Rheumatoid Arthritis: Arthopathy & Alternative Treatments

00:00 Good evening and welcome once again to this month’s Ask Your Herb Doctor. My name’s Andrew Murray. My name’s Sarah Johanneson Murray. For those of you who perhaps have never listened to our shows which run every third Friday of the month from 7 to 8 p.m. we’re both licensed medical herbalists who trained in England and graduated there with a degree in herbal medicine. We run a clinic in Garberville where we consult with clients about a wide range of conditions and recommend herbs, supplements and nutritional counseling. So you’re listening to Ask Your Herb Doctor on KMEG Garberville, 91.1 f.m. and from 7.30 until the end of the show at 8 o’clock. You’re invited to call in with any questions either related or unrelated to this month’s subject of rheumatism in the broadest sense. It’s rheumatoid arthritis and the other arthropathies that I think will be related. And an alternative treatment to rheumatoid arthritis. We’re very welcome to have Dr. Peaks expertise on the show and of course as always a very counterculture viewpoint but very positively 01:04 associated counterculture. It’s a very alternative scientific viewpoint not mainstream and not even naturopathic. There’s a lot of information that he comes out with very much based and rooted in firm science. Probably the science at some of which has been largely ignored and shelved in favor of new drug treatments because we all know that new drug treatments are hugely profitable and not always beneficial. So we’ll be introducing Dr. Peaks here very shortly. Just incidentally for people listening to the show if they want to look at Dr. Raymond Peaks articles he has a pretty extensive list of articles covering many different conditions that people suffer with and the articles are fully referenced scientific articles and they can lead you down a trail that will open your eyes and illuminate for you what it is that he has uncovered continued the research that’s been done from people 02:11 back in the 50s and 60s and even before and brought it into a mainstream 21st century appreciation of what we now can detect with our improved skills etc. in measuring things but anyway so his website repeat.com is fully referenced articles and he doesn’t sell them they’re all available there for people to look at print out share etc. We do encourage a lot of free material and free sharing it’s not about making money and making a profit it’s about sharing this wisdom with other people so the other thing that people might want to make a note of is that on our website we have a website western botanical medicine dot com all of the audio archives are on the website so people please feel free to download those share and distribute them as well I forgot to mention that some time ago we have a comprehensive list of shows from 2009 through 2016. There’s one from 2008 there too I think. Yeah there’s a couple there. 03:16 Okay so we can be reached whole free 1-888 WBM Herb for consultations or further information Monday through Friday as I’m going to say after the show but we won’t be here so Monday through Friday 9-5. Okay so this month’s discussion is going to be on alternative approaches to the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis it’s an extremely crippling and debilitating condition affects I think the last count was something like 30 million people in the US and obviously people globally it’s not just confined to the US. So to coin this loose term arthritis we first need to differentiate rheumatoid from osteoarthritis. Osteoarthritis implies a type of joint disease that results from breakdown of joint cartilage and underlying bone. Typical visual clues in the skeleton of the hand the knuckle joints can display masses that they 04:18 called Bouchard’s nodes and the fingertips have swellings referred to as Hebedon’s nodes so this is what we were taught when we were studying herbal medicine these were very diagnostic indicators and you can see them when people lay their hands on the table these big swellings that are very typical of osteoarthritis. The information is typically not red or hot and the underlying cartilage is lost with the bone underneath affected from the wear and tear and typically only the joints are affected. Now with rheumatoid it’s a long-lasting autoimmune disorder that primarily affects the joints resulting in warm swollen painful joints. Pain and stiffness often worse following rest and commonly the wrist and hands are involved with the same joints typically involved on both sides of the body. There can be systemic involvement which is some of the worst presentations of this type of disease from the autoimmune condition which can affect red blood cell count decreasing it, pleurisy and inflammation of the pleura in the lungs and pericarditis the same 05:21 sac membrane that the heart has around it. The information of that is not also uncommon now fever and low energy may be present as well so it’s multi-systemic the lungs the kidneys the heart and blood vessels can all be affected. So you can look at osteoarthritis is just a wear and tear breakdown of the joint with years of use and rheumatoid is an autoimmune condition where the body’s attacking itself. Yeah so it’s three times there’s a