Fertility, Pregnancy, and Development

00:00 Hi Ray, how’s it going? Hi, very good. Awesome, well thank you for doing this today. I think this is going to be great. I’m really looking forward to this question and answer session. What we’ve done, I had some help from my wife and we compiled a list of questions from basically a Northern California birth community and listeners of the podcast and just in general we’ve kind of gathered an assortment of questions. They might be all over the place but I’ve tried to compile them in a way that kind of makes sense. But before we get into the questions and hear your thoughts, could you go into your background a little bit, especially as it pertains to women’s issues, pregnancy and human development in general? In 1968, after studying many other things for about 12 years after getting out of college, 01:07 I went to graduate school at the University of Oregon specializing in reproductive physiology. My dissertation, 1972, on oxidative changes in the uterus with aging. That had been one of my lifelong interests with the physiology of aging. It seemed especially relevant to the process of reproduction because I had seen publications in the 40s and 50s in which they saw that when you make a graph of the baby’s birth weight and head circumference that both of these increase with each subsequent pregnancy 02:08 so that the older the mother is, the bigger her baby’s brain is. That held true up until about the age of 38 and at that time women were having many more babies each and so it tended to be the third or fourth or fifth baby by the time she reached her late 30s. At that point, instead of increasing the last birth before she became infertile, the last baby tended to be lighter with a smaller head. The general drift of both aging and of parody was for the birth weight and brain weight to increase steadily. That was sort of in the background. 03:14 I had started out intending to study brain physiology in graduate school but I found that that subject was completely dogmatic where the reproductive physiology actually tolerated a scientific approach. That’s great. One of the questions, actually this leads right into one of our first questions. I love that summary of your background as it relates to pregnancy and child development issues. One of the questions from a woman was directly related to kind of what you spoke to and it’s maintaining fertility as a woman ages. This is kind of a general question but what could a woman do to maintain fertility as she does get older? The failure of progesterone around it starts statistically happening in the mid-30s. 04:21 Estrogen production and concentration in the body tends to increase steadily from about the age of 20 up until the late 30s. That’s about the time when aging and stress symptoms start becoming noticeable. Sometimes a woman is gaining excess weight around that age and any kind of nutritional or environmental problem limits the ability to produce progesterone. As the racial estrogen continually increasing and progesterone reaching a limit, discernment by stress and nutrition, at that point you start getting the signs of menopause and infertility. 05:29 There are two processes that tend to extend fertility as well as lifespan in general. One is that the liver metabolically when it’s healthy excretes 100%!o(MISSING)f the estrogen arriving in the circulation to be made soluble for excretion in the urine or put into the bile for excretion. The estrogen that goes into the bile tends to be reabsorbed if there’s not enough fiber in the diet. Keeping a steady supply of fiber running through the intestine allows the liver to get rid of the bile excreted estrogen. 06:30 It’s a sulfated or gluteuronidated water-soluble form of estrogen that goes out in the urine. To make that, the B vitamins and protein are the most essential nutrients. Keeping up the B vitamins and, in general, good nutrition, adequate protein and calcium keep the liver able to minimize estrogen as it reaches the liver, it should be 100%!e(MISSING)xcreted so it doesn’t build up steadily with aging. And that, in itself, makes the problem of producing adequate progesterone manageable because it isn’t against this rising tide of estrogen with aging. 07:33 Vitamin A protein, adequate minerals, a balance of calcium and phosphate, and vitamin D are the main limiting factors for making progesterone. Vitamin A is used, almost a one-to-one relationship with the amount of progesterone you produce. Thyroid hormone travels on the same protein in the blood as vitamin A, and that protein with the vitamin A and thyroid are taken up by cells along with cholesterol and are used in the conversion of cholesterol to progesterone. So it’s essential to maintain a good level of cholesterol in your blood to be able to keep producing adequate progesterone. 08:38 So Ray, when you talk about vitamin A and vitamin B vitamins, would it be preferable to get these from food sources rather than supplemental sources? Yeah, the supplements always contain manufacturing contaminants and breakdown products. Vitamin A, for example, is extremely oxidizable, and many people get serious side effects when they take vitamin supplements that they don’t get at all when they eat foods that are very rich in those. So eggs, milk and cheese, and liver, for example, are very safe sources of vitamin A, to some extent vitamin D. But if you don’t get sunlight, then you will need a supplement of vitamin D. 09:39 Okay, great. That’s great. Now, for progesterone, if a woman is obviously supporting an environment where natural progesterone continues to be adequate or optimal, that’s great. But as a woman ages and progesterone levels decrease, does it make sense for a woman to supplement progesterone more as she ages? In the 1950s, Katharina Dalton in England, at that time, the main progesterone product on the market was injectable in oil solution. She was treating women with premenstrual syndrome with these monthly or twice monthly injections of progesterone and found that the women who suffered from PMS tended to have their previous babies before they had come in to have their PMS treated. 