Temperature Set Point & Regulation, Menopause, Night Sweats

00:00 You’re invited to call in with any questions, either related or unrelated to this month’s subject, amongst other things, of hot flashes, night sweats, and the relationship to stress, aging, PMS, and sugar metabolism. If you live in the area here, the numbers 9233911, or if you live outside the area, this whole free number is 1-800-KM-UD-RAD. We can also be reached toll free on 1-888-WBM-URB for further questions during normal business hours Monday through Friday. So as it’s becoming very, very popular, and we’re very pleased also for it to be the way it is, we’re joined by Dr. Raymond Pete, and he does have a new topic of research that he’s been working on here for the last month or so, so we’re going to be very lucky to have his take on what is, by many people, held a very common misconception about the neurotransmitters, 01:01 etc., that he’ll be talking about in a moment. So once again, we’re very pleased to have Dr. Raymond Pete on the show. Good night. Oh, good night. Excuse me. Good evening. Hi. Okay. As usual, perhaps there are people who have just tuned in tonight who’ve never heard you before. There’s always possible, and I want to make sure that people that are listening get the opportunity to hear of your technical background and your expertise. So if you wouldn’t mind. Between 1968 and 72, I studied biology at the University of Oregon specializing in physiology, especially reproductive aging and related biochemistry. Okay. So your main background is physiology and reproductive physiology. Okay. So I know that the topic that you’ve been working on recently, and I know from one of your most recent newsletters on serotonin, that is also tied in with it. The subject that I was going to ask you about this evening, especially for those female 02:06 listeners who’d be very interested to hear what you have to say about it, is the subject of hot flashes in menopause and also related night sweats that are not related to menopause. But the system of body temperature control and the set point that you mentioned of body temperature and how that can be aberrantly set and sweating can be a subsequent result of that. Perhaps would you start by describing a little bit this set point. It’s not something that I’ve ever really heard about before for body temperature and how it relates to sweating and how, you know, we’ll later on bring out how the hormone side of it is largely treatable. In mammals, the temperature is regulated by hormones and nerves, partly by causing 03:13 vasoconstriction or vasodilation in the skin and sweating. When you want to lower your temperature, you sweat and turn pink so that your skin radiates, gets the blood to the surface where it can, by convection, conduction and radiation release heat in the environment. Cold-blooded animals like lizards, when they need to increase their temperature, move into the sun or exercise running race at their temperature. But for example, to treat an infection, reptile will sit in the sun and let its temperature produce the fever that’s needed to activate the immune system. Humans do that by tightening up the blood vessels in the skin and reducing sweating, 04:22 and that when we’re producing a fever, we experience a chill, and that in the case of reptiles, they probably feel chilly when they have an infection, and so they have to move into the sunlight so they feel warm and they don’t feel comfortable until they have a temperature, have a fever. And when a person is experiencing chills, that means their temperature is rising because they’re producing goose bumps, making the hairs on their skin stand up as the skin gets pale, cutting off circulation. And inside the body, the same adrenaline system is activating energy metabolism, burning 05:30 sugar faster, or fat in some cases, producing heat faster and losing heat more slowly to raise the heat. And the opposite of that, to lower your temperature, you experience a heat surge. People very often confuse the sensation with the actual temperature, so lots of people think they’re really getting hotter when they experience a hot flush. But if you measure the temperature, the core temperature typically drops by close to one degree Fahrenheit just in the minutes surrounding a hot flush. So does that mean when somebody is experiencing an infection and their body is alternating chills with sweating, that their body is trying to raise the body temperature in order to 06:36 fight the infection and then it gets too hot and then the body is trying to lower it so they actually are getting warmer when they feel cold and colder when they feel hot? Yes. The sensation that you experience is closely related to the thermostat set point. No one knows exactly how that thermostat works in an animal, but the physical basis for it seems to be the protein water fat system in the cell. As the temperature rises, it needs to change its chemistry to maintain steadiness. To increase the set point, you stabilize this cytoplasmic system so that it becomes liquid 07:41 basically at a higher temperature. If you liquefy the structure, it has to decrease the temperature to achieve the normal amount of order, but the details of it just aren’t known, but it’s equivalent to a mechanical thermostat. How quickly do you think this is possible to achieve this set point regulation throughout the organism? When you administer estrogen to a person or an animal, their temperature within probably minutes, but usually it’s measured on an hour scale. It’s a very quick reaction when the estrogen gets into the cells so that they’re being excited by it to offset that excitation, the temperature has to decrease. 