couple of factors here that seem to differentiate it or single single out the targets for it three times more common in smokers than non smokers I think that’s particularly significant especially in men and a vitamin D deficiency is more common in people with rheumatoid arthritis and in the general population. So from 7.30 until the end of the show we’re opening up lines of people who want to call in with questions to ask Dr. Pete his approach to what he’ll be explaining is 06:21 not particularly well treated with modern methods like methotrexate for example a very toxic compound very harmful to the liver I think also gold sorts of gold have been mentioned as treatments for it but anyway let’s introduce Dr. Pete. Dr. Pete are you with us? Yes. Thank you so much for joining us I appreciate your time. As always folks just recognize that we don’t pay Dr. Pete and he does this very freely so I do also I do very much appreciate your time giving what you do. So Dr. Pete in terms of what you are uncovering I know it’s I know it’s linked to previous papers that you’ve written on cancer and we’ve mentioned this failed war on cancer and also this the same war on rheumatism or rheumatoid arthritis is also kind of lost already it’s very rarely yields anything beneficial and doesn’t seem to be really providing too much for patients in fact probably making people I would like to say worse in some ways 07:26 through the modalities of treatment that are being used because they’re not very holistic and they’re quite destructive so how do you how do you first see rheumatoid arthritis as a systemic condition and how do you see it how do you see it being produced and then any other viewpoints that you have around it. First of all I don’t make a clear distinction between any kind of arthritis or even between heart failure, atherosclerosis, various degenerative diseases and any of the forms of arthritis. I think there the interesting thing is to explain how a few basic metabolic problems have these very different looking expressions and the really interesting research over the 08:33 last 30 years or so has been in showing how inflammation relates to metabolism and what the factors are that can increase inflammation or reduce our ability to resolve it get over inflammation and in the case of rheumatoid arthritis many years ago I knew two women who were completely disabled with huge swollen knee joints and hands that they couldn’t use and the I was interested in the fact that the condition developed when they started taking estrogen. One was only in her 30s and her doctor when she developed the 09:34 arthritis I think he told her that she needed to increase the dose of estrogen because of the very deep belief that estrogen is protective against almost everything and I spent several hours of her period of two or three weeks going over some of the research with her and then she would have to reach, I think we talked she would go back to her doctor and the doctor would say she had to increase the estrogen but finally she was getting worse and she decided just to stop it. The other one had not taken so long to reconsider and had recovered within a week or two of stopping it and this one had the same experience. Total relief, clearing of the swellings and that that got me interested in why they 10:38 recovered so fast when they simply stopped estrogen and so I kept that in mind and the next person I saw with rheumatoid arthritis was a man about 50, 48 years old who every afternoon his knee would just suddenly swell up hugely and during the night it would get better but he was increasingly disabled hardly unable to keep working at his bent fixing televisions but remembering the way the women recovered from when they stopped estrogen I thought he might have the same imbalance and got him a bottle of 500 milligrams of injectable progesterone which he covered his leg with all in one application and about two hours later the inflammation was down and the next day it didn’t return and I 11:45 saw him I think was 40 years later and he was just starting to get knee inflammation again never had to return in all of those years so I was convinced that estrogen had a central role that progesterone could be more curative apparently then cortisol the glucocorticoids are the main popular treatment but people usually end up using those for years and one of the main side effects of the glucocorticoids is loss of bone density and rheumatoid arthritis which tends to involve overgrowth of the bone around the joint shades over eventually into breaking of the bones from osteoporosis 12:48 and I started reading about the osteoarthritis and some of the studies that were published only in books not in the medical journals made a clear association between estrogen and osteoarthritis even though the medical journals are very consistent in saying osteoarthritis with its loss of bone cartilage is caused by estrogen deficiency I tended to believe that the research published in books somehow had been excluded from the journals and so I looking at the research on what activates the osteoclasts that cause bone 13:50 breakdown in osteoarthritis endotoxin is a major activator of the osteoclast mm-hmm and so that would have a role to play in both osteoarthritis as well as osteoporosis