Thyroid, Polyunsaturated Fats and Oils

00:00 Well, welcome to this month’s Ask Your Herb Doctor. My name’s Andrew Murray. My name’s Sarah Johanneson Murray. For those of you who perhaps have never listened to our shows which run every third Friday of the month from 7-8pm, we’re both licensed medical herbalists who trend in England and graduated there with a degree in herbal medicine. We run a clinic in Garverville where we consult with clients about a wide range of conditions and 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 suppliers. So you’re listening to Ask Your Herb Doctor on KMUD Garverville 91.1 FM and from about 7.30 until the end of the show at 8 o’clock, you’re all invited to call in with any questions either related or unrelated to this month’s topic. The number here if you live in the area is 9233911 or if you live outside the area, the toll-free number is 1-800-568-3723, that’s KMUD-RAD. We can also be reached toll-free on 1-888-WBM for further questions during normal business hours Monday through Friday. 01:10 So, this month we’re again very pleased and fortunate to welcome Dr. Ray Pete back to this show and we will be examining further some common misconceptions surrounding thyroid treatment and the apparently normal thyroid test in clients with obvious manifestations of thyroid imbalance. We have ourselves seen remarkable progress made with clients with many and varied symptoms that improved dramatically with diet and lifestyle changes that promote thyroid health, revealing a prior lowered thyroid function even in the absence of diagnostic tests that show no obvious problems. So, welcome again to this month’s show, Dr. Pete. Hello, thank you. It’s very kind of you to join us again. Okay. Oh, I think we should. Dr. Pete has over 40 years experience. I want to introduce Dr. Pete’s experience for those of you who haven’t heard Dr. Pete on our radio show last year. But he has over 40 years experience in lecturing, teaching, writing, editing, and nutritional counseling. 02:16 So, we’re very happy to have him join our show tonight. And he also has a PhD in biochemistry and he also teaches on physiology and basically functions as an endocrinologist. Does that sound right, Dr. Pete? Yeah. My PhD is in biology, but my work was all in physiology and biochemistry. So, we wanted to talk about thyroid disease because it seems to be such a chronic epidemic. And we thought we’d just start by introducing what thyroid disease is in case there are listeners that are not aware of what their thyroid is or where it’s located. Dr. Pete, what would you describe low thyroid disease to be or hypothyroidism? It’s basically a slowing of the oxidative metabolism. And that means your biological efficiency falls drastically 03:21 because we rely almost entirely on oxidative metabolism. In emergencies, we can use glycolytic non-oxidative metabolism, but then we have to make up for it by reoxidizing the lactic acid that was produced in the oxygen deprivation or energy over the stressing. And so everything that is a human or mammalian or even a complex organism depends on the thyroid because all cellular activity to be efficient requires oxidative metabolism. So, thyroid, in a sense, is controlling the oxygen to all the cells in our system. Is that correct? And so one of the effects is that our carbon dioxide production is kept at a fairly high rate 04:33 in relation to oxygen consumption. And that keeps our tendency to produce lactic acid very low. So if a person is low thyroid, even at rest they can seem metabolically as if they’re doing stressful activity. They can chronically have elevated lactic acid. Is this something that involves chronic fatigue? People’s muscles are chronically fatigued even though they’re not really even doing any exercises that might seem to be using their muscles besides just walking around? Yes, because when you don’t use oxygen efficiently, you have to make lactic acid to keep the cells alive. The lactic acid then has to be reoxidized in your liver to turn it eventually to carbon dioxide. 05:34 And so just sitting passively for a hypothyroid person can be the same as running at high speed for a healthy person. And about 60 years ago it was very well known that a hypothyroid person has trouble relaxing their muscles and nerves. And so there were publications showing that you can just about invariably diagnose hypothyroidism as a simple thump of the ankle tendon to the gastrocnemius muscle. Which is a calf muscle? Yes, and when you’re kneeling and you thump that, you can see that the relaxation is delayed. That was very well established as a good diagnostic method in the 1930s and 40s. 06:38 The labs and pharmaceutical companies couldn’t sell anything. You can use just a table knife or a wooden hammer handle or anything to thump the tendon. And it just takes about two minutes to do it. And so it’s a very uneconomical business