10:50 Their previous babies had a very high likelihood of being premature, underweight, and mentally not up to par. And she found that the patients that she had treated adequately for PMS were having healthier pregnancies. And if they continued having a PMS symptom in the pregnancy, she would continue treating their PMS symptoms. And many of these women had previously had monthly bleeding episodes right up into the fifth or sixth months of pregnancy, and then they would deliver prematurely. And she found that by preventing the symptoms of depression, anxiety, headaches, and so on, that she prevented the monthly bleeding episodes and the babies were treated to full term. 12:01 And after doing that for about 15 or 20 years, someone mentioned to her that her patients’ babies were remarkably intelligent. And she said that isn’t very likely because the women who deliver prematurely are known to have babies with an average IQ of about 95. And she did a study and found that her babies were averaging about 130 IQ. So the younger siblings were all many IQ points better, just the difference was simply the mother was a little older and was getting progesterone support. Wow, that’s awesome. Right, there was a poll going around. 13:02 I saw recently where women wrote in and answered the question, is progesterone supplementation being effective? And a lot of the women said yes, extremely effective. They noticed positive effects from the progesterone. And then some women said they weren’t seeing positive effects. Could there be a reason that some women would see positive effects from supplemental progesterone and then other women maybe would not? Some women have a much higher need and many of the products simply aren’t able to deliver enough progesterone to be effective. And I think it was 1951 there was a study of using the commercial progesterone that was available at that time for treating uterine cancer. The treatment, it turned out that doctors examining the changes saw just remarkable improvements in the uterine cancer. 14:16 But they were giving what they considered to be a maximum dose, many, many injections of, I think it was a couple hundred milligrams per injection. They would give several of those per day. But they never mentioned that the patient was being anesthetized or they didn’t even mention a sedative effect. But it’s now recognized that when you get the amount of progesterone that the placenta produces in the latter half of pregnancy, those amounts of progesterone are strongly affecting the nervous system, preventing childbirth pain, for example, with an actual anesthetic effect and having a sedative effect, improving the quality of sleep. 15:23 So what they were demonstrating in that 1951 study was that even injecting hundreds of milligrams of progesterone, it wasn’t being available to the bloodstream. It was dissolved in oil and it was simply staying in the muscle or fat tissue where they injected it. And when you take it orally in a powdered form, the particulate, even micronized progesterone, as it touches the lining of the intestine, a small amount of it is passed into the cell structure. And in that form, in the intestine, as it moves from the intestine to the liver, in that form, both the intestine and the liver have the enzymes to solubilize it the way the liver handles estrogen. 16:35 And so any of the powdered estrogen or progesterone preparations that touch the intestine tend to go into the soluble form and leave the body quickly. And if it gets into the circulation as a sulfated progesterone, that will have its own sedative effects, but definitely doesn’t follow the metabolic pathway that natural progesterone produced by the ovaries or in the brain would have. And the closest you can get to a natural supplement of progesterone is when it’s dissolved in oil and taken orally. The digestive system has the ability to break it up into micron-sized particles for absorption directly through the intestine into the lymphatic system where those particles are transmitted. 17:58 They’re transmitted directly to the bloodstream, so it circulates as fat-dissolved particles through the general circulation bypassing the liver repeatedly because of red blood cells and these chylomicron particles are not recognized as something for extrusion. It’s through the liver over and over and can be absorbed by the uterus, brain, all of the tissues. Wow, that’s great. If you are taking a progesterone that gets into that metabolic pathway, for example, like dissolved in vitamin E, and you aren’t noticing effects, would a good gauge be to just try taking more? Yeah, a fourth of a teaspoon of the solution containing 100 milligrams will, for a man, that amount will likely bring on sleep very quickly. 19:14 For a woman, it will have a definite relaxing sedative effect, and a dose of that sort during pregnancy be a tendency of any given dose of progesterone that is sensed to be adequate. The ovary when you’re not pregnant or the placenta when you are pregnant will be stimulated so that there’s a positive feedback between a given dose and the ability of the ovary or the placenta to maintain and increase its production of progesterone. So it can have a catalytic effect. There were studies in which women who were giving signs that they were about to mystery at maybe the third or fourth months of pregnancy were given an injection of progesterone. 20:16 And it was two-thirds of the group went from the third month when they got that injection all the way to a full term. One third of the group needed another injection around month six, and they then carried it to full term. So there’s a positive feedback catalytic effect that one good strong dose will often solve the deficiency problem. Wow, that’s great. One woman, it’s kind of related. One woman asked a question about miscarriage. You mentioned miscarriage and thyroid. So thyroid and progesterone are related, I imagine. And can you talk about thyroid and miscarriage in the same line? Yeah. Everyone who is hypothyroid becomes subject to an excess of estrogen relative to the other protective hormones, progesterone, 21:25 and then DHEA and to some extent testosterone. When the thyroid is low, the tissues accumulate water and shift their metabolism, their energy production towards lactic acid formation rather than carbon dioxide. The carbon dioxide that should be produced under the influence of thyroid has a relaxing sedative effect on the uterus, tends to deliver more oxygen to the fetus. When your thyroid is low and you don’t produce that carbon dioxide, you make a lot of lactic acid, which has an excitatory effect on the tissues, tending to over-activate contractions in the uterus, causing stress to the fetus, and triggers cortisol production, which tends to produce delivery. 