Thyroid, Metabolism and Coconut Oil

00:00 Welcome to this month’s Ask Your Herb Doctor. My name’s Andrew Murray. My name’s Sarah Johanneson Murray. For those of you 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. We manufacture all our own certified organic herbal extracts which are either grown on our CCUF certified herb farm or which are sourced from other certified organic supplies. You’re listening to Ask Your Herb Doctor on KMUD Garberville 91.1 FM 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 continuing topic on the thyroid, its role in health and the use of coconut oil as a means of weight loss and improved thyroid function. The number here if you live in the area is 9233911 or if you live outside the area a toll free number is 1-800-KMUD-RAD which is 5683723 01:03 so we can also be reached toll free on 1-888-WBM-ERB for further questions during normal business hours Monday through Friday. So to carry on from last month’s expose on the polyunsaturated versus saturated fat controversy that’s raging right now I wanted to mention right from the get go that some of this material has been copied from Dr. Ray Pete and that this material is not something that we have produced although in between the other excerpts the material is ours. So I wanted to carry on like I said from last month and just carry on this expose of a fairly startling turnaround for some people at least in the belief that polyunsaturated fats are good and that saturated fats are bad and actually it’s seemingly very much the other way around and that our ancestors and our grandparents had it right the first time around eating lots of saturated fat, animal fats, eating butter, milk, cream, dairy products 02:09 were very healthy and actually had very very low incidences of cancer diabetes and obesity things which have shot up since the 1920s. So a lot of things that we’re going to say for some people will be cheeringly applauded by those people perhaps in their 50s and 60s or a little older even they used to eat just the same kind of things that we’re going to be covering and talking about and to another group of people might be very shocking so I don’t mean to shock people but I just want to make these other viewpoints known so that those people who do find some thread of truth and it can actually hold on to it and find out more. Most of this information is freely available on the web and the web is increasing in popularity as time goes on as a source of material for all different viewpoints and the truth is out there if you just want to search for it, you will find it. So I wanted to carry on the whole end of the war, the Second World War essentially then the seed oil industry was in a crisis point 03:11 and the traditional use of seed oils such as flax seed oil in paints and plastics was being displaced by new compounds made from petroleum and the industry itself needed new markets. It was discovered that ways to convince the public that seed oils were better than animal fats were introduced and they called their seed oils heart protective. Even though human studies soon showed the same results that the animal studies had namely that they were toxic to the heart and increased the incidence of cancer. This all came about from the 1920s and 1930s experiments with animals on feedlots that were basically put there for the last six or eight weeks of their life to increase their weight, become more saleable and more valuable by having an increased portion of fat on their bodies and that essentially they started using coconut oil. It was basically a fairly cheap imported tropical oil that was a saturated fat 04:14 that they believed would be a pretty good feed source for cattle and other ruminant animals to increase their weight gain prior to slaughter and that would help the industry and would help the farmers and everyone would get more money and that the product would be appreciated. So they started feeding these animals coconut oil with a saturated fat and lo and behold, rather than gaining weight, the animals actually lost weight. Anyway, so they soon changed their plans there from coconut oil they suddenly switched to corn oil and soil oil. Now, when they did that, lo and behold, the animals started gaining weight so they suddenly thought, OK, well this was a good idea, soy and corn did the trick put lots of weight on animals even though these animals would never be eating it unlike coconut oil, they’d never be eating it either but as a food stuff it was certainly a hit in terms of gaining weight on the animals but essentially the long term effects of these fats and oils were pretty toxic 05:15 and the animals themselves were certainly unable to continue eating this for more than seven or eight weeks before they started getting very serious inflammatory disorders that were eventually life threatening and would kill them so eight weeks was about as much as they could feed these animals before they started dying of gastrointestinal disorders from eating these products so they should never be eating in the first place so that doesn’t surprise anybody. So ultimately the coconut oil was thrown out and a huge campaign was started to alert the American public that these cheap tropical imported oils were not very good for you, they were toxic and actually that they should be kicked out and that the alternatives would be USA grown corn and soy and lo and behold with the chemical and pharmaceutical industry behind this fairly big players in pharmaceutical production was that the corn and the soy were there again other very important crops to be genetically engineered and the seeds to be owned 06:16 so that they were a product that could be sold and owned independently rather than a wild product, a wild seed that no one had the rights to and that people could get freely so soy and corn soon became rapidly two very big US crops and rapidly the information was disseminated that soy and corn were very good for you polyunsaturated, they were good for your heart, they were good for cholesterol they were good for lots of things and everyone should be eating lots of it and the propaganda was promoted by a lot of money and soon it became a very common place that these oils were good for you and that everyone should be eating it and so obviously the natural production of these two crops rapidly