. 01:17:15 So I guess when it comes to HRT I know you do recommend taking progesterone and there’s many types of progesterone. Can you maybe elaborate a little bit on I know you like yours that’s suspended in vitamin E and that a lot of people say well I do these drops or I take the cream. What’s the major difference between these? For about 40 years I’ve been telling people that I don’t believe in hormone replacement therapy because I’ve seen so many people dementia, epilepsy, rheumatoid arthritis, other types of arthritis and totally disabling diseases. I’ve seen recover overnight from one dose of progesterone and most of these people I’ve seen them 10, 20, 30 years later and they still hadn’t had the recurrence of that terrible problem. 01:18:24 So I think of progesterone if it doesn’t work within a week something else should be fixed and so I advocate the diet first, thyroid next and then you probably if your cholesterol is okay and you’re eating right and your thyroid is working then you don’t need progesterone. But for an emergency the things I do recommend it for are epilepsy, other movement disorders, MS, dementia, all types of mental impairments and arthritis of all sorts. Any very acute migraine it’ll usually stop a migraine if you have some backup of thyroid function it’ll stop a migraine sometimes in two minutes with a big dose. 01:19:38 So for any disabling acute thing for example there are studies now being done on brain trauma patient. If you can get the progesterone to them in the first day they practically all recover before they would have practically all died. So I think it’s important for the listeners because Ray has his thoughts on gelatin and sugar and progesterone and estrogen and stress and all these foods. The thing is it’s all individualized. Not every single person needs progesterone. There’s only certain times you need it or you know try the nutrition first which is nutrition is really specific and like I said we work with people based on our interpretations of his work. Try that first to make sure to see if you can get the thyroid working and down regulate stress and then you know last ditch try the progesterone but it can be used like you said for specific disorders and insomnia to definitely help people. 01:20:41 We’ve gone about an hour and 20 minutes. I don’t really have any more questions. Of course we consider for hours and hours and hours and talk about this stuff but like I said guys Ray’s got tons of articles on his website on estrogen and progesterone. His book on progesterone is great. From PMS to menopause is probably one of my favorite books that he’s written. It’s a great book you can look into. Do you have any more questions for Ray? I don’t at this time. No. I think we’ve got a lot of great information. Yeah I mean I think it’s a lot for people to kind of digest and there’s a lot more to it than even what we covered. You know so definitely check out his website. Do you have anything else you might want to add Ray? You had sent a question about Barbara’s theory of cancer and that’s something that lots of people are starting to talk about again after he was ridiculed by most doctors in the United States for about 30 or 40 years. 01:21:51 We’re now starting to talk about him again but they’re invariably misinterpreting him. They haven’t read what he really said and they’re thinking that you should go on a sugar-free diet or something that had really nothing to do with what Barbara was talking about. What he said was that the respiratory apparatus of mitochondrion is impaired and causes cancer and with the impaired mitochondrion the cell can’t turn off its use of glucose. He didn’t say that it stops its use of body tissues. The cancer goes on burning the body’s protein and fat stores at a tremendous rate and if you give it sugar you can slow down the destruction of the body. 01:22:58 But what he emphasized was that the sugar is being converted to lactic acid even when there’s a good supply of it in the body and what you want to do is prevent the destruction of the body by the tumor and lactic acid happens to turn on all of the stress reactions, inflammatory mediators, promoting the spread of cancer and the survival of cancer by promoting the conversion of the body into fuel for the cancer. The sugar-free diet that a lot of people are now blaming on Warburg doesn’t really fit with what he did. He’s referring to Warburg’s theory on cancer. 01:24:04 So it’s about our body’s incorrect use of sugar in a sense and when you talk about CO2 and all these different things in oxygen I guess we could start saying it’s more estrogen even has more of an effect on that because of how it pulls oxygen from the tissues and even from our organs. The instantaneous effect of either estrogen or unsaturated fatty acids is to imitate the Warburg effect of lacking the Pasteur effect which is for oxygen to turn off lactic acid. In the presence of high estrogen and high polyunsaturated fats will make lactic acid and not be able to use the energy oxidatively. And correct me if I’m wrong that he’s actually saying or you’re saying it’s actually the lack of sugar that’s creating the excess estrogen or it’s the poofes that are getting sugar into the cell that’s creating the cancer and it’s not too much sugar, it’s actually not enough. 01:25:20 The cancer is eating everything at a high rate including wasting the sugar by turning it to lactic acid which burdens the whole system and that turns on the stress system. You’ve got to find a little bit in this article and that article kind of like where’s Waldo and intertwine it together and if you can do that you’ll have a great philosophy. So anything else you want to add or any other questions? I know I’m pretty much, I think I’ve got all my questions answered I’m sure. Yeah so unless you have anything else to add or anything we really appreciate you once again coming on. 01:26:23 We’ve had tons of listeners, thousands of listeners and people are really taking in what you say and honestly appreciating it. So everyone says thank you for coming out each month and sharing your knowledge. Okay yeah I’ve been getting a lot of emails but I wouldn’t even be able to fill book orders for a few weeks because we’ve got to get caught up. Right. Well everyone definitely appreciates that and I gave everyone a little introduction speech at the beginning in regards to that because everyone does value their time and I don’t want people to take advantage of your time. Okay. So I give them a little speech but we definitely appreciate it and if you don’t have anything to add we’d like to say thanks and have a wonderful day. Okay thank you. 01:27:27 So guys once again repeat check out his website R-A-Y-P-E-A-T-E lots of great articles and books. If you’re starting out books are probably easier to read than the articles but just grab one and just start reading. Just jump in. It’s not going to make sense but just keep reading and reading the articles and connect the dots and it takes years. This stuff is technical but it’s just great stuff. Didn’t take callers, didn’t really feel like taking callers you know as you always see it kind of frustrates me so I just said hey I’m not going to take them. I’d rather just listen to Ray talk and educate us all. If you’ve got questions like I said you can contact Ray please if you even send him a dollar. I don’t care what it is 10, 100, 500 whatever you want to send him please send him something. Not just to send it to him but if you’re asking him questions he e-mail and he knows a lot of you have he’ll just answer him. You know he’s a great guy so please you know. It’s not that I’ll answer him but it takes a lot of time sometimes to answer all these questions so. Oh I know. 01:28:33 Thanks everyone for tuning in. Check back. We’ll have our next show posted soon in regards to the month of April in regards to Ray’s show. Next week we’re actually going to be doing a show Tuesday at 1 o’clock Pacific Coast time. A gentleman named Matt Stone, he’s got a website and blog out there. You can look him up on Facebook as well. He contacted us and wanted to do a show. The three of us more like a conversation type show in regards to you know health, weight loss, thyroid, liver. You know all that stuff out there and what’s worked and what hasn’t worked in regards to Ray Pete’s philosophy and proto bonds because he’s been using it for years. So it’s going to be a conversational show I guess more layman’s terms of Ray’s philosophies. You know what are anti-inflammatory proteins and why use gelatin, why we’re advocating sugar and why is it important to use temperature and pulse. So check it out. Obviously it’s a free show and it’ll just be the three of us chatting in. 01:29:36 So and we’ll be taking callers. So that’s all I have to say. I think I produced more estrogen because I talked fast. That’s my correlation from today’s show. Alright, I’m Ben. Thanks guys for joining us. Alright, we’ll see you guys later. Spend $10. Get your free stamp saver. Start collecting. Safeway. It’s just better.