22:38 The thyroid acting on the liver is lowering estrogen, which has the tendency to shift metabolism towards lactic acid. The estrogen itself activates cortisol production and excites contractions in the uterus. The direct effect of thyroid and cholesterol on the ovary or the placenta is to increase the conversion of cholesterol to progesterone. At every level of metabolism, thyroid is working towards maturing the pregnancy, keeping the delivery of sugar for the development of the embryo’s brain, keeping the progesterone high and the uterus relaxed. 23:49 Great. So then with thyroid, sometimes the appropriate as another supplement that could be used by a pregnant woman? Even before getting pregnant, there have been many studies showing that thyroid hormone for both men and women is the most important single fertility hormone. I’ve known dozens of men and women who were unable to get pregnant. Usually the very first month they supplement thyroid, they’re pregnant. Some of them after 10 or 15 years of trying all it took was one month of thyroid. So it’s good to start early. Another study looked at women who had used a supplement of progesterone, even for just one month preceding conception, where the normal percentage of birth defects in that study was 4%!,(MISSING) 25:02 and those women who had even for just one month who had used progesterone before conceiving, there was only 1%!i(MISSING)ncidence of birth defects. So progesterone has a very powerful stabilizing effect on the chromosomes, and thyroid is working right along with the progesterone, stabilizing the genetic system. Wow, that’s great. Ray, you mentioned the lactic metabolism being maladaptive for a developing fetus. A lot of people seem to be into intense exercise. Can overexertion and intense exercise actually be not really what we want for a healthy pregnancy? Yeah, if you look at just athletes, not pregnant athletes, but just men or women either, one of the definitions of overtraining is to look at their lung’s ability to diffuse oxygen. 26:22 And one study found that athletes who thought they were in great condition but who were overtraining had a tremendously deficient ability of their lungs to admit oxygen to the blood. The overtraining gave them a chronic oxygen deficit and lingering lactic acid level in the blood. They found that those athletes who had elevated lactic acid even 12 hours or more after their exercise, those were the ones whose lungs had taken up so much excess water that the diffusion pathway was about twice normal. So no matter how fast they breathed, they just couldn’t get efficient oxygenation. 27:26 The same sort of thing happens under the influence of too much estrogen. Asedian, I think was mice, gave one injection of estrogen and then monitored the ability of oxygen to move through their lungs. They found that 95%!o(MISSING)f the diffusion capacity was knocked out in an hour following a single overdose of estrogen. Wow. Ray, I’m going to go back to a general question here from a woman. She asks, what is the most important piece of advice that you would give an expecting mother? You eat well, and that means keeping protein up, having a good ratio of calcium to phosphate in the diet, 28:30 be getting around 100 milligrams of good protein every day and something like a one-to-one ratio of calcium to phosphate if possible. Great. That’s awesome. Thank you, Ray. Another question here from a woman. What are your thoughts on the common suggestion that a pregnant mother should be consuming high volumes of water? Water can be very dangerous. Your requirement for protein and calcium means that during when pregnancy gets going, two quarts of milk a day is kind of the minimum, along with maybe a quart of orange juice, and with two or three quarts of those going in as food, you have very little need for other liquid. 29:41 If you don’t balance your water intake, especially with sodium, but also with calcium, magnesium, and potassium, sodium is very often the most important mineral lacking in pregnancy, and if you add water to your regime without balancing it with salting your food to taste, that can have very bad outcome. In the 1950s, when the drug companies devised new chemical diuretics, they decided pregnant women would be a good market for them, so they invented the idea that you shouldn’t gain so much weight during pregnancy, and almost every doctor in the country fell for the advertising for diuretics and taught women to control their weight gain, 30:47 and to do that largely with the water pills, that had really a disastrous effect on the outcome of millions of pregnancies. The progesterone is pretty much the basis for the body’s ability to regulate water and salt accurately, but you have to take in a generous amount for the progesterone to be able to regulate it. In the two different studies of preeclampsia, in which the women were developing high blood pressure, knowing the physiology when progesterone is deficient, you tend to retain water without sodium, potassium, calcium, and so on, 31:53 and so they tried giving pretty big supplements of table salt to these women with eclampsia, where the standard medical prescription was to have them avoid salt and take diuretics. These two studies supplemented several grams per day of table salt and cured the preeclampsia, regulated their blood pressure, and that same principle works at any time your progesterone is deficient relative to estrogen. You seem to be retaining water, but it’s really that you’re losing sodium too fast, and balancing your minerals will help you get rid of the water. How that works is that albumin in the blood forms the negative charges on the albumin molecules, 33:01 bind the positive charges of sodium, and that combination of electrical charges binds water around that cloud of molecules. And if you don’t have enough sodium, the albumin can’t retain its water. The albumin tends to fall out of solution going into your tissues or out your kidneys. The preeclampsia, high blood pressure women, tend to lose a lot of albumin in their urine, and how these researchers cured the preeclampsia with sodium, it was because the sodium allowed the albumin to stay in the bloodstream and to attract water to it, pulling water out of the tissues and keeping it to increase the volume of blood needed to perfuse the placenta and uterus. 