Heart I: Heart and Hormones

00:00 As usual, people can and are invited to call in with any questions related or unrelated to this month’s show on heart failure and hormones. And as usual, there’s an ever-growing repeat Facebook fan page, and we get emails from all over the states from people that are following him. And always very good to hear anecdotal evidence of people improving fairly drastically, making the changes that he’s been advocating for probably the last 20-something years. I know he’s been studying and researching probably for 35 or nearly 40. So OK, the thrust of the show, like I said, is heart failure, although there is going to be hopefully some time to look at new research surrounding the understanding of cancer and metastases in relation to solid tumors and the way the body recruits collagen as part of the event that leads to a fairly poor prognosis with some cancer diagnosis. 01:05 So for those who perhaps have never listened to our shows, which run every third Friday of the month from 7 to late PM, we’re both licensed medical herbalists and trained in England there, graduating with a master’s degree in herbal medicine, and we run a clinic in Garberville where we consult with clients about a wide range of conditions and recommend herbal medicines and dietary advice. So you’re listening to Ask Your Herb Doctor on KMUD Garberville 91.1 FM, and from 7.30 until the end of the show 8 o’clock, you are invited to call in with any questions either related or unrelated to this month’s subject of the heart and hormones, the number if you live in the area is 9233911, or if you live outside the area, there’s a toll-free number you can reach us on, and that’s 1-800-KMUD-RAD. Incidentally, we can also be reached toll-free on 1-888-WBM-URB for any further information 02:05 or consultations after the show, basically during working hours, Monday through Friday. So anyway, welcome all of you who are listening, and welcome to you Dr. Pete. Hi, sir. Hi. Okay, so as usual, we do get callers every month, and indeed people emailing every month who perhaps have never heard of you and are very interested to hear what you have to say. I think a lot of the time, people, new listeners hear what you have to say. It seems to be fairly shocking in terms of it seems to go against the grain of everything we’re told from the medical community and by doctors if you like to carte blanche, cover them as a title, and then you have some very different views and research that you’ve used and proven with your own approach, a very different treatment outline for people that have very wide-ranging conditions ranging from degenerative to endocrine and metabolic. 03:07 So would you, for the benefit perhaps of people who’ve never heard of you and who’ve tuned in tonight, just give us an outline of your academic and professional career. From 1968 to 72, I was in graduate school at the University of Oregon, and I did my dissertation on reproductive aging and how oxidative metabolism changes with age, and I found that the changes that happened causing basically the menopause equivalent in animals is something that happens in every tissue in the body. It just happens in the uteruses where I did my dissertation work, but I was interested in aging changes in the brain and ovens and so on, and it turns out that the same chemical 04:10 and biological processes change through time in all of these tissues. In my dissertation, one of the aging theories that I talked about was the collagen theory of aging, that estrogen XS causes a wastage of oxygen basically suffocating tissues the way radiation would, for example, and destroying the ability to use oxygen, and as a result of that, XS collagen is produced by the fiber collagen producing cells, fibroblasts in the connective tissue, and with aging, the collagen becomes progressively denser and more cross linked, creating an oxygen deprived environment, so my emphasis at that time was 05:19 on how estrogen produced by irritation or aging causes more collagen to be produced and to become more dense, creating further interference with oxygen consumption. Okay, well, surrounding the talk for tonight and the recent article that you’ve written that’s fully referenced for people who might perhaps want to explore getting a copy of it, the situation concerning congestive heart failure that roughly 5.7 million people in the US are suffering from congestive heart failure, and its physiology is particularly relevant to tonight’s show as it’s a feature of a defective function of heart muscle itself. Would you explain to our listeners the pathophysiology of congestive heart failure so that they can understand what it is that disease entails, and then we’ll get into some of the mechanisms by which that can 06:24 be changed and how people can see a better way of treating their bodies and eating the fright foods, etc.? In congestive heart failure, the heart muscle simply gets weaker, less able to pump a full volume of blood with each stroke, and the diastolic phase, which should be a relaxation phase, is inadequate. The heart stays partly contracted, so it has a short stroke, and the make up for the shortness of the stroke, it tends to pump