Progesterone Part 3

00:00 The following show was recorded on the 7th of February 2012 and more information can be found about Ray Pete’s work at raypeat.com. That’s R-A-Y-P-E-A-T dot com. Hello and welcome to Politics and Science. I’m your host John Barkhazan and this is part three of a discussion about progesterone and Dr. Raymond Pete’s work with progesterone over the years. Dr. Pete for those who don’t know has a PhD in biology from the University of Oregon and with a speciality in physiology and has done a lot of research in the fields of endocrinology and science history. So Ray welcome once again to Politics and Science. So in the last two shows Ray we covered some of the history of and your work with progesterone. This week I’m hoping we’ll be able to cover some of the politics and economic pressures affecting the science of progesterone. So to start this off in spite of its proven 01:05 anti-cancer anti-inflammatory effects progesterone is now deemed a carcinogenic substance under California’s Proposition 65. So I guess my question is how did this turn of events come to pass? Yeah the proposition says that you can sell carcinogens in any form you want but you just have to quote the law that says this is known by the state of California to cause cancer and or birth defects and such but it isn’t a law against selling carcinogens just that you have to warn against them and the partly driven by lawyers who were given the opportunity to enforce the law instead of the state lawyers could make collectivines themselves. They chose to interpret the law to mean that the 02:07 presence of anything which could be carcinogenic in any other situation makes a product require the warning so that it ended up that parking lots had to be warned that they were carcinogenic. The public had to see a sign if they went into the parking lot. What was the rationale for the parking lots Ray? Oh it was either the paving material or the fact that there were cars there emitting exhaust fumes. Oh my gosh. Chocolate producers were sued. Manufacturers of drinking glasses that had paint on the outside. Bread manufacturers, potato vendors, vegetables anything that there was a whole wave of these insane prosecutions. Employers 03:11 made a lot of money and the real function of that law besides enriching lawyers it was to put the warnings everywhere in the produce department of grocery stores and on apartment buildings and on fishing tackle and hardware and so on so that it became a joke everything was labeled the carcinogen so the carcinogens became invisible the real carcinogens were submerged in this phony warning business and it was still legal to sell car synogens but since everything had the warning the public basically wasn’t warned against the real carcinogens and the physicians could prescribe the carcinogens as long as they were under under a doctor’s orders. That’s a 04:16 brilliant brilliant strategy on the part of business it sounds like. Yeah I’m very bad for the public and it had been brought to the attention of the Attorney General and so on and the lawyers basically are in control of the government so that anything that would impair their ability to shake down the public doesn’t interest the law enforcement people. I gathered some evidence and asked the Attorney General if non-profit corporations aren’t supposed to take money from industries to destroy their competitors and such and I gathered up evidence and made it look pretty clear that that was what was going on and they said if I can prove that they have committed the crime they 05:19 will investigate. So if you do all the work then they would just investigate and say they would prosecute. And I didn’t quite follow what does a non-profit have to do with it? The non-profit organizations were being formed either as friends for lawyers to extort money or as I couldn’t prove it because I couldn’t subpoena the documents but it on its surface it looks very much like the competing industries are using those organizations to get rid of progesterone and other products. Sure that makes perfect sense so they basically form kind of a cartel and go after their competitors under the it’s a very strange law where you sounds like the Wild West where you just anybody can deputize themselves and go after somebody else to enforce this very open ended law. Yeah and 06:25 the state prescribes the type of penalty that they can get. I forget it was like $50 for each drinking glass that was sold without a warning. Wow. And it was a huge amount of money millions of dollars that the lawyers have collected. That’s so Kafka-esque. And it sounds so ridiculous but it actually has serious repercussions for somebody who’s trying to sell a product that they think is is helpful. For instance what happens to you if you don’t obtain the California seal of approval of not being a carcinogen? If you don’t have 10 employees or more the law doesn’t apply to you so you legally shouldn’t be able to tell anything without a warning except the lawyers ignore that they go ahead and extort money from people who just on the face of the law it can’t be applied to. 07:25 And do they threaten to pursue you in court if you don’t pay them off or do they actually? Oh yeah they do. First they threaten you then they pursue you and they keep it going for years. So it’s basically extortion I guess. Yeah there if you Google how to shake down lawyers California we’ll get some of the history of it. Okay I had no idea and because I in our state I think it carries quite a bit of weight if you don’t if you’re listed as a carcinogen