oh yeah and in all of the degenerative diseases and several things follow once you start having endotoxin absorbed in your system then you begin overproducing nitric oxide and prostaglandins for example and doctor can you please recap just for our listeners where endotoxin mostly comes from it’s produced by bacteria and it’s a combination of fatty acids and 14:52 carbohydrate lipophiley saccharide chemical name and the main sources from the intestinal tract yeah the intestinal bacteria are always producing it and we absorb a little bit of it all the time and it acts as sort of a stimulant to the immune system is and other cells are being constantly irritated by it so it in everyday life it doesn’t have a harmful effect and this is and this is why you’re a proponent of the raw carrots because they help to protect against some of that absorption of endotoxin yeah the bactericidal effect of the carrot suppresses the growth of the bacteria and then fiber absorbs and and stimulates the excretion so even in a healthy even in a healthy person that has a healthy digestive tract this lipophiley saccharide is still going to 15:56 be produced by commensal in our own gut bacteria that we need or yeah and there’s always a little bit of it getting into the liver and and probably a little always seeping into the general bloodstream but in a very small amount it doesn’t have those serious degenerative effects but when you when you let your liver function slow down it massively gets past the liver barriers and then it starts poisoning all of your your systems increasing nitric oxide and drastically lowering the oxygen metabolism and this is where endotoxin and estrogen come together they both interfere with the metabolic use of oxygen and so that turns on glycolysis turning sugar into lactic acid the 17:03 lactic acid shifts everything throughout the more irritated tissue or organ is or organ is the you know the more reduced it is the more electron excess it has and this shifts everything coherently through that tissue and organ and eventually through the whole organ is this is the excitotoxic stage yeah where where these electrons need to be quenched or need to be taken up by electron acceptors yeah the concept of reductive stress is now pretty well established but 50 years ago everyone was thinking about oxidative stress but really the degenerative processes are exactly the opposite not enough oxygen 18:03 too much reduction and so estrogen and endotoxin do many things that interfere with the use of oxygen and shift us over to the glycolytic lactic acid producing condition in which we since we can’t oxidize glucose then we are forced to oxidize fats and that’s very inefficient and that leads to lipid proxidation and the increased production of prostaglandins right which are pain mediators for those people listening they the mediators of pain yeah if we’re if our bodies are well loaded with polyunsaturated fats which we don’t want yeah then that tends to increase steadily with aging and so as a person 19:04 increases their stores of polyunsaturated fats every little stress becomes more reductive and more inflammatory so the prostaglandins act increasingly to amplify any little stress let me let me just give out some details here and we’ll carry on with that your your description here for those people listening from 7 30 to 8 o’clock the lines will be open for those people living in the area there’s an 8 7 0 7 numbers 9 2 3 3 9 1 1 well there’s a toll free number 1 let me see here 8 8 8 no yeah 1 800 KMUD rad so that’s 800 5 6 8 3 7 2 3 okay those people that listening on the web also can contact the studio very interestingly had people from Scandinavia from Europe from the East Coast that’s always fun I think we even have one from South America didn’t 20:08 South America yeah okay well so dr. P can carry on in terms of the way you understand rheumatoid arthritis in terms of the processes as you’ve already mentioned things like estrogen obviously in increasing inflammation endotoxin absorption from the gut because of either poor gut bacterial habits either you know constipation I’m sure is definitely an exacerbating factor for increasing lipopolysaccharide reabsorption as is diets are deficient in non digestible fibers I know you mentioned lots of things like the carrots and bamboo shoots as indigestible fibers that actually work to remove excess estrogen from the bowel keep the bowel mobile so that the chances of reabsorption are minimized so how else do you see the energetic aspect of rheumatoid arthritis and how it manifests in such a wide range of 21:09 systemic conditions most many of which are life-threatening there are two main directions other than these local processes from the intestine to whatever organ that is that’s failing that ends up with the prostaglandin amplified inflammation but meanwhile the thyroid pituitary system are being affected by the processes of the intestine and the organ itself which is wasting energy the the organ part of how sand inflamed knee affects the thyroid is by leaking substance a weak cell leaks its various components proteins in particular leak out and when a cell is under stress the so-called stress proteins which 22:16 include heat shock proteins okay and the glucose regulated proteins