34:10 So water without sodium, especially with the diuretics that were being sold to American and European and Australian women, the excess water and diuretic combination and salt restriction is a very deadly mixture. Wow. Ray, one woman who worked with families who are becoming pregnant, she’s worked with midwives, and she’s worked with pregnant women directly. She said there definitely seems to be an increase in preeclampsia. Yes, so what you’re saying is it sounds like this, and I’m asking you, I guess, could it be from something as simple as not having enough salt and consuming waste and much liquid? Yeah, salt and protein, milk especially, because it comes with the calcium. Awesome. 35:12 You mentioned earlier the B vitamins, vitamin A. Are there any prenatal vitamins that are on the market that could be good, apart from just getting the vitamins and nutrients we need from booze? I don’t really know of any. Traditionally they have emphasized iron and the idea that women need more iron than men isn’t true because estrogen gives women a powerful advantage for efficient absorption of iron from a meager diet. Estrogen makes you attract into the intestine about 10 times as much iron as a man would, and the reason so many women seem deficient in iron isn’t that they’re losing some every month with menstruation. 36:19 That’s not true, but since the average diet contains enough iron if they’re absorbing it efficiently, the real cause for the apparent anemia is low thyroid function. Thyroid is what governs the formation of red blood cells, and as the red blood cells form, if you have enough copper in your diet, that will attach to the iron. I would guess it’s more than half of the diagnosed iron deficiencies in women are really thyroid deficiencies. The temperature of your arms and legs powerfully governs your ability to make red blood cells, 37:20 and if your thyroid metabolism is low, your arms and legs tend to be cooler than optimal, and so you slow down your production of red blood cells. That’s great. Great. One woman, I’m trying to connect some of these questions here. One woman had a question about iron, speaking of iron. She’s a senior teenage boy. She wanted to know, is there a way for us to help my teenage boy, my son, lower iron levels, even though he’s not eligible to donate blood yet? Is he having symptoms of iron excess? I don’t know anything other than the question I got from this woman. If a person simply goes on a milk and cheese heavy diet, 38:21 a couple of eggs per day will provide the required amount of iron from M without an excess. If you just go about meat, meat or fish, things that are higher in iron, the milk and cheese are so low in iron within a couple of weeks, you will probably have normalized your iron stores. You can often go on for many weeks without developing an iron deficiency on a milk and cheese-based diet, but at some point you’ll start craving foods that are rich in iron when you actually start needing iron. Awesome. That sounds like a good rule of thumb. Iron excess is similar to polyunsaturated fat excess over time. 39:26 That can be really problematic. Can you talk about that at all? Those interacting tend to start causing problems about the age of 45 or 50 or so. With aging, just eating an average diet because the polyunsaturated fats tend to go into storage while saturated fats are preferentially oxidized, just an average diet after several decades, your tissues become very high in the polyunsaturated fats. On a typical American-European diet, we’re all getting more iron than we need, the liver and marrow and so on become overloaded with iron. 40:28 A stress that makes us short of oxygen, the same thing that leads to lactic acid production, it’s a shift in the reducing direction away from the oxidizing direction. That turns iron atoms in the sources of reactive electrons producing hydroxyl ions that cause tissue deterioration. When the tissues are overloaded with possible lipids that have been constructed out of polyunsaturated fats, the tissue structure starts being attacked by these hydroxyl-activated free radicals of producing chain reactions of inflammation, toxic breakdown products that tend to destroy mitochondria 41:33 and put the cell over into the glycolizing lactic acid producing condition. Interesting. While there are several foods a pregnant woman should definitely be aiming to include in her diet, polyunsaturated fat is something a pregnant woman should be trying to avoid. Studies in various species, for example, cows, they’re easy to study because they’re used for meat. The studies, there are large amounts of tissue to examine. They find that newborn calves, brains and other tissues are what we would dietitians nowadays would say are deficient in the so-called essential fatty acids. But eating hay and grass and so on, very quickly the tissues start acquiring these polyunsaturated fats. 42:47 But even though the cow was eating a diet rich in the grass, poofa, polyunsaturated fats, the newborn calf was completely free of these in its brain. And looking at humans, they are now saying that the full term newborn baby typically is deficient in the essential fatty acids so they want to give them a supplement of these to make the tissue start accumulating them faster. But if you look at the brain metabolism of a healthy full term newborn, their oxygen consumption is very high and their free radical toxic breakdown products in the blood are extremely low. And in the first couple of years, the brain and other tissues of healthy kids tend to be borderline deficient in the so-called essential fatty acids 43:56 and their brain metabolism and brain function ability to learn language quickly are very high. And as the brain gets more and more saturated over time with the poofa, the learning ability and the brain metabolism are slowing down. That process in an Alzheimer’s brain, for example, prematurely aging, the polyunsaturated fats are extremely high and they are bound up with cholesterol so the available cholesterol is very low but the potentially reactive toxic fatty acids are very high. That’s a process you want to get to as late as possible and so you don’t want to supplement a baby with these unstable, highly oxidizable polyunsaturated fats. 45:03 Many of the best hospitals now give premature babies intravenous soybean emulsion because of this absurd doctrine of essential fatty acids in the brain. Simultaneously, at the University of California Riverside, professors found that animals’ brains were damaged by a single infection of soybean emulsion. Forty-five years previous to that, someone else demonstrated that injecting this soybean emulsion, intralipid, for example, into a rat’s carotid artery, 17%!o(MISSING)f that injected emulsion stuck in the brain was taken up directly into the brain as soybean oil, 46:09 causing changes, microscopically visible changes from that one dose of soybean oil. So almost all the doctors in the country are going to be pushing pregnant women and their newborn babies to either eat fish oil or supplement with various kinds of polyunsaturated fats. It’s basically an advertising campaign for industry that is counterfactual. Seems just fraudulent. Yeah. So clearly, to avoid maternal stress, one way to do that is to limit polyunsaturated fat as much as possible. Yeah. What are some non-dietary ways a woman can reduce stress during a pregnancy? 