Thyroid/Progesterone and Diet

00:00 Good afternoon, and welcome to your own health and fitness talk show. I’m health integration specialist, Laina Berman, and I’m here live with you every Tuesday at noon, talking to you about healthcare and fitness trends and taking your phone calls. This week’s show is an interview with biologist, researcher, and medical activist Raymond Pete. He’s the true pioneer of the use of supplemental natural progesterone, among other things. And as usual, I will open up the phone lines at 1230 at 510-848-4425 for your participation. I want to remind people if you’d like to get a tape of today’s show or you need to get hold of me after the show, you can call my office during normal business hours, and that number is 707-769-1458. 01:00 I don’t actually want to do much of an editorial today because I have a lot to discuss with Dr. Pete and I want to get right into the show, but I’d like to give you some information about why the show is so important to me and why I chose Dr. Pete to come on there with us today. It was roughly 15 years ago I went to a lecture, a small talk actually at UCSF, and Ray Pete was there speaking. He spoke a bit about, among other things, some research that had been done on the topic of helplessness in using animals. It was unfortunate. I mean, animal rights people would not like this research, but they had done an experiment that proved that when animals were made to feel helpless, they lost the will to live. He was discussing this in the context of how it affects patients who are caught in a chronic 02:01 illness cycle and are in a cycle of being treated constantly and being dependent on treatment. He also spoke about the use of natural progesterone and thyroid medication as things that excite the cells and help the body to pull out of an inhibitory state. His work is very controversial, although some of the things, many of the things, most of the things that he said that I heard 15 years ago now are considered sort of the new wave of information in somewhat alternative health, although even in mainstream health, some of the swings that we’ve made from polyunsaturated oils to recognizing the use of saturated fats for cooking and various things. And certainly the use of progesterone, natural progesterone and thyroid medication and the problem that people are having with thyroid. So I have chosen to do a show with him and I want you to understand that you may find a lot of what he has to say confusing and controversial, but I want you to maintain an 03:05 open mind, as I do with him at all times, and consider what he has to say and try it on for yourself. Because with all of the shows that I do, I want you to think for yourself, but it’s a rare opportunity to have Dr. Pete available to us, and I think that he’s a very important researcher and I think you ought to listen carefully to what he has to say. In ways of an introduction, Raymond Pete has a doctorate in biology from University of Oregon with a specialization in physiology. His books include Mind and Tissue, Progesterone in Orthomolecular Medicine, Nutrition for Women and Generative Energy. He’s taught at the University of Oregon, Urbana College, Montana State University, National College of Naturopathic Medicine, Universidad de Veracruzana, and the Universidad Autonoma del Estado de Mexico. He founded a Blake College, which is an international university. Now Dr. Pete, in addition, does independent research, continues to do it. 04:08 Thank goodness for all of us. And private endocrine and nutritional counseling. Some of you have just been introduced to Dr. Pete because he’s mentioned in Dr. John Lee’s book, What Your Doctor May Not Know About Metapause, as Dr. Lee’s inspiration for his research on natural progesterone. So without any further delay, I’d like to welcome you to the show. Are you there, Ray? Yeah, hi. Hi. Thanks so much for taking the time. I thought that was a good context you created talking about the helplessness thing, because since Dr. Lee’s book came out, I’ve been hearing from people who say, I just want progesterone for my bones or whatever, and I think the real meaning of any of these natural supplements or substances is that they participate in everything. Their physiology and ecology are tied together in the system, and these things are important 05:13 because they’re sort of central links in this ecological, physiological system. But even insight, the perception of power or helplessness can make a tremendous difference in how these hormones work, and when people think of them as products or drugs, they are almost certain to misuse them in some way. Well, the reason I brought up the research on helplessness is because, essentially, hearing the lecture that you gave let me out of a cage, and I had a completely different view of my health after that, and it had a profound effect on me. I think it’s a good segue to talk about what you talk about when you talk about an inhibitory state, which is the same as what you just started to say, so that I want you to talk about the fact that we’re not just talking about progesterone, we’re talking about the way, for instance, our modern diet has suppressed thyroid function and the way 06:14 that all of these systems work together. The idea of the inhibitory state comes largely from the Pavlovian tradition, and Pavlov saw three basic biological states, one in which you’re so well rested and prepared that you could respond to challenges without being stressed, and that was high inhibition, readiness, and the low state of being inhibited is sort of protection against overstimulation, and in between is the range of stress, and energy