these are these are like signals then these are stress signals they act as a stress signal to the body yeah the so-called heat shock protein is activated by too much exercise or too little oxygen and glucose anything that deenergizes or especially heat will stimulate the cell while that’s wasting its energy so these glucose deficiency specifically will bring up the glucose regulated stress proteins and all of these are intrinsic stabilizing factors they’re defensive reactions that sort of hold the cell together acting as chaperones but they 23:19 leak out because of the cells structure being loosened by the the inflammation and take up of too much water and these things leak out and become immunogenic right in their own right yeah that’s where the even before there are any signs that all of swollen joints people can detect the rheumatoid factor at the antibody right that’s that’s a good point to bring up I think I read that 70%!I(MISSING) think of rheumatoid sufferers have it 30%!d(MISSING)on’t and there is some people that have rheumatoid factor in the absence of rheumatoid arthritis but it’s a co-factor in other inflammatory processes out inflammatory diseases yeah yeah so I see it as as a sign of stress that isn’t being handled right that can eventually go in the direction of visibly inflamed and 24:23 stiffened joints and so on so what you were getting to is I think is that the the rheumatoid factor and the other markers of inflammation are circulating in the blood in there either poisoning the pituitary the anterior pituitary or was it the thyroid gland directly the the thyroid is responding to the same stress signals that the local connective tissue is responding to so the nitric oxide for example goes up in the whole organism and this shifts the the brain and the pituitary to increase the thyroid stimulating hormone while blocking the ability of the thyroid gland to produce the hormone so your your functional hormone goes down while the TSH rises and even within the normal range of TSH which currently is something like 0.4 to 5.0 I think even 25:33 though that supposedly the American Association of Endocrinologists lowered it to 0.3 to 3.3 I think yeah but but even within that normal range the upper part of the range is now known to be associated with an increased risk of death from cancer and heart disease and other things so the I think the best evidence is that you want to keep your TSH low because it’s a factor that promotes all types of inflammation especially the rheumatoid swelling loss of energy tumor necrosis factor interleukins 1 and 6 in particular and so on so TSH is a major responder to the stress signals which come from the intestine and the degenerating joints for example and the antibodies that have 26:38 been defined as thyroid specific antibodies turn out to be joint specific antibodies as well well so things like the TPO the thyroid proxies and the thyroid globulin yeah the thyroid globulin yeah I think the thyroid globulin specific enzyme is also specific for joint tissue and probably they’ll turn out to have even more over overlaps than that if people begin looking for them like with heart disease and yeah and the known atherosclerosis associated with rheumatoid arthritis actually doesn’t seem to involve attack on the blood vessels by antibodies but it’s simply something going wrong in the whole organism that causes more or less simultaneous degeneration of the blood 27:42 vessels and the joints it isn’t a specific autoimmune process even though it’s the whole organism can be said to be in an autoimmune state but the when people were studying viral emcephalitis for example they found that an antibody in autoimmune process seemed to be involved so they engineered the animals so that they could prevent the autoimmune antibody production and they found that the animals died quicker when they lacked the autoimmune process so that supports the Amy Cunliffe polymatting or approach to what the immune system is it’s really doing. Amy Cunliffe’s idea is that the primary function of what is called the immune system is a maintenance of order of the 28:45 body and the tissues and when something goes wrong it can be an organism causing damage to the tissues in that case the organism is destroyed and creates a specific immunity to that type of organism but that’s really in his view a side effect of the basic cleanup process and there are many theories of virus or bacteria of various types causing rheumatoid arthritis and the other inflammatory diseases but I don’t think you need those when you when you have an energetically precarious tissue condition it just takes any little cause to tip it over the edge and to an uncontrolled degeneration and the 29:48 inflammation. I think what comes over time and time again I think that most people really kind of lose sight of is that if you want to put out that glib term you know we’re all connected as human beings on a planet the same interconnectedness exists in our body where nothing nothing is done in isolation and so if you mention an organ or a tissue in any part of the body being affected obviously the blood is passing through that organ or through that tissue and carried to the rest of the body whether it’s through the vasculature or through the lymphatics