for doctors in the pharmaceutical industry to be able to diagnose the conditions so simply. So is this why the blood test came about, that test the TSH thyroid stimulating hormone? Yeah, for the first 20 years or so doctors were told not to use the Achilles relaxation test or the basal metabolic oxygen consumption test or any of the proven absolute confirmations of hypothyroidism because they had what they called the scientific blood test to prove it. 07:41 And that was called the protein bound iodine test. And that convinced doctors all over the country that were previously 40%!o(MISSING)f the population had shown some evidence of being hypothyroid. The new blood test showed that only 5%!w(MISSING)ere hypothyroid. So for 20 years this test was used convincing the whole medical world that very few people are seriously hypothyroid. And then in the 1960s it turned out that protein bound iodine has essentially nothing to do with thyroid hormone functioning. And what about the TSH that’s used today? Do you think that’s relevant? Yeah, when the protein bound iodine test was thrown out they looked for other tests which conveniently proved to be even more expensive than the protein bound iodine. 08:49 And that finally has settled in on the TSH test as the favored one. And they can measure it very precisely but it just doesn’t clear what it means in many cases because other things can raise it or lower it other than the absence or excess of thyroid hormone. So if someone is low thyroid or is not low thyroid they can have varying levels of this TSH which the doctors are saying is thyroid stimulating hormone but which you’re suggesting and other scientists are suggesting doesn’t really relate specifically to thyroid. That’s true. And it has some bad side effects. It promotes inflammation in itself. So low thyroid people not only lack the metabolic energy but they tend very often to have very high TSH levels and the TSH is causing some tissue damage chronically. 09:58 Wow. Okay, so what do you think is causing low thyroid function in a lot of people in the U.S. today? I think well 70 years ago it sometimes included an iodine deficiency but with the iodination of table salt other factors became far more important. I’ve only seen the iodine deficiency condition a few times in people from South America or the mountains of Mexico and many times it’s a protein deficiency or an excess of eating certain foods that inhibit the thyroid such as raw cabbage or even an excess of any of the cabbage family foods. 11:00 So that would include kale, broccoli, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts. And mustard and watercress and even if they’re cooked if you eat a huge amount of them that sometimes can be enough to make you hypothyroid. Is this anything to do with the sulfur groups? Yeah, it’s a combination of a carbon that contains an oxygen or nitrogen and the sulfur group and those are known medical chemicals that are used to specifically inhibit the thyroid to treat hyperthyroidism. I know in the previous interviews that we’ve done that you’ve very much brought out the polyunsaturated oils as being definite antagonists to thyroid function and in fact downright thyroid destructive. 12:06 Yes, they antagonize the thyroid function at several levels. For example, they inhibit the proteolytic enzyme in the gland itself which are needed to secrete the hormone and they bind to the protein in the bloodstream that transports thyroid preventing the transport to the tissues. And they block several of the active sites in the cell, the points at which thyroid should bind to enliven the cell, the polyunsaturated fats. So they’re affecting thyroid health at the production location, the thyroid gland, the transportation through the bloodstream as well as at the tissue level where the tissues and the cells can pick up the thyroid hormone. Yes, and they act on several other parts of the system including indirectly on the TSH and every other part of the metabolic system. 13:15 So these polyunsaturated fatty acids are found in very high levels are mainly consisting of vegetable oils, corn oil, soy oil, sesame seed oil, safflower, canola, rapeseed and canola are the same and fish, hemp and flaxseed oils. So a lot of these oils that are purported to be good for our health are actually quite thyroid toxic and long term use could lead to conditions that are common in low thyroid as detrimental as cancer. Yeah, and there’s one which isn’t really a fatty acid, but it’s a highly unsaturated molecule, keratin, which is the precursor to vitamin A. It not only blocks the cellular sites that use vitamin A, but as a polyunsaturated molecule, it also blocks the thyroid function every place that the vegetable oils do. 14:20 So this would be basically ingesting lots of cooked carrots, that would be that. Yeah, and cooked pumpkin, anything that had high levels of keratin. Okay, that’s that yellow pigment or the orange pigment. Yeah, some of the studies confused people because they knew that vitamin A was protective against cancer, but they saw that some types of cancer increased with a supplementation of keratin. Right, so it’s that the keratin blocks the receptor so your body can’t use the vitamin A that’s in your diet. And so it sits in the receptor, but it doesn’t stimulate or receptor. It sits somewhere in the cell that doesn’t stimulate the effects of vitamin A, the protective cancer-protecting effects of vitamin A. And vitamin A and thyroid work so closely together biologically that the protein that transports them is a single protein. It’s called transthyretin for retinol and thyroid transport. 