increased as did the awareness or the false awareness that these things were good for you so getting on to the point that the animals were fed these things and they gained weight despite the widespread acceptance then that the lipid hypothesis which we cover has never really been proven 07:18 an oil researcher, Mary Enig, PhD and Sally Fallon, founder and director of the Western A Price Foundation point out in their article called The Secrets of the Edible Oil Industry that the lipid theory was first proposed by David Kritschetsky a Russian researcher who in 1954 published a paper describing the effects of feeding cholesterol to rabbits now by showing that polyunsaturated oils from vegetable sources lowered serum cholesterol at least temporarily in humans says Enig Kritschetsky appeared to show that the findings from the animal trials were relevant to the coronary heart disease problem that the lipid hypothesis was a valid explanation for the new epidemic of heart disease and that by reducing animal products in their diets Americans could avoid heart disease so soon the United States was on an anti-cholesterol campaign in 1956 an American Heart Association fundraiser was shown on all three major TV networks 08:19 panelists presented the lipid hypothesis as the cause of America’s heart disease epidemic and recommended prudent diet in which corn oil, margarine and chicken replaced butter, lard, beef and eggs but the panel was not unanimous Dudley White, MD, Dr. Dudley White disagreed with his AHA colleagues by noting that heart disease in the form of myocardial infarction, MI, was non-existent in 1900 when egg consumption was three times what it was in 1956 and when corn oil was completely unavailable I mean who would have ever thought of making oil from corn anyways how much corn would you have to squeeze or process or do what to to get a teaspoon of oil when pressed to support the prudent diet Dr. White replied see here I began my practice as a cardiologist in 1921 and I never saw an MI patient until 1928 09:24 back in the MI free days before 1920 the fats were butter and lard and I think we would all benefit from the kind of diet we had at that time when no one had ever heard the words corn oil but unfortunately his observations fell on deaf ears and ads in the journal of the American Medical Association described Wesson Oil, I’m sure a lot of people have heard of Wesson Oil it’s a famous corn oil manufacturer so the AMA described Wesson Oil as a cholesterol depressant Mazola, another large corn oil company advertisements claimed that, quote, science finds corn oil important to your health and medical journal ads recommended Fleischmann’s unsalted margarine for patients with high blood pressure Dr. Frederick Stair, head of Harvard University’s nutrition department wrote a syndicated column in which he encouraged the consumption of up to a cup of corn oil per day great meanwhile experimenters found that feeding a diet that totally lacked the essential fatty acids 10:30 produced animals with remarkable properties they consumed oxygen and calories at a very high rate says Dr. Ray Pete their mitochondria were unusually tough and stable their tissues could be transplanted into other animals without provoking immunological rejection and they were very hard to kill by trauma and a wide variety of toxins that easily provoked lethal shock in animals on the usual polyinsaturated oil diet as German researchers had seen in 1927 they had a low susceptibility to cancer and new studies showed that they weren’t susceptible to various fibrotic conditions including alcoholic liver cirrhosis Dr. Mary Eneg points out that other researchers conducted population studies that showed that the animal model used by Kroczewski, especially one that used vegetarian animals, was not a valid approach to the problem of heart disease in human omnivores 11:31 she cites studies conducted in the 1950s showing that the presence of arterial plaque which is considered a symptom of heart disease is a natural process that has nothing to do with diet American soldiers killed during the Korean War had similar amounts of severity of plaque 75%!a(MISSING)s Japanese natives whose diet was lower in animal products at 65%!(NOVERB) and the largely vegetarian Bantu in South African had just as much occlusions or plaque buildup in their arteries as other races in South Africa who ate more meat In 1957, Dr. Norman Joliff, director of the Nutritional Bureau of the New York Health Department launched an anti-coronary club for businessmen aged 40 to 59 all were placed on the previously mentioned prudent diet and results were published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 1966 12:32 Those on the prudent diet of corn oil, margarine, fish, chicken and cold cereal had an average serum cholesterol 30 points lower than the meat and potatoes control group but the more important statistics were the heart disease deaths of eight prudent diet followers while none of those who ate meat three times a day died Joliff himself died in 1961 from a vascular thrombosis although his obituaries listed the cause of death as complications from diabetes larger follow-up studies produced the same results and an ambitious million-man diet heart study was abandoned for reasons of cost when its chairman died of a heart attack In the 1960s, interest in organ transplantation led to the discovery that polyunsaturated fats prolonged graft survival by suppressing the immune system Immunosuppression was considered to have a role in the carcinogenicity of the essential fatty acids, says Dr. Pete So just to reiterate that, that the polyunsaturated fatty acids suppress the immune system 13:38 That’s the crux of that last sentence, isn’t it? So in the 1960s they found that if people who had just recently had an organ transplant, if they were taking in a lot of polyunsaturated fats in their diet their immune system was suppressed and they didn’t reject the transplant At around the same time, there were studies showing that unsaturated fats retarded brain development and produced obesity In addition, the age-related glycation products that are usually blamed on sugar are largely the result of peroxidation of the polyunsaturated fatty acids Okay, that’s one of the other important things about the polyunsaturated fatty acids is because they are