faster, and ordinarily when a heart muscle pumps faster, it has a bigger stroke so that it doesn’t have to simply increase the speed that can increase the volume with each stroke. But with heart failure, that’s impossible, 07:30 so it tends to lead to a fast but weak heart beat. The actual muscle of the heart itself becomes more flabby and weak? Well, it becomes waterlogged, higher concentration of water in the tissue. That’s because it isn’t relaxing fully, and when it doesn’t relax, it’s like when you work a muscle tremendously, you can actually make a muscle swell up in just 15 or 20 minutes of very intense contraction. Your muscle will gain weight because it doesn’t relax fully and retains calcium excess water. So a very fatigued biceps muscle, for example, is temporarily equivalent to what’s 08:33 happening in the failing heart. And with that condition of retaining water and calcium, if that persists for a long time, because the heart isn’t getting enough sugar or oxygen, whatever it needs to relax, or if it’s being stimulated by estrogen, for example, that prevents the full relaxation, then chronically it tends to produce more collagen, and that collagen tends to become hardened. So at first it’s just a swollen condition, then it gradually becomes a fibrotic condition, and that can actually lead to the development of a bone in the heart calcification that actually contains crystal and calcium. Okay, because I understood the 09:33 basic mechanism of treatment at least 20 years ago to be things like diuretics, and this would be in part the removal of excess water that you mentioned is a feature of congestive heart failure in the muscle, and then even plant derivatives like digoxin from the woolly foxglove as a strengthener of heart contraction, so that each contraction was more effective. Yeah, that steroid from the foxglove is similar in structure and function to progesterone. Wow, really? And since George did experiments of 50 or 60 years ago in which he showed that progesterone acts on the heart using a rabbit heart, it acts like a digitalis to increase the staircase effect of heart contraction in which a faster simulation increases the stroke and 10:44 amount of blood pumped with each contraction, and that’s because the progesterone or the digitalis is accelerating the ability to both contract and relax. Okay, because it’s as much in part the relaxation as the important phase of muscle contraction for the next contraction to be important, the next contraction to be functional. Yeah, that’s why the failing heart has a very weak small beat because it isn’t relaxed and it’s becoming harder just by being filled up with water the way your muscles when they swell up they feel harder. Okay, okay, and I’m very fatigued from that swelling. Okay, so you mentioned this staircase effect and it’s the first time I’d come across that as a statement because I always believe that the increasing contractions of the heart 11:46 were a kind of mechanism to compensate for the lack of blood volume being ejected with each contraction in the failing heart, at least in things like arrhythmia and tachycardia, which are part of a congestive heart failure type picture, aren’t they? When you’re exercising, you will notice the beats per minute increase as you use your muscles and consume more oxygen, but at the same time that your healthy heart is beating faster, it’s beating harder, so when it’s going maybe 130 beats per minute, it will also be something very hard and you can feel the pulse in your wrist or throat as a big bulging throb with each beat. 12:46 That’s the staircase effect, it’s both going faster and having a bigger stroke with each contraction. Right, now that’s efficient, that’s an efficient contraction. Okay, all right, you’re listening to Ask Your Health Doctor on KMUD-Garbeville 91.1 FM and from 7.30 until the end of the show at eight o’clock. You’re invited to call in with any questions, either related or unrelated to this month’s subject of the heart and hormones. We’re joined by Dr. Raymond Pete, who’s has about 40 years of expertise in research into cell physiology, particularly with hormones. A number here if you live in the area is 9233911 or if you live outside the area, the toll-free number is 1-800-KMUD-RAD. So I think the next question I wanted to ask was you’re explaining the waterlogged effect of cardiac muscles and congestive heart failure. This has a relationship to growing 13:51 pains, doesn’t it? I think you’ve got a very different way of looking at growing pains or the treatment of growing pains. Yeah, it turns out that exactly the same things are happening in skeletal muscle and heart muscle. People have known it empirically. Doctors have seen the changes in their patients for 100 years and found that thyroid would correct those problems of both the heart and the skeletal muscles, but now fairly recently with analysis of the genes and proteins, you can see that in fact exactly the same things are involved in the growing pains, which come with a somewhat low thyroid function around puberty. Usually a couple of years before puberty estrogen is increasing, blocking thyroid function. That makes the cell fatigue more easily 