is needed to put us up into the readiness state where we’re relaxed and able to cope without experiencing the stress reaction, and we think of cortisol and the glucocorticoids as the central stress handling hormones, but the 07:22 brain is set up such that ACTH, which turns on the adrenal hormones such as cortisol, ACTH is produced in response to a substance which is only produced when we’re deficient in pregnenolone and thyroid, the precursor materials, and so that when you’re in that replenished state with enough pregnenolone, you don’t even resort to the stress reaction. That’s the latest biological meaning of the high state of inhibition or readiness. So to make it accessible to people who are listening, many of us have been, as we often like to say, running on adrenaline instead of something more sustaining, and there’s a lot of adrenal exhaustion in people with autoimmune diseases and whatnot, so part of what happens 08:23 is there’s a wheel, and somewhere along the line you have to be able to stick a stick in the wheel to make it stop. What is the stick? What’s the first stick? Adequate protein and sodium are very crucial for the average American. Adequate high quality protein is needed before your liver can regulate your blood sugar and all of the hormones, and without that you tend to waste your minerals, and sodium is a key mineral, and so people who are on low protein and low sodium diets are doing exactly what puts them into the stress situation. And as I understand, there are foods that you believe suppress thyroid function, which is another key to this, yes? These low sodium and low thyroid are sort of basic things to think about, but there’s 09:26 a whole layer of American foods, and they’re worldwide poisons. You can see belts of thyroid disease and tuberculosis, for example, wherever people eat too much cabbage or too many beans and lentils. These foods are the classical, traditional thyroid inhibitors, but chemically it’s the essential fatty acid, so-called the unsaturated fats, that are becoming very important to Americans and thyroid and progesterone function. The reason both of us are laughing is because we’ve had no end of conversations about essential fatty acids because I don’t know how I feel about this. I’m rather alarmed by what Raymond is saying, but I’m confused because when you go to, at least what I’ve seen in biochemical and nutrition textbooks, they say that the premise I think 10:31 that Ray is talking about is that saturated fat will turn into essential fat, but my understanding is that saturated oil can’t turn into long chain omega-3s, and that although Paleolithic meat had it in it because the animals are eating leafy greens, since we’re now eating corn fed meat, we’re not going to get it outside of- Omega-3 and Omega-6 are the things that people are currently conscious of because of a vast marketing campaign that has been going on for 40 years, but when we aren’t given these things which inhibit these external unsaturated fats, inhibit our own enzyme system, and when we are not saturated with these enzyme inhibitors, our own cells produce omega-9 unsaturated fatty acids. Coconut oil and olive oil are very similar to what the baby produces when 11:38 it’s not- when it’s relatively insulated, and if you take cells and grow them in cultures, they grow wonderfully in a completely unsaturated oil-free culture medium, showing that human cells, whether in the developing fetus or in the laboratory dish, do a fine job of producing unsaturated fats and in fact have more cellular vitality than when they are exposed to these environmental oils. Okay, well just again to make it accessible, what you’re really saying is to stay away from vegetable oils, correct? Yeah, for example, the degree of unsaturation, linoleic with three double bonds or linoleic acid with two double bonds, in proportion to the number of double bonds, they poison the thyroid function at every known level. The synthesis, the transport, and the response 12:46 in two or three different ways inside the cells are strongly poisoned by the three unsaturated groups and significantly inhibited by the two double bonds of linoleic acid. I told you guys this would be going against everything else you’ve been hearing, and truly it is. We’re going to run out of time, and one of the things I want to make sure we go over is that I think what we’ve just said is that eating polyunsaturated oils is thyroid inhibitory, not eating enough protein, also inhibits thyroid function, and don’t you also believe that grains do the same thing? Well, the whole grains contain a variety of toxins that are put there to protect the next generation of the plants. The plants put their worst poisons in their seeds, and the next level of toxicity in their leaves to prevent bugs and grazers from killing them. 13:53 Fruits and roots are where the vegetable matter is least toxic, but the unsaturated oils in the seeds are part of the plant’s defense against being eaten and digested. When we start to talk about being careful what you eat because it may inhibit your thyroid function, the reason we’re saying that is because even people who are testing normal for thyroid function, but have cold hands and have low normal temperatures and maybe are just slightly low in thyroid function, often also are estrogen dominant, and this includes some men. As your thyroid goes down, your estrogen comes up. It’s a very neat connection, which is because your liver needs both protein and thyroid to get rid of estrogen, and when your liver function decreases, your estrogen automatically piles up. Just a quick ID for the show. This is your own health and