polyunsaturated, they’re very susceptible to lipid peroxidation which is oxidation of the molecule because they’re not stable Unlike saturated fats that are completely saturated, the bonds are saturated and they’re very stable oils And they don’t go rancid very quickly, I mean coconut oil has a very long shelf life 14:41 Through the 1970s, information about the harmful effects of polyunsaturated fatty acids was slowly being assimilated And by 1980 it looked as though reasonable researchers would see the promotion of cancer, heart disease, mitochondrial damage, hypothyroidism and immune suppression caused by these polyunsaturated fats as their most important feature And they would see that there had never been a basis for believing that these were essential fats But then, without acknowledging that there had ever been a problem with the doctrine of essentiality, fat researchers just started changing the subject shifting public discourse to safer, more profitable topics As a result, the old discredited theories about polyunsaturated fats are alive and well for the past 68 years And so are the inaccurate health claims that replace them Most of us are so used to hearing that saturated fats harm health while polyunsaturated fats improve it that the recommendations of experts like Dr. Mary Enig, Dr. Ray P and Dr. Bryce Bruce Fife require mental adjustments 15:48 Get acquainted with pasture-fed butter, lard and tallow products and other traditionally saturated fats like coconut oil Throw away the canola corn, sunflower, safflower, sesame, soy Stay away from anything that contains polyunsaturated fats Kiss tofu goodbye and forget soy milk, soy yogurt, soy cheese, soy protein and soy lecithin For good measure, says Dr. Pete, stay away from commercially raised chicken Animals that eat polyunsaturated fats don’t produce saturated fat Dr. Pete explains when you eat their meat, you’re eating polyunsaturated fat with all of the adverse effects of soy and corn oil Because polyunsaturated fats are perceived as healthful, the meat, milk and egg industries are working on ways to promote these products, which are incredibly harmful, as desired The beef industry is doing so, he says, by treating soy oil so that it won’t be broken down in the cattle’s rumen I think that’s a factor in causing scrappy and mad cow disease, he says, since it was already established that the equivalent disease in chickens, called crazy chick syndrome, is caused by too much polyunsaturated fat in the diet 16:55 Chickens don’t have a rumen, so they are much more susceptible to these oils and cows and sheep Okay, it’s 7.18 now, you’re listening to ask your herb doctor on KMED, 91.1 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 topic Which is a continuation on the thyroid gland, its role in the health and maintenance of the human body, and a coconut oil, as a means to lose weight and improve your thyroid function Okay, so in 1995, researchers studied 25,862 participants at the Colorado Statewide Health Fair They discovered that among patients not taking thyroid medication, 9%!w(MISSING)ere hypothyroid that had an underactive thyroid, and 1%!w(MISSING)ere hyperthyroid with an overactive thyroid Now this indicates that 10%!c(MISSING)learly of the population had a thyroid problem that had most likely gone unrecognized 17:59 Now these figures suggest that nationally, there may be as many as 13 million Americans with an undiagnosed thyroid problem In her book Living Well with Hypothyroidism What Your Doctor Doesn’t Tell You, that you need to know, Mary Shaman quotes endocrinologist Kenneth Blanchard, MD of Lower Newton Falls, Massachusetts are saying The key thing is doctors are always told that thyroid stimulating hormone is a test that gives us a yes or no answer And in fact, I think that’s fundamentally wrong But it’s commonly called TSH Right, the TSH test Okay, so what they were saying is that it’s commonly wrong Now in fact, I think that’s wrong very much so The pituitary TSH is controlled not just by how much T4 and T3 is in circulation, but T4 is getting converted to T3 at the pituitary level Now excess T3 generated at the pituitary level can falsely suppress TSH 19:00 Hence, many people who are simply tested for TSH are found to be within normal, in parentheses, normal range They are in fact suffering from thyroid problems that are going undetected Now consequently, reader R.M.M.D., associate professor of medicine in the division of endocrinology and metabolism at Bayer College of Medicine agrees He says that hypothyroidism may exist despite normal TSH levels In his book The Thyroid Solution, he says Many people may be suffering from minute imbalances that have not yet resulted in abnormal blood tests If we included people with low-grade hypothyroidism whose blood tests are normal, the frequency of hypothyroidism would no doubt exceed 10%!o(MISSING)f the population Now what is of special concern, though, is that many people whose test results are dismissed as normal could continue to have symptoms of an underactive thyroid Their mood, emotion and overall well-being are affected by this imbalance, yet they are not receiving the care they need to get to the root of their problems 20:09 Even if the TSH level is in the lower segment of normal, a person may still be suffering from low-grade hypothyroidism Thus if we were to include those who may be suffering from low-grade hypothyroidism, the number could well be double the 13 million estimate from the Colorado study Now while more research needs to be done, it is generally accepted that diet plays a major role in thyroid health For decades we’ve known that low iodine’s intake leads to low thyroid function and eventually to goiter Now the goiter is the large swelling around the thyroid cartilage as the thyroid swells in response to a decrease in thyroxine and other thyroid hormones Now iodized salt was intended to solve this problem, but it’s not been the answer There are a number of foods known as goiter gins that block iodine Two goiter gins are quite prevalent in the American diet, one is peanuts and peanut butter and soy beans 21:14 Used most often in prepared foods as textured vegetable protein known as TBP, which is a refined soy food and soy bean oil We mentioned the widespread growing of soy and corn in the 1930s and the subsequent GMO control