anything that is in any kind of degenerate state in one small location the effects of that are far reaching and like you said when things like the thyroid stimulating hormone is picked up again and is in circulation even in relatively low amounts none of it is actually good it’s pretty much an inflammatory marker in itself and so 30:54 the same thing with gut related dysbiosis or you know whether it’s a local trauma to one small area in the body it’s all has a potential to seed the whole body with these signals these markers these shock proteins these defensive cries for immune cells to come in and start unloading various chemicals and in a kind of defensive mechanism to try and restore repair but is very important to get the concept of healthy eating and healthy living is not just you know one day and then not the next or you know it’s got to be a lifestyle change and so what I’m re reaffirms or reaffirms everything that you’re saying and have been saying for years and years now that we’ve been interviewing you for quite a few years I sometimes catch myself thinking well you know what it’s a lot of it is thyroid and progesterone and all these 31:55 other anti-inflammatories and and and but they are so key they’re so key to maintaining structural integrity energetic resilience and these people that you’ve mentioned Jamie come kind of live matzinger and then Meshnikov and all the other you know kind of brilliant-minded people that you’ve mentioned in the past all have this very holistic picture and then we talk about holism as a very glib term and kind of think about you know I don’t know what I want to say what it is just in case it get offends anybody because they do it but the holistic approach is very much a way of life and these things that you’ve mentioned whether it’s progesterone whether it’s thyroid whether it’s vitamin D these are all things that we should have adequate quantities of but our diets been radically degraded over the years environment everything so it’s a constant plastics our own bodies are a constant melee you know it’s just a constant war going on to try and maintain homeostasis and 32:56 energy it doesn’t always work and there are plenty of things that can be introduced into someone’s lifestyle on a daily basis that will certainly mitigate these effects it’s 735 and I just want to let people know that the phones are open local number is 923-2511 and 923-3911 beg your pardon and the 800 numbers 1-800 KMUD rad so what we’re taking calls until 8 o’clock I think I see the lights flashing but so yeah dr. B I wanted to have you go over a little bit more since it seems to be over the intestinal tract and the effect we can have on that in reducing these inflammatory meteors that seem to be starting up the whole inflammation well let’s before before we do that hold up thoughts so let’s take this caller because they’ve been waiting here so caller you’re on the airway from what’s your question hi I’m from the San Francisco Bay area hi what’s your question hi I listened to your July 2013 recording on your website Western Botanical Medicine’s radio archive page 34:00 okay and Dr. Pete you mentioned that it’s beneficial on that recording for women to have their monthly menstrual cycles throughout their entire life which I was really surprised about so I have two questions regarding that point one why is lifelong fertility beneficial for women and two what do women need to do to achieve that the one of the things about the the cycle and degenerative diseases that people have noticed is that rheumatoid arthritis is frequently completely resolved during a pregnancy and then returns afterwards and I think it’s the huge production of progesterone that the sender takes over during pregnancy and in both animals and humans the number of pregnancies during the lifetime correlates very well with longevity the more babies produced the 35:07 longer the mother lives and the better the health is and that if you look at the age of puberty the mortality rate decreases from infancy when the organism is very dependent on conditions as it grows and becomes more autonomous at around the age of 12 the likelihood of dying is very very low then from puberty on there’s a steady increase in the risk of of dying from any cause and I think that’s the the same estrogen risk factor that when the organism is detecting something in the environment that is threatening it turns on the reproductive 36:09 apparatus and when that apparatus is working efficiently it produces these huge amounts of progesterone that have a life protecting anti-inflammatory life extending effect but if the estrogen isn’t adequately compensated because of low thyroid or toxins anything interfering with progesterone then the the estrogen cyclically produces damage to the organism and accelerates the aging process so the reason that a cycle is valuable to maintain is that what shuts it off is the failure to produce enough progesterone so even though the actual production of estrogen decreases somewhat at menopause the effective 37:10 estrogen making the inflammatory factors that lead to degeneration those become persistent in the absence of the cyclic production of progesterone so it would be better if you could delay puberty to the age of 70 or 80 but in the absence of