in the state of California. Yeah the California lawyers were getting big money from foreign corporations even outside the U.S. because they do business with California and California has such a big economy but they control the world. Yeah okay well that sort of sets the context for the legal environment in California and and when did you become aware that progesterone was going to be coming 08:26 under the sights of these guys? I guess about 10 or 15 years ago the manufacturers started labeling the progesterone itself known by California to be a carcinogen. So it was already a done deal when you first heard about it? Yeah I think it was 1987 when the California review happened I’m not sure of the date when the Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment is what California’s board is called they call it WIHA and they weren’t willing to give me the names of the people who were there qualified the experts by their definition who made those decisions but the law requires them to either just automatically list it because World Health Organizations or 09:33 National Toxicology program listed they could just defer to them but in this case they decided to have their board of qualified experts look at the relevant evidence and out of thousands of publications on the issue of cancer and progesterone that they picked out about a dozen articles that they said was the relevant decisive evidence and of those several of them weren’t even progesterone there were birth control pills and things that contained no progesterone at all they listed them as the relevant evidence but when I got them to send me copies they weren’t even about progesterone in several cases and then the ones that did involve progesterone in the research every one of 10:36 them was totally incompetent as toxicology or science or cancer research they were clearly manipulated to get a case against progesterone but they failed in every case they had had only one outside person testified during meeting Richard Edgren and asked him why he had chosen to testify and he said because progesterone is in the carcinogen and then he went over some of the studies and mentioned that one of the studies using non progesterone chemicals had produced some tumors that weren’t metastatic but he wasn’t in 11:39 that moment talking about progesterone but the chairman of the committee heard him say metastatic even though he had said they weren’t and and since the topic of the meeting was progesterone you know Edgren wasn’t talking about progesterone in that case that was the basis for making the decision like the Marx brothers couldn’t have been sillier yeah yeah or Kafka couldn’t have been more surreal yeah you said Richard Edgren they asked him why he had chosen to testify it sounds like he wasn’t even going to be there except that he was concerned with this yeah because he pointed out that if you call non carcinogens carcinogens then what’s the public going to think about real carcinogens if you’re going to ruin the whole issue of public safety if you blur anti carcinogens with carcinogens and one of the studies that they 12:44 listed as evidence of proving that progesterone is a carcinogen the article introduced itself by reference to some studies by Alexander lipshoots who had published many papers and a book describing the anti tumor properties of progesterone yeah and this article referenced that and said that they were checking up on on lipshoots work but lipshoot in his paper that they were referring to had specified that progesterone given continuously prevents or even sometimes reverses cancer and in this paper that they the California considered evidence of carcinogenicity they gave intermittent progesterone 13:45 treatments exactly what lipshoots had said wouldn’t prevent cancer and they concluded it doesn’t prevent cancer that was all paper consisted of a bad reputation of lipshoots evidence that progesterone prevents cancer and California presented this of this strange non-refutation of progesterone as a cancer preventing as evidence that it causes cancer again it’s bizarre but very effective it sounds like you know nobody’s gonna question it because they’re the experts all that was there was a title their panel of experts was probably the receptionist who looked up some titles that had cancer and progesterone in them and they just figured nobody’s ever gonna care or look into it yeah and that’s because there’s no money behind making progesterone as 14:52 you pointed out in an earlier show so that they’re not really stepping on any big toes when they do this except the people who are actually benefiting from the use of progesterone yeah and around the time that someone petitioned to take progesterone off the list and that petition was rejected because the person in charge of responding to the petition mentioned a study that was done at the World Health Organization Cancer Research Agency as having shown that progesterone was a carcinogen so I looked that up and the people at the World Health Organization said they didn’t know of any such thing but they looked carefully and finally found one with the same date that California had cited and it wasn’t about progesterone but what was that that synthetic progesterone how 15:57 I see and California had cited that one obscure article not about progesterone to refute the petition that had presented evidence that progesterone protects against cancer but that was just a way of saying no don’t bother us at the point that I asked them who made the decisions that were decisive even though the decisions violated