of this by big multinational companies The rise of industrialization, corporate farming and mass production of food has drastically changed our food supply from what our ancestors ate Many studies now show the detrimental effects of refined sugars and grains on our health These foods are very taxing on the thyroid gland and we consume them in large quantities Environmental stress such as chemical pollutants, pesticides, mercury and fluoride are also tough on the thyroid A growing body of evidence suggests that fluoride, which is prevalent in toothpaste and water treatment, may inhibit the functioning of the thyroid gland 22:16 Additionally, mercury may diminish thyroid function because it displaces the trace mineral selenium And selenium is involved in the conversion of thyroid hormones T4 to T3 Ok, so that’s certainly food for thought in terms of the effects of modern farming and modern industrialization And how these things have certainly become the norm and how the prevalence of the diseases, obesity, cancer and diabetes have shot through the roof as it were And pretty much so connected to the ingestion of these food groups as these food groups are very specifically thyroid or thyrotoxic In many ways that they slow the thyroid function down or stop it altogether in some cases I think it’s true enough to say that people that have fairly what we call normal thyroid function tests that are on the border of being hypothyroid 23:20 There are several different things that can be done even in your home without any complicated chemical analysis That pretty much confirm the diagnosis of hypothyroidism So Sarah, perhaps you want to talk about some of the things that will be useful for people that can try out themselves And if any of the signs or symptoms are present, then these people may well do themselves a lot of good to find out more information on the internet Or from other sources to see in fact whether a thyroid replacement, either a glandular or a prescription would be useful for them I think the best place to start is always with your diet and everyone could benefit from taking coconut oil From eating coconut oil internally it will help your skin externally, from applying it externally it will help your skin externally It helps your thyroid gland, helps improve your metabolism It’s very beneficial for everybody to eat coconut oil What’s some of the main benefits of coconut oil? 24:24 I just mentioned a few of them that it can help as an amoliant for your skin, it helps improve your metabolism All of our body has, well we store a lot of saturated fat in our body and that helps to maintain a healthy level of fat I think a real low fat diet can be very detrimental You won’t gain weight eating coconut oil But something you could do in your home to assess your thyroid function would be to take your temperature People should have a fairly normal body temperature from 98 to 98.6, that’s normal You can buy a thermometer, especially useful as a basal body thermometer from any pharmacy And you can take your temperature before and after you eat breakfast and before and after you eat lunch And as well as your pulse, your pulse should be around normal, which is 70 to 85 And those are some things that you can assess with low thyroid 25:27 It’s not definitive, so don’t think that just because you might have a slightly lower temperature or slightly lower pulse That that’s it, your hypothyroid is of course always best to work with a practitioner in assessing your symptoms To read your temperature and your pulse To come up with a proper diagnosis of exactly what’s going on with your system Can I just quickly read out a couple of sample questions that people maybe would be able to answer These would all be things that for the greater number of yes to these questions There would be more of a basis for wanting to find out more information about your own self in terms of your thyroid health So some of these questions will be things like have you experienced infertility or miscarriage, especially if this is for women Are you feeling like you’re getting every infection that goes around or is it taking longer for you to recuperate from infections? 26:28 Do you regularly eat significant amounts of uncooked, goitogenic foods such as brussel sprouts, broccoli, rutabaga turnips, radishes, cauliflower and millet And cabbage and kale again of two other goitogenic foods And then are you experiencing changes in your menstrual cycle as in the cycle is too short or long or your period has become very heavy or very light Now there is actually I think it’s a two or three to one ratio in gender of female to male That certainly more females seem to get hypothyroidism than males And that’s because females have higher estrogen levels and estrogen is a very powerful thyroid suppressant But in a healthy women your estrogen should be in balance with your progesterone which is a powerful thyroid stimulant and supportive to your thyroid And I just want to mention one thing there Andrew about the goitogenic foods 27:30 Plants in the Brassica family, brussel sprouts, broccoli, cauliflower, kale, cabbage, those are all meant to be cooked I mean everybody knows if they eat these vegetables raw they have terrible gas, terrible indigestion But if you cook them till they’re soft and they don’t cause any gas then you’ve taken away the potential for them to cause a goiter and to suppress your thyroid So the person who wrote these questions out isn’t suggesting that you don’t eat them, they just said to not eat them raw Okay, what did you want to carry on? Do you have any more questions? Well there’s lots of questions here but they were some of the more obvious ones So many of these dietary unsaturated fatty acids, dietary polyunsaturated oils can negatively affect the thyroid health We cook them almost every day and they are plentiful and commercially prepared foods 28:31 Expeller pressed or solvent extracted oils only became a major part of the American diet in the last century It is possible they are among the worst offenders when it comes to the thyroid They are known as vegetable oils or polyunsaturated oils The most common source of these oils used in commercially prepared foods is the soybean And I don’t mean that you have to eat a lot of these oils in order to suppress your thyroid Yes the more you eat the