08:46 Apparently, the sensation of being exposed to estrogen is one of warmth. That very sensation is what lowers our set points of the temperature. In the menopause, when women are experiencing hot flashes, it’s really down to an increased estrogen and a deficiency of progesterone that’s causing them to feel hot, but their actual body temperature is dropping, so their set point is at a lower temperature, therefore they sweat more easily at a lower temperature. All the symptoms of menopause, including the hot sweats, set in when progesterone fails to be produced, but the estrogen levels in serum even are pretty much the same in women with and without hot flashes. 09:48 It’s the absence of the anti-estrogen progesterone and endotones that cause the symptoms of hot flashes. So why are we told by the medical community that it’s really a deficiency of estrogen and you need to take estrogen to replace this deficient hormone when, in fact, it’s a deficiency of progesterone? There are more and more people realizing that just in the last few months, two different people have published on that subject that the evidence really is clearly on the side of the progesterone deficiency, but it started back in the 30s when the drug companies wanted to sell, at first, a synthetic estrogen product. Is that DES? Yeah, that was the first one, and then they did have a synthetic estradiol that became 10:50 one of the staples. The ethanol estradiol was, I think they say, 17 times more powerful than natural estrogen and that’s an early product. And to sell those products successfully, they had to create an ideology. Progesterone was known to be the main operian hormone, and already in the 1930s they saw that estrogen was an anti-fertility abortion-producing hormone where progesterone was the real female hormone that made pregnancy possible. But just to market the product, they created this whole ideology calling estrogen the female hormone and saying that the ovaries fail, they simply run out of eggs at a certain age, 11:53 and when they run out of eggs, they don’t produce estrogen, and the failure of estrogen is the loss of femaleness. And so they said, if you replace estrogen, you can maintain pregnancy, prevent miscarriage, and prevent the loss of femal enmity with aging, but all of that was just an advertising campaign with lots of doctors fell for it. And lots of poor women suffered with deformed babies? And you mentioned it in one of your newsletters saying that the history behind DES or diethyl still best role, I think it is, when they marketed it, they marketed it for the prevention of abortions, and then it came out as a morning after contraception or the abortion pill. 12:58 Yeah, the drug companies got a husband and wife team that connected with Harvard and they lobbied the FDA to approve it for treating menopause, and so they created the legal and public relations environment based on that completely false idea that estrogen was the fertility hormone. It takes such a long time for this kind of thing to come around when research is coming out all the time to a point where people finally get it that actually it’s completely wrong. Well, they stopped that trial they were doing on hormone replacement therapy because women were having strokes and heart attacks and their bones were not becoming healthier, but now back again doctors are prescribing HRT to menopausal women. All of those events, the heart attacks, strokes, dementia, breast cancer, and so on, all of 13:59 that stuff was known on the basis not only of animal studies going back 50 years, but even in human studies they saw all of those things in very good studies, it was just that the government did such a big study that no one could easily deny it, but now they’re running campaigns these last 10 years to reverse the effects of that women’s health initiative study. Well, pharmaceutical reps are some of the best paid salesmen and women and they are convincing doctors of a very unsafe practice, unfortunately, because they’re such good salespeople. Okay, you’re listening to Ask Your Herb Doctor on KMUD-Carbo, 91.1 FM from 7.30 to the end of the show at 8 o’clock. You’re invited to call in with any questions related or unrelated to this month’s subject of night sweats, hot flashes, PMS, and