47:13 Oh, I’m doing interesting things, just avoiding things that are fatiguing, resting as much as feels right. Activity that feels good is fine, but whenever it seems desirable to rest, that’s very important to do. About 50 years ago, it was recognized that bed rest sometimes was all that was needed to have a healthier delivery. Recently, I heard doctors saying that there have been no controlled double-blind studies showing that bed rest was helpful for preventing miscarriage, so they didn’t advocate it. 48:16 Ray, thank you for that. This is just so great. One woman asked, can you talk a bit about polystasis and why that might occur during pregnancy? About what was the word? Polystasis. Say it again. Polystasis? Oh, the bio. Yes, yes, yes. High estrogen is known to be the villain. Just keeping your thyroid up, I think is the essential thing. Thyroid and progesterone are the treatment as well as the prevention. Okay, thanks. Another woman wrote, the occurrence of caesarean births have more than tripled in the past 30 years from about 6%!o(MISSING)f all births to now around 31%!a(MISSING)s far as statistics go. 49:22 Wow, that’s crazy. How might this impact the generation being born by caesarean? This is the first question from this woman, and the second question is, what effect might this have on future generations? I think the main statistical thing is that it’s being done for the convenience of doctors and hospitals. They don’t like to sit around waiting for the woman to be ready to give birth, and I think it often results, they have a mechanical calendar model of when the delivery should happen. For example, if a woman is just slightly hypothyroid, or just has less than optimal ratio of progesterone to estrogen, they can mature the brain properly if they just stay pregnant for another month or so. 50:25 There’s nothing wrong with prolongation of pregnancy if the woman is still healthy and eating well, getting enough sugar, and other nutrients delivered to the baby. Just by an arbitrary definition of when the pregnancy should terminate, the hospitals are creating a lot of underweight babies, and if the baby is underweight, its brain is underdeveloped. And in the last three months of pregnancy, there’s a tremendous, at month six, I think it’s about twice as many brain precursor cells as will be there at full term. So during that last three months, if you slow down the death of these brain precursor cells, you’re going to massively increase the number of functional, mature brain cells when the baby is born. 51:41 And the process of brain growth is fastest in the last month, and if that’s allowed to continue, the future of the baby is going to be healthier in every way. The brain is in control of the circulatory system, the immune system, metabolism, and so on. So it isn’t just that the baby will get in the Harvard, it will have good immunity circulation, general vitality, if the brain is allowed to mature. That was great. Wow, you really covered a lot in that one. I think that’s amazing. And yeah, it’s just so sad that the doctors are on schedule, and that’s determining, it seems like, when they want women to give birth rather than just the natural course. 52:42 Yeah, many things are tending in the same direction. For example, multiple vaccinations, I think various environmental pollutions, but one of those is multiple vaccinations and other over-medicalization. The history of birth weight and brain weight have been pretty steadily increasing for 100 years or so. In the 1980s, in three countries, Japan, Germany, and the United States, brains stopped growing. In Germany, the body kept growing, getting bigger, heavier babies, but without a bigger brain in proportion. In Japan and the U.S., there has been actually a downward trend in head circumference at birth. 53:49 Wow. Ray, you mentioned autism and vaccination. I mean, sorry, you mentioned vaccination. One of your recent newsletters, which I thought was so great, and people can subscribe to that by writing to you at Ray P. Can you briefly talk about maybe several women actually asked about the autism connection with vaccinations and autism in general? Why is autism increasing? Could you speak to that at all? Yeah, there have been several studies showing that a woman’s estrogen balance during pregnancy strongly corresponds to the risk of autism. Estrogen creates inflammation and lactic acid excess. Inflammation during gestation in animal experiments creates behavior that resembles autism. 55:07 The various things that contribute to inflammation during pregnancy include the aluminum adjuvants in vaccinations, not only the intentional aluminum adjuvant, but a lot of the junk. For example, if they grow the vaccine in a culture, the vaccines are known to contain contaminants from the culture medium. Milk protein, egg protein, various things, synthetic chemicals known to be used in some of the culture media for producing vaccines. All of this junk is there producing inflammation. The purpose of the adjuvant is deliberately to produce an inflammatory state to activate the immune system to produce the antibodies. 