more suppressed it will be but it can even be as much as one teaspoon a day That’s quite a scary thought Large scale cultivation of soybeans in the United States began after World War II And quickly increased to 140 billion pounds per year Most of the crops are produced for animal feed and soy oil for hydrogenated fats such as margarine and shortening Very poor quality fats, very cheap and expensive fats are produced Roundup ready corn and roundup ready soy When we traveled across the Midwest we saw so many fields of roundup ready corn and roundup ready soy 29:36 And these are the food staple of America This is what’s being made into oil and of course we all know that the oils of animals and plants suppress I mean it contains the toxic compounds of whatever has been applied to them The herbicides, the herbicides, it’s in the oil And here most of America is eating corn and soy oil in products And those two plants are grown with a huge amount of chemicals Michael Moore’s expose on the burger diet When he was just ahead of 30 day he was just eating McDonald’s and he was just eating He was always encouraged to get the super size version and how he was suddenly gone His blood pressure was going through the roof, his pulse was going up, he’d gained all this weight His doctor was trying to pull him off it because he was worried that he was going to I don’t think that was a Michael Moore though I thought it was Michael Moore 30:38 I don’t know, I think that was that You know the one I’m talking about, super size me, I think Super size And then there was the other thing, the other expose on the corn The high fructose corn syrup that’s prevalent in the population of America Almost everything that you see on the store if you pick up the package and look at it It has high fructose corn syrup in it And it’s become the common sweeter, no longer is sugar or honey used Because of course it’s too expensive But high fructose corn syrup is readily available And they grow it massive, widespread, thousands of hectares Roundup ready Okay great Okay I think there’s a caller on the line Hello Hello That’s why I make a distinction in my life and I started talking to people about it There’s a difference between food and food like products Yes Exactly And when I’m out and about with people I just do those little bits of education You know, steering away from the food like products Yep, this education is what it’s all about People need to be educated as to what’s happening because most of it is a common misconception 31:40 Oh this is okay or this is acceptable because it’s on sale It doesn’t mean that at all Yes and also especially when they ask me if I want ketchup or jam at a restaurant I say do you know that stuff has high fructose corn syrup and that has E. coli in it So just those little spots of education here and there Thank you Well done, thank you, keep up the good work It’s unfortunate There’s one more caller I think on the line Hello Hi Hello Hi You’re on the air You guys have neglected to discuss the issue regarding the Omega-6 and Omega-3 fats and the ratios And I wanted to recommend a book called the Omega Diet It’s written, it’s a long Greek name, it’s Artemis P. Simapola S-I-M-O-P-O-U-L-O-S And Joe Robinson And I wanted your feedback on that As I understand it, there’s actually amounts of evidence coming out now that show that they’re having a higher ratio 32:42 I think it’s the Omega-6 fats makes a big difference for health issues of many variety And the most affordable oil that’s high in Omega-6 is canola But also I think flax and walnut oil are the other ones I think that’s right Anyway, I wanted your feedback on that because you haven’t discussed that at all on this show or the last show Okay, thank you So a question and answer, what about essential fatty acids? Aren’t some polyunsaturated fatty acids essential? As we all believe, they happen and we’re taught During the last 30 years, Dr. Ray Pete has asked prominent oil researchers for evidence that there is such a thing as an essential fatty acid One professor cited a single publication about a single patient who recovered from an illness after taking unsaturated fat If he had known of any better evidence, wouldn’t he have mentioned it, asked Dr. Pete 33:43 The others, if they had answered it all, cited Burr and Burr 1929, a study that tested rats The surprising thing about that question is that these people would consider any research from 1929 to be definitive That’s like quoting the 1929 opinion of a physicist regarding the procedure for making a hydrogen bomb What was known about nutrition in 1929? Most of the B vitamins weren’t even suspected to exist Burr had no way of understanding what deficiencies or toxicities were present in his experimental diet Two years before Burr’s experiment, says Dr. Pete, German researchers found that a fat-free diet prevented almost all spontaneous cancers in rats Later, a work showed that polyunsaturated fats both promote and initiate cancer With that knowledge, he says the people who kept claiming that linoleic, linolynic, and maybe arachidonic acid are essential fatty acids Should have devoted some effort to finding out about how much of that essential nutrient was enough so that people could minimize their consumption of the carcinogenic stuff 34:54 The way I’d like to logically look at this situation with polyunsaturated fats is that how did we get to where we are today? What did our ancestors eat? Did they eat bottles of essential fatty acids canola oil? Did they make oil from canola from sunflowers? They might have eaten sunflowers, but they wouldn’t have made oil from sunflowers necessarily because it was much easier to make oil from olive and coconut and butter And how much fish were they eating? Probably not that much fish Well, it depends where they lived. I mean, of course, some people did see fish. What were they doing? Right, they wouldn’t have eaten as much tuna and only salmon when they could catch it from the shore or close to the shore They wouldn’t have traveled 40 miles out in the ocean. I mean, maybe in some areas where the ocean is calmer, but definitely not in our Pacific Ocean Whereas it could be very scary 40 miles out in a paddle boat That’s why I logically like to look at it. Let’s get back to basics and say, what is it that we used to eat? How did we get to where we are today? 