fitness. I’m a health integration 14:53 specialist, Laney Berman, and I’m on the phone with a biologist and I would say, I’d like to call you a medical activist, Raymond Peat, who is a rare guest and a very important guest, and we’re talking about the relationship between a diet and the various hormones and steroids that exist in our bodies, including thyroid and progesterone. We’ll open up the phone lines maybe at 12.30. I may actually extend the interview a little bit. Let’s see how we do. What happens when you’re throwing off the estrogen balance in the body, and again to remind people, this is not just women, this is men, and particularly because we’re living in an environment with a lot of Xenoestrogens and foods that have estrogen like soy, this can happen in men as well. This leaves us susceptible. Am I right to autoimmune dysfunction? Yeah. There are several good books available on the role of estrogen in autoimmune diseases. 15:54 It’s very central to autoimmune degenerative diseases. In our hamster lab many years ago, some of the researchers saw that estrogen first causes over-development of the adrenal cortex in the animals, and as they increase the dose, it reached the point that it killed the adrenal cells. In essence, it’s a stress hormone, Han-Sel-Yi, in the 1940s, described it as the shock hormone. It imitates everything of shock and stress. Because it’s this sort of line of thinking, I think, the end reading. I was going to ask you about where you’re looking, what research you’ve been looking at that brings up this stuff about polyunsaturated oils, because in many of our conversations you’ve said this research is very old about the carcinogenic, the potential carcinogenic effect of polyunsaturates. Yeah, the oldest study that I know of was 1927 in Germany, in which they showed that 16:58 fat-free diet in rats caused them to be essentially free of spontaneous cancer. In the last several years, researchers have demonstrated that as you increase the amount of unsaturated oil in the diet, there’s almost a straight line associated increase of the development of cancer. Yeah, and so saturated fat apparently doesn’t do this in your estimation? No, and saturated fat is, for many years, it’s known to be pro-immunity. Yeah, of course, there’s all this stuff about heart disease that everybody’s getting excited about though, and people do, well, go ahead. The Broda Barnes books on heart disease are probably the best introduction to this, even though the chute family started in the 1930s showing how estrogen promotes blood clots, 17:58 but Broda Barnes’ work shows that low thyroid, which of course is caused by too much unsaturated fats, is the main cause for degenerative circulatory disease, and the research of just the last few years is showing that, in fact, unsaturated fats are highly atherogenic. The free radical reaction, which is developed in thyroid deficient animals, causes the blood vessels to be the first site of attack as these unsaturated fats are either eaten or drawn out of the fat storage tissues. They are exposed to oxygen in the bloodstream, produce free radicals, and attack the lining of the blood vessels. Just to, again, to break this down for people, what we’re talking about is a real hunter-gatherer diet. That’s what we’re talking about, is eating a very strict hunter-gatherer diet 19:02 that is probably 40%!p(MISSING)rotein and includes probably some cooked vegetables, well-cooked and tubers, potatoes, and fruit. But let’s go back to progesterone, because you’re really quite famous for this now, and talk about the link and how progesterone works to help with this, again, to put a stick in the wheel. Okay, the reason cholesterol is high in low thyroid people, and this was neatly established in the 1930s, that they took high cholesterol to be diagnostic of low thyroid, because you can demonstrate such a neat up and down relationship. For example, a month ago I saw two people who wanted to pass a health test in a few days, lower their cholesterol 200 points in about three or four days, just by adjusting their thyroid. Thyroid is what makes you regulate 20:11 your cholesterol, but it does it largely by turning cholesterol into steroids, starting with pregnenolone and progesterone being one of the major products, so that if you have adequate thyroid and cholesterol, and vitamin A, your cholesterol is going to be turned efficiently into progesterone, and these are the hormones that prevent the stress reaction that involves cortisone and adrenaline. Okay, well that’s a big if, because for many of us, even those of us who, I mean as we’ve talked about before, there are many people who already have autoimmune disease, and maybe you’re supplementing with thyroid now, so part of this has to do with supplementation of thyroid and progesterone, because this sort of mechanism of getting well again after the damage has been done is a slow one, no? And the unsaturated fats also poison the, for example, ovaries and brain cells directly. 