that ability then having the regular fairly generous production of progesterone is what makes it valuable to keep cycling as long as you can. Wow that’s fascinating thank you so much and thank you for all your work Dr. Beat. Okay thank you for your call Caller. Okay so the number here if you’re in the area is 9233 9-1-1 the area code 707 if you’re on the web or you’re outside toll-free number is 1-800-KM-UD-RAD-RED so we’re taking calls until eight o’clock so Dr. P getting back to rheumatoid arthritis and the 38:12 manifestations I came I came upon a fairly old gosh on encyclopedia if you like but it was quite quite an old text and they mentioned quite a few different types of arthritis and some of which I didn’t I didn’t recognize but obviously I think some of these older documents would list things that we’ve kind of tend to forget now one one was an arthritis from mumps and I don’t even know if people know what mumps are anymore because I mean I had them when I was a child but mumps are not that common these days and then arthritis of leprosy so there were infective arthritis is either gone a cockle or tuberculosis tuberculosis arthritis so that these types of arthritis could also be bacterial in origin now whether or not any of the compounds that I kind of made a note of here whether they are herbal or isolated chemical compounds 39:13 that have been used in the treatment of arthritis are directly due to the antimicrobial effect and probably the antimicrobial effect in the gut is unknown but berberus and berberine containing herbs was certainly implicated in reducing bacterial load and this bacterial antibacterial action I would think probably has a definitive action on endotoxin production and or general gut health so it’s like organ great barberry bark golden seal root and you mentioned a couple copters Chinese herbs yeah do you what do you have much experience with berberine or knowing it’s antimicrobial activity I’m known none at all I’ve eaten the the Oregon grapes as jelly but the extent of my experience with berberine okay because I know they mentioned copters which is a 40:16 Chinese medicinal golden thread I’m pretty sure it’s called and that’s actually an adulterant of gold and seal because it’s a lot cheaper but apparently it’s a very bright yellow very much like golden seal root but it contains a pretty high concentration of berberine that’s definitely was indicated here for rheumatoid and I think from an antibacterial point of view I thought I read in one of those articles that dr. Pete sent the abstracts that berberus actually blocked nitric oxide yeah that would be my first thought about how it’s working with it because infections of any sort are gonna increase nitric oxide and impair oxidative energy production which goes back to what I was trying to say earlier about the intestines and eating foods that feed the bacteria that then make the endotoxin that then poisons the system and creates that vicious circle of inflammation the berberus the berberine containing herbs are very antibacterial and then they’re also stopping that 41:17 nitric oxide production if they’re antibacterial and stopping the bacteria okay well we got a couple of callers here so let’s take the first caller caller you’re on the airway from well yeah you’re on the airway from and what’s your question I’m calling from a little farther north than your okay I had some questions about vitamin D okay why are the stores selling vitamin D3 not vitamin D2 I had a doctor prescribe me vitamin D2 and and then what are the effects of vitamin D on weight gain and weight loss and and what are the issues having to do with toxicity maybe taking too much vitamin D right okay at dogs pee the difference between the vitamin D3 and D2 did you you said you were prescribed D2 yeah the doctor told me he thought I was low and then I was tested and I was low and he told me take 5,000 units of vitamin D3 a day oh you 42:20 said these and that’s on the shelf and then he prescribed me 50,000 units once a week of vitamin D2 and and then I know it seemed like six weeks or two months later I noticed a change in my my my hunger patterns and the last couple times when the doctor I’d lost weight and I haven’t really checked on it since to see if things are happening like that but when it seems something like my hunger returned a little bit more back the way it was but it occurred to me that I could see that vitamin D might you know it says you get more in the summer and it might fit in with weight gains and weight losses that would be normal to people in northern and southern hemispheres yeah and but when I go to sort of see if you could just buy vitamin T on on the shelf it’s not there vitamin D2 is not right here and I mean if it is gonna help me lose weight you 43:23 know I’d like to take you know lots of it it’s really nice not to be like starving hungry all the time sure dr. Pete from an energetic point of view how would you would you describe the difference between D2 and D3 no I don’t know of any real evidence but there were some publications around 1970 and arguing that D2 was contributing to atherosclerosis and the calcification of blood vessels and up until that time milk had been reinforced with vitamin D2 and suddenly every milk producer in the country