15:27 And in the 1930s, one of the ways of confirming that a person had died from hypothyroidism was that the steroid forming tissues turned red because of the accumulated keratin. Because you can’t use vitamin A if you don’t have thyroid, and so the keratin accumulates in the steroid forming tissue and makes them red. Would this be any reason now behind the basis of people with yellow calluses being very apparent on their souls or their palms? Yeah, that’s one of the old ways to diagnose hypothyroidism. I think you’ve told us that before, Dr. Pete. We’re going to pause here for a moment. Okay, well, just you’re listening to ask your doctor on KND 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 related or unrelated to this month’s topic of thyroid disorder, and we’re going to hopefully cover iron and a few other subjects. 16:35 But again, this month we’re very pleased and fortunate to welcome Dr. Raymond Pete back to the show, and we’re going to be continuing to examine some common misconceptions surrounding thyroid treatment. Okay, so Sarah, did you want to carry on with? Yeah, I printed out a long list of symptoms that are common in low thyroid disease. So we’ve been talking about low thyroid disease, which is known as hypothyroidism, and we’ve talked about what it is, what causes it. But I want to mention some symptoms and signs that accompany the disease because so many people seem to be suffering from these symptoms. Okay, well, the list is pretty exhausted. It may seem a little extreme, but pretty much all of these will be apparent in some people. So things like the obvious ones are less stamina than others given that the metabolic rate helps us produce energy and gives us kind of gives us life, less energy than others, a long recovery period after any activity. 17:39 There’s also the inability to fight infection, low grade chronic infections. Cold hands and feet are very kind of symptomatic of low thyroid, and then high, usually high, or rising cholesterol in low thyroid patients does seem to be fairly common. And then things like dry hair, dry skin, hair loss, dry cracking skin. Also, though, the other thing that seems to be contrary to dry skin is that you can have acne on the face, the shoulders, the chest and the back. Dr. B, why would symptoms such as dry skin and dry hair and acne and oily skin both be symptoms of low thyroid? Partly, it’s the close connection between vitamin A and thyroid. The skin needs vitamin A to differentiate properly, and mucus membranes require vitamin A, too, so that in an extreme deficiency, the surface of the eye becomes scaly and like snake skin. 18:57 But the lack of both thyroid and vitamin A can cause lots of skin problems, including plugging the pores and allowing infection to set in because the thyroid doesn’t allow the immune cells to function properly. And thinning of the skin, just because it isn’t growing fast enough, estrogen is contrary to vitamin A’s effect. Progesterone and vitamin A are closely connected, so that when you have enough vitamin A and thyroid, even your skin can produce progesterone and other steroids. And when they’re lacking, then estrogen takes effect and it tends to prematurely harden or keratinize the skin cells. 20:02 They’re called keratinized because they become horny, the juicy cell collapses and becomes just a bit of leathery scale-like material, like makes up horn or hair. That’s accelerated by estrogen and retarded, and the cells are allowed to stay vital and moist longer when there’s enough thyroid, vitamin A and progesterone. All those good things, Sandra, do you want to carry on? I don’t want to bore people too many different things. I know, but there’s quite a lot of things here that I think people… Things like exhaustion, and we mentioned that in the very beginning, physical, mental and emotional exhaustion. It’s easy to work full-time or work hard or feel that other people just seem to have that more go than you do, and not understanding that. Lack of motivation, lack of concentration, broken or peeling fingernails, we’ve mentioned dry skin, tinnitus, ringing in the ears, another fairly common symptom. 