21:17 I just hate it when you talk this way. It makes me nuts. Go ahead. There are other things such as iron overload or unsaturated fat excess or vitamin E deficiencies that poison the progesterone producing cells, but the basic thing is having enough cholesterol, vitamin A and thyroid to produce these protective hormones. Okay, so some people are starting to take extra supplemental thyroid, again, I’m looking at trying to stop the wheel, and people are introducing natural progesterone as a supplement to help the absorption of the thyroid and to lower, you know, to contest the estrogen. Am I okay? Yeah, progesterone facilitates function of the thyroid gland, and that is a potential side effect of taking progesterone, because everyone who’s low in progesterone is going to have some kind of thyroid malfunction, because the thyroid is blocked in its function 22:20 by estrogen and activated by progesterone. So if it has been blocked and has a store of hormone, when you take progesterone, sometimes it starts the thyroid working too fast as it unloads this bulk. Okay, so then we’ve got people who are getting older. Okay, first we’ve got people who maybe are even really young that are still having trouble with the thyroid being inhibited and the autoimmune diseases and they’re taking progesterone, and this is again, men can take this as well, no? Then we start to get people who are getting middle aged and things start to change, and that’s when I think you like people to consider, if they’re ill, or maybe not only ill, to consider supplementing with pregnanolone. And I think I told you I asked Michael Colgan, who is a sports nutrition specialist about pregnanolone. He went, oh 23:22 no, it makes cortisol, and people who are exercising will make cortisol, and that won’t be good. So tell everybody about that. The one hormonal effect that has been seen consistently, and it’s the only thing that shows up in when you study animals or people who are given pregnanolone, the only hormonal consequence is that if their cortisone is elevated, pregnanolone brings it down to normal. That’s because the elevation of cortisol is connected through mechanisms in the brain circuitry. High cortisol is a symptom of a pregnanolone deficiency, and once you get your cortisone down by having enough pregnanolone, then any amount of pregnanolone you take has no hormonal action whatsoever. But you need to be saturated, otherwise you are going to 24:26 resort to cortisone, and cortisone is the basic thing that ages the skin, the brain cells, the bones. Every cell is aged faster under the influence of cortisone. And then pregnanolone usually advise people after 50 to do. Incidentally, just to let you know, I am going to go long on this interview. What I’ll do is I’ll still break at 12.30 for about 30 seconds. And you guys who are listening who want to call in, please try to maybe write to me a question sound because we’ll probably have to move quickly through the calls. And then when we come back from break, I’m going to go ahead with the interview for maybe another 10 minutes because there’s several things I want to sort of go through with Ray before I open up the phone lines. So start listing your questions down so we can move through them quickly. Pregnanolone after 50, now we’ve got the vitamin companies are pushing DHEA. So why don’t you explain how that fits in? Okay, pregnanolone turns into either progesterone or DHEA. And DHEA happens to be close to 25:30 testosterone and estrogen. It’s in the sex hormone pathway. And progesterone happens to be in the adrenal pathway. It’s the main protection. It’s a very powerful protection against all of the adrenal hormones so that you don’t even need your adrenal glands. Han Selje demonstrated that the adrenals can be removed and the animal is happy and lives its full lifespan if given progesterone. So progesterone is necessary to make the adrenal hormones, but it’s the basic protection against an excess of them. So these two pathways are both kept supplied by pregnanolone. And you know, I’m not, I’m telling, especially women to sort of stay clear of DHEA because I think that that’s the wrong step in the pathway. Yeah, I knew a middle aged man who was taking DHEA and had his liver was expanding so large 26:34 I had him get his estrogen measured and his estrogen was high for a young woman and a few days after he stopped the DHEA his estrogen level was down to normal, but his liver now a year later is still like a watermelon. And in rat studies, DHEA is highly carcinogenic to the liver. It stimulates first enlargement of the liver and sometimes shrinkage of the thymus because of its overflow into the thymolytic sex hormones estrogen and testosterone, but it is chronically a great risk of liver cancer. So the way to encourage production of it would be after 50 or so people who want to can supplement with pregnanolone instead. Yeah, and if you have adequate cholesterol, I think of people as being lucky if they 27:35 have a cholesterol of 250 because that means all they have to do is take thyroid until they have brought their cholesterol down to about 170 or so. And at that point the abundance of cholesterol is a great benefit because it makes them able to produce pregnanolone and progesterone and DHEA. That makes a lot of sense actually. I’m going to break in a moment here, but when we come back what I want to ask you about is men and progesterone. Also I want to make something clear to people. We’re talking about natural progesterone, not progestins, not pharmaceutical altered hormones that are sold by pharmaceutical companies and patented that are changed. We’re talking about natural progesterone that is synthesized still from natural sources but not changed, not altered. And we’ll talk about some sources of that when we get back. So let me take a brief musical break. When we come back I’m going to continue the interview 28:36 for another 10 minutes or so. At about 12.40 I’ll open up the phone lines. This is your own health and fitness talk show. I’m Laina Berman on the phone with Dr. Raymond Pete. We’ll be right back. Thank you. Welcome back. Welcome back. 29:59 This is your own health and fitness talk show. I’m Laina Berman, health integration specialist. I’m on the phone with Dr. Raymond Pete, a biologist and researcher. I’m holding off on