56:22 But an inflammatory state in every study that has investigated that in humans and animals both inflammation during pregnancy damages the nervous system of the fetus. The whole outcome of the organism’s health is deteriorated by inflammatory conditions during pregnancy. This question actually is, I think, related. Someone said, and you talked about any kind of stress, any kind of inflammation in pregnancy, which comes from stress, it can be detrimental. Someone said, we seem to be so caught up recently with this idea of hormesis in our society that if you do something that’s stressful that we’re going to have positive adaptation from it. 57:25 That’s another advertising point. The radiation industry was a leader in developing the whole idea of hormesis. If it’s something that we produce in making atomic bombs or in doing our CAT scans and so on, or radium technologies and so on, it goes way back to the trying to explain a way. Why some certain commercially valuable amount of poisoning isn’t something that you can sue the industry for, because it’s really good for you. In the 1950s, the Atomic Energy Commission was getting data that they were exploding bombs in Nevada. They were causing cancer in people in Utah and all of the downwind states, but especially in the nearest towns in Utah. 58:45 And to explain away the radioactive elements they were seeing in babies’ teeth and the increasing mortality in small children with leukemia and blood cancer, to explain out of way that they intended the idea of hormesis, that these small doses are actually good for you. Incredible. Ray, they called their big project, one of their projects, they called Project Sunshine. That was the one looking at Strontium Neide in babies. Oh my gosh. Sounded nice to call it Project Sunshine. Unbelievable. Wow. Ray, one woman asked in relation to the autism subject, she said if kids already have autism or they are on the spectrum, and you quote, what’s a good way to go about this, or are there any things we can do to mitigate some of the kind of the effects of autism? 59:58 Yeah, everything that’s good for the brain of the developing baby is probably still good at any age for helping the cells to mature and function. Pregnantal and progesterone, DHEA, all of these are at any stage of life. There are central brain hormones, and there are some drugs that have been developed in relation to blood pressure and heart disease that probably are working on part of the inflammatory system. For example, ACE inhibitors, amphetamines converting enzyme inhibitors, and amphetamines receptor blockers, and calcium blockers, all of these stabilize the living state of the cell. 01:01:00 The way they’re explained isn’t necessarily very illuminating, but what they’re doing is protecting cells against things like high estrogen, high lactic acid, deficient trigger, deficient carbon dioxide, and so on. Oh, good enough. Awesome. So, Ray, this question is still related to pregnancy during pregnancy. What would be the best course of action, this woman asked, for someone who experiences frequent migraines? My own migraines were one of the things that got me interested in studying brain physiology, and when I was about 10 years old, I noticed that girls were much more likely than boys to have migraines, and that got me interested in the physiology of estrogen. 01:02:04 And the two techniques that I came across, someone in the 1960s told me that eating a carrot every day often prevented headaches. I tried it and it worked, and the method someone studying fertility had one group of women who had frequent infections, and so they gave them a series of antibiotic treatments, and they found that their cyclic monthly migraines had disappeared when they were taking the antibiotic, and it turns out that a carrot a day or an antibiotic has the same effect. The antibiotic is suppressing the inflammatory bacteria in the intestine. 01:03:12 The carrot is, to some extent, suppressing them and carrying them out of the body. The following up on the antibiotic effect, they saw that the women taking the antibiotic had lower estrogen, lower cortisol, and higher progesterone. Same thing, we tested a few women with a daily carrot. Same thing happened, their estrogen and cortisol went down when they had a daily carrot. And then supplementing thyroid, I found that I wasn’t so bound to my carrot addiction. The thyroid itself helps to lower estrogen and cortisol and keep your progesterone DHEA and progenital up. 01:04:13 And once when I, for example, in San Francisco, I was taking my thyroid supplement and not realizing that poor David Water knocked out T3, destroys T3 totally. And I became suddenly very hypothyroid and developed a migraine. And I happened to have the progesterone in vitamin E. I took about 100 milligrams on my tongue. And within seconds, the visual flashing effect started right at the center of my visual field, quieted down. And this area of visual quiet spread quickly during about 30 or 40 seconds, covered my whole visual field. 01:05:14 And a sense of well-being kept flowing. And after about a minute, all of the sickness and headache had disappeared and I got sleepy. I experienced that effect twice, exactly the same effect of about 150 milligrams of progesterone quieting the visual effect within seconds and totally knocking out the headache in about two minutes. Wow, that’s amazing. Ray with the carrot and the antibiotic is like twice a week activated charcoal. Would that be kind of a similar deal? The animal studies suggest that it’s doing much the same. It has an antibiotic effect. The pores in the charcoal act as catalysts and break down endotoxin. So it’s working chemically as well as an antibiotic. 01:06:27 Great. Awesome. This woman, Ray asked about PCOS or polycystic ovary syndrome. She says, how can I begin to correct it? Having a vitamin D blood test probably is helpful. Vitamin D is one of the things widely recognized that is helping it. And the animal experiments in which they would remove the thyroid gland and then give a gonadotropin to increase the estrogen production. That combination of boosting the ovaries while cutting out the thyroid will reliably produce polycystic ovaries in animals. And so that implies that you would want to start with normalizing the thyroid and then check on the balance of estrogen and progesterone. 01:07:33 So probably needing a supplement of progesterone to balance the overactive adrenals. When something like a hypothyroidism limits the ability of the ovary to make progesterone, the adrenals become hyperactive in response to the estrogen excitatory action. And the adrenals aren’t as good at making progesterone, so they make lots of testosterone, which has the same anti-excitatory protective effect. But that becomes a vicious circle, and you can break it with thyroid, progesterone, and vitamin D. Oh, great. Ray, this woman asked about labs. You said about the lab, getting a lab done during a pregnancy. One woman asked, what are the most helpful labs? Are there any other labs that would help during pregnancy to best understand current health status? 