36:01 Okay, there’s a caller on the line Hello? Hello? Hi, you’re on the air? Yes, thanks for your show. It’s been really interesting for me because I’ve heard all my life how good polyunsaturated oils are Most of us have, yeah Hello? I’m sorry, I think we had a little bit of interruption between the last 20 seconds or so, so just reiterate what you were saying Okay, I have a basal temperature of 96.8 consistently in the morning and then I eat and it stays the same Right I have a number of symptoms of hypothyroidism and I’ve painted iodine on me and it disappeared within 12 hours So I’m wondering, do you think I should get a prescription for the armor thyroid or what do you think? Well, the best thing to do would be to go talk to a doctor who’s open-minded and knows a lot about thyroid One of those doctors was Connie Bash. Unfortunately, she’s moved to San Francisco 37:06 Another doctor is Beverly Copeland and she’s also open to alternative methods for testing thyroid, alternative being taking your temperature and having symptoms that match the hypothyroidism picture Alternatively, you can buy glandular thyroid extracts from health food stores and online Most of them are bovine, but I think there are some porcine available But I always recommend it’s better for people to see a practitioner and work with a practitioner because you don’t want to take too much thyroid That’s definitely not safe and besides that, you know, something like the diet would be the first place to start Yeah, I’m not eating those thyroid suppressive foods that we’ve mentioned Which I have eaten in the past and I’ll avoid the polysaturated oils and possibly I’m thinking that it eats and seaweed for the thyroid The problem with the iodine is, yes, you can have deficiency of iodine and that can lead to hypothyroidism 38:07 But also too much iodine can lead to hypothyroidism, so it’s a really delicate balance and maybe you just want to eat some very occasionally Okay, thanks for your help You’re welcome This one more caller? Hello Hello, you’re on the left Hello Hello Oh, good Thanks for the show. I got a call from my sister yesterday. Her cholesterol is 280 Okay And she asked me and I love getting this call. What can I do naturally, you know? So the first thing I said to her is you have to start eating the right oils Right And I wondered if you could distill some more advice for her, some steps she can take towards lowering the cholesterol Well, cholesterol is often raised because of too much sugar and carbohydrates in the diet So when you say good oils, I mean, if heart attacks, myocardial infarctions were unknown before 1920, what were the oils, what were people eating? 39:08 How did we get to where we are? Well, they ate coconut if they lived in tropical climates, if they lived in Europe, they ate butter and lard, animal fat Animal fat in this day and age is not something you want to be eating because the animals have had so many horrible things and given so many antibiotics But butter, organic butter, organic coconut oil, a small amount of olive oil, those are some good oils to start And decreased grains and sugars would be a healthy place to start in her diet, in my opinion Yeah, this is the first time I heard that corn oil and polyunsaturates in general could be so harmful I don’t know if they’re directly related to cholesterol, but high fructose corn syrup is something I presume she should avoid Yeah, and you know, just instead of eating so many carbohydrates and sugar foods that get converted to fat and cholesterol to eat instead more protein 40:10 And even for vegetarians, fruit has a lot of protein in it, potatoes have a very good quality protein and that would be one carbohydrate she could eat I don’t know if she’s vegetarian or not, if she was a meat eater Do sugars get converted into cholesterol? Sugars get converted into fat, yes, and they can also raise your cholesterol levels You have to start with some kind of lipid structure to make Well cholesterol, your body makes cholesterol on its own, people who have a fat-free diet, they can still have cholesterol levels off the chart But the other thing I want to say about cholesterol is that a recent research that was either Harvard or Stanford came out saying that people who had a cholesterol of around 230 over the age of 50 were less likely to die of heart attacks, cancer, and degenerative diseases than those who had a cholesterol below 200 And we all know that, well maybe we don’t all know, but the average number that they say you should have your cholesterol under is under 200 41:13 Right And now they’re coming out with these results saying, well look, the study of these people was a 10-year study These people that were in their 70s versus people that had high and lower cholesterol The people that had a higher cholesterol live longer Because cholesterol is a protective function in the body, it’s a natural protective function Every one of ourselves in the body, in our body, has a cholesterol membrane Right And also I think What about plaque buildup in the arteries? That’s supposed to be the big concern with it Well that’s what they’re saying is a lot more contributed coming from an increase of sugars in the diet And also these polyunsaturated oils because they’re trans fatty acids and they’re an odd shaped molecule Just think before the Industrial Revolution, we would have never tried to make oil from corn Who would think of it? Well maybe we’d eat corn and eating corn in small amounts, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that Especially the way traditionally it’s used is like masa harina, it’s fermented and soaked and much more digestible 42:18 But corn in large quantities in the form of oil has been shown to suppress the immune system There’s lots of information on the internet, all you need to do is just Google it Yeah I wonder, Michael Paul’s new book is about corn, we’re always called corn fed and stuff Right We’re way too corny, alright well thanks a lot Okay very welcome Thanks for your call Thank you So Sad did you, I think you were, okay you’re going to carry on, alright So large scale cultivation of soybeans in the United States begin after World War II And quickly increase to 140 billion pounds per year, so that’s in the 1940s Most of the crops are produced for animal feed and soy oil