aging, and in relation to such things as serotonin 15:08 and melatonin and 5-HT, it also ties in. So, Dr. Pete, the relationship then between the serotonin and temperature regulation or aberrations in temperature and the misconception again about serotonin being good for you or 5-HT or melatonin being good for you, which is completely bogus, and would you just bring out the fact that the relationship then between the night sweats and estrogen and serotonin, and then we will, well, you can, when you talk about it, you can obviously bring out those erroneous statements about melatonin and 5-HT being good for you and just let people know why they’re not good for you. Fifty years ago, a similar thing with the drug industry and government happened in relation to serotonin. The disease carcinoid, an intestinal tumor that produces serotonin, was being studied 16:15 just when serotonin was discovered to be both a brain hormone, but mostly an intestinal hormone. And the drug industry with psychoactive chemicals wanted to, for various reasons, my newsletters talk about, wanted to create the idea that serotonin was the hormone of bliss, they’ve called it, and that it was something to be raised to create well-being, but still the carcinoid study was identifying it as a stress-related hormone that caused flushing. One of the basic signs of having that intestinal disease was frequent flushing, as well as 17:17 psychiatric symptoms. And one of the effects of serotonin is to activate the stress hormones, the cortisol system, and to activate, aromatase, the enzyme that makes estrogen. But estrogen also releases and activates the production of serotonin. So it can become a vicious circle of stress, flushing, tissue breakdown under the influence of cortisol and so on. And cortisol is a backup mechanism for survival when normal healthy metabolism fails to work. Cortisol is the stress hormone that keeps you alive, but under an unhealthy metabolism. Yeah, that’s where the sugar metabolism comes in. 18:21 The estrogen’s basic effect is to shift metabolism away from sugar to burning fat as a basic defense mechanism. If you’re starving and starvation turns on flushing, among other things, if you’re starving, you don’t want to eat up your body tissues converting protein to glucose. And so under stress, you have to turn your metabolism towards oxidizing fat, but at the same time, you turn off your thyroid, which is responsible for oxidizing sugar efficiently. So this keeps you alive through times of famine? Yeah, it slows your metabolism down and makes you burn fat and spare your tissues by not 19:25 turning protein to sugar. Now, some listeners might think, oh, great, it makes me burn fat. That must be a good thing. Except that it slows your metabolism somewhat. That a little bit of fat burning doesn’t account for much weight loss at all. It actually counts for probably weight gain. And that metabolism tends to, in most species, it puts the animal in the torpor or hibernation. And when an animal is getting ready to hibernate, it tends to stock up its tissues with lots of polyunsaturated fats. And they found that they can bring on torpor or hibernation by either feeding them or injecting them with polyunsaturated fats. And if you give them sugar rather than unsaturated fats, you can keep them from going into torpor. 20:26 And so this is a survival mechanism for animals in cold climates. That they eat a lot of the polyunsaturated fat-rich foods so that they can slow their metabolism and survive a cold winter where there’s not as much food supply. But you were telling us about the flamingos in Africa. Yeah, Leslie Brown, a specialist in flamingos, wrote a book in the 1950s. And he said that no one really has any idea how long they live. But he suspected that 130 would be a good estimate. They’ve seen that the annual mortality doesn’t change with age. So a 50-year-old animal is no more likely to die than a three-year-old animal. So what’s so different in this hot climate in Africa? Well, they wade around in hot, salty water eating algae that is living at this very, 21:30 very warm water temperature. And the flamingos live basically on the blue-green algae, which at that high temperature, the algae itself couldn’t live if it made polyunsaturated fats because they would oxidize immediately. So they make saturated fats. And most of the blue-green algae that are available here are grown in cold climates. And so therefore the fats and the blue-green algae are very unsaturated and unstable. You mentioned also that that part of Africa has a high CO2 concentration. Yeah, some of their lakes that the flamingos wade in, the water fields viscous, they say, because of the high sodium carbonate concentration. The carbon dioxide bubbles out of the volcanic 22:35 rifts and makes the water both salty, alkaline, and very rich in carbon dioxide. Would you have any idea what percentage of CO2 might be present there? No. I’ve heard that the air in some regions has a very high concentration just seeping out of the volcanic rifts. It’s just an aside here, but I wonder, do you know what makes the flamingos pink? I’m sure that’s say, yeah. Yeah, that’s some kind of algae food. We know that cold water fish have to have a polyunsaturated, unsaturated essential fat in order to have their fat stay liquid at cold, cold temperatures. But you were telling us about fish in the Amazon. Yeah, they’ve analyzed the fat in Amazon fish where probably the average temperature is something like 75 or 80, maybe 85 degrees, varying with season and rainfall and so on. 23:41 But very warm water, and their fish, their fat is similar to butter for saturation, about 97%!s(MISSING)aturated. Okay, well, let’s just actually, we’ve got a couple of calluses. So you’re listening to Ask Your Herb Doctor on KMD Galboville 91.1 FM and from 7.30, which is just about now, until the end of the show at 8 o’clock, you invited a call in with questions either related or unrelated to hot flashes and night sweats. Once again, we’ve got Dr. Raymond Peat on the line and let’s set the first caller. Hello, you’re on the air? Hey, is this live right now? There you go. Yeah, you’re on the air. Yeah, that was really strange. I can’t hear anybody on my telephone. Can you hear anybody now? And I’m getting this weird delay. If you’re up in Eureka, then there is an eight-second delay. No, I’m in Albion County. I don’t know. And I do apologize when callers call. The me talking to you on the phone is very, very quiet. 24:45 So I’m actually shouting when I talk to you on the phone. I can’t hear the person that’s trying to talk with me. Okay. But I have a question for that. You were talking about something about night sweats and estrogen and whatnot. Is that correct? Yes. Okay. Now, I have a friend. He’s a male kind of guy and he has, he gets like anxiety attacks and he gets night sweats mostly right in the morning just before he wakes up. And I was just kind of curious about what would be that or how could that relate to say estrogen or testosterone or whatever. I kind of just tuned in, but I’m getting this weird delay. So it’s like, it’s delay, delay, delay. It’s like, hello. I can’t hear anybody who’s trying to talk with me. So I’m just going to get, hang up and maybe get your answer if you have one. 25:48 And I’ll listen. Okay. Thank you much. Thank you. Dr. B, did you hear that? When a man is under severe stress, which can be infection or trauma or starvation, his estrogen multiplies and becomes equivalent to a woman’s estrogen. And anytime you’re under stress and you’re likely to waste your stored glucose and have fluctuating episodes of hypoglycemia. And that triggers several things, but especially the release of cortisol, which breaks down your tissue and turns it to sugar. And so when, when your stress is very high, usually at the end of the night, your cortisol is at its highest for the day. 26:49 And when you’re stressed by anything metabolic or an infection, for example, your cortisol can go extremely high as well as the estrogen. And that brings your blood sugar up and bringing the blood sugar up lowers the adrenaline system, letting your skin produce sweat and become pink and hot. So the actual sweating and sense of heat goes with very high cortisol, which normally is the highest around dawn. So really, this gentleman is experiencing a stress during the night due to dropping blood sugar levels. And perhaps if he woke himself up, maybe around two or three and had a glass of orange juice, 27:51 maybe with a little salt dissolved in it, that might help to lower his stress and keep his blood sugar up? Yeah, lots of people do that. I’ve known fat people who had a nightmare every 30 to 60 minutes during the night. And if they would wake themselves up after less time than was enough to cause the nightmare and had a glass of orange juice or milk, they could lengthen the time between their nightmares in just three or four nights by catching it in time using an alarm clock. And in just a week or so of preventing those surges of night sweats or nightmares, you can get your liver stocked up with enough glucose that you can sleep usually through the whole night. So it’s really just a failure of glucose storage and people don’t get enough sugars. 28:58 And when we’ve spoken at length and we’ll keep on about the need for fructose fruit sugar specifically, if people consume enough fruit sugars each day, the glycogen stores can get replenished in the liver. And during the night, when typically we’re fasting, there’s enough stored sugar to enable the person to get through the night without getting into that anxiety state using adrenaline as a next worst thing to keep things going. Another thing is that when somebody is stressed under physical or mental stress, they’ll use up their sugar stores much quicker. And a lot of times when people are under stress, they don’t tend to eat properly and they actually can tend to eat less. And then that just creates a very, very vicious cycle of stress hormones, raising blood sugar by breaking down fat and that whole backup metabolism that can lead to cancer, all sorts of destructive problems. It lowers thyroid and progesterone, which are the basic energy producing protective hormones. 30:04 And in the absence of those, then you have to increase the acute emergency hormone, serotonin, estrogen, and the various inflammatory things. And in just the last five or six years, there have been several studies showing that hot flashes, menopausal hot flashes, can be prevented just with sugar. A big dose of carbohydrate at bedtime will work better than estrogen. And that’s just because it’s replenishing the liver’s store so that liver doesn’t have to rely on those stress hormones to get some sugar. Yeah. And the mechanism by which estrogen does have some effect in reducing hot flashes, it’s a very unphysiological effect. When morphine withdrawal is being used as a model of hot flashes, 31:06 they find that old animals can have such a low metabolism that they don’t experience the hot flash. They can simply be already in the hibernating state and don’t have the surges that cause the hot flashes. And estrogen lowers the metabolism and apparently it can put a person into a so close to the hibernation state that they don’t have the surges, raising their metabolism enough to produce heat to cause the flash. But another effect is that these high doses of estrogen block the sweating mechanisms. In animal studies, if you look at the actual details, they were stopping the hot flashes, but using a dose of estrogen 2000 times the physiological amount. And in some of 32:07 the studies of humans showing that estrogen can stop the sweating and flushing, they were using 30 times the physiological amount of estrogen for a young woman, but giving it to menopausal women. And that’s why so many women who take HRT tend to put on a lot of weight because they’re lowering their metabolism so much with all that high dose of estrogen. But we do have a couple callers on the line. Okay, you’re on the air. Next caller, you’re on the air. Next caller was on the air, I think. She was waiting a while. Caller, here’s your chance. If you’re up in your rica, there’s an eight second time delay, so you better hurry. Okay, well, here’s our next caller. Hey, the next caller, you’re there. Hello? Can you hear me? Okay, there we go. All right, and I’m listening on my radio, so I can hear also through that. And by the way, just for technical 33:09 purposes, I’m near Fort Bragg, just right on the Mendocino coast, and it’s a very slight delay, almost about the level of an echo from the difference between the radio and the phone. So I can hear you quite well here, just for tech purposes. Now, my question is, I believe, related to this, however, it’s probably a whole other show, but if you could just address this, and I’ll put it under the headline, be careful what kind of juicing you do, and it’s not a milkshake, it’s a milky shake. Now, this goes to the San Francisco Giants, Milky Cabrera, and the aspect of what steroids or juicing that they do, that’s what they call it, even though it’s not the juice you were talking about earlier, that these are often related to female hormones, and they actually will take female hormones to basically mask the fact that they have been taking these steroids. So the question goes kinder to the entirety of the spectrum. What does that do to their 34:10 corticosteroids? What does it do to the cortisone and the cortisol? And really, when they get better as they get older, which doesn’t make sense, as in the case of the milky shake man here, the question goes through, how much does this stress their older body and shorten their life? And I appreciate if you don’t get into a whole lot of detail on that, maybe address that entire subject in another program, but if you could touch on it, it’d certainly be appreciated, especially with the idea that they use female hormones to mask those steroids and maybe why they do that. Thanks as always for this great program. Thank you for your call. Dr. Pete, could you hear that caller’s question? I don’t know what milky shakes are. I’m not sure what they are either, but perhaps… Oh, milky shakes would be related to the man’s name, Milky Cabrera. M-E-L-K-Y, and they play on the milk man, and I was trying to be funny, but it didn’t work. So what you’re saying is that they take female hormones to mask the fact that they’re taking 35:16 corticosteroids? Yes, in fact, it was on record that the way they shown up at many remerias, primarily at the LA Dodgers and currently at the Oakland Athletics, at least last time I checked, maybe. He was using that and got suspended for 50 games when he was with the Dodgers a couple years ago as milky cabrera just got taken down for 50 games from the Giants. And if you don’t have the answer, Dr. Pete, I don’t know if you follow sports at all, but I know this is kind of a medical question that a lot of people are interested in. If you can’t answer it tonight, I look forward to a future program on it, maybe. Thank you for your call. Dr. Pete, do you understand the question now? Yeah, but I don’t know anything about that, fake. Okay, but I think what he’s saying is that these athletes are taking female hormones in order to mask the fact that they’re taking corticosteroids to cope with the athletic performance. Well, a progesterone will cover up and protect against many of the toxic steroids. 