14:58 so it retains water and the pain is associated with usually in the late afternoon and evening the muscles have progressively retained more water and calcium and they’re painful and swollen. And if a person in middle age becomes a very hypothyroid they start getting the same thing. Fibromyalgia is one of the variations on that. I was just going to ask. The muscle disease of hypothyroidism or hypothyroid monopathy involves leakage of enzymes from the skeletal muscles. That has been the assumption, but in fact the heart is also leaking those proteins. You can identify proteins coming from both the heart muscle and the skeletal muscles 16:02 in the hypothyroidism or in heart failure. So you can pick these up in the blood then? Yeah, and urine. Interesting. Okay, so somebody perhaps if they were suspecting from having a lot of fatigue in their arms and legs and all their back muscles just from standing erect might suppose they got a diagnosis of, gosh, that’s completely out of my head, the fibromyalgia, sorry. Could that be tested in a lab if they were to give a urine sample or a blood sample, would they be able to find myoglobin for example from the heart? Yeah, creatinine kinase is the first thing to look for if you’re suspecting a thyroid related pain problem. Creatinine kinase, okay. All right, so it’s a hypothyroidism because the two, I think the two terms get interchangeably confused both with patients and doctors that some people 17:07 would say they have hypothyroidism and they actually may have the opposite and vice versa. So people who say they have their hyperthyroid may just have very high adrenaline states and actually be low thyroid. So how do you understand the myopathy, the muscle weakness in hypothyroidism again? In hypothyroidism, you can see it in an electrocardiogram or if you kneel and have someone thump your Achilles tendon, so your toes twitch away from your body, the relaxation, if your thyroid function is good, the relaxation will be instantaneous and your foot will relax with a floppy, instantaneous, complete relaxation. If your thyroid is low, it’ll come back slowly to exactly where it started and the heart is doing the same thing with the prolongation of the Q-T interval. The T-wave represents repolarization or relaxation. 18:18 And so you can see it in either you’re thumping your Achilles tendon or looking at the electrocardiogram and when that is slow, that means the cell is retaining water and calcium and in that swollen state it is permeable, it absorbs things that it shouldn’t and it leaks some of the enzymes that shouldn’t leak, so you can see those in the blood during fatigue or hypothyroidism. Is this related perhaps to, and it’s a little bit off the beaten track here where we’re going, but the reflexes, someone’s reflexes in general, if somebody has very quick reflexes and they seem to be very alert and sharp, is that reflex down to being able to also relax the muscle that’s spasming or producing that reflex quickly? Is that a sign of a fairly well-functioning thyroid? 19:21 Yeah, the conduction and time, the rates of nervous conduction is slowed in hypothyroidism and so there are different things involved in ordinary functioning. A hypothyroid person will tend to react over 10 milliseconds or 20 milliseconds slower than a person with a good thyroid function. I’ve seen when someone popped a firecracker on the 4th of July, I saw people around the room, there was sort of a wave of jumping. You could tell who the hypothyroid people were by how fast they jumped. Okay, interesting. I think it’d be interesting for people that are listening just to go over again the Achilles tendon reflex because it’s not something, when we were studying it was always a patella reflex. You’d sit on a stool with your legs swinging like an 8-year-old or 20:27 whatever on a grown-up chair so your legs were swinging and it would hit your patella with a little rubber patella hammer and your reflex would initiate and however fire your leg swung out and return to normal. That shows the extent of the reflex ability but it doesn’t show the speed of relaxation because your lower leg is so heavy it’ll swing back if your leg is only if your muscle is only partly relaxed but when you kneel the calf muscle is very big in relation to the small weight of your toes and when that muscle contracts it’s the muscle that makes you able to stand on your toes so it’s a very strong muscle but when you’re kneeling all it has to do is make your foot twitch a little bit and so the return from the twitch is a very small 21:32 burden on the muscle and so it won’t drag a half contracted muscle back to the resting position. It comes back exactly as the muscle reaches full relaxation. Yeah, excellent. Okay, so those people that are listening then if they ever wanted to do it themselves to purely test their own reflexes in their thyroid state and what Dr. P is talking about is if you were to kneel on a chair facing the back of the chair so your legs are off the chair and basically have your leg just nice and relaxed and floppy then someone behind you gets a rolling pin or something like that kind of nature and just gently taps with a quick tap your