for hydrogenated fats such as margarine and shortening Today it is nearly impossible, absolutely impossible to eat at restaurants or buy packaged foods that don’t have soy oil in the ingredients 43:19 Often label simply state vegetable oil That reminds me of the caller who called in and said food and food like products Most Americans eat food like products, even bread has dough conditioners in it, iodine bromate Yeast bread made with yeast which is highly indigestible, iodine bromate is enough If Americans eating bread every day has enough iodine bromate in it to suppress your thyroid Okay I think there’s another caller or two on the line Yeah hi there, am I with you? Yes you’re on there Yeah I have two kids and I’m pretty careful about what I buy and I don’t buy any high fructose corn syrup or anything like that And I was hearing you guys say that soy milk and tofu and all of those products also have polyunsaturated fat in them So I was wondering if you could maybe clarify about the other soy products other than just the oil factor 44:20 Well the soy has a goitrogenic effect, it’s the soy flavonoid in there that is also thyroid suppressive And that’s why you don’t want to eat soy products, they might not have a lot of soy oil in them But they have a lot of a goitrogenic effect And it has been shown that 11 ounces of soy milk a day in a healthy individual Not someone who already has disease and isn’t healthy is enough to suppress thyroid function Okay wow this has just been a really enlightening show you guys I’ve heard so many things I’ve never heard before so I really appreciate you guys being on the air Well you’re very welcome and the best advice I have to feed your children is the least processed foods I give him tons of chocolate soy milk because he eats so much dairy cottage cheese and butter and everything else I was just trying to balance out his diet a bit so that he’s not eating quite so much dairy products 45:23 And he just loves the chocolate soy milk so I give him quite a bit of that every single day Well maybe you just want to replace it with make your own chocolate milk I have Dutch cocoa and we still have milk in our house too so I could totally do that And just to make sure to include plenty of fruit, children need lots of fruit, soft fruits are the best Soft ripe fruits, bananas if they’re very ripe otherwise they can have a latex like banana allergy Yeah I found that my two year old actually really prefers eating stuff straight from my garden too Like food that he won’t eat necessarily if I buy it at the store He loves picking it right off the vine and he’ll eat it like that for some reason That’s exactly the same I just found it amazing, it’s wonderful It’s wonderful, that’s the same as with my four year old niece She loves everything out of the garden Yeah it’s been really amazing since we had the garden how much his diet has improved just because he’s so much more open to the new experience Of picking it himself and just eating it right there 46:26 Well that’s how it’s supposed to be, that’s the way it always used to be Yeah I really appreciate your show, this has just been really great, it’s been awesome information Well thank you for your call Have a good one, you too Okay I think there’s another call on the line Hello Hello Listen thank you so much for the program and I did not catch your show last week and don’t want to take up a lot of your time because you have a lot of valuable information you’re getting out I’m actually someone who was diagnosed four weeks ago with hypothyroid and just started the medication three weeks ago Okay are you on I’m very small, there’s 25 milligrams of lovoxal Okay I eat a really clean diet, I’m blessed I live in Arcata so I can go to the farmers market and it’s 95%!o(MISSING)f my diet is home cooked fresh food from the farmers market But what I’m wanting is additional information about dietary dos and don’ts Red up on the soy and used to take a lot of soy until I realized that it’s not good because I have breast cancer happening with a sibling a year older than I am and lots of cancer in the family so I try to stay away from the soy 47:41 But I do drink a lot of almond milk and I like peanut butter and I like almond butter Bad bad bad Bad bad bad, sorry you should cut it out of your diet now If you want you can take our toll free number and call us and give us your email and I can email you a do and don’t diet sheet for your thyroid That’s the best thing you can do, call us on our toll free number and we’ll email you the diet sheet Okay put your toll free number Okay Go ahead 888-926-4372 4372 thank you so much I just have one more thing I want to tell you and that is whoever your prescribing doctor is Since you called in I want to tell you my advice and that is to switch to armor throid or nature throid or west throid One of the natural glandulars because it has both T3 and T4 whereas lovoxal is just T4 And then that relies on your liver to do the conversion into the active form which is T3 And it’s a much better alternative for people than taking synthroid or lovoxal 48:46 Okay so armor throid and what were the other two? They’re all the same, they’re a porcine raw glandular, a thyroid glandular So it’s armor throid, nature throid or west throid Thank you You’re very welcome Okay bye bye Have a good night Okay there’s another caller Hello Hi I have a question concerning soy products, what do you think of can pay for many soy products? Do you think it’s as harmful as other soy products? I don’t think it’s as harmful, I think if grains and beans were eaten in a little bit more traditional way They’re a little bit better but for someone who is hypothyroid or has some hypothyroid symptoms My advice is do not eat anything that could possibly stress your thyroid Okay and also I’d like to make a comment that I started eating coconut oil probably about three or four years ago And I lost about 20 pounds after I started eating it so it’s very good for weight loss 49:48 Absolutely, yeah It’s very good for weight loss It’s what they call a thermogenic product so it increases your body’s metabolism and your oxygen consumption It improves the function of your thyroid and your thyroid governs every metabolic process in your body So that involves heat production, muscle activity, sympathetic drive So yeah, that’s what