their own regulations the head of the agency said we don’t have the resources to answer your questions anymore like go away yeah please go away you’re bothering and around the same time someone petitioned to remove saccharin from the list of carcinogens and there’s a lot of evidence that saccharin is a carcinogen and the California decided to remove it from 17:04 their list on the basis that the reason it causes cancer of the bladder in rats is peculiar to rat bladders and it’s sort of a crystallization and the concussion caused by falling crystals on the wall of the bladder basically that’s what the argument consisted of they had no evidence that it was the contact of crystals with the bladder but they found the paper that said it does cause crystallization in the bladder yeah but they there are also articles that showed that human urine crystallizes in exactly the same way the rats did so there was nothing special about the rat crystals yeah it was just again reaching as far as they could not to see the evidence and so they took it off the list again just as 18:11 false in the other direction to take saccharin off the list because it’s a big industry moneymaker yeah so it sounds like they’re there to represent certain interests and basically be a filter for what becomes available to the public or not based on those interests not the public’s interests yeah that’s their public the corporations are the only public they’re concerned with yeah and I just recall from your newsletters that some of the tests they cited against progesterone some of them were progestins as you said and you explained last time that progestins actually have many of them have opposite effects of progesterone there’s synthetic progesterone and they don’t are they considered synthetic is that the right term progestin well yep they’re synthetic but they are there are different molecules so they aren’t progesterone at all right okay and they’re the industry got the FDA to allow them to call them progestins even though they are good 19:15 contraceptives they prevent gestation but because there is a change in the lining of a rabbit uterus under their influence that happens to coincide with the changes caused by progesterone at least in one or two features on the basis of that they call a non-progestin a progestin it’s a contraceptive but they can see one feature of overlap with progesterone so that’s the strength we’re calling them a progestin I see and for those who didn’t hear the first two parts of this talk about progesterone Dr. Pete was telling us that many times progestins are prescribed people think they’re taking progesterone but they’re actually taking these different molecules named after progesterone but actually do not have many of the benefits that progesterone does in 1970 when I was working on progesterone occasionally someone 20:23 would say did you see the paper in some big science magazine that progesterone causes cancer and at that time they were actually putting it in the title progesterone causes cancer but they weren’t working with progesterone they were just even the editors of science journals were letting them get away with calling things by false names and by the early 70s the science world had clarified their terminology enough so that they started consistently calling the other molecules progestins or progestogens and so there has been much less scientific confusion about the terms but medical doctors are still pretty well confused about the difference between the anti-progestational progestins and the real progesterone and consequently the public’s also very 21:27 confused because I know a lot of people who are taking estrogen with progestins and they think they’re getting both progesterone and estrogen and yeah natural progesterone has to carry the warning that it can cause heart defects because some of the things that are called progestins cause heart defects and so something that has one property of progesterone gets to be called called the progestin and then anything toxic that molecule does gets laid over on real progesterone and and that prevents for example women with epilepsy are told to avoid progesterone during pregnancy because it’ll cause heart defects but actually the real progesterone has been reported to prevent almost all birth defects when it’s used before pregnancy and as we talked about in the earlier 22:31 shows most of these rulings seem to be connected to the estrogen industry which just one drug alone we were talking about last week premmarin I think was two billion dollars in sales roughly before the World Health Initiative test became public and estrogen sales dropped so Dr. Pete was saying last week that as estrogen sales drop a progesterone sales were going up and this alarmed the industry and consequently it seems like there’s a move against progesterone yeah and you can see it in some of the traditional centers of estrogen promoting research they around that time turned against progesterone instead of concentrating on on how good estrogen is they’re stretching to find something bad linked to progesterone hmm that’s very interesting who is sitting on these boards right where do these people come from do you 23:34 know any of them or have heard of them or oh I looked up everyone on the board and we’re talking about the board that decided what was a carcinogen in California excuse me yeah yeah some of them were linked to the the university that was doing the anti-progesterone research and the leading anti-progesterone guy was Malcolm Pike and he and one or two others formed a company to