Achilles tendon which runs from your heel up into your calf and tapping that tendon then will elicit a reflex so your foot will swing out away from you and it’s how quickly it returns to its resting state where the toes are pointing down to the 22:33 down to the floor again. It’s that resting repolarization that’s the important marker of how well your thyroid is working. If your toes they swing out but they take a long time to return they kind of gently swing back down to perpendicular then that’s not a very good sign and if they swing out and back down again quickly that’s actually the good sign you’re looking for. Maybe somebody can help you out there if you want to try this yourself at home. Okay, you’re listening to Ask Europe Dr. on K-Mu-D-Gavel 91.1 FM and from 7.30 which is coming up here in five minutes or so until the end of the show 8 o’clock you’re invited to call him with any questions either related or unrelated to this month’s subject of the heart and hormones. Number here if you live in the area is 3911 or if you live outside the area the toll-free number is 1-800-K-M-U-D-RAD and we’re very pleased to welcome Dr. Raymond P on to the show once again to share his wisdom with us. Another way of looking at that reflex system is insomnia. 23:35 Many doctors think that thyroid is a stimulant that will make you stay awake but when you think of the brain as having exactly the same process of excitation and relaxation as your heart muscle or your leg muscle when the brain is fatigued if it’s somewhat hypothyroid it gets the equivalent of a growing pain or a cramp and it can’t relax fully and that amounts to insomnia and so if you can energize the brain cells you can get sleep to come on quickly and the active thyroid hormone and magnesium and sugar are the things that most quickly will restore energy to your brain or your muscles heart and so on. Okay did you have a question? I thought maybe you 24:36 yeah somebody already wanted to know the best foods for the heart the best diet yeah Dr. P? Well fruit is extremely important and avoiding polyunsaturated fats because the the heart is much more efficient using oxygen when it’s burning sugar rather than fat and having plenty of all of the minerals calcium magnesium sodium and potassium those interact very closely people think of calcium as the exciting iron which it is when the cell is excited and can’t get rid of it but calcium happens to inhibit some of the hormones that maintain inflammation and excitation so if you are well saturated with all of these 25:42 minerals the alkaline minerals that will help the heart to relax more quickly and then contract more quickly yeah okay you said calcium potassium magnesium and sodium sodium okay so things like eggshells from the calcium or milk obviously is another very good source of calcium and then potassium and magnesium and these are fairly rich in green leafy vegetables and fruits orange juice and watermelon for example are good for the sodium and potassium yeah there you go and obviously table salt I know we’ve done several several shows on salt and how good it is for you but I think we need to keep reminding ourselves again that there’s absolutely no truth in the fact that salt is harmful it’s actually very very beneficial for you and actually lack of salt is more harmful I’m pretty surprised the last couple of months I look at the news the BBC news pretty much probably because I’m British of descent and tend to think of the BBC as a kind 26:48 of non but non-biased non-corporate news entity and it doesn’t really have any funding one way or the other from parties and corporations etc but perhaps some very interesting health articles that come out of there that have really corroborated what you’ve been talking about and I was almost going to point out and point out several of these towards the end of the show but okay so it’s 7.30 and I don’t know but go ahead one point about the sodium is that if you restrict sodium you increase your aldosterone and one of the current interests in heart drug treatment is to find an aldosterone inhibitor but the eating enough sodium is the simplest way to it’s too cheap it’s too cheap and they can’t patent it I found the same thing about the one of the BBC articles was just showing it’s a complete reversal of the last 20 years or so of doctrine from the medical profession if you like on skin cancer and melanomas and exposure to sun 27:52 they’re now in England they’re actually promoting people to go out and get more sun because they’re saying that the vitamin D deficiency causing rickets is actually on the rise and actually there’s very little evidence now to suggest that sun exposure causes melanoma and it’s actually related to many other things most of which are probably polyunsaturates in the diet there have been a couple of studies in which they found in fact that the incidence of melanoma decreased with the altitude at which a person lives and so it’s inversely related to ultraviolet exposure okay we’ve got a caller on the line so let’s take this next caller hello you’re on the air hello you’re on the air hi um I I have a question that’s exactly about the heart but could I first start by asking