we said in the beginning, the whole coconut thing is essentially a very good saturated fat It supports your thyroid, feeds it and allows you to lose fat while eating fat And in the 1940s when they were experimenting with animals, they found they lost weight I don’t know if you heard that part earlier in the show I did that just about when I turned it on But the thing is is that they didn’t want, the American Soy Association at that time did not want all these imported coconut oils to come in They wanted to sell their soy and corn oil and so they boycotted all these coconut oils And that’s why we haven’t until just recently, say in the last ten years, heard all this research that was done in the 1940s 50:50 For crying out loud, it’s 2008, why haven’t we heard this? Why is it only just coming out in the past five to ten years? Well all I know is I lost weight on it and I’m sure others could too and it also tastes good and I like it So that’s all I have and thanks a lot for the show Thank you for your call Okay, so do you want to carry on? Well we have a couple more minutes here We’ve got six minutes So off today it is nearly impossible to eat at restaurants or buy packaged foods that don’t have soy oil in the ingredients Often labels simply state vegetable oil Dr. Ray Phd Physiologist who has worked with progesterone and related hormones since 1968 I think he’s in his 70s now Says that the sudden surge of polyunsaturated oils into the food chain post-World War II has caused many changes in hormones He writes, their polyunsaturated oils, their best understood effect is the interference with the function of the thyroid gland 51:56 Unsaturated oils block thyroid hormone secretion, its movement in the circulatory system and the response of tissue to the hormone When the thyroid hormone is deficient, the body is generally exposed to increased levels of estrogen And another small point I want to make is sometimes people might eat a perfect thyroid promoting diet Which is very rare because there’s so much corn and soy in our diet and in our meat that we eat or our vegetables But there’s environmental toxins Andrew mentioned earlier High levels of mercury, suppressed thyroid Pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, a lot of these chemicals interfere with estrogen and further suppress the thyroid The thyroid hormone is essential for making the protective hormones progesterone and pregnenolone So these hormones are lowered when anything interferes with the function of the thyroid The thyroid hormone is required for using and eliminating cholesterol So cholesterol is likely to be excessively raised by anything which blocks the thyroid function 53:03 There is a growing body of research concerning soy’s detrimental effect on the thyroid gland Much of this research centers on the phytoestrogens, the phyto-means plant that are found in soy In the 1960s when soy was introduced into infant formulas, it was shown that soy was goitrogenic, cause goiters And the babies started developing goiters. When iodine was supplemented, the incidence of goiturg dramatically reduced However, a retrospective epidemiological study by Fort et al. showed that teenage children with a diagnosis of autoimmune thyroid disease Were significantly more likely to have received soy formula as infants 18 out of 59 children, 31%!w(MISSING)hen compared to their healthy siblings Which was only at 9 out of 76, 12%!o(MISSING)r control group, which was 7 out of 54, 13%!(NOVERB) So it was 31%!o(MISSING)f the children who developed, teenage children who developed autoimmune thyroid disease Had received soy formula as an infant 54:06 When healthy individuals without any previous thyroid disease were fed 30 grams of pickled soybeans per day for one month Ishiizuki et al. reported goiter and elevated individual thyroid-stimulating hormone levels, although still within the normal range In 37 healthy iodine-sufficient adults One month after stopping soybean consumption, individual TSH values decreased to the original levels and goiters were reduced in size And as I stated earlier, 11 ounces, which is a cup and a half of soy milk is enough to suppress someone’s thyroid Traditionally, polyunsaturated oils such as soybean oil have been used for livestock feed because they cause animals to gain weight These oils are made up of what is known as long-chain fatty acids, the kind of fatty acids that promote weight gain In the North Carolina State University’s Extension Swine Husbandry, 1998-2000, departmental report, for example, was a study entitled Effect of Dietary Fat Source, Level and Feeding Interval on Pork Fatty Acid Composition 55:10 Ironically, since the market in its low-fat dogma of recent years is demanding leaner meats, this study showed that one could produce leaner meat And reduce the weight on pigs by reducing their intake of soy oil and instead substituting it with saturated animal fat According to Dr. Ray Pete, the fattening effect of these polyunsaturated oils, primarily soy and corn, is due to the presence of the quote Essential fatty acids, linoleic and linolynic, long-chain fatty acids which have an anti-thyroid effect Dr. Pete says linoleic and linolynic acids, the essential fatty acids, and other polyunsaturated fatty acids, which are now fed to pigs to fatten them In the form of corn and soybeans caused the animal’s fat to be chemically equivalent to the vegetable oil In the late 1940s, 40s chemical toxins were used to suppress the thyroid function of pigs to make them get fatter while consuming less food When that was found to be carcinogenic, it was then found that corn and soybeans had the same anti-thyroid effect, causing the animals to be fattened at low cost 56:16 The animal’s fat becomes chemically similar to the fats in their food, causing it to be equally toxic and equally fattening So there you go. Well, it’s 7.58 so we’re going to begin to wrap it up now, but I think next month we will continue Although there’s not too much left, I think there’s certainly more information that we can find to help make people aware of the changes that are in the winds So you’ve been listening to Ask Your Herb Doctor on KMUD, 91.1 My name’s Andrew Murray My name’s Sarah Johanna Summary, thank you for listening Until the same time, the 3rd Friday from 7-8pm in September, we’ll see you then, take care