promote birth control pill based on his idea of protecting against progesterone and the state of California was using federal grants and other funding to support 24:34 corporations his included so so government money was flowing into his anti-progesterone business while he was sitting influential in saying that progesterone is a carcinogen and everyone I looked up on the board was either directly or indirectly concerned with with something competing for example one of the people was on the board of a company promoting transdermal medical treatments things that will administer drugs through the skin while most of the progesterone products were being delivered through the skin this person was representing a company that would would probably be in line to market 25:43 a medical progesterone transdermal I see and and what universities were they working for and what were their fields of expertise where are they physiologists you know most of it there was only one biologist on the committee and several toxicologists and the University of Southern California has I think the biggest concentration of anti-progesterone work I looked at the USC website about five six years ago and I found easily I think it was 140 references to the glorious properties of estrogen and I found I forget numerous but not not a competitive number numerous references to progesterone but 26:45 every one of them was about its harmful properties and if you look at them objectively you have to look hard to find an objectively beneficial effect of estrogen and you have to stretch very hard to find a harmful effect of progesterone is the contents of this library because they’ve called it or they’ve just always cultivated articles with the right attitude as far as they’re concerned well the things on the website were on research projects in in progress I guess they were all in progress right so they’re being funded through the University probably from pharmaceutical yeah research companies yeah so that’s basically that that university has come down on the side of the pharmaceutical companies that are funding them in short yeah there there 27:46 there are several labs around the country Berkeley has more recently moved in that correction Michigan was was a big center of estrogen research and some of those people move to UC Berkeley and interestingly the Lawrence Livermore laboratory is involved in anti progesterone research which seems to have grown out of the chemical warfare line of line of thinking yeah that’s really interesting that’s like that’s a weapons lab basically and and why are they interested in estrogen research or anti progesterone research do you think well obviously would be for benign and harmless purposes I’m sure yeah are they affiliated with businesses do you know Ray I don’t know anything about Lawrence 28:48 Livermore laboratory I don’t know I think it’s all government money well one of the things you’ve written about Elwood Jensen who’s the supposed inventor the concept of the receptor protein the hormone receptor is that right he invented that that concept yeah there were the idea of receptors in general was being discussed in various fields but for estrogen the enzymeologists were progressing very quickly in understanding the effects of estrogen and molecules like estrogen through the 1940s into the 1950s and one of the lines of very productive research was showing that and change estrogen back and forth 29:55 between estrone and estradiol estrone is relatively inactive estradiol is very active and that that was classified as is in psychology and Jensen’s argument was that if estrogen acts by activating a genetic program and so it’s only a female acting substance because females are genetically determined to be female and so what estrogen does is act on a receptor that activates the genetic program and if if if something is acted on by enzymes men have enzymes that are going to do the same reactions and the entymology tended to generalize the 31:01 estrogen issue and make it a masculine problem as well as female but Jensen got the only support from the atomic energy commission which controlled the isotopes needed to do enzyme studies and the user isotope labeled form of estrogen and in his experiments with uterus tissue claimed to show that there was no oxidation or reduction of estrogen by the uterus and said that’s the end of the enzyme tradition it’s all receptor and genes now and that spread through the research world and by mid 1960s was the dogma but then the 32:04 entymologist started getting the same isotopes that he had had and showed that in fact the old 1940s research was exactly what’s happening and now everyone knows that estrogen estradiol and estrone are perfectly interchangeable and that’s exactly where progesterone and thyroid and stress hormones interact with estrogen progesterone turns off some of the enzymes that activate estrogen and activate enzymes that inactivate estrogen so the enzyme approach opens up the whole issue of environmental physiology nutritional metabolic effects on the estrogen system and the estrogen’s deranging effects on all of those systems so that’s all now coming back but 50 years of belief in a genetic 33:12 explanation of why estrogen is so good for females and harmless to everyone else yeah yeah you got too fuzzy on that last sentence I couldn’t understand it yeah I was saying that Elwood Jensen the reason I brought him up is because you mentioned the Livermore Labs and he worked in the chemical weapons industry isn’t that right yeah University of Chicago I think is where he was