you where you’re from where you’re calling from I am living in Phillipsville okay spoken over the phone okay very good um my father actually died of a heart 28:55 attack and I am like because he had psoriasis of his toenails too I’m and since I learned from Dr. Pete that estrogen can cause heart attacks I kind of feel like that’s what happened with him but me what happens with me is that I have a grand mal seizure like once a month and it’s what’s known as catamennial epilepsy because of this that out of whack ratio between estrogen and progesterone so I am slightly derailing you but I’m taking it’s not going to be actually speak to Dr. Pete please say go ahead what was your question well I’m wondering like what like what can I do to balance my hormones I’m keeping your cholesterol level up fruit is one of the best ways to help the liver make enough cholesterol and then if your cholesterol production is good uh thyroid and vitamin a are the main things for turning uh cholesterol into progesterone 30:01 which not only has anti seizure effects but it has a heart protective effects steadying the heart rhythm the way that digitalis does and uh blocking albosterone preventing fibrosis of the heart and so on so keeping your cholesterol production up but having the factors that convert it to progesterone is basically is that something that’s operative in the in the gut like eating the raw grid of carrot oh yeah the effect of having a raw carrot every day or bamboo shoots uh the these are antiseptic fibers which can’t be easily broken down by microorganisms and so uh they don’t stimulate bacterial growth in fact tend to sterilize the 31:02 intestine and at the same time uh it the fiber binds the estrogen which your liver is producing and excreting all the time in the bile and prevents it from being reabsorbed so immediately you can see a decrease in your estrogen level uh the day or two after eating a raw carrot and that reduction of absorption of bacterial products and estrogen very quickly uh reduces your stress and cortisol production and that allows your progesterone to increase okay um as you’re talking about these things that are like the the good and bad bacteria in the guts and i wonder even too if you know about the gaps diet um yeah the the simplest thing is to avoid 32:04 starches and polyunsaturated fat because those are the things that promote olive oil then like is something to avoid um well the olive oil is saturated enough that it helps the carrot with a germicidal action coconut oil butter and olive oil especially associated with the fiber of carrot um help to suppress microorganisms okay okay but i think we better leave it for other callers i appreciate your calling in and i would better take the next caller thank you you’re welcome hi you’re on here hello yes hi and where are you from um this is i’m sorry what was that where are you from where are you calling from oh i’m calling in from minnesota okay i’m just yeah i’m just trying to make a habit of calling people uh and asking them where they’re from just to get an idea of the demographics of the radio shows reach oh gotcha thank you for calling 33:08 what’s your question yeah well this is probably sort of off topic but um i was wondering dr pete’s opinion on what can a person do to recover from getting off of ssri’s oh um i hear that a lot and basically it’s doing everything you can to restore a good intense metabolic rate uh restore the um energy level of cells so that they don’t uh go into the stress state the high serotonin uh trains the nervous system to stay in a stress state because serotonin activates the pituitary acth and adrenal system and ultimately the way to break that pattern 34:12 is to increase your cellular energy production of lower stress keep your thyroid function up and keep the estrogen down um okay well thank you very much um i guess it’s uh it sounds somewhat easy but i’m i’m sure it’s pretty tough for for someone who’s been on ssri’s for so long and uh is it something that takes quite a long time to recover from in your opinion um yeah people seem to um take about a year to uh feel fairly normal again even doing everything right okay well thank you very much uh yeah the um the serotonin itself creates an inflammatory state in the nerves and body in general and so they they affect your your whole metabolism 35:20 increase fat production and and stress and and so you want to concentrate on keeping your whole body in an unstressed condition uh eating frequently is probably one of the helpful things not not forcing yourself to to go on adrenaline okay all right thank you we’ve got thank you for I do appreciate you calling in and your interaction we’ve got a couple of more callers so let’s just make sure everyone gets a chance to pose some questions to dr pete so next caller you’re on the air and where are you from uh this is david from Missouri hi david welcome to the show and congratulations on your baby oh thank you um you know i don’t know if you’ve seen this but i i see this quite often where somebody will put a cell phone in their pocket right over their heart and i’ve heard that each organ in the body 36:21 has a specific frequency and i know that