01:08:43 Yeah, making sure that your thyroid is good. Temperature and pulse are very important. Waking temperature and pulse rate in the middle of the day, another measurement, and any blood tests that would validate good thyroid function. But the ratio of progesterone to estrogen is very important. Some fertility clinics found that women whose progesterone was not 50 times or more higher than the estrogen were the ones who didn’t get pregnant. So if they had 50 to 100 times as much progesterone as estrogen, they were the ones that would get pregnant, and then their ratio would tend to stay very, very good heavily towards progesterone. That’s something that should be tested at least twice during a pregnancy to make sure that the estrogen isn’t creeping up. In animal studies, if you make a graph of estrogen and progesterone, all of the animal studies, there is a constant increase, just a straight line of both progesterone and estrogen, but with the progesterone being any times higher. 01:10:12 And that’s the end of the day until the day of delivery. The recognition in the medical world that most pregnancies are defective turns up as advice that your progesterone should level off after month six. But all of the animal studies say that the best pregnancies turn out when the progesterone has continued to rise steadily right up to the last days of pregnancy. Wow, that’s great. The same woman Ray asked, is metabolism linked to the length of gestation? Yeah, a good high thyroid metabolism, keeping your blood sugar steady, letting you keep the progesterone increasing, not letting the estrogen get out of proportion. 01:11:16 Since estrogen dominance triggers cortisol production, cortisol triggers premature delivery, so you want to keep your sugar intake high enough that your cortisol doesn’t tend to rise terminating the pregnancy. Okay, great. And is that because in general, sugar can help? Yeah, sugar is the primary limiting factor for brain growth. In chickens, for example, have very small brains, the egg holds only a certain amount of glucose, and some of the protein can break down to make glucose. An egg is a closed world, and the brain is known to stop developing when the glucose present in the egg is used up. 01:12:24 But experimenters made a hole in the egg, and then at the day that they knew that the glucose was being reaching zero, they injected either glucose or amino acids that could be turned into glucose. And they found that the chicken’s brain kept developing for the rest of its gestational period, producing chickens with bigger brains than it ever happened naturally. So the amount of brain development, in the case of a chicken, isn’t developmental. It’s environmental. The egg just didn’t hold enough glucose to finish making a smart chicken. And if your glucose is limited after the six months of pregnancy, the brain stops developing. In the 50s, experiments were done on dogs and other animals. 01:13:35 And they found that if they gave a little bit of insulin, lowering the mother’s blood sugar, the cell division in the fetus’s brain came to a stop. If they added estrogen, same thing happened. Blood sugar dipped, the brain stopped growing. No, I’m not, no, Ray. Would you say anything to a woman who has been tested as a pre-gestationally diabetic? Oh, that was, first there was the real diabetes, which was defined as high blood sugar and excess urination, leading to wasting away. The body tissues were being turned into sugar, so it was a wasting disease. So they developed a market for insulin, and they found that they could create a new type 2 diabetes and have a new market for selling insulin and then other drugs to lower the blood sugar. 01:14:54 That market was saturated type 1 and 2 diabetes. They came up with gestational diabetes, but the old obstetricians, several of them have told me that they observed that women, diabetic women, so-called, who had high blood sugar during pregnancy, often had babies with very large heads. I happened to talk to one of those women. Her doctor had sent her to me for a weight loss diet, and her blood sugar was only 130 or so. But the doctor told her she needed to stop gaining weight and not have another baby like the previous one. And I said, what’s that baby like? And she said, these two years old wears an adult hat and reads adult literature. 01:16:01 So I don’t think the invention of gestational diabetes was very constructive. Great. Ray, this question comes from a woman. She’s asking about extended breastfeeding, and she says she’s asking, for those who are extending breastfeeding beyond two years or more, would there be any additional considerations as far as diet and supplementation? Yeah, drinking lots of milk. Some women whose milk seems to be limited, just drinking, adding a quart of orange juice to their diet, getting their sugar and potassium up, is sometimes overcoming limited ability to lactate. If you’re doing it chronically for more than a year, you need to make sure you’re getting lots of calcium and protein yourself. 01:17:10 Awesome. Same woman asks, does the continued production of high levels of prolactin involved in breastfeeding necessary to lactate? Does that have a negative impact on the breastfeeders’ health? If you keep your thyroid function up, you won’t experience bad effects from that prolonged. The prolactin does guide metabolism towards producing milk, and thyroid is the other. It keeps your ability up to produce the sugar if you’re getting lots of protein and carbohydrate and minerals in your diet. The thyroid supports lactation, and it keeps your pituitary from overproducing a stress-induced prolactin. So it would be good to have both the thyroid and the prolactin test maybe a year in the lactation. 01:18:19 Okay, great. That’s awesome. This woman asked about childhood allergies. Actually, there were several women who wrote in about childhood allergies, specifically eczema, and they’re asking what might this be caused by and how can we mitigate or help that? Some studies found that the women who were urged to supplement with things like fatty fish, high intake of omega minus 3 fats, those were the women who had the most allergic children. So it’s prenatal inflammation again. Those fats aren’t really very compatible with pregnancy, and so they create a tendency to suppress the thyroid and maintain inflammation. 