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You're listening to Holistic Living, brought to you by EastWest Healing and Performance.
And now, here are your hosts, Josh and Jeanne Rubin.
Hey everyone, this is Josh Rubin from EastWest Healing and Performance.
Welcome to our blog talk radio show today.
Today we're going to have Ray Peat on again. I'll do his little introduction in a little bit.
Once we get him on here, and like always, we're probably going to have a little bit of an issue getting him on, so just hold tight.
We do our radio show every month, once a month.
If you want to learn more about us, check out our YouTube blog, Facebook page.
Go to our website at eastwesthealing.com.
We've got a lot of great information on there. It's free. People love free information.
I can be honest with you, it's only going to be up there for a certain amount of time.
Check it out. Feel free to call us any time for a free consultation.
760-597-9727.
We always want to put that out there.
Once again, we've got Ray Peat on our show.
Of course, you know we've been following him for some time.
We've been really lucky enough to get him on our show.
You can learn more about Ray on his website. It's raypeat.com.
He's got tons of great articles that would probably keep you occupied for the next 100 years,
as well as a lot of great books that you can order.
You can send in a check, and he'll ship those to you.
His books are just fabulous, to be honest with you.
He's got a newsletter that you can sign up for that comes out every quarter, as well as he's an artist.
This guy's got a lot going on.
He's got a PhD in biology from the University of Oregon, and he specializes in physiology.
You can pretty much get that from reading his articles.
If you want to start reading his stuff, my recommendation is read an article, reread it,
but move on because you can start to connect the dots in all his articles.
Sorry about this, guys. Once again, we're having a little bit of an issue getting him on here.
What's the problem?
His phone number.
Hold on a second, guys. I'm sorry about this once again.
We are running into technical difficulties.
He has taught at many schools, including the University of Oregon, Urbana College, Montana State.
You can look at his website.
He's taught at other schools that, unfortunately, I can't pronounce that are in Mexico and things like that.
He started most of his work studying progesterone and hormones back in 1968.
He's got a lot of different papers and dissertations on that that he published in 1972.
Since then, he's been working on practical and theoretical aspects on his view with hormones and the thyroid and things like that.
You know, and the bottom line is the guy is just a genius.
He's got a lot of stuff out there.
He's got a lot of stuff that, unfortunately, I would say most people will poo-poo and say that it's a bunch of baloney,
but I can tell you that from reading his stuff, doing this for the past 12 years, that, honestly, his stuff is cutting edge.
He's probably 80 years ahead of his time, if not more.
So if you really want to be progressive and you're a practitioner, read his stuff.
You can work with people like myself and other people that have studied his stuff for years, or you can call him and email him.
Maybe do consult with him.
I don't know how he works that, but you can definitely ask him some questions today on the radio show.
So enough of me rambling, because that's pretty much what I'm doing.
Let's get them on the show and let's get the show started.
We're going to be talking about the thyroid today.
Probably will not take callers, because if you listen to the show, you can probably come to the conclusion that when I take a caller
and the caller is not there, it kind of aggravates me.
I find it superficient, and unfortunately, I find it a little disrespectful for us.
So I'm not going to take callers.
If there is time permitting at the end, I will, but unfortunately, if you're calling from the 858, I will not take your call.
So enough about that.
So let's get them on the show.
Hey, Ray and Jeannie, are you there?
Oh, they're not there.
Hold on a second.
>> Yeah, we are.
Hey, Josh.
>> Oh, hey, Jeannie.
Hey, Ray, are you on?
>> Yeah, I'm here.
>> Oh, there he is.
How's it going, Ray?
>> Good.
So I just did your gigantic introduction once again, so people got to know who you are and where you've been, you know,
where you've come from and what you have to offer, because we feel you have a lot to offer,
and that's why we want to do the show to, you know, get your stuff out there.
So once again, we really appreciate you taking time out to come on our show and really educate people on your science,
because that's what it really is and how the body works.
So today we're going to be talking about the thyroid, and I know we could talk for probably days on that,
but we want to kind of simplify it for the public.
So me and Jeannie got a list of, you know, outline probably 12 questions/topics that we want to go into
and then some questions from our audience.
So I guess -- do you want to add anything before we start, before we get going on the show?
>> No.
>> Okay.
We're ready to rock.
You know, in a lot of your articles in your science, you get a lot on the thyroid.
So maybe you could enlighten us on why you study the thyroid so much
and why you feel the thyroid hormone is so important or the most important hormone in the body.
>> Okay.
So looking at life in general, plants and funguses and amoebas are the organisms that apparently don't need
or don't want thyroid.
But as soon as you get what we think of as real animal life, that includes corals, cylinderets, echinoderms,
mollusks, crustaceans, insects, just about everything that has an organization to it uses thyroid.
And the basic function of thyroid is to energize cells and to give them enough energy
and sufficient energy and sufficiency to allow them to differentiate so that they don't just concