Thyroid, Hypothyroidism & Diet, Lifestyle, Exercise to Fix it!

00:00 Welcome to the Get Fit with Jodell podcast. I am as usual Jodell and I am so thrilled once again to have with me Dr. Pete and he’s my forever go-to source for all things health and nutrition related. Dr. Pete has a PhD in biology and he has taught at numerous schools and universities all things nutrition and women’s health specifically and you can learn more about him by visiting reypeat.com that’s R-A-Y-P-E-A-T.com and you’ll be amazed at his science based articles and newsletters all of which we’ll talk about later. I’m completely in on the thyroid today. I’m really excited about talking about the thyroid because I have had thyroid issues resulting from a toxic mold exposure that I’ve since gotten better from but I always love talking about the thyroid for that reason and I wanted to let the listeners know to stay tuned because at the end Dr. Pete I really want to touch on the foods for the thyroid. I want to touch on is exercise a do or a don’t and lifestyle 01:04 habits that will amp up the thyroid. Also we actually have two viewer or listener questions related to the thyroid so I hope to get to those as well. So thank you once again for joining me. Let’s get started. So many people speculate Dr. Pete that the reasons we have such a thyroid problem now more than ever is you know you hear things like because of the chemicals in the food systems or they say our our poor water supply or the fluoride in the water or EMF radiation I mean all these different speculations on why we have such a low thyroid problem now but I want your professional opinion why are thyroid problems such a problem these days? All of those things contribute to the problem but I think the basic most common problem is the increase of polyunsaturated fats in the diet of vegetables, liquid kind basically. They inhibit the polyunsaturated fatty acids inhibit the secretion of the hormones 02:13 from the gland and it’s transported in the blood and it’s used in the cell in various ways. In the 1930s and early 40s people were estimating that around 40%!o(MISSING)f the population suffered from some degree of hypothyroidism as defined by symptoms for since the late 19th century symptoms of hypothyroidism were being described in the medical literature and the low body temperature tendency to have poor liver function, depression or excitatory brain symptoms, insomnia, high blood pressure, abnormally low blood pressure many things 03:14 dozens of symptoms were well identified as mainly caused by hypothyroidism and in the mid 1940s drug company synthesized what they called the thyroid hormone it was a component found in the secretions of the thyroid gland and it’s called thyroxin and it was made synthetically in the 1940s and came on the market as a treatment for hypothyroidism but along with that marketing of a single chemical came a whole ideology since this new chemical didn’t cure most of the symptoms that were known to identify hypothyroidism those were decided in the literature the advertising 04:23 program of the company selling the synthetic thyroid they were written out of the definition of hypothyroidism gradually over the next 50 years the only defining characteristic of hypothyroidism came to be an elevation of the pituitary hormone thyroid stimulating hormone which rises when your thyroid is slow almost always and that couldn’t be measured in the 1930s and so it people went entirely by the symptoms but with the marketing of thyroxin as the thyroid hormone that they looked over a period of decades looked for a way to define chemically exactly 05:27 what the features of hypothyroidism were so that they could have an exact basis for prescribing the synthetic hormone and the first test was a blood test for protein-bound iodine and that became the prescribing basis for more than 15 years that people were tested for protein-bound iodine in the blood and if this was low then they could be prescribed the synthetic but in the 1960s it was shown that this protein-bound iodine had absolutely nothing to do with your thyroid function it’s a very sort of a more or less random event that can go with either high or low thyroid function and eventually a sensitive test for the pituitary hormone was developed and 06:34 progressively other indicators were thrown away and doctors were told to rely only on measurement of TSH and if it was above 10 of the standard units that was said to be hypothyroidism if it was below at first they were saying poor I think it was of the units that would be hypothyroidism and in the last two or three years guidelines have been published in major medical journals advising doctors almost threateningly telling them not to pay any attention to the physiological signs that traditionally identified hypothyroidism go only by the measurement of TSH and return to 07:38 a standard range usually from between three and five I think is the most common definition of TSH it’s so interesting that you mentioned that because it’s it seems like there are quite a few people that go to the doctor with classic symptoms of low thyroid function and then are yet diagnosed as no your thyroid’s just fine you’re in range so can you talk about why like subclinical hypothyroidism is so prevalent like why aren’t they quick to look at the signs and symptoms and only look at the TSH when the company first marketed this synthetic thyroid they said they had tested it on I think it was two dozen young male medical students for some reason I guess there weren’t many female medical students at the time but the funny thing about thyroid is the 08:42 hypothyroidism is several times more frequent in women because estrogen messes with the the function of all the functions of the thyroid and so they threw out most of the hypothyroid women from treatment in the first years and I had obese friends in high school who had been previously diagnosed as needing a thyroid supplement but they were told by the doctors I heard it from all of my fat friends that they had discovered that they were not it was not a glandular problem they had they were just gluttonous people accepted that if it was all that they ate too much not their glands were being poisoned by something else in the environment right that’s why you 09:44 hear doctors saying now eat less move more that’s their prescription now when we see these people with thyroid issues I’m yeah and the women who could stay obese despite saying that they ate almost nothing doctors doctors were taught that women were basically lying about how much they ate but but someone did the study had women in a locked hospital ward where there’s no possibility of getting extra food and it was found that these women who said they ate almost nothing but gained weight they were found to be able to maintain their weight on the diet of 700 calories a day the only way to do that is to be very hypothyroid but it’s still very common for extremely hypothyroid 10:47 women in particular to be diagnosed as gluttonous rather than hypothyroid isn’t that sad well let’s talk about some of the major symptoms that someone would see if they suspect they might have low thyroid like what are some of the major signs they would notice and see clearly like with with their own body um when I was nine or ten years old I started noticing symptoms in myself that I saw that more girls had had similar symptoms I didn’t see any other boys with migraine headaches and nearsightedness but these often begin in puberty as a result of low thyroid and I’ve known girls in their teens who had just suddenly become nearsighted and when a doctor gave them a thyroid in a timely manner their vision was corrected to normal so so chronic 11:58 myopia is one of the very frequent signs of hypothyroidism weight loss inability to gain weight was known more than a hundred years ago 1890 the first publication relating uh the uh wasting disease they called it tatexia strome priva caused by loss of the thyroid function so overweight or underweight both can be caused by low thyroid the thyroid hormone is an anabolic hormone that builds proteiny tissues and bones but doctors by getting most things upside down doctors warn that excess thyroid will cause osteoporosis but animal experiments way back in the 1940s 13:04 for example on on rabbits they fed them one percent of their food by weight was thyroid plant a gigantic diet equivalent to uh oh like 20 grains probably of thyroid hormone for a person and they their metabolism went up so much that they were starved to death no matter how much they ate and so they became very thin but their bones became abnormally strong and dense uh showing that the anabolic effect on the bones has takes precedence over even a starvation diet and uh lacking this anabolic tissue restoring effective thyroid 14:05 when when your actual metabolism is slowing down in the thyroid deficiency the emergency stress hormones starting with adrenaline and including cortisol rise to maintain function but at the expense of your muscles and bones and uh so you’re even if you are eating a good diet these stress hormones can damage your tissues make your muscles and bones atrophy leading to osteoporosis and connective tissue diseases in which your muscles and skin and tendons ligaments all deteriorate that makes me think about like cellulite so would low thyroid you mentioned the tissue would be not building up the way it should so which makes makes me think that 15:10 the tissue would then be thinner like kind of creepy skin to where cellulite might become more prevalent would that be the case with low thyroid the skin becomes under the the high cortisol which breaks down proteins and they aren’t replaced when your thyroid is slow protein synthesis is pretty much turned off and while the skin gets thinner in the low thyroid condition estrogen is left in an exaggeratedly active form and you retain the water but you don’t retain salt in proportion so you become waterlogged actually hypotonic relative to the normal concentration of salt and the salt when it’s retained normally under 16:11 the influence of thyroid hormone the salt associates with albumin in the blood and pulls water from the tissues into the bloodstream and delivers it to the kidneys to be excreted in low thyroid you lose the sodium in the urine and so the albumin instead of forming a sort of a cloud in the bloodstream of ionized sodium atoms along with the ionized albumin the albumin no longer has this osmotic ability to retain water in the bloodstream keeping up to blood volume and keeping it out of the tissues so the water is allowed to fall out of the blood vessels cause tissue to swell and the albumin in the absence of sodium goes along to some 17:15 extent with the water and that becomes a viscous extra-pascular solution protein and any sodium that might either will form a kind of chelic like mass around cells they instead of ordinary edema in this condition when albumin has leaked out of the blood vessels it becomes a mucous like edema and that used to be the most common defining feature of hypothyroidism was mixed edema or mucous like edema and this water retention in healthy relatively healthy women there’s a tendency of the estrogen 18:23 at the time of ovulation to suppress thyroid function a little bit and cause a little bit of sodium loss and a little bit of leakage of water into the tissues but if it only goes on for a few days it doesn’t become mixed edema like it’s just a passing monthly edema or swelling I think this is so important for so many people to hear this because I don’t think people think of water retention as a as a symptom of low thyroid and so many people have that too I know you had mentioned cortisol as well as kind of a culprit behind the the issue with with the water retention too and so talk to me about how like high cortisol is that the precursor to low thyroid or does high cortisol result from the thyroid dropping down low? Thyroid keeps your energy running efficiently so that glucose is turned into carbon dioxide 19:28 and you get many times more molecules of ATP to do your work than you would if you didn’t have a thyroid deficiency it’s like an oxygen deficiency and you burn your sugar wastefully producing lactic acid instead of carbon dioxide and don’t produce the ATP needed to do all of the cellular work like making protein and that means that your blood sugar becomes unstable and tends to drop sharply with exertion as the lactic acid rises the blood sugar drops and both of those the falling blood sugar and the rising lactic acid trigger adrenaline and cortisol and the cortisol breaks down your protein and tissues including muscles and connective tissues 20:31 and your immune system to produce sugar so the cortisol and the adrenaline will rise as your thyroid falls and they will keep function going but at the expense of good structural maintenance processes so you get apparent normal blood sugar in the normal range but at the expense of breaking down your muscles and skin too fast makes complete sense so that that’s actually the low thyroid that actually leads to the issues with adrenaline and cortisol and so with regard to stress what are some of the biggest stressors in our lives that might be the initial cause of low thyroid? In the healthy person you can do an intense exercise session you can run 21:35 maybe half a block and have no production of lactic acid at all but there’s a threshold the more you use your oxygen increase your energy production rate you will find a level at which you have used your oxygen too fast and you start producing lactic acid and the lactic acid causes these tissue damaging cortisol increasing effects so the lactate threshold and the good athlete is very high they can run a long distance or perform many weight lifts before increasing the lactic acid production so that’s a very safe kind of exercise activity where you don’t reach the lactate threshold but a hypothyroid person the worst 22:40 your thyroid status is the worst your oxygen metabolism is and the closer you are to the lactate threshold until just sitting still a hypothyroid person will have increased lactic acid so when you hyperventilate if you’re a normal person sit still and breathe as fast as they can for a minute they’re going to blow out so much carbon dioxide by that over breathing but the lack of carbon dioxide creates a hypothyroid imitating condition in which you produce lactic acid but a person on the borderline of hypothyroidism is at rest is in effect hyperventilating 23:41 they’re at their lactate threshold and then any further activity is going to just increase the lactic acid and further increase the cortisol and destructive processes and and fairly recently people have realized that serotonin increases with a stressful exercise and it’s the it’s the signal directly that activates the pituitary gland turning on the adrenals to produce cortisol and so the serotonin is now recognized as a signal of fatigue and also something associated with hypothyroidism the excess pain signaling and fatigue signaling 24:44 a function of serotonin that goes with hypothyroid wow so the the low energy that a lot of people feel on hypothyroid if they are low thyroid is could actually be high serotonin right yeah that’s so interesting see no one talks about serotonin being a negative you know you always hear it being a positive and so it’s neat to hear a doctor actually saying you know we need to really be careful with how much we’re elevating our serotonin um yeah it increases the corticotropin release hormone which then turns on acth which then turns on the adrenal stress hormones and serotonin is right at the heart of our stress system and so with so many people running on adrenaline and high stress and they already might be low thyroid and having this high serotonin what happens when they’re running on 25:45 adrenaline you know they’re not sleeping and even from my understanding low thyroid causes sleeping issues too so when you’re not sleeping you know what’s this vicious circle here that we’re talking about some of the people early sleep studies where they monitored brain waves and could define the different levels of sleep found that hypothyroid people never got below the second level of sleep never reached a deep recurrent in sleep and so hypothyroidism very often involves difficulty getting to sleep but almost by definition it involves inadequate quality of sleep waking up feeling unrested often with with pains that are worse before in the morning before any activity than there were bedtime so which regard to sleep a lot 26:49 of people sleep with their cell phones right by their head or they get up in the night if they can’t sleep let’s say they are low thyroid and they flick their phone on to play games or whatever to go on facebook or whatever and so the blue lights blasting in their face are they doing themselves any favors as far as their thyroid when they’re exposed to emf radiation and blue light constantly um yeah i think almost any stimulus but especially a random cell activating thing like a cell phone for a few days i would get insomnia hard to go to sleep and i found that taking a very small amount of a t3 would put me right to sleep five five or ten minutes after taking ten micrograms and on one of my trips i was going to speak at a conference sponsored by a doctor and the day before i got there i saw him and he said 27:54 he hadn’t slept for three or four nights and was just in a desperate condition and i told him my experience and gave him some 10 micrograms uh cytomel tablets and the next day as i went to the conference before he let me talk he pulled me aside and said that stuff is better than morphing and so how does how does that relate to the as far as like the emf are we depleting ourselves with constant radiation and blue light is that what we’re missing out on is that conversion to t3 is that where it’s coming from uh yeah the if you keep in mind that the uh that thyroid lets you get into the deepest layer of sleep uh it the muscle physiology is very analogous to the brain physiology and an old way of diagnosing hypothyroidism was to have a person kneel on a 29:00 chair so their toes hung down freely and then something on the achilles tendon triggers a reflex of the muscle in the calf and it makes the toes jerk out and then fall back uh the diagnosis of hypothyroidism is when the relaxation phase where the toes fall back into the relaxed position is retarded so it looks like uh there’s a pneumatic door closer on a healthy reflex the toe jumps out and bounces back just like a loose piece of pork chop hanging there it bounces and sways but a hypothyroidism person relaxes very slowly so that it comes back in little notchy movements exactly to where it stopped and might take half a second of this slow relaxation 30:02 the brain is the same way it’s very slow to relax in hypothyroidism it takes energy to relax the muscle ATP has to be uh regenerated same in the brain it takes regeneration of ATP to relax the brain and in the absence of thyroid the brain simply can’t get up enough energy to relax and go to sleep and I would say the radiation from the devices and the electromagnetic radiation is probably blocking that as well the brain you know the the cells are staying in a semi excited state so they’re more sensitive to any kind of stimulation and the people who are extremely sensitive to simulations such as a cell phone are the ones who are hypothyroid their cells are already half stimulated they can’t they can’t reach a deeply relaxed condition it makes sense 31:08 because if your body is on high alert because there’s a stressor because it’s not functioning optimally because you’re you know not functioning in an area that should be so critical to health which is your thyroid then it’s almost like the body is resistant against shutting down or repairing or you know getting rid of anything it needs to get rid of in the night toxins and repairing tissues and things like that it’s just not going to do that it’s almost like it’s just in survival mode is that right um yeah the deep sleep restores and renews everything and the cortisol increase towards dawn is greater when your energy production from thyroid activity is impaired and so your your stress starts out at a higher level in the morning and 32:09 hypothyroid people often feel best at sunset because the light has helped restore steroid production to some extent and lower the cortisol so that kind of makes sense that there’s so many studies on red light because red light closely matches the the light of the sunset that there are so many studies saying that red light is actually beneficial to the thyroid um yeah it increases circulation among other things but one of the types of stimulation that keeps cells from relaxing is a background more or less free radical activity and accessible electrons because the oxygen isn’t withdrawing electrons the cell stays in a reductive condition too many electrons not enough 33:16 oxygen and that is uh coincident with the uh excitability for example to glutathione in a well oxidized cell should form the disulfide uh bonds uh associating proteins with glutathione and glutathione to some extent with itself and binding proteins into a stable condition and when your thyroid can’t withdraw the electrons completely your cell has a highly reduced state with too much free reduced glutathione and that if that becomes chronic this state of chronic excitation 34:19 leads to all of the degenerative diseases ultimately cancer which is an ultimate failure of the cells to relax and reach the reparative high energy state oxidation fails chronically in cancer cells and all of the other degenerative conditions involve some degree of the same over reduced under oxidized energy failure process all of which would be preventable by keeping your thyroid function proper okay you reminded me of the fact that the liver is actually really important when it comes to the thyroid and hormone conversion and so when you said glutathione it reminded me like we probably need to let listeners know like how important the liver is to the thyroid can you talk about that yeah in the 1940s when soldiers were coming back after being in prison camp 35:30 and on a starvation diet for a year or two many of them when they started eating enough many of them developed breasts and this led doctors to investigate why why these formerly starved soldiers suddenly started growing breasts when they ate a good diet and they found that starvation stops the liver from excreting estrogen the same thing can happen in various liver diseases but starvation is the basic thing that prevents the liver from detoxifying things and estrogen is active in such extremely small amounts that it’s the first thing you usually see when the liver function slows down and when the liver is is not able to attach either glucuronic acid or sulfuric acid to 36:39 the estrogen molecule letting it become water soluble and leave the body either in the bile or urine it quickly accumulates to an excess and at the same time that the liver has started uh uh letting estrogen stay in the body the low energy is also decreasing the ability to metabolize cholesterol and you can’t make progesterone and DHEA and the protective steroids which counter counteract estrogen so man’s testosterone and DHEA fall as the estrogen increases when something has damaged his liver any kind of injury sickness or traumatic injury that sends a man to a hospital when they give a blood test they will often find is estrogen level is two or three times 37:46 or more higher than normal even higher than a woman’s normal estrogen level just because stress of any kind is likely to stop that liver function of getting rid of estrogen and as estrogen accumulates it blocks all of the thyroid functions and since the thyroid is necessary to activate the liver to excrete estrogen then a trauma can can set up a chronic hypothyroid state and a glandular failure organ failure and so on this is so good so and what I learned from you is that the thyroid and the liver work in tandem together as far as the t4 to t3 conversion has to happen with the liver and only if you have enough glycogen or you’re getting enough glucose and that would stand to reason like when you said the starvation diet um is similar to what people 38:46 are doing today this intermittent fasting or days and days of fasting and they think they’re doing their body of service but really they’re slowing down their thyroid or they’re at least harming their conversion can you talk about that many diet studies have found that you oxidize fat at a high rate the first in in some people the first 12 hours and some people the first 24 hours you keep oxidizing fat when you go on a starvation diet and lose fat for maybe your first day but at some point you have depleted your stored glycogen and that blocks the formation of the active t3 thyroid hormone and from that point on you’re relying for energy to an increased extent on the breakdown of tissue protein turning it into fat and and so a more or less starvation diet 39:54 that goes on for a week or two will I think it’s about 80 percent of your weight loss is in the form of muscle loss and very little maybe 20 percent in the form of fat loss but if you eat enough sugar and and have the minerals such as in fruit and and keep a slight protein intake the small amount of sugar will prevent the the breakdown of proteiny tissues and a 10 to 14 day diet in this case will cause you to lose maybe 80 fat and only 20 muscle so a starvation diet after the first 12 to 24 hours is turning off your thyroid turning on the destructive tissue breakdown in one experiment people were put on a treadmill and the chest had killed if the treadmill was 40:59 adjusted so that they kept a steady heart rate of no faster than 120 beats per minute just just just like you were walking down the street and they had blood tests at intervals and and almost everyone stopped producing T3 in the first hour of that mild exercise so when your T3 is turned off whether it’s by starvation or by excess activity that’s the point of which you start breaking down proteiny tissues okay so you heard it here folks we don’t want to go without some sugar so you actually can have sugar and actually have a really well functioning thyroid and I want to talk about the fact that when you had mentioned that you had supplemented with T3 so obviously and I’ve heard you say many 42:00 times that you really feel like natural thyroid medication would benefit most people and so I want you to touch on just exactly like how how would you go about telling someone to begin supplementing if they think they have low thyroid but their doctor is not really doing anything about it I think everyone who thinks about that as a possibility should read Gruda Barnes book hypothyroidism the unsuspected illness or his other book on preventing heart attacks by taking in this whole career he didn’t have any a patient’s die of of heart attacks or he should have had I think he said more than a thousand from the number of patients that he had he basically prevented all of the heart attacks in his patients by giving them an appropriate amount of of thyroid and most of his people in the long run were getting two grains of armor thyroid 43:06 you would start them on usually a half a grain 30 milligrams and watch their temperature over the first several weeks and if their temperature didn’t rise to normal it would then add another half grain and it took him typically several months to find exactly the right dose patient but most of them would need around two grains I’m glad you mentioned temperature that’s something really easy that a lot of people listening could do is if they suspect they might have low thyroid they could take their temperature right and that will tell them if their body is running a little cooler than it should be that means that thyroid is not functioning right uh yeah and Broda Barnes worked in Colorado Springs Colorado where you felt them have hot and humid weather and one hot and humid summer in Eugene I noticed obviously hypothyroid people coming in with a normal temperature 44:13 and I realized that a dead person in Florida can maintain a normal temperature if the environment is at 98 degrees and humid then a potato will maintain adequate body temperature so you have to look at other signs if the weather is humid or if they sleep with an electric blanket and anything artificial so the pulse rate is another thing that helps you interpret when you’re very hypothyroid the adrenaline is the first thing to rise during the night when you use up your glycogen and then the cortisol increases and most people have their highest cortisol at dawn