they all pretty much fall within the same frequency but that they do have a frequency that that helps that system to operate normally um what do you think the ramifications are of having that competing frequency right next to the heart it’s um pretty well established that you uh damage the tissue create stress in the brain of the cancer rate increases when your head is exposed to the microwave frequencies great amazing that all of these mainstream media outlets they never talk about things like that you would think they would be warning people about putting a cell phone over their heart but anyway the other thing i’ve been exploring um eating bamboo sprouts i grow several different types of bamboo so this spring i’ve been trying different things and i was just curious about 37:25 the different techniques i’ve been using you know i’ve been steaming them like in a steamer basket and then i’ve also just been boiling them in water and i’ve noticed that how i peel that bamboo i can leave more fibers that obviously are not digestible but then it seems like the more tender parts inside are really soft i mean almost like a really well cooked potato do you think there’s a benefit maybe not cooking them too much i don’t know they still have a good fiber even if they’re soft and then i’ve also been drinking the water that i boil them in do you think there’s actually some antibiotic um yeah i think still in that water i think so the japanese and chinese have some drugs that they make from extracts of the bamboo plant and i think they get the strongest ones from the leaves but i think there is the same antiseptic and probably anti-cancer material in 38:30 the shoots wow i’m going to harvest extra and then freeze them i’m assuming that’s not going to hurt it at all i don’t think it’s worth some what i don’t think it’s harm something to freeze okay i don’t want to hog the the questions here but i do have one more question unless you think we should go on i know we’re running out of time go ahead now go ahead um you know the orange juice thing i live in missouri and through the winter i can get fresh oranges it’s very difficult to get organic oranges but all through the winter i was you know juicing fresh oranges and and they were just regular oranges it seems like i’ve heard that you know even though they’re not organic most oranges because of that heavy peel they’re probably not too bad as far as pesticide but i think i’m going into summer it’s almost impossible for me to get fresh oranges so i’ve been you know like buying tropicana orange juice and i’ve been trying different organic frozen 39:31 orange juices and so i did a bunch of research on how all these frozen orange juices and things like tropicana are made and it seems like all of them are doing the same thing where they create these big vats and they take all the the moisture out and then they add the oil from the peel back in are you aware of that i’m beyond i think there’s a worse process that all the companies all the big companies are using the last five or ten years which is to use enzymes to break up the pulp so that they have less waste and more volume in the juice the stuff that used to be pretty solid material that had to be discarded has now you mentioned that before and i’ve been i’ve been calling these companies and trying to find one that you know it’s it’s really hard to find somebody to talk to that actually knows what’s going on in these different companies but i have made an effort to do that and you know like tropicana says they do not do that in their non-pulp orange juice 40:39 and i’ve called two of the organic ones like cascadian and then i forgot the other one but um they both say they’re not doing that so do you think that there is a benefit from drinking these processed orange juices oh yeah okay so so the fresh is definitely better but drinking the processed ones are still going to be better than not doing it right um yeah for example of people with heart pains even with with frozen orange juice concentrate you can see a very quick relief from mild heart pains just by drinking a pint of orange juice per day yeah i’m addicted to orange juice now it’s amazing it’s a great addiction i have a question for you since you’re in missouri yes the engineer uh is there a march against mothanto going in their home state there is yeah i’m going to i live close to a town called springfield and there’s going to be a lot 41:41 of people there and there’s there’s one in st louis which is where marchanto is and there’s one in columbia which is where the university of missouri is and there’s one in kansas city so yeah we’re all we’re all wanting to make a stand for on that for sure awesome thank you all right thanks for your caller uh thanks for your call caller and uh let’s move on to the next one of two or however we have a call one more thing thank you dr pete for everything you do and thank you andrew for the show yeah you’re very welcome yeah thanks for call hi okay and i’ll comment saying it’s great what a wide-ranging people i think i get more calls from farther away on the show than any other and i did get a local call it’s all because of dr pete it’s dr pete yes uh i got