36:24 Pregnant alone and progesterone protect against several toxic steroids. But I mean, why would athletes take the steroids then to begin with if they take progesterone just to mask it? I’m not sure what the hormone was they were taking, but I think just corticosteroids, cortisone. I don’t know of why an athlete would take the cortico… Maybe after a game, is it anti-inflammatory? I’m not sure. I’m sorry, our knowledge is not too great in this area of sport. I think they’re taking them as performance enhancers. Well, then they’re maybe taking more like testosterone or other. Okay, I guess until we get clarification, let’s just take the next caller. Hi, you’re on the air? Hello. Hi, do we have an eight second delay or are you hearing everything on time? I don’t know, I’m hearing you right now. Good. Okay, what’s your question? What do I tell my doctor when they want to put me on statins for having high cholesterol? 37:29 Tell them not to. Dr. P. I could send you a lot of research reports on that, but basically you have to remember that they don’t just inhibit cholesterol, they inhibit a whole system of related chemicals in the body and impair energy production and have not only the risk of muscle damage, but also toxic effects on the brain and liver. Tell them you’d like to try a supplement of thyroid first and to get your cholesterol down that way. Okay, well yeah, I’d like the animal fats too. Good. Well, good. That does not raise good animal fats, saturated animal fats do not raise cholesterol. Yeah, I’ve been listening to you two guys talk about that for a long time. 38:33 Great, avoid pork and chicken and turkey and duck fat. Okay, so grass-fed beef is probably the best, huh? And lamb. Okay, great, thank you. And make sure your thyroid’s working. Yeah, get your doctor to do a test and take your temperature and if it’s below 98.6 you could have a thyroid problem and ask your doctor for a supplement. Okay, so we had a caller who called to say that the sports players are taking testosterone and someone else is calling to say that they’re andestrogens. Androgens. Yes, so we have two more callers. Okay, let’s take the next caller. I’m actually standing in for the next caller. Could you please comment on bisphenol A and its use in plastics and its estrogen mimicking characteristics and how that might affect the whole estrogen milu? Yeah, it’s a disastrous early in life prenatal infancy exposure. It shapes the whole development of the organism and an adult is less sensitive to it, but it still is 39:40 very toxic as a strong estrogen leading to all of these degenerative inflammatory effects. So what do you think is the biggest causative factor in that increase in bisphenol A in our dietary? Oh, I currently don’t know. They’ve used it in a lot of food packaging things, but now it’s getting into water supply even. So you mean like water bottles and plastics and things that food is put in? Yeah, and even into some municipal water supplies. Recycling. Recycling the water? No, getting into groundwater and being pumped into water supply systems. Okay. And does bisphenol A cross the placental barrier to the fetus? Oh, yeah. 40:44 Okay, we have another caller. So let’s take this next caller. Actually, they dropped. I’m sorry. Or maybe I dropped them by accident. So call back if you want. Yeah, call back in. Okay, so Dr. Raymond Pete’s joining us tonight on the show, and he’s explaining the mechanisms for hot flashes and night sweats. The number here, if you live in the area is 923-3911, or if you live outside the area, the 800 number is 1-800-KMUDRAD. So you’re listening to this month’s Ask Your Herob Doctor. My name’s Andrew Murray. My name’s Sarah Johanneson Murray. Okay, Dr. Pete, let’s just get back to what you mentioned about the temperatures for fish. Just mentioning that the fish were consuming microorganisms in the water that was too warm normally, and that their fat was saturated a lot more than you’d normally find in fish, and that this was actually a beneficial thing for the fish in terms of 41:45 not having them to have a polyunsaturated oil in their bodies because they didn’t need that cold protection. There were even studies in salmon who normally are cold water fish with very highly unsaturated fats, but they fed them diets less polyunsaturated and found that in some of their endurance tests, they had better performance than the ones on the pure algae cold water highly unsaturated fats. So even though they talk about eating cold water fish