because the glycogen has been used up but if your temperature is below normal 45:22 when you wake up everyone has a lower metabolic rate during the night so it’s normal to be as much as eight tenths of a degree below normal when you wake up but it should rise right after breakfast and stay up at around 98.6 until around sunset but I saw that besides the low temperature some people would have a very fast pulse when they first woke up because their adrenaline was high but the cortisol hadn’t risen enough to slow down the adrenaline effect and very fast pulse along with a low temperature at waking is very common in hypothyroid people and the pulse should slow down to normal after breakfast but where the normal thing is for the 46:24 the metabolic rate to come back to normal when you eat breakfast and that brings up the pulse rate and the temperature in healthy people but the high adrenaline can cause an artificially rapid pulse in a hypothyroid person yeah I felt that when I went through my hypothyroid spell like I remember hearing my heart beat very fast on my pillow so if people are feeling that in the night when they’re laying down that’s not normal also like cold hands and feet is not normal being cold all the time and having to carry a sweater everywhere that’s not normal so those are some things people should watch out for yes yeah just a doctor should be able to diagnose hypothyroidism most of the time just by shaking hands with the person because they almost always have cold hands so I want to touch on now the food aspect because I know at the very beginning you you talked about how poofa polyunsaturated fats are probably the biggest culprit when it comes to why we see so 47:27 many thyroid problems but can you tell us what other than like crowding out the poofas what does a healthy diet for the thyroid look like and how often should one eat you know can you talk about the dangers of those those poofas even in small amounts and things like that I mentioned that one of the effects of high estrogen low thyroid is the loss of sodium and when you lose sodium that you increase aldosterone and aldosterone is closely connected to parathyroid hormone which is the regulator of calcium and so if you don’t eat enough calcium you’ll have high parathyroid hormone if you don’t eat enough salt or can’t retain it you’ll have high aldosterone and uh stress causes you to lose both sodium and calcium and it happens that aldosterone 48:29 and parathyroid hormone both suppress mitochondrial oxidation the same effect as not enough thyroid hormone and so the low thyroid is failing to activate the parathy the mitochondria and its effects are increasing these two other hormones aldosterone and parathyroid hormone which activate which block the uh mitochondrial respiratory enzymes to turn off energy production so that’s three ways from this interaction that you’re knocking out your productive use of oxygen and glucose so i’m getting off calcium and sodium in your diet and the only way to tell the amount of sodium practically is whether you crave it 49:34 women premenstrually very often have intense salt cravings and i’ve known many who have avoided salt because of medical recommendations that eating salt raises blood pressure and so on but they would avoid salt and if anything they’re what retention got worse that that’s because it’s when you avoid salt you increase parathyroid hormone and those both work with hypothyroidism to turn off energy production so calcium is very important in a thyroid very very pro thyroid adding salt and sea salt probably is best with all the mineral content to your diet would be good and then crowding out the poofa anything else like i know you’re you’re a big fan of saturated fats too um yeah saturated fats are they they avoid many of the effects inflammatory effects of the 50:41 polyunsaturated fats uh linoleic acid directly uh leads to forming arachidonic acid which its mere presence leads to the formation of prostaglandins which have many uh pro inflammatory effects including loss of bone calcium and so the rising adrenaline when your thyroid is low rising adrenaline liberates arachidonic acid which turns to prostaglandin which breaks down bone and makes you lose bone tissue and turns on the um parathyroid hormone in our schooling we were told that linoleic acid and um and things like arachidonic acid and things like that that there’s good prostaglandins there’s bad you know there’s two essential fats that you should really have and i’m hearing you say this and it’s like 51:44 countertuitive to everything that i was told but yet yours makes so much logic sense when you when you break it down like that it makes so much sense why we wouldn’t want to have those things um yeah just recently people are starting to look at the consequences of having the arachidonic acid prostaglandin rise as you accumulate fat with aging the brain gets more and more polyunsaturated fats and they’re starting to look at the role of prostaglandin in Alzheimer’s disease among other things the Alzheimer’s brain has lots of spontaneous oxidation of of fats into substances called isoprostanes and neuroprostanes which are spontaneous equivalents of the enzyme produced prostaglandins but they are made from both 52:51 in minus three and then minus six fatty acids in the stressed brain and go with our increase in Alzheimer’s disease and following the idea of essential fatty acids in the 60s people were told to eat more linoleic acid because it’s an essential fatty acid when it was found that that was increasing both cancer and heart disease the marketers turned to a fish oil type of in minus three but but still those are accumulating in the tissues in the blood vessels leading to plaque formation in the brain