a local call someone with information from for the earlier person uh about ssri uh there’s a a website called drug awareness dot com and she had wanted to tell this to you and sarah as well her name is ann blake tracy and she has a phone number on 800 number 800 2807030 and there’s a lot of information 42:50 about getting off ssri’s good excellent and we have one more caller calling all the way from maranda in hobo county you’re not too far away okay welcome to the show um i hope my question won’t be redundant i missed um part of the program driving home without a radio in my car um the question is i have chronic sinusitis that i’ve had for the last 10 years and um i have been lately feeling like it might be straining my heart um and i wondered if you know i’ve heard like you could have a a minor chronic infection like say an abscess tooth or something like that um i think there is a definite relation between uh sinus or tooth infections in the heart but i i don’t think it goes from the the sinus or tooth to the heart but i think uh it’s endotoxin from chronic intestinal inflammation that uh sometimes bacteria enter the bloodstream along with the 43:58 endotoxin but uh just the endotoxin enough is alone is enough to uh cause sinusitis and uh inflamed uh periodontal tissues and at the same time it’s causing those changes in the heart calcium retention water retention easy fatigability yeah well i um i i get regular exercise and i have a vegan diet and uh i’ve been off gluten pretty strictly very strictly for a couple of years now which is very helpful um but i can’t seem to get ahead of the sinusitis um anything that might pop up that i should um when when the uh the simple foods and um the fibers to disinfect your intestine when those aren’t enough uh then uh the drugs that are most helpful 45:04 in my experience are aspirin and uh the antihistamines uh benadryl for example if you could get the pure chemical that’s better than prepared tablets and uh ciproheptidine which is an anti serotonin antihistamine and then uh antibiotics mm-hmm yeah i haven’t responded to the antibiotics and i don’t use them very often but what about um cordial silver wondering about that i tried that once but i i have to go in and make my own um oh one one other thing that helps the uh general immune system and avoidance of inflammation is vitamin d have you had a blood test for vitamin i haven’t but i take um i take 10 000 units um a day vitamin d take oh yes as i get this drop here i take 10 of them 46:05 is supposed to come out to 10 000 units does that seem like a reasonable dosage yeah if it’s vitamin d3 yes it is and uh do you get some sunlight exposure yeah yeah we my wife and i walk every day and um it hasn’t been raining very much in oboe county unfortunately i don’t sunday though or whatever well i uh thank you i think i should get off to leave room for anyone behind me okay no problem all right well thanks for your call appreciate you appreciate you calling in whilst we’re on the topic before the callers started coming in let me just give people who are listening again an opportunity to know how to get in contact with us we can be reached here at 1 800 k mu d rad or the toll free up the 923 number uh 923 3911 um we were discussing cholesterol you know at the beginning of the call in questions you were talking about um the 47:07 relationship of cholesterol um and how this is relevant the the harmful effects perhaps rather of lowering cholesterol uh and its relevance to heart failure um yeah the uh the drugs uh that lower cholesterol one of the accepted side effects of both of the main categories of cholesterol lowering drugs is to uh causes occasional muscle breakdown raptomyelosis uh the muscle dissolves itself and one of the known things is the interference with the production of coenzyme q10 but that isn’t the sole reason for the muscle breakdown uh the simple lack of cholesterol cholesterol is a a cell stabilizing substance with hormone like action which in the absence of uh 48:10 progesterone and uh the other protective steroids it actually has a a cell protective effect in the skeletal muscles and in the heart of the same process that causes uh raptomyelosis the skeletal muscles uh can happen in the heart of cholesterol deficiency tending to kill heart cells there we go see i mean dr p you uh you recommend yeah well yeah recommend to have a cholesterol of 200 but you don’t have any uh you don’t have any problem with someone reporting a cholesterol of 200 especially if they’re uh 50 or more do you um yeah the um uh framing him study found that people over 50 uh who had at least 200 cholesterol or higher had a much lower risk of Alzheimer’s disease because it’s brain protective as well as heart protective there you go okay we’ve actually got a couple of callers on the line so let’s take the 49:12 next caller hi caller you’re on the air so hi and where are you calling from you calling from arcada well actually trinidad okay welcome to the show yeah i am dealing with uh truth infection that i’ve had for a number of years now and i have um been treating it with petri oil and it seems to be helping some but still hanging in there it seems like it’s