01:19:20 And if a kid is having allergies, you should check, especially their vitamin D and thyroid level. Sometimes supplementing toes will make an allergy disappear. Awesome. Thanks, Ray. A few more here. These questions, I think, are great, and they’re obviously directly related to some concerns and some thoughts, and just think that these women think, I think, are important, which is great. This woman asked about reversing autoimmunity in the toddler. Oh. Progesterone has the most immediate effects against some things like rheumatoid arthritis, and estrogen for a long time has been known as the main villain. 01:20:22 Women have at least five times the incidence of all kinds of autoimmune diseases as men, and so it’s been known for several decades that estrogen creates these, way back in the 50s, women who were getting the early estrogen treatments were coming down with horrible rheumatoid arthritis. That’s another autoimmune condition, but the estrogen industry has diverted attention from that. Just by stopping taking supplements, I saw one woman in a week go from totally incapacitated by rheumatoid arthritis to having no symptoms, just by stopping her medical estrogen supplement. Another woman with scleroderma was getting a hardening of the back of her hands and her face, just by stopping the estrogen, that cleared up. 01:21:37 Adding progesterone has the same effect as withdrawing from estrogen, normalizing thyroid function, and maintaining a good level of progesterone and vitamin D. So far, I haven’t seen a fail to stop the so-called autoimmune symptoms. Dry eyes is another one. Sometimes thyroid load does it, but all of the natural stabilizing factors, vitamin D, calcium, adequate protein, as well as the thyroid and progesterone. That’s great. Ray, this woman asked what is actually considered early puberty in children? And another woman asked about pre-teen hormones, and should I honor craving that my child might have for sugar, for example, or should I let them eat as much sugar as they want? 01:22:54 It’s important not to keep sugar in your mouth steadily, so it satisfies the appetite of them to rinse the mouth to reduce cavities. What was the first question? Yeah, sorry about that. I kind of asked a few questions at once. So the first question was, what is actually considered early puberty in silver? It’s just a statistical thing. I looked at the average age of puberty in girls in areas that were of coconut-based economies, and their average age was 18. In animal experiments, polyunsaturated fats acting like estrogen, increasing estrogen production and activity, you can bring on puberty earlier with excess poofa in the diet. 01:24:09 My interpretation was that the coconuts in their diet were protecting against the estrogenic effects of polyunsaturated fats. The tendency in the last several decades has been for puberty to come earlier so that even eight years old isn’t considered extreme anymore. It had been that nine years old about 40 years ago was notable as early puberty, but it’s eight years, I think now is in the same position that nine-year-old puberty was 40 years ago. Yeah, wow, that just seems awfully early for sure. And so, back to the sugar question, because I kind of put those together and you mentioned something about keeping sugar in the mouth too long. 01:25:17 Does that just seem like maybe rinsing after you’ve consumed sugar being a good effective measure? Yeah. And rinsing with water and salt or what? No, just plain water. Okay, great. Ray, there’s two more questions here. One woman asked, actually three more questions. This is so great, by the way. Thank you so much for doing this. This woman asked about endometriosis, how that develops, and why the tissue can become displaced in various spots in the body. The estrogen effect is to activate cell division and it, at an extreme, increases the motility of the cells and the looseness. Progesterone should come in quickly and change the development of the tissue into glandular tissue. 01:26:23 And if, I think the basic problem is low-fibrin function when your estrogen isn’t eliminated quickly and progesterone isn’t produced abundantly and quickly, then the endometrial cells keep getting the stimulus and besides groin excessively, they lose their tissue integrity when there isn’t enough progesterone. Progesterone is the same effect in the cancer cell. A cancer under the influence of estrogen becomes more likely to metastasize and progesterone makes it tend to stay put. All of the women that I’ve known who had very serious endometriosis cured it immediately when they corrected their hypothyroidism, just immediate turning off of all of the symptoms. 01:27:35 Awesome. That’s great, Ray. I saved these last two questions because I thought they were kind of more general parenting kind of topics. So the first was from someone who said, what do you think is the ideal learning environment for a young human together with a young family? Together with a young child and the family. What’s the appropriate or what’s the optimal learning environment? Also schools, et cetera. I think the optimal thing is to have an interesting environment and that includes having adults talking about interesting things, constantly being engaged in doing something that’s interesting, which could be working. Any activity that is meaningful to the adult is going to be a learning experience for the kids. 01:28:52 Experiencing adults being interested in life, I think is the most important thing for kids to see that the world is intrinsically interesting and a matter for exploration, not for indoctrination. That’s awesome. Ray, that’s so great. The last question is, I guess, kind of related because it was, does Ray have any kind of parting message from this for parents? And I think you might have kind of talked about that, but the question was, would you have any kind of overwriting message that you would give to parents of our next generation of people? To be watchful for imposed doctrines and ideologies and procedures being critical of medical doctrines is just a starting point. 01:30:11 The world, the culture has some very dangerous things that it wants to impose and you have to be watchful for the multiple ways those keep turning up. We certainly have our work cut out for us, don’t we? Ray, this is such a bright light in so many ways. I really enjoy this and I also know that there are so many women who are going to listen to this and so many families and so many men and so many children who are actually going to hear this. And I think we’re all grateful for your time and your knowledge and your experience and your thoughtfulness, so thank you so much. Okay, fun talking to you. Likewise. Okay, until next time. Bye.