leading to various kinds of under functioning of the brain tissue so you’ve heard it here folks you don’t need to take a fish oil pill you can eat sugar and do you want to make sure that you get rid of the ones they are calling the essential fatty 53:55 acids like linoleic acid instead you can eat a really awesome pro thyroid diet of things like cheese and milk and good seafood and you know well cooked vegetables occasionally and getting some good starches from your fruits yes Dr. Pete? Yes and keeping the ratio of calcium to phosphate high enough is an important part of keeping things in balance some Americans have five six or seven times as much phosphate in their diet as calcium where you should have approximately equal amounts or maybe twice as much is safe but the high high phosphate turns on parathyroid hormone and leads to the degenerative ultimately 54:56 cancer forming processes of turning off oxidative energy and compensating with lactic acid formation yeah so avoiding too much like red meat would be it would help that balance like not eating just so much red meat and stuff like that yeah yeah meat and beans are both very bad high in phosphate because of their their high phosphate yeah moving on to lifestyle though what are some lifestyle changes we can make in order to improve the thyroid naturally like you mentioned the sunset you know being in that sunset light is is red light something that would be beneficial for us to use daily or what other lifestyle things could we do as far as like habits we could adopt? Being outside as much as possible it is very important but the people who work outside 10 hours a day cowboys and such have terrible skin on their face if they’re if they don’t use a good 55:59 hat the sunburn does age your skin but these people have a very low incidence of internal cancers breast cancer prostate cancer bowel cancer and so on because the red light inactivates the the free radicals or active electrons and reduces inflammation while maintaining good circulation yeah I have to jump in here real quick because my husband works in the outside more than 10 hours a day he’s he owns his own lawn business and he will be glad to know that he is avoiding cancer by doing so and he has just to give a little plug to you he follows kind of your principles of eating and has lost 25 pounds since doing so so he enjoys his milk and orange juice in the morning. One of the studies in the 1960s that the oil industry doesn’t like to 57:02 talk about they shaved rabbits so that the sunlight hit their skin directly and they fed one the essential fatty acids the other they gave I forget whether it was butter or coconut oil but a high saturated fat diet and the ones on the so-called the essential fatty acids the poofa they got very wrinkly sun damaged skin the ones on the saturated fat had good skin despite the constant sunlight exposure. Wow that’s fantastic for people that that want to know some natural skincare they could do they could just change the oils that they’re eating from poofa to saturated fat so that’s good to know as far as exercise I know you had mentioned that even that small bout walking on a bit of an incline actually lowered thyroid so in your opinion what would you tell someone who is experiencing low thyroid and trying to correct it what would be the best form of exercise to help their thyroid and what would they want to avoid? Well having 58:08 adequate carbohydrate when you set out and then again as soon as you finish like some fruit juice and milk before and after contains maybe some salty like athletes who take a spoonful of baking soda before exercise it’s both the the carbon dioxide released from it and the sodium both of them have an anti-stress anti-lactate effect that make make you return to normal more quickly. That’s a really good tip so even like kind of old school mentality I’ve heard it said back when when I was doing a lot of body building early on in 2000 it’s like we always ate carbs right before we worked out we always ate carbs right after so that kind of principle still stands so this kind of brings me to as long as you still have a few more minutes Dr. Pete I have two listener questions that I wanted to go to 59:09 because they were kind of really great questions the first one is and I guess I should ask you are you okay on time right now can we keep going okay great he says can Dr. Pete explain the connection between thyroid and the autonomic nervous system? Yeah the adrenaline connection is an important part of it the adrenaline compensates keeping your functions going despite being low thyroid and if you supplement with thyroid after having been hypothyroid for a while and having very high adrenaline your first reaction to the supplement is to have an excessively high heart rate because the thyroid makes you sensitive to the thyroid which is to the adrenaline which is there 01:00:10 so you experience the excess adrenaline and it takes a while to convince your autonomic nervous system to quiet down and let thyroid take care of it that usually takes a week or so to slowly increase the the thyroid and reduce the excess adrenaline but the adrenaline itself has as many protective functions if you don’t have tissues loaded with polyunsaturated fats because a surge of adrenaline releases fatty acids and if they’re unsaturated they start forming these spontaneous equivalents of prostaglandins as well as real prostaglandins and causing inflammation and degeneration if you release saturated fats they can’t form those pro degenerative molecules. I’m so glad you said that about the the I’m sorry I didn’t mean to 01:01:11 interrupt you the the jitteriness or that somebody who experiences that high adrenaline rush after taking a natural thyroid supplement