very um hard to really get to because i guess it’s anaerobic so it’s i don’t know just really been a challenge to treat and i’m wondering if dr p has any suggestions about how to go about it what kind of infection is a tooth infection the tooth infection yeah and it’s pretty nasty sometimes some of the discharge i get from it um i know a dentist who um cured chronic dental problems like periodontal disease 50:13 with simply giving his patients a laxative and he would talk at dental conferences and say he was a good surgeon but he found there was no need at all to do periodontal surgery if he gave the patients laxatives but the idea didn’t catch on among the dentists do you have a do you have any uh any constipation that’s long-standing at all or uh not really no not that i know of i i’m pretty regular um although i i would say that my digestion hasn’t been hip top i’m i’m 57 so it’s like um i don’t know it’s gotten a little bit sluggish but it hasn’t been anything i would call constipation sometimes just avoiding starchy especially raw vegetables and raw fibrous fruits um apples are easier on the 51:16 intestine if they’re well cooked and uh vegetables ought to be cooked about 40 minutes to be protective to the intestine wow so avoid raw vegetables um yeah often uh if you keep the vegetables that you’ve been eating put them in a plastic bag where they don’t get oxygen and then keep them at 98 degrees for a few days and you’ll basically see what happens to them because we don’t have enzymes for breaking up the uh cellulose of vegetable material and so the bacteria are favored by the warm moist conditions and the bacteria can thrive on raw vegetables hmm wow it’s just so counter to what i was sure everybody else said so it felt interesting to me 52:19 well i know i know dr pete’s always advocating making sure that the transit time through the gut is as quick as possible so that um uh prevents the uh well especially with the right kind of foods prevents the overgrowth of any bad bacteria is because of an endotoxin point of view it’s the endotoxin that gets into the system that can cause the inflammation and other disruptions and i know tooth infections uh fairly well supposedly notoriously difficult to treat because of the uh don’t have a particularly good blood supply um but i i think the seat of most people’s conditions when it only comes down to changing the diets in people and then hearing back of the great amount of changes that are going on in them in their life that the uh the gut is the most the most important aspect of humans is what you put into your gut and how well it moves through it’s probably single the single most important factor in good health uh rock carrots are the exception among vegetables because uh being a root vegetable they happen to be very germicidal uh bacteria won’t 53:26 touch them in the transit time so i should even avoid salads uh yeah green salads or other vegetables other than rock carrots okay wow and do you know dr p anything about the light therapies that are out there these days i’ve been treating it also with a friend of mine does light therapy and she’s got a little box that gives red red rays off i’m just curious if you know anything about light therapy uh yeah uh sunlight is uh the best in general and if you’re going to be exposed to uh full sunlight very long then you have to uh worry about sunburn and so avoiding sunburn is the only caution but many hours a day of brilliant light white light 54:27 incandescent light or sunlight it has many effects uh balancing the hormones increasing your defensive hormones such as progesterone and testosterone and uh just a year or so ago an american researcher trained rats and found that just shining red light on their heads because red light penetrates through the tissues he found that their learning was improved just by exposure to light wow so that could be helpful in the tooth infection um yeah it helps your whole system lowers the stress and probably lowers the tendency to absorb endotoxin for your intestine thank you very much dr p and thank you andrew yeah you’re very welcome okay well thanks to everyone who’s called in appreciate your feedback and your comments um let’s just uh 55:32 cut the callers for now it’s three minutes too i just want to make sure that everyone gets to hear how to contact dr p and read the articles that he writes freely thank you so much for joining us dr p really appreciate your time thank you okay so uh for those who are interested in learning more about what dr p has to offer in terms of his approach to sickness and good health uh www.reypeat.com he’s got lots of scholarly articles fully referenced uh most of the reference material uh is very current so um check it out and there’s lots of new stuff that he’s writing continually so he’s a great source of inspiration to us all um for those of you uh this time next month the third Friday of next month will be at the summer solstice so can you believe it we’ve only got about four and a half weeks and then the uh daylight starts getting shorter when we start going back the other way but anyway we haven’t quite got there yet and um thanks for listening everyone 56:37 good night