opening the phone lines for another 10 minutes because we have an awful lot to talk about. At about 12.40 I’ll open them up. Raymond, we were talking about pregnant alone and I’d like to move to progesterone, natural progesterone in its use for men and also you discovered that it’s good for the relief of migraine headaches. Yeah. It’s, Han Steli discovered all of the basic properties of progesterone. I think his technicians reported that they had killed all of his rats in one experiment with progesterone and he said he couldn’t believe that and he fished the dead rats out of the garbage and found that they were just profoundly anesthetized and it turns out that when healthy animals are in their last day or two of pregnancy people have put them on electrified floors 31:03 and they don’t even notice that they’re being shocked because the progesterone that’s naturally present for childbirth is putting them in a literally anesthetized state even though they’re apparently happy and moving around but… Yeah, don’t try this at home people. Most of the progesterone that has been researched in humans, the maximum doses they give injecting 6,000 milligrams for example, made people drowsy but never put them into an actual anesthetic unconsciousness but that’s because the solvents drop crystals of progesterone when you inject it or if you take the powder it doesn’t dissolve in ordinary oils but if you take a dissolved in vitamin E so it actually gets into the blood stream, the progesterone has this rising 32:04 series of effects which at the peak is a highly protected but anesthetized condition. Short of that state it protects against harmful stimuli. For example, some of the amino acids are called excitotoxic amino acids and the basic protection against these which are normal brain transmitters but they happen to excite brain cells to death. The brain’s normal protection against cell death produced by these ordinary transmitters is progesterone and to some extent pregnantilone does the same thing. They are the only two hormones that work with the other transmitter called GABA which puts the brain in a protected resting state and prevents the stress damage. Okay, so what we’ve done a segue here instead of talking about men and progesterone what 33:08 we’ve talked about is that it’s not possible really to overdose on progesterone although one of the questions that came up for me is why can’t you become progesterone dominant? Well on the way up the scale towards protecting everything it’s also protective against salt imbalance and imbalance of the sex steroids and that means that it protects your thymus and immune system against destruction by the stress hormones or the sex hormones. So it’s extremely important in the sense of being protective but it also neutralizes the male hormones and so this is at a very low level in men it begins to neutralize the testosterone and so a man wants to be conscious that there is this deadly rising protective function and if they don’t want to be protected against having whiskers and other typically male traits 34:14 they don’t want to take more than just a very few milligrams a day, two or three milligrams a day is about enough to offer general protection without neutralizing them sexually. Oh I didn’t think it had any feminizing effect. No it isn’t. Well feminizing in the sense of not being either estrogen affected or testosterone effect. Oh that’s interesting because I thought it did, I thought when women took progesterone that it does increase their testosterone levels. No. Well why does the libido come back then and women were having it? Well because the estrogen as a shock hormone causes protective loss of libido at some point and by stopping that shock reaction the libido comes back and men can still function even with their testosterone highly neutralized so they feel like they’ve just come out of a cold shower but the brain still knows how to make everything function. 35:18 This would be nasty though if the woman is taking progesterone and the man is taking too much it could get really ugly. Well it doesn’t really prevent potency. Oh well just interest I would think after a cold shower but it sounds like taking a very small amount of progesterone for men will be protection against maybe something that we loosely call andropause or male metapause and prostatitis and prostate disease. Yes it has been used largely in Europe to shrink enlarged prostates and I’ve seen it happen at a very moderate dose that doesn’t even affect their sexuality it’ll shrink an enlarged prostate. Okay a couple of quick things I think what we’re saying so what you’re saying about the headaches is it has an aesthetic effect. Yeah and it stops the vascular problems that are involved in the blind spots of migraine. I in two of my worst migraines ever I found that in a minute and a half the headache totally 36:21 resolved and in women it is less likely to have such a quick massive effect because women are likely to have a much higher estrogen level. Estrogen causes nerve sensitivities which can culminate in epilepsy but migraine is a lower grade of this estrogen poisoning and the effect on the vascular system of progesterone is in the direction of digitalis it’s considered to be the body’s own heart and circulation regulatory substance which is affected by digitalis and this means that it tones up for example varicose veins or bulging veins on the backs of your hands are an easy way to see a progesterone deficiency but that’s what happens in a migraine the bulging veins impair circulation. Okay very quickly do you completely disapprove of ever supplementing with estrogen if women 37:24 have vaginal