because that happened to me and I’ve heard it happen to several other people and I kind of felt the same way like without knowing I kind of felt exactly what you were saying is well I have to kind of teach my body to get rid of this excess adrenaline that’s kind of what I portrayed to my clients is like keep taking it you’re your body’s going to get used to the actual feeling of having an adequate thyroid functioning. Yeah that’s very common and because so many doctors think of thyroid as a speed equivalent people very very often will stop using thyroid they become afraid of this over simulated state where they should reach the point of relaxation. Yeah okay so that’s great to know about the autonomic nervous system so that’s a great question. The next question the final question 01:02:11 was can you talk about keratinemia or keratinemia and how to resolve it when you’re trying to recover the thyroid so I would assume this individual is talking about having kind of that yellowish skin or having too high of keratin? Around 1940 people who were doing surgery sometimes saw that a woman’s ovaries in hypothyroidism the corpus luteum it’s named the yellow body because it normally has a yellow color they found that in hypothyroid women sometimes the corpus luteum was red rather than yellow because of the beta keratin which is red having reached such a high level in hypothyroidism and when it reaches such high levels it blocks 01:03:14 progesterone production but leaves the the accumulation of estrogen so you can’t produce progesterone and progesterone is needed to produce DHA and other steroids the whole cholesterol conversion process goes bad when you’re poisoned with keratin and vitamin b12 is needed to break the keratin molecule in the two vitamin a molecules so you you have to make sure your vitamin b12 is adequate I saw one man who had a toxic level of keratin in his body and no detectable vitamin a in his blood when he took vitamin b12 I think was just a week and he had a reversed blood test high normal vitamin a and very low keratin as fast as that because 01:04:25 vitamin b12 deficiency necessarily blocks the formation of real vitamin a and the the thyroid makes you need vitamin a because it’s involved in the conversion of cholesterol to progesterone DHA all of the steroids and as your metabolism rises you’re using your cholesterol faster to make progesterone and that means that your cholesterol will be used you’ll cure your hypercholesterolemia at the same time you’re curing your keratinemia if your thyroid is at a proper level and you’re eating such that you have adequate vitamin b12 okay so that’s so cool how the thyroid you’re healing the thyroid and you’re healing so many 01:05:29 other things at the same time so I think that brings us to a good stopping point Dr. Pete and this has been such a valuable podcast I think anyone and everyone will benefit from something in this podcast so you guys make sure and share it with anybody you know that’s having some thyroid issues or you know someone that’s dealing with low thyroid or hypothyroidism Dr. Pete your newsletter is something all my listeners would also benefit from and the information you keep providing in it is worth the small cost of the newsletter so I really encourage my listeners to give back to Dr. Pete for his time and wealth of information and purchase his newsletter so Dr. Pete can you tell them how they can do that and how it’s how affordable it actually is okay the email address is repeatsnewsletteratfemale.com and for 12 bi-monthly issues that’s two years it’s $28 by email yeah and it is worth every penny I have so enjoyed them 01:06:35 and I think all of my listeners will too and it’s just a great way to give back to you we so appreciate your time and your wealth of information so with that I will let you go today and I hope you will join me again for another podcast because I have so much more I want to ask you so thank you so much Dr. Pete okay very good thank you all right thanks you guys and we’ll say bye for now hey out there I’m about to drop one more bit of knowledge about why you should drop an f-bomb so I have ripped open a packet of coconut oil here but I’m not going to eat it I am going to use it as a little natural moisturizer so you know how when you travel you don’t want to take a whole lot especially nowadays they only let you take a carry on and maybe you’re just going away for the weekend and you need some moisturizer and some sunscreen to take with you well guess what coconut oil is kind of nature sunscreen so you pack one of these little bag boys with you and not only can 01:07:38 you eat it but you can put it on your skin and it’s nature’s best sunscreen because it’s a natural way to protect from the sun in a low grade way so you can stay out all day get a little color but not get burned also maybe after the gym you want to moisturize them and head to work you can use this maybe you need to get a little dryness out of your hair this is a wonderful way to saturate the hair and really soothe the hair pour it all over your head let it sit with a shower cap for a couple hours and then rinse it out and wash it and you’re going to have really soft silky hair and your scalp will be soothed too if you have kind of itchy scalp coconut oil is great for that there are so many great reasons to have a packet of coconut oil with you not just for eating but also for body and skincare purposes works great as a face oil and a body oil so check out dropinfbomb.com and get some of these handy dandy little packets to keep with you even if you’re not into eating it you’re going to find it really beneficial to just take on the go with you oh also you can use my code get fit g-e-t-f-i-t to save 20%!t(MISSING)hanks for watching