working and that was the big weapons laboratory the government doesn’t say much about their chemical biological warfare research but if you look at the careers of some of the famous biologists you see that they’re you can’t explain their achievements other than that they were being pushed by the Pentagon to get the 34:15 information that they needed for German chemical warfare so just to put a political context then on Elwood Jensen’s work and relate that to science you’re saying that the fact that he was able to shift the damage that estrogen does to the genetic causes that sort of remove the liability of government pollution and industry pollution away from them to basically random genetic problems yeah the until just I guess about 25 years ago biologists thought about estrogen working on the estrogen receptor as simply activating femaleness in genetic females and that therefore it would act only on a uterus or a female breast or the female pituitary as if a man didn’t share 35:18 practically all enzymes and genes with women yeah it was just just an extreme case of genetic cleaning up of the dangerous possibilities in the actual reality of how things work yeah estrogen has been known for about 30 or 40 years to act on every kind of tissue you can find the estrogen receptor everywhere but even without the estrogen receptor you can demonstrate that it works on any kind of tissue and some of the estrogenic compounds attached to the so-called estrogen receptor but some have estrogenic effects without touching the estrogen receptor so really they should have a new name it’s the sometime estrogen receptor activator system but it isn’t really the crucial 36:26 thing because you can get estrogenic effects from radiation or cyanide or suffocation or various stresses and infections and so on they’ll all bring on estrus and swelling of cells and activation of the uterus and so on inflammation and yeah and the overlap of stress and radiation and industrial smoke and so on with estrogen that’s one of the things that has been carefully avoided and the receptor idea is crucial in covering that up yeah it sounds like what he came up with was a very sort of smoke and mirrors cartoon for selling a concept of how everything works in such a way that it fit in with the popular idea of the gene being how life is directed and people may be wondering 37:30 why we’re talking about estrogen when this is a show about progesterone and well estrogen in the physiological situation activates the production of progesterone and then progesterone knocks down the production of estrogen so it’s it’s a matter of an occasional stimulus from stress or estrogen which turns on a system that then definitively gets rid of estrogen and leaves things operating for the rest of the month and it’s only the exaggerated prolonged effect of estrogen that becomes a danger and progesterone is is the basic thing for getting rid of estrogen and if you look at the enzymes involved progesterone inactivates the aromatase enzyme that produces estrogen 38:35 from the androgen and it activates the two types of detoxifying enzymes the glucuronide transferase and the sulfur transferase the attach sulfuric acid to make it water soluble and it estrogen opposes those and progesterone inactivates the estrogen activated enzymes that remove the detoxified sulfate and glucuronide so it’s just an amazingly comprehensive system that progesterone does and only real progesterone does that so systematically it it knocks out the production and maintenance and activation of estrogen and it even destroys 39:37 the so-called estrogen receptor protein and so at the action and the production and and all of the intermediate steps progesterone systematically destroys the estrogen system and that’s one of the reasons that progesterone is so universally important but it’s the the opposite side of why estrogen is so universally dangerous. Progesterone even protects against radiation as part of that same system because radiation imitates estrogen and the cancers produced by either radiation or estrogen these are equally protected against by progesterone so it’s a comprehensive protective substance 40:38 against the full range of biological threats. And Elwood Jensen the inventor the estrogen receptor that concept and he goes on to talk about his work it was apparent to him that very small amounts of estrogen caused cancer and that was his challenge is to figure out why that was and he went on to try to discover other chemicals that opposed estrogen and he came up with tamoxifen I think everybody knows that has a lot of fat side effects. A man named Dan Lednitzer gives a more insider view of where tamoxifen came from and the people who were working on the the fact that estrogen is likely polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons in causing not only cancer but inflammation and and fibrosis they 41:42 were looking for anti-inflammatory things because the polycyclic hydrocarbons and estrogen create inflammation and looking for anti-inflammatory things they accidentally found that tamoxifen was anti estrogen as well and out of that line of research according to Dan Lednitzer even Celebrex the what do you call them the cox two inhibiting enzymes even these derived from that line of research that was thinking about a more basic view of what estrogen does. The receptor wasn’t involved at all with that kind of thinking. Okay well maybe I could be misquoting Elwood Jensen but it sounded like he was involved in 42:46 something to do with tamoxifen and but the thing I didn’t understand was