21:15 Things like joint pain, fluid retention, almost to the point of congestive heart failure, swollen legs. That makes it difficult to walk or painful. Blood pressure problems seem to be fairly frequent amongst low thyroid people, as do varicose veins. That’s something that many doctors are completely confused about, is that hypothyroidism typically increases the viscosity of the blood and raises the blood pressure. So that a slightly hypothyroid person might have low blood pressure, but a very high percentage of the people with hypertension are simply hypothyroid. And correcting it with a supplement of thyroid, even the point of making them hypothyroid, will lower the blood pressure. Because it just seems so counter-intuitive to what most people would understand as being hyperthyroid. 22:20 Well, it’s contrary to what we were taught in medical school. We were taught high blood pressure is a sign of high thyroid function. Low blood pressure is a sign of low thyroid function. So to hear the opposite and to see that in our own clients is astounding, that when they take a thyroid supplement, their blood pressure comes down. And you would think before this came about, that you think that normally your imagination of thyroid is a stimulating hormone, when actually it really improves your sleep and calms you down and lowers your blood pressure and lowers your resting pulse. From a point of maybe 90 or more of an adrenaline high pulse, it brings it down. I’ve seen two people who chronically had a pulse of around 180 beats per minute. And one of them had it like that for about 20 years. And both of them, within a couple of weeks of taking thyroid, had it down to a normal 90 or 100 beats. 23:23 Wow. I wonder what they thought. So that’s another thing, is a racing pulse. What do you consider to be a healthy, normal thyroid pulse? And what do you consider to be a low thyroid pulse? What are those ranges? Because of course, in medical school, we were taught 70 to 80 beats per minute is normal. If you’re higher than 80 beats per minute, you could have a disease. So what is your opinion on this, Dr. Beat? There have been several studies of people of different ages, for example, high school kids. And the ones who were healthy and got the best grades and had the best attention, had the resting pulse of averaging 85 beats per minute. And when old people on heart pacemakers were given mental exams with the pacemaker set at the usual 70 beats, they had the usual old person’s memory and reasoning ability. 24:24 When they cranked the pacemaker up to 85 per minute, every mental function improved. So there you go. So that’s pretty interesting, because that’s again, we’re taught that high thyroid, excess thyroid, hyperthyroid, is diagnosed by a racing pulse. There is an old doctrine that around the beginning of the 20th century, they called it the rate of living theory that the faster your heart beat, the sooner you would die. And the experiment that defined that and proved it for so many people was to put some cantaloupe seeds in a dish, in a saucer of water, and watch them sprout. The ones that sprouted the soonest and grew the fastest died soonest, but they didn’t put any soil. So they use up all their food, huh? 25:25 And that’s what they were using to support that rate of living theory? Yeah, it’s just an embarrassment for science. It’s like if you gave a person all the thyroid they needed, but no food, naturally they would die quickly. Okay, skinny. I think, God to Pete, there’s a couple of callers on the line, so let’s take the first caller. Okay, you’re on the air? Hello? Hello, is it me? Yes, you’re on the air. There was no sound. Hi, thank you all. I have a couple of related questions. Okay, go ahead. If a person was quite low in thyroid and it wasn’t known for a long time, like more than 20 years, I wonder what kind of damages that could cause. And about 12 minutes in, Dr. Pete talked about tissue damage, and maybe you could tell me what he meant more by that. And then once taking supplementation, when could you expect to be much better? 26:29 I have been getting supplements for 20 years after not having any, and I’m still quite incapacitated. Oh, usually doctors prescribe thyroxin because that isn’t the thyroid hormone. It has to be turned into the active thyroid hormone, which is called triiodothyronine or T3 in the liver to be active. And the thyroid gland secretes a little. But when a doctor prescribes thyroxin, there’s no chance that you’ll be overdosed because as you increase it, one of the first patients I heard about who had a myxodema coma became totally unresponsive from hypothyroidism. She had been mildly hypothyroid for years, and they prescribed 100 micrograms of synthroid, and she became more hypothyroid, and they doubled it. 27:33 And when they reached 500 micrograms, she went into a coma. What about… oh, sorry. That was supplementing more and more thyroxin. But when in the hospital, they gave her an injection of the active hormone T3, she came out of the coma in just a few hours and was completely well after that. You can have a complete, just amazing recovery for many things in just a matter of minutes in some cases. For example, a doctor who had been having agonizing breast pain, especially premenstrually for increasing over the recent years. I visited and she said that that was her main problem. I gave her a 10 microgram tablet of cytomyl. She went in to… said she would see me in an hour when she finished with the patient. 