around that time had just quietly shifted to D3 yeah and that was really just a few papers with with superficial largely opinions rather than facts but it convinced most people to 44:27 stop taking the risk of of using the fungal form of vitamin D right do you think there’s an energetic in I’m sure I’m sure there is a metabolic energetic improvement of course then from D2 that might explain that from D or D3 or D2 that would explain its weight loss yeah I think it’s the parathyroid hormone which is suppressed by calcium and vitamin D both types of vitamin D will will keep the parathyroid hormone down and so calcium and vitamin D both reduce inflammation in multiple ways and the reduced inflammation goes with a more productive efficient higher rate of metabolism keeping the weight gained down stopping to reduce the production of fat from protein and sugar okay and 45:30 from a taking too much or a monitoring your levels so you don’t get too much you want to have a blood test you know every couple months until you find a stable level you don’t really want it any higher than 75 and you don’t really want any lower than 50 so 50 to 75 is a good reference range to have for your vitamin D level and you’d want to check it you wouldn’t want to just take a load of it because it can be harmful in high levels okay well what I noticed was and I’m not sure this is due to the vitamin D but not much else has happened was that I would come in the house say after doing a lot of physical labor and I could actually take a shower and take a rest and I wouldn’t have to eat like immediately and that is very noticeable not to be hungry like that all the time most probably helping your liver start sugar better I kept losing weight so that and I’m not sure what’s causing that so but thanks a lot yeah okay well okay 46:32 really a lot of publications showing that a high calcium and vitamin D intake will do almost everything good and including the avoidance of abdominal fat tending to have a leaner body and keeping especially inflammation down and it’s just important to note that listeners when you want to take vitamin D if you change your dose or start taking it it takes eight weeks to get to a plateau level before you’d want a blood test and you can do finger prick tests they’re available online okay so milk milk and vitamin D very beneficial so we have another one or two quarters let’s say the next caller on the air you’re on the air and where you from caller hello I’m from Arcada Arcada okay what’s your question my question is I’m diabetic and I read some research that said the little cells that put out the insulin don’t really die they just in your 47:35 pancreatic they just become white juveniles again and I just wanted to know if it is possible to wake them up on Dr. Pete has any advice about diabetes I believe it’s like one so dr. P a senescent pancreatic beta cells for type one diabetes yeah the beta cells are always tending to regenerate but they die quickly when you’re having diabetes and the the factored that seems to be the main thing that kills them as they are being reborn is lipid peroxidation and so getting your polyunsaturated fats down I think aspirin would be one of the protective things but glucose happens to be the thing that maintains the renewal 48:38 constant regeneration of the beta cells so keeping the the metabolism under control so that you aren’t degenerating the you know the polyunsaturated fats into lipid peroxides and prostaglandins is the thing to keep in mind and this takes a long time it takes four years to replace your fat cells completely but you could make a big change right away so replace your vegetables using polyunsaturated fat based on your advice I mean and we’ll continue to do so and appreciate the advice your research are you saying aspirin is helpful you said that yeah aspirin improves insulin sensitivity what does like the baby aspirin 81 milligram dose it would you recommend or like a regular big old aspirin one thing 49:44 to remember if you’re going to supplement any quantity of aspirin for a long time is to make sure your vitamin K is adequate taking a supplement of vitamin K is a good idea because chronic aspirin will tend to give you a bleeding syndrome deficient in K so the dose is for one aspirin one 325 milligram aspirin you’d want to be taking one milligram of vitamin K it is on Amazon the thorn research is a very pure form that’s just in a medium chain triglyceride drop form and one drop is one milligram and that would counteract the bleeding tendency you could get from taking one aspirin but doctor how much would you recommend is a good kind of dose for helping to block that lipid peroxidation well vitamin E and aspirin have overlapping effects and and so the 50:49 amount of poofa that you have stored in your tissues it is what governs the amount of those that you need okay well let’s we’ve got two more callers I think so let’s get these next callers thank you for your question call and let’s say the next one way from what’s your question I’m from you kipa okay what’s your question I have a question about t3 does it affect TSH certainly does dr. p what was the question does t3 affect TSH oh oh yeah yeah it does but the since you’d normally have a much higher level of t4 circulating