it’s been known for a long time that progesterone does oppose estrogen and it does it so completely as you pointed out and so why were they even bothering to look for something else that’s what puzzled me. I think you have to imagine the mentality of like the person he said suggested the looking for how the estrogen affects the tissues was Charles Huggins. I think he found the lab that Jensen was working in and according to Jensen he gave him the idea but I think you have to see what flakes they were even though it was 43:48 the University of Chicago they were just totally unaware of the world of biochemistry as related to cancer. I don’t really know how it was possible you’d have to have a detailed biography of what courses they were teaching and so on but Huggins is a guy that theorized that since you know he read a textbook in which they made the rooster grow its comb by giving a testosterone and the classical things and so they said since testosterone makes a man develop a prostate gland and estrogen makes women develop breasts if you want to stop the growth of cancer in the breast you will either remove estrogen 44:53 or give testosterone that was his first suggestion I think and for the prostate you would either castrate the man or give the man estrogen or both because his simple idea was that the female and male were opposite and so if you give the opposite hormone you’ll antagonize the growth promoting effect of their hormone basically a completely idiotic idea at the time he proposed it but no one was there to tell him so that immediately started doctors all over the country castrating men by the millions and for 45-50 years they were giving men estrogen with or without castration to treat prostate cancer all on that very ignorant early 20th century idea of opposition of the hormones I had no 45:59 idea that that went on the castration yeah and Huggins was the one who besides proposing castrating men to cure prostate cancer and giving them estrogen he first proposed removing the ovaries to stop the estrogenic stimulation and then since some of them didn’t recover from that he took out their adrenal glands as another source of estrogen and that was practiced up right through the 60s I think until about 1970 and at one point Huggins even proposed treating breast cancer with estrogen just didn’t make any sense but he had sort of a Frankenstein mentality let’s tinker with things and maybe we’ll 47:02 come up with something and he saw everything in just black and white yeah and that’s the mentality that Jensen was working with and he you know I think it involved basically either incredibly bad science or deliberate fraud for him to say that estrogen absolutely wasn’t being metabolized in the tissues word where it was having an effect and that was that was his proof of the that it acted only through the receptor well that’s reminds me of H. L. Menkins saying that for for every complex problem there’s a simple simple concise answer that’s absolutely wrong yeah and perhaps we only have about 10 minutes left I believe it would be good for people to hear about how progesterone does work in combating cancer I don’t think we’ve actually talked 48:08 too much about that mostly we’ve talked about its anti-inflammatory effects but and maybe you could cite some of the uses it’s actually had with success well Alexander Lipschitz was the person who did the most comprehensive work showing that where estrogen causes fibrosis fibroids first and eventually cancer it acts first on the uterus then on the breasts then on the lungs kidneys brain and it’s just a matter of where estrogen concentrates that it tends to cause fibromas and cancers and in every one of those situations progesterone is protective and now it’s known that it has this about I think nine different mechanisms by which it eliminates the estrogen problem so the cause and the 49:11 effect outcome was defined by 1950 by Alexander Lipschitz and and then the more detailed stuff is still being developed an Italian has done some very good work looking at the range of things progesterone does defensively someone named Mendelssohn has done a lot of work on the protected effects of progesterone against estrogen but the the full reason of why progesterone is is protective against cancer you have to look at the the whole spectrum of what estrogen is doing the first thing estrogen does is cause the cell to take up water and taking up water stimulates cell division and fat production and a lot of other enzyme activities these effects happen within minutes of the time of estrogen 50:18 exposure and so anyone looking at at simple tissue biological experiments way back 80 years as soon as they had a concentrated estrogen like material they could see that it instantaneously was causing the tissue to take up water and begin producing fats and other substances and divide so it takes at least several hours for genes to get activated and cause cellular changes so obviously the the receptor wasn’t involved in those instantaneous effects of estrogen and those are exactly what the essence of the cancer problem is if you start an inflammation that causes cells to keep taking up water in that stressed 51:18 condition of activating cell chemistry they’re using energy faster and the stimulation of cell division is is tending to use up the supply of oxygen and sugar in my thesis research one of the things I did was show that adding estrogen to a system such as uterus lowers the oxygen tension it just sucks the oxygen out of the system and so it kills the embryo that’s trying to implant