28:36 In 10 minutes, she came out saying, I can’t believe that it stopped. And that’s a very typical thing in less than an hour with just T3. Eye pains, such as menstrual or breast pain, will stop totally. I have taken both of those. And also, now I have the, like, armor. It’s not synthetic. So you’re saying that no matter how much damage over, like, a couple of decades, all of that could be repaired. Yeah, some types of damage, such as osteoporosis, when your thyroid is very low, your one compensation is that your pituitary tends to swell up and overproduce prolactin. And that’s one of the factors in causing breast pain and disturbed salt regulation and so on. 29:37 But prolactin is a major factor in causing loss of bone. And as at menopause, very often prolactin goes up because thyroid has gone down. And the prolactin coincides with extreme loss of bone. And so it takes sometimes a long time of correcting your diet along with thyroid before you restore your bones. But I have seen a couple of people. One had her X-ray bone exams showing tremendous, I think it was 20%!i(MISSING)ncrease in less than a year when she was taking thyroid. Okay, I’m going to go so other people can speak to you. But I don’t have a thyroid, so I don’t know if that makes a much more of a difference. I’m wondering if the question you’re wanting to ask is what would happen to someone’s body? How much damage is there? 30:38 That’s what I was asking, because for 20 years the doctor removed my thyroid, but they never did anything about checking back. So I went for more than 20 years. Without taking any supplementation at all after thyroid is removed. Do you think there’s damage that’s been done in this client, Dr. Reed, that’s irreparable? It just increases your stress and slows your recovery from stress. And so it tends to age you faster than usual, just like working too hard would. But those changes, for example, bone growth, I grew an inch and a half in my 40s when I started taking thyroid. Wow. So it happened over just a period of a few months. And so even lifelong things can be corrected pretty quickly. 31:39 Thanks again. Bye. Okay. Well, let’s see if we have any other callers on the line. I think there’s one or two at least. Okay. You’re on the air? Yes, I am. Okay. Go ahead. Hi. I wanted to ask two questions and I’ll take my answer on the air. Okay. What is, first of all, let me say, I’ve had, I was thyroid toxic in the form. Thyrotoxicosis, or? Yeah. Thyrotoxicosis. Okay. Went into the storm for four months, was treated with I-131. And for the last 30 years, I’ve been taking thyroid. Okay. Okay. Now, here’s my question. Could the doctor please explain the connection between the adrenal, the, the, in the brain, the pituitary and the thyroid gland? It seems to be a miracle round that goes around and around and back and forth. 32:42 Okay. Can you possibly turn your radio down if you haven’t already because we seem to be getting some feedback interference and we can barely hear your question. My radio’s not on. Okay. That’s our, okay. All right. Okay. I think I heard your question. You said basically, you had thyroid toxicosis. You were treated with I-131 and then you were given a thyroid replacement? Right. Okay. And your, your main question was? What is the connection between the adrenal and the stress factor? Okay. The, the pituitary and the thyroid? How do they communicate with each other and just how bad is stress? Okay. There you go. Dr. Pete, did you hear that question? I think most of it. When your thyroid is low, you, because you don’t have the efficiency with oxidative metabolism, you turn a lot of your sugar into lactic acid and then your liver spends more energy converting 33:48 the lactic acid back into sugar. So low blood sugar is constantly a problem in hypothyroidism. And the compensation for that is that first your adrenal medulla secretes a lot of adrenaline to force your liver to give up any sugar it has stored. And when that doesn’t meet, meet your needs for sugar, then the adrenal cortex begins over secreting cortisol to break down protein or muscle tissue to make sugar out of it to keep your energy up. And the falling blood sugar itself and the rising adrenaline, both of those are signals to your brain to increase the stress hormones. 