in the body the pituitary has the ability to convert t4 to t3 locally as so usually t4 is what is suppressing the TSH but if you get enough 51:50 t3 into your brain and pituitary then it’s at least as effective as t4 okay we’ve got two more callers so thank you can I ask one more question oh yeah could you go ahead a reverse t3 what’s the mechanism of action how does that affect metabolism and apparently it’s partly occupying the same response site that the active t3 would and simply competing against it and even t4 can outcompete t3 if there’s too much t4 but there are local de iodinase enzymes that some of them can eliminate reverse t3 and if those are blocked by some stress substances then the local reverse t3 can accumulate so the systemic 52:57 level of t3 and reverse t3 are both important but they aren’t the absolute factor that determines how effective t3 will be that’s my taking temperatures and pulses will tell you if you’re getting enough t3 or if your body’s converting the t4 that you might be taking or producing naturally into t3 all right thank you you’re welcome okay we have two more callers let’s see if we can get through these callers with quick answers that will satisfy the next call away from what’s your question is that me yes go ahead your question hi I have two quick questions one you mentioned about endotoxin and causing a problem in the bacteria and I have been confused about whether probiotics are a good thing or a bad thing as far as that goes so that was one question and then the other question is about how much exercise is too much exercise okay well 53:58 I’ll quickly speak for Dr. Pete for the exercise one any exercise that keeps you will make you out of breath is not good for you so the gentle moderate exercise gentle weight-bearing exercise definitely what you want or if you do have those cardiac bursts then don’t let them last for too long because what you will do is go into the anaerobic respiration and produce lactic so if you’re just walking and you know your heart rate raised a little bit you know but you’re breathing fine I mean you’re not like huffing and puffing is that okay that’s I that’s ideal you don’t want to be over breathing and you don’t want to get your heart rate up too much so walking is gentle walking or just gentle weight bearing exercise so Dr. Pete what do you say about probiotics in terms of the addition to the ender back to endotoxin load pros and cons of probiotics I’m usually they’re helpful but not always yeah and it depends on the particular species and the individual probably can judge best by how how you feel when you 55:04 take it yeah like some species will cause a lot of gas in people and I think that’s harmful yeah some people really get worse when they take a certain prebiotics or probiotics so your particular reaction I think should determine that because everybody’s a commensal bacteria in their intestines are different anyways so you’re introducing another one in the interactions okay we’ve got about two minutes left and we do have one more call us so rather than not giving him a chance let’s just take this next call away from and watch hello yeah you know I heard you say that having more babies would prolong your life I didn’t hear the whole answer because I was interrupted for a few minutes but you were saying that the more babies you have the longer you tend to live up before there was birth control women got worn out having too many babies well they were there were women that had 12 and 13 14 children so they must have been doing pretty good well but not always the guy that built the Taj Mahal his wife died having her 14th child and 56:08 you know I have a friend who got pregnant at 48 with her seventh child and they told her you know she would not probably make it through the pregnancy that’s right I mean one lady I know had 10 children and almost died having a 10th I mean Dr. Pete do you have a comment on that yeah there was a study in Hungary that looked at the whole population over a span of a lifetime and they grafted the number of babies and the age at death of the mothers and it was a very smooth perfectly straight increase in longevity longevity with the number of babies up to eight when was this up to eight babies did you hear that call I heard eight babies that’s not 13 or 14 when was this study done in Hungary Dr. Pete did you hear she the caller is asking when was the study done in Hungary oh um I read it in the 1970s and I think it was probably done 57:15 around 1968 or 69 okay we better we better hold it there folks thanks for your call well as always Dr. Pete thanks for being gosh being so giving of your time and your energy and your knowledge thank you so much I’ll just give people your details okay thank you good night okay so for those people who’ve heard the show tonight maybe not heard Dr. Pete explain his scientific rationale of approaching things that we often find bad evidence for his website is www.repeat.com fully reference articles well worth a look go check it out he doesn’t charge any money for them they’re all free we can be reached toll free one 888 WBM Monday through Friday my name is Andrew Murray my name is Sarah Johannes and Murray thanks for listening and have a good night and till next November yeah see you then