atrophy and stuff like that? Yeah because of the side effects there must be a lot of other hormones that people could research without going right to the most dangerous shock hormone estrogen. So your sense is that if women are having those even with progesterone supplementation? Yes I’ve found that vitamin A in progesterone and even DHEA very often it seems to be the missing factor. Okay now you’re confusing people. So you’re saying after metapause when women are experiencing maybe some specific symptoms intervaginally that rather than use estrogen that in that situation maybe DHEA is appropriate what about testosterone? Sure people have been researching all of those and all of them seem to affect at least some of the women and so I think it’s better to check them out in the order of safety like with pregnenolone, thyroid, progesterone first and then try as your last resort try the one 38:31 that tends to kill you sooner. That makes sense so thyroid and pregnenolone first that makes sense. You had some success treating Graves disease with pregnenolone I mean they’re irradiating people’s thyroids for Graves. If there’s published stuff using what I consider mild doses of pregnenolone all of their people the eyes receded and in my few experiences the eyes just sort of were sucked back into the head it’s such a dramatic process that you have to see what it can do to deformed arthritic joints or emphysema in which there’s almost no oxygen getting through the lungs or in the state of Graves disease in which there’s a gelatinous material behind the eyeball. The valves of the heart can get the same gelatinous deposit which is historically it’s thought 39:31 of as a low thyroid product at glycoprotein but pregnenolone has the most dramatic almost instantaneous effect like in an hour you can see results. What I want people to do is to make sure you’ve got a pencil and paper because I want Ray to give out his PO box number and his address I’m sorry his PO box number and if you’d like to Ray also your phone number in a second because you actually make an oil which is a vitamin E oil with progesterone which is much stronger than the creams that are available on the market and I think it’s a very effective way of supplementing for progesterone and it’s easily gotten by ordering it from you by mail including all of your books which are self published and available by ordering them from you by mail but you know what you never send a protocol with your progesterone oil so I’m getting no end to phone calls. People should read the book and become their own expert because like I said at the beginning it’s always individual and progesterone is just one of the central factors in a whole 40:39 physiological ecological problem and usually you can fix the problem with diet and if not just diet then thyroid and I think of progesterone just as one of the first aids in repairing the problem but not the answer. Okay so the book being progesterone in molecular medicine but given that people should use their body and their understanding to help to treat themselves how much progesterone is in say an eighth of a teaspoon of your oil? Fifty milligrams but you can’t think in terms of what doctors often talk about because that’s enough to make some people a little bit drunk. That’s three times the normal day’s dose. Okay so maybe a sixteenth of a teaspoon is a better starting dose and how much vitamin E is in that dose? Well the salvent is vitamin E is ninety percent of the quantity and so if you have twenty five milligrams of substance it’s going to 41:44 be about two hundred units of vitamin E. Great I’m so glad to know this now you have no idea how many phone calls I have. Alright your PO box and your phone number. PO box five seven six four. Five seven six four. Eugene Oregon nine seven four oh five. Okay and do you want to give out your phone number? No. Okay so if people want to do a consultation with you? Yeah they can write to the post office box. PO box fifty seven sixty four Eugene Oregon nine seven four oh five and you also have a newsletter which is twenty four dollars for twelve issues a year and you can I assume send people information on how much each book costs and yeah okay. I also have a list of the books and the PO box at the front desk of KPFA so people after the show if you get confused can call five ten eight four eight six seven six seven to get some of the information we just gave out you know 42:48 the PO box. Alright I am going to open up the phone lines at long last for those of you have been waiting patiently. This is your own health and fitness talk show I’m a health integration specialist Laina Berman and I’ve been on the phone for the last forty five minutes it’s been very luxurious with Raymond Pete PhD a biologist and researcher we’re going to open up the phone lines now at five ten eight four eight four four two five again five ten eight four eight four four two five please remember to turn your radio down before we pick you up and let’s move to our first caller. Caller you’re on the air with your own health and fitness. Um yeah I was curious about how much progesterone you need to take to treat migraine headaches because I have been getting them and I do think they’re hormonally related. Like I said the problem is to balance the estrogen and it’s hard to tell how much estrogen a woman has to balance and so a dose that would not touch a headache in one person might make the other one so drunk they couldn’t walk for several 43:50 hours so I would say not to try more than fifty milligrams at a dose but then repeat it every fifteen minutes until the headache is gone and the efficient way to prevent