34:52 The ACTH is produced by the pituitary gland, but also other brain and pituitary hormones, including prolactin, increase along with it. And the ACTH is what drives your cortisol up, and the cortisol is what causes the most acute tissue damage, loss of muscle mass, and quick loss of bone structure and so on. Okay, also weight gain, isn’t it? This is low muscle mass in relation to weight. As your ability to burn fat decreases with your falling thyroid, the cortisol eats up your skeletal muscles that burn fat, and so the unburned fat gets laid down in your trunk and neck and face area. 35:55 It’s probably some kind of a defensive reaction to pad your organs when you’re under chronic stress. Right. Right, because muscles burn a lot of energy, and so therefore muscular people can eat a fairly high calorie diet because that energy is being consumed by the muscle, whereas people that have an excess of fat and a lack of muscle tone can very easily get fat on a very small amount of calories. Is that right? Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Well, I don’t know if that answered the… I’m pretty sure it helped to answer the lady’s question, if not answer it completely. And a lot of people who have measured deficiency of adrenal function, that seems to be a medically popular diagnosis is adrenal fatigue or insufficiency. But to get any adrenal function, you need the vitamins, vitamin A especially, and thyroid. 37:02 So many people have been diagnosed as having Addison’s disease simply because their thyroid was so low that they couldn’t produce steroids. The other factor for producing steroids is cholesterol. And so if you have both low cholesterol and low thyroid, then your adrenals aren’t going to be able to make the steroids such as progesterone and prognatolone and cortisol. So really, what some doctors would say, oh, you have adrenal fatigue and that would be maybe diagnosed by a saliva test, really what they need to be looking at is the thyroid function and making sure those people are getting enough vitamin A and that their cholesterol is high enough or they’re getting enough in their diet. Yeah. Do we have any other colons? We don’t. Okay, so let’s carry on with… I wanted to say another thing that I believe this is what you think, Dr. B, is the temperature 38:03 and pulse can be a measurement of one sign of the low thyroid function. So how would you say a temperature is affected with someone who has a low thyroid? What would their waking morning temperature typically be in the range of? Usually around 98 degrees or old temperature. And then after they eat, what would their temperature be? It should pretty quickly pop right up to 98.6, 98.8, and then as they get some muscle activity going during the day, it can even rise above that 99 degrees is good in the afternoon. Okay, so this is a normal function. First thing in the morning, your temperature should be around 98. Okay, now I just want to say of all the clients that I’ve had take their temperatures and pulses about two out of 50 have had, since I’ve been doing this temperature and pulse thing all of last year, about 50 of them have had much lower temperatures in that and only 39:06 two have had what you just described, Dr. B. So can you say most of them, if they had low thyroid symptoms in conjunction with those low temperatures, would be a diagnosis of low thyroid? Yeah, if you look at the whole picture, the Achilles reflex and their symptoms and how many calories they can burn without getting fat and how well they sleep and the activity efficiency to be able to relax instantly after the exertion and to be able to go to sleep quickly, all of those go with the good temperature curve. So it’s something that can be used in conjunction with symptoms. I think we have a caller on the air. Yeah, we do. Go ahead, caller. 40:08 Hi, this is Kevin. Hey, Kevin. Hi, Kevin. Hi, Sarah. Hi. So I had a question about Hashimoto’s disease. I was diagnosed with that and understand that it interferes with the absorption of thyroid and I’m wondering if Dr. P can speak about Hashimoto’s and what, if anything, can be done to alleviate it, cure it? The disease was originally defined as infiltration of white blood cells into the inflamed thyroid gland and since they didn’t necessarily like to cut out a piece of gland to confirm that that’s what was wrong, they started looking at antibodies in your blood and assuming that you would have the infiltration and inflammation of the gland if you find the antibodies circulating 41:12 in the blood, but in fact the anti-thyroid antibodies overlap with many other problems including arthritis and so the antibodies aren’t strictly clearly diagnostic, but they do indicate that something is inflamed and since the thyroid is the basic anti-inflammatory hormone and organ, very often the thyroid is the main problem when you have these antibodies and there have been several studies in which simply supplementing, even with thyroxin for six months or a year, the