if there’s a little too much estrogen or not enough progesterone so that stimulation creates an oxygen deficiency and as far as sugar is available the sugar will be glycolized to produce emergency energy in the absence of enough oxygen to meet the stimulation the glycolysis produces lactic acid the 52:26 production of lactic acid leaving the cell raises the pH inside the cell and that increased pH keeps the swelling going on activates cell division and expensive energy so it needs something from the outside to stop the production of lactic acid and deliver oxygen and so on progesterone is one of the essential things for stopping that process but once it starts under the influence of estrogen you get the lactic acid production which creates the vicious cycle of cell activation and the lactic acid acts as a it increases the supply of blood and spreads growth of blood vessels into the environment so it activates everything that you need to produce a tumor and all it’s needed is the absence of an anti-inflammatory energy restoring substance such as 53:32 aspirin or progesterone to stop this process if you don’t have those available of the lactic acid stimulates surrounding cells to change their physiology in ways that you have a progressive increase of the malignancy behavior of the cells in the simplest situation an injury causes the lactic acid to be produced which activates the energy changes and growth to heal the wound but at a certain point the system should come in with the anti-inflammatory substances such as progesterone to finish off the healing and in the absence the healing attempt at healing simply goes on and creates the swelling and oxygen deficient situation and if you grow cells in a culture dish and deprive 54:37 them of oxygen just by having them in a dish without good circulation they will eventually mutate and form other types of cell that cause a derangement and alteration of the tissue type so all of the steps of cancerization can be seen structurally and metabolically in terms of wound healing but can’t be brought to completion oh yeah that’s that’s good I like that and and I think Harry Rubin you’ve pointed out has basically proven that it’s that cancer is not from a gene gone bad but rather there the tissue itself has developed an unhealthy state it could you we have a couple minutes if you could maybe cover that briefly he is just um honestly summarize the real cancer research showing that the 55:38 deranged metabolism and structure is what causes the chromosomal damage so the instead of genes causing the tumor the tumor causes the genetic defects which is the opposite of what we hear basically every day in our popular culture when people talk about cancers yeah and when an oncologist or pathologist says your tissue shows abnormal cell division and the wrong number of chromosomes and such if you they said that means we have to cut it out and irradiate you and so on but if you look at the fate of those deranged cells they’re going to live maybe to the next attempt to divide then they don’t have the right number of chromosomes and the the haves will die so they’re very short-lived once they get to that deranged state but the death of the cell contributes to the inflammation of the area and so stopping the inflammation 56:42 and energy deficit is always the the solution to the problem when it’s now recognized by some oncologists that the reason and malignant cancer reforms after they’ve irradiated the area or cut out the cancer or both the reason it reforms is that stem cells are called into the inflamed area that has been treated and even if you’re irradiate a healthy area it will call stem cells in the try to repair the wound and if the radiation deranged the fibrous material in that area you’ll produce a cancer from the irradiation so whenever you enter a tissue by removing a tumor you’re just guaranteeing that the body will try to repair the wound by sending in new cells which then turn into cancer 57:43 cells if the area is still sick yeah so the way to actually heal or to stay healthy is to make sure that your cellular environment is a healthy one yeah so for anti-inflammatory substances that people can use that progesterone is one of them and aspirin is another and antihistamines going way back 50 years people were seeing that antihistamines would occasionally cure cancer but that just didn’t catch on in the profession aspirin 10 or 15 years ago when I would mention it to someone with cancer they would think I was you know like the doctor saying take an aspirin and call me later call me from the next life but you’re saying that progesterone and aspirin are actually viable cancer treatments yeah and some of the antihistamines are definitely protective all right well if people want to read more about this they can find 58:45 out lots of Ray Pete’s ideas at raypeat.com that’s r-a-y-p-e-a-t dot com where I think Ray you said you had 70 articles up there or so and yeah I’ll be putting about a dozen more up in a couple weeks I think that’s great it’s a beautiful website by the way I love the sombrero and the ice cream and we have been talking to dr. Raymond Pete who’s has a PhD in biology from the University of Oregon and with speciality in physiology and also done extensive research and endocrinology and science history and as always it’s been a real pleasure to talk to you Ray thanks so much for coming on okay okay thank you that wraps it up for politics and science this week please tune in again next week for another edition of politics and science podcast can be found at radioforall.net