them is to take thyroid or optimize your own thyroid production so that your estrogen is controlled to a reasonable degree and then it takes little or no progesterone because the estrogen is able to be controlled. Okay caller thank you. Um you know you’ve also mentioned Broder Barnes books but they are in fact out of print am I right? Yeah I think so. Okay so maybe libraries Broder Barnes, B-R-O-D-E-R, B-A-R-N-E-S, B-R-O-D-A, B-A-R-N-E-S, Broder Barnes. Maybe in the library. Okay let’s move to another caller. Caller you’re on the air with K-P-F-A. 44:53 Ah yes um I was diagnosed with Hashimoto’s disease. Along with everybody else in the world. A month ago with an astronomically high level of thyroid antibodies I have no symptoms which can clearly be traced to it and I’ve now reached a dose of synthroid which balances out my blood test but there’s no change in the way that I feel. There’s a lot of history involved here but in the practical point that I’ve seen is that for example any tissue which is injured like they have experimentally twisted a piece of cartilage and found that just that small amount of disruption causes it to raise antibodies from its own body and so any tissue which is under stress is going to have antibodies as part of a cleanup process so don’t worry about the diagnosis or the antibodies because everyone who corrects their 45:58 thyroid function that I’ve seen has corrected their antibody level after about a year of good functioning but the real problem is that in the 1940s it was known that almost half of Americans were hypothyroid and got over their symptoms whether it was diabetes or heart disease or infections when they were given adequate thyroid but a drug company came out with the test for protein-bound iodine in the blood and they found that 95%!o(MISSING)f the population had enough of that and so were not hypothyroid and that indoctrinated the whole country to believe that only 5%!o(MISSING)f the population is really hypothyroid but in the 60s it turned out that that test was complete nonsense it didn’t measure anything of significance but what stuck was the doctrine that 95%!o(MISSING)f the 46:58 people are not hypothyroid and the synthroid type thyroxin was tested in the 1940s on young male medical students who were healthy and they said oh it works just like thyroid but the fact is that it was not tested on women and women because of the high estrogen that is exaggerated by low thyroid women who are low thyroid have almost a complete inability to respond to thyroxin because it has to be activated by the liver and over and over I see women who get more and more hypothyroid as they take more and more thyroxin and sometimes this happens in men sometimes men can respond because their livers are not as poisoned by estrogen that’s I’m sorry to do 47:58 this Ray but you know I actually know a lot of people who taking a combination of medications including some synthroid have done really well so I don’t know sometimes it works but it’s utterly unscientific that may be so actually that may be so but then there’s that quality of the body is a laboratory well it’s better than nothing for sure but it very often goes the wrong direction caller thank you for your call I guess we should move oh you know you know let me ask you something if people were to experiment with losing a lot of people are supplementing with essential fats like primrose oil and flaxseed oil and everything because it makes them feel better when I asked you about that initially you said because it has an inhibitory effect on the immune system and so you get less inflamed because of that how would you stop taking something like that if it’s making you feel better fish oils are the ones that are more effective anti-inflammatory patients but there’s a generalized anti-immune function such that they used to sell emotions for intravenous 49:00 use of vegetable oils as feeding for cancer patients but since they’ve made the patients die faster then they discovered that it was destroying their immune systems now they use the very same emotions for organ transplant patients just because it does suppress immunity okay so basically maybe up the fish oils get rid of the other stuff is a transitional thing possibly anyway let’s let’s move to some more callers call you you’re on the air with KPFA do you have a question hello yes I’ve had chronic fatigue syndrome for 15 years do you have any information that might help me um yeah very often it starts with either thyroid or beans in the diet or yeah beans are a very common dietary factor they contain antigens that make make them a more complex toxin that cause the liver and the intestine and the thyroid to malfunction and you can break the 50:09 cycle sometimes just with diet but usually thyroid is an important thing to consider okay hunter-gathered diet I think I’ve talked about it in newsletters one called the bean syndrome which involves muscle soreness as well as chronic fatigue several people have written about it in the past but can people get back issues of your newsletters I don’t like to mention oh okay because it takes a long time to find the back issues what about nutrition for women your book does it talk about it there um no I think the progesterone book is the the one people should start with okay caller thank you for your call thank you let’s move to another caller you’re on the air yeah I wasn’t listening to the painting of the show so I don’t know what are you spoke about this but when you’re talking about treating low thyroid how do you treat it oh boy I don’t know if we can give you a short answer we’ve got a lot of people waiting to call in it depends