antibodies will decrease and the whole problem is solved. One thing I’ve heard about is taking low dose naltric zone as a way of helping with 42:14 the condition, have you heard of that? When you’re hypothyroid and produce lactic acid too easily, you tend to accumulate endorphins and endorphins are produced in response to the signal of increased lactic acid to compensate for the stress by acting like morphine equivalents and the endorphins themselves limit your physiological functions in a protective way, sort of like a localized kind of hibernation and so the naloxone or naltrexone will clear those out sometimes in two or three days you can see a person come out of depression or a lethargic state or if there was a study in California 43:17 of demanded people who were given very big doses of naloxone for several days or several weeks and their dementia improved just by blocking the endorphins. And how long does somebody should be on naltrexone with the conditions like Hashimoto’s, is there any problem with long term use? No, but I usually see good results in just two or three days so I think the basic treatment is a good diet and thyroid supplement as needed and then the naloxone or naltrexone is a good thing to try once in a while if it makes you feel better than it probably was breaking up a pattern. Okay, thank you very much. Okay, thank you. Thank you for your call, Kevin. We have two other callers on the line. Go ahead. 44:17 You’re on the app? Thank you for taking my call. My name is Mike and I have a question for the doctor and earlier I heard the show the doctor was listing a number of vegetables and some polyunsaturated oils that had something to do with making something higher and I’m assuming that had to do with the thyroid and my question is it would cod liver oil be placed in with those other oils and I’ll take my question off the air, thank you. The fish oils are long molecules compared to the seed oils and they are also more unstable to oxidative breakdown and the fact that they are long means that they don’t inhibit our enzymes for metabolizing fats as seriously as the seed oils such as canola or cornoil 45:21 do but their instability means that by the time they get in the blood they’re pretty well oxidized and several studies have shown that the fish oils do have an anti-inflammatory effect but only their oxidative breakdown products which include some serious toxins only those are really active anti-inflammatory substances and what they’re doing is poisoning the immune system suppressing immunity so temporarily it’s effective for alleviating symptoms but in the long run it’s not good because the breakdown products include things like acrolean and several of the free radical oxidative damage fractions of the broken down 46:24 fats. Those are both very dangerous toxic substances so not only does it suppress your immune system it also through this immune system suppression it’s also releasing toxic substances. There are really quite a few articles that people don’t get to hear about showing that the fish oils contribute to atherosclerosis and increase the risk of metastatic cancer and are toxic to the brain and so on the commercial promotion of the fish oils they happen to never mention those. I think we’ve got two other callers on the line Dr. Pete so let’s take the next caller. You’re on the air. Hello. Hello you’re on the air. Hi my name is Jenny. Thank you for speaking Dr. Pete. 47:27 I’ve been on Armour Thyroid for some years now and they want to change over, change me and put me on one of the synthetic thyroid and I’m wondering if there are any disadvantages to doing that and also I’m wondering about if the synthetic thyroids I’ve heard they are made with milk products which I can’t tolerate with cow’s milk so I’m wondering about those two things. The company that makes Armour also makes a synthetic called Thyrolar which was based on the original Armour Thyroid product and the FDA has been requiring a lot of formula changes in the natural thyroid so it seems to vary in quality according to the interference by the FDA and the Thyrolar as a synthetic I think is, it has been pretty steady over 48:32 the last 40 or 50 years since it is just a synthetic chemical and it’s very equivalent to the traditional Armour but you could find out on the Armour company’s website Forest Pharmaceuticals whether there’s milk in it. Several other products contain the same synthetic chemicals. I get them from Mexico one is called NoPoTiRal and the other one is Cnoplus and they’re very similar to Armour Thyroid. So when you see your doctor if you want to ask them to, if you want to request that you have a prescription for Thyrolar that’s spelled T-H-Y-R-O-L-A-R Thyrolar, you’re very welcome. Okay I think we might just have time for one more call before we need to wrap up here so you’re on the air? 49:33 Yes, I’m on the air. Okay. This is not related to