as being good for people, even fish don’t do so well. And they would do better if they ate blue-green algae that was high in saturated fats because it grew in warm waters. Yeah, it couldn’t be too saturated if they went back to the cold ocean because they would harden like a cube of butter. Okay, I think we’ve 42:49 got that other caller. Maybe you could create a new product called salmon butter and encapsulate that and sell that to people. Okay, I think there’s another caller on the line, so let’s see if the engineers captured that caller or if he’s got out of the net. Can you hear me? Yes. Excellent, I can hear you well. Oh good. Briefly, I went through a similar experience as the earlier caller who was talking about his physician, presumably a physician wanting to get him on statin drugs. Right. I had that same conversation with my physician and I told her that I would prefer to see if I couldn’t figure out some way anyway to avoid taking the statin drugs. And she said, well, okay, there’s no tremendous rush. She said your cholesterol is trending high. Your blood pressure is trending high, but you’re not there yet. It’s borderline. So give it a go and get back to me 43:54 in three months and we’ll see how you’re doing. So I didn’t have a clue what to do, but I knew that I didn’t want to take statin drugs. So I got into a bunch of diet books and in a nutshell, stayed away from greasy fatty foods, salt, sugar, and got into load bearing exercise. And in three weeks, not three months, three weeks, I turned it around. That’s been about eight years ago. I realized that I’m not prescribing for anyone else. I was lucky, I think. But I thought you might have some comments to make on that and I’ll get off the line and listen to you. Thank you very much for the program. Thank you for your call. I know, Dr. Pete, you won’t have too many good things to say about not consuming sugar. But I think the biggest change that was made was not eating greasy foods because America eats too much greasy food that’s all fried in those toxic polyunsaturated fatty acids. And that probably made the biggest difference. Wouldn’t you agree, Dr. Pete? 44:57 Yeah, the way it works is that the polyunsaturated fat blocks your thyroid at all levels of function. And in the 1930s, people who knew that removing the thyroid gland caused an immediate rise in cholesterol, they gave these people a supplement of thyroid and found just as an immediate decrease in cholesterol. So it’s a mirror image. Your thyroid function and metabolic rate going up, your cholesterol goes down. And I’ve seen two people who had cholesterol of 450 or 500 milligrams percent get down to normal in just a week by a very, very intense supplementation with fast acting thyroid. Excellent. Excellent. Okay, let’s carry on about the sweats because that is after all this month’s topic. And I know that you’ve done a fair bit of research on it in the very 45:58 recent times. Let’s just go on to night sweats. Now, I’ve always understood, even from university, that night sweats were indicative of disease and it wasn’t good. Now, what do you think about night sweats in the way that you understand temperature regulation now because it’s probably very different from what we were taught? I think it’s the same thing. The body needs to be hot, but the night signal is to cool off the metabolism to permit sleep. And you have to mobilize the nervous system in a different way, shift from sympathetic to parasympathetic. And parasympathetic activation makes you sweat. And getting your blood sugar out is the other thing that shifts you away from the sympathetic dominance. And the various things during the night 47:05 trigger those nervous changes. Just lying down tends to shift you towards the parasympathetic dominance, making you sweat more easily. But then prolonged darkness increases the production of cortisol, which raises your blood sugar and shifts you again away from sympathetic to parasympathetic. So it’s a combination of darkness, the day cycle, whatever the stress is, lowering your blood sugar and then compensating cortisol, raising your blood sugar. So what are some things that we can do to fix this? We’ve talked about avoiding polyunsaturated fats and eating saturated fats in their place. So that means avoiding meat fat that’s from pork, chicken, turkey, duck. 48:07 One of the things that happens at night is that this shift of the nervous system tends to slow the digestive process. And it can allow bacteria to become more toxin producing during the night and keeping your intestine clean during the night as far as possible. And eating a carrot in the afternoon, for example, to stimulate the intestine and suppress some of the bacterial growth. A raw grated carrot. Yeah. Okay, there’s one more caller on there. So let’s see if we can take this next caller. Are you on? Yeah, I’m calling about your couple of questions on that. You’re talking about the being low fat with the meat or you’re saying the beef is the best kind of low cholesterol. 