on where you’re 51:12 starting from sometimes four ounces of orange juice every hour through the day for several days is all it takes to activate the thyroid sometimes it takes adding eggs or milk to the diet depending on what the limiting factor is in your thyroid problem sometimes one dose of progesterone can break a person out of the cycle sometimes dropping out vegetable oils or beans or nuts or seeds is all it takes yeah switching to a higher protein diet with without those items in it and low grain too the grain is irritating as well yeah okay okay caller thank you let’s move on caller you there go I’m we’re having some hello yeah are you there oh yeah great okay hello can you hear hello yes please go ahead do you have have you done any research on the connection between high estrogen 52:16 levels and fibroid tumors or and obesity of course sure that was well documented by 1950 Alexander Lipschut and his group showed that the very smallest incredibly small dose of estrogen that he used if it was allowed to act continuously without interruption by pregnant loaner progesterone or thyroid was first produced fibromas in the uterus then the breast then the intestine then the fibromas tended to progress eventually the cancer of every organ he was one of the people who documented the natural history of estrogen-induced cancers and fibromas are just an early influence of estrogen primarily in the uterus and breast but ultimately in all connective tissues and other 53:17 types of cell what can you do about it thyroid is the basic thing I’ve had people get into a slightly hyper thyroid state taking a good balanced thyroid supplement and month by month they have documented that the thyroid alone is able to shrink the uterine fibroid really without using progesterone yeah the progesterone was tested that does work but partly it works through the thyroid and the essential thing is to take enough thyroid to get your estrogen way down even below normal for a while what do you get you have to go to doctor yeah you do and that’s going to be an interesting argument I don’t even want to hear that argument caller thank you for your call good luck thank you I actually have heard of people just changing in my experience with clients that I’ve had just changing their diet and getting rid of the grains getting the protein out getting rid of the beans getting rid of the soy and getting them on some supplemental progesterone has worked that’s ultimately the best thing but if they’re in a hurry to have a baby or something 54:19 they can speed it up to get some black market thyroid all right let’s take just one or two more quick calls caller you’re on the air um hi I was just wondering I missed the very beginning of the show and what what in what relation are you talking about the thyroid right now well you know what we’re not going to be able to go back okay it’s way too but you can order a tape of the show and if you take my number down at the end okay well then I’ve got a question okay I eat a very a diet very high in beans and grains and I’ve been experiencing um lots of fatigue right that’s what we’ve been talking about thyroid symptoms my thyroid has been kind of I’ve been noticing it which is unusual Ray did you pay this guy a few weeks ago there was an article in the newspaper about China having 25 million cretins and 100 million hypothyroid people at least and uh just a couple days after that article someone said but but you say soy is poisonous because it’s estrogenic and antithyroid what about all the asians and I said yeah it’s proven that it causes hypothyroidism 55:25 caller I I’ve made it my mission since I’ve been on the radio to get people to look at this problem it’s not that I have some kind of of moral thing about vegetarian diets I’ve just found that they’re not entirely healthy for everyone yeah I’m not I’m not entirely vegetarian I do eat meat you know occasionally well you can experiment with dropping the beans uh-huh and pulling back on the vegetable oils and certainly not cooking with vegetable oils and eating more potatoes and stuff yeah don’t do that ordinary potatoes especially if they’re fried in coconut oil are often fantastically therapeutic for people with a dietary problem that’s a long story but potatoes have an extremely high quality protein what do you think of protein supplements you know what we’re not gonna have we’re gonna have to I’ll let Ray answer you real quick we’re gonna have time if they’re generally produced under oxidative conditions that damage the protein seriously so uh you can better to skip it you can get much better protein much cheaper from natural milk and the eggs or potatoes 56:30 we’re gonna have to stop I don’t want to stop but we have to stop Ray Pete we’ve given out a p.o box for him it’s at the front desk of KPFA if people need it you can call 8486767 Ray thank you so much we’re gonna have to have you back if you’re willing to do it okay thanks again okay thank you bye bye for now bye I’m Lena Berman and I want to thank you for listening if you need more information or want a cassette copy of this or any other in the series your own health and fitness you can call my information number 24 hours a day at 707-874-2772 for a list of other available shows information about guests and news about the nonprofit and the benefits of membership and to listen to the show free online go to the website yourownhealthandfitness.org your own health and fitness is a joint production of your own health and fitness and KPFA FM the engineer for your own health and fitness is Vinnie Beachham remember being informed not only protects your health it protects your 57:33 freedom