Thyroid. I actually wanted to ask you about something that has to do with tuberculosis and staph infection. I’ve had somebody at Red Riveral and also at Galbraville Clinic, I’ve been diagnosed with staph. Okay. How do I treat this? Okay, I mean when you say you’ve been diagnosed with staph do you have multiple lesions resembling small balls? Yes, all over my body. Okay. Well. Right. And it started, a cat scratch went up my nose and then it went into my eyes and it went 50:41 all over my body and then my husband caught it too and they had to put a wick into his chest because he abscessed. Wow. Yes, I don’t mean to be personal but is there any kind of drug abuse or any kind of very low immune status amongst either of you? Immune status? Do you normally get coughs and colds more frequently than other people or any kind of infections more easily than other people? Do you have any kind of history of having a weak immune system? I’d say that I get a cold every once in a while because my stepson comes back from CR and he always gets a cold. Okay. All right. I think without going too far into it because we really don’t have the time that I would 51:42 certainly come up with a few suggestions of things to try and then we’ll go over to Dr. Pete and see what Dr. Pete would be thinking about. I know there’s one product and it’s actually manufactured in England. I don’t know if you can get it in America but basically it’s an allicin rich garlic extract. Now Dr. Pete may not like this much, I don’t know because it does contain a lot of sulfur and there’s sulfhydryl groups that we were talking about to begin with that you find in the Brassica family. All right. A thyroid suppressive. So the allicin was used very successfully for staff, for internal staff. So that’s basically one solution. The immune stimulating herbs from an herbal perspective would certainly be useful to improve your tissue’s resistance to the byproducts of the staff infection that cause that boil and that breakdown of that tissue. But Dr. Pete, I’m very interested to hear if you have any comments to make on staff infection and systemic staff infections. Well, I’ll talk to you directly then. 52:42 Yeah. Go ahead and Dr. Pete will talk on the air now. Well, I’ve seen a few cases of chronic infection, some that had gone on for decades, that cleared up with just thyroid or thyroid and nutrition and it’s good to cover the bases. Even some antibiotics, tetracycline for example, happens to have a structure that’s parallel to vitamin K and to the active ingredient of aloe and cascara. And so those three or four molecules have a very beneficial effect on your immune system as well as being slightly suppressive to a variety of bacteria. Doctor, have you ever known somebody who has gone into the VA? 53:46 My husband is a VA clinic and he’s gone and we were worried about that. I have a friend whose doctors insisted that they first were going to amputate his feet and then they decided they would amputate his legs because they said the infection in the bones made it incurable. And since I had read Broda Barnes book and had seen a couple of cases of chronic infections clearing up myelitis and such, I made my old friend take thyroid for a while and the ulcers, he had gangrene into the bones of his feet. Within two weeks the sores had closed and he was putting on his dress shoes and going to lodge and we went through cycles. I think there were three cycles where his doctor made him stop the thyroid. 54:46 The bone infection came back after two or three months and I would see his feet rotting, make him take his thyroid and his feet each time cleared up totally. But the doctor finally said, well, there’s still infection in there so we have to cut them off. Okay, I’m going to have to call it a night there. Thank you very much for all of your calls and Doctor Pete, thank you very much for joining us again on the show. I want to mention that Doctor Pete’s website is very extensive, has lots of articles on it, very much researched scientific information so some of it may seem counter controversial or counter to what we’re told but it’s scientific information that you can all check out. His website is www.Raypeat.org and that’s spelled R-A-Y-P-E-A-T, no it’s .com now, sorry .com Raypeat.com, okay folks so that’s the website, go check it out, thank you very much Doctor 55:47 Pete for joining us. And I just want to say thank you Doctor Pete and for all those listeners who are interested in trying to eat right for their thyroid health. We can be contacted Monday through Friday, normal business hours toll free 888-926-4372 which is WBMURB. Okay, so thank you very much for joining us, thank you for all the callers, thank you for being out there and asking questions. And also Doctor Pete is available for nutritional counseling from his website directly which is www.Raypeat.com, thank you Doctor Pete. Thank you and good night.