49:07 Is that what I heard you say? Well, yes, I was saying to avoid the fats from the pig, chicken, turkey, duck. And instead, if you’re going to eat meat, get the fat from beef and lamb, the saturated fat, because it’s a myth that it’s the bad fat because really it’s the most natural fat. And it’s only just because those other animals are fed corn and soy, which are a bad fat. Is there a difference between the kind of fats and beef or is it just whatever kind of beef you eat you know, whether it’s a hot dog or it’s a filet mignon, it’s all the same? Well, grass-fed beef is, of course, ideal. Ideal for what reason? If the grass has a high content of vitamin E and vitamin E is used primarily in the beef animals to destroy the polyunsaturated fats. I see. And so the more vitamin E in the diet, 50:11 the lower the polyunsaturated fat content of the beef will be. Well, one of the things that I noticed when I’m shopping, I look at the grass-fed beef or the organic beef and I noticed it has a higher fat content than it does the leanest meat that you get that’s just maybe more standardized production. It’s the ratio of saturated fat to unsaturated because it’s most important. So a grass, I mean, a grain-fed cut of beef will have more polyunsaturated oils. Is that what you’re suggesting, Dr. B? Or just less vitamin E? Yeah, less vitamin E and more of the unsaturated fats, but it’s mostly the low vitamin E that lets the oil survive the rumen and get into the tissues. So it’s the high percentage of polyunsaturated fat that is the danger, not the quantity of it, 51:17 because you have lots and lots of perfectly saturated fats. That makes it relatively safe, like normal beef is 98%!s(MISSING)aturated and about 2%!p(MISSING)olyunsaturated. So I too have a little trouble here, but I guess the bottom line is which one would I want to eat for my health would be the lower fat one that’s commercial or the grass-fed? The grass-fed. The grass-fed, okay. And the other question is kind of different. Do you know any kind of relationship between any of these health matters and, you know, their Epstein bar and Lyme’s disease found a lot around these parts? And you know anything about how that relates to the metabolism system or something like that? Well, you know what? We’re running out of time. We only have four minutes left and we need to wrap up, but maybe you can call in with next Friday, that third Friday of September. Third Friday of September? Well, I’ll put that on my calendar. 52:19 Okay, thank you for your call. Thank you. Thank you for listening. Okay, so I want to make sure to cover some things that we can recommend for people to help decrease hot flashes, whether you’re a male or a female. And Dr. Pete, you were mentioning. Sugar, carbohydrate in general, but especially fruit. Gelatin is the protein that’s best because it doesn’t make any serotonin. And salty foods help to stabilize your blood sugar and lower the stress systems. And there’s also some herbs that can help to work on these different systems. Nettle root blocks the romatase enzyme that increases estrogen, Vitex, blocks prolactin, which increases estrogen. Aspirin. Aspirin and caffeine. Aspirin and caffeine. There you go. Aspirin blocks the romatase and caffeine. Stimulate progesterone. Progesterone production. There you go. 53:22 Okay, and then libelia, I think, was one of the other ones. That was the Indian tobacco. That also has an effect. Because you were describing the nicotinic receptors as having an effect on blocking the sweat. You mentioned nicotine patches. Has FDA approved? Well, a study is being done right now. I don’t know who funded it, but it’s plausible that it would, since it lowers aromatase and lowers estrogen, might protect against some of the symptoms of hot plasters and such. And libelia occupies a nicotinic receptor, and it’s not nicotine. It’s lobeline. And it’s also effective for helping people stop smoking. Okay, well, let’s give out Dr. Pete’s information so that people that have listened to him can take some more action and get on the internet and maybe email him or read these articles, find out more about him. So, Dr. Pete, thanks so much for taking your time out to share your 54:24 knowledge with people this evening. Okay, thank you. Thanks so much. Okay, so for people that have heard the show, Dr. Raymond Pete’s website is www.repeatrypeat.com. And he has lots of scholarly articles, probably 50 or so, fully referenced articles on many different subjects. Mostly, his interests are around the polyunsaturated versus saturated fats, aging, how to prevent early aging, and hormones. So, progesterone, estrogen, et cetera. So, I’m not going to go through that again now. What do you want to say, Sarah? That all of Dr. Pete’s articles are free for those who can get on the web. Okay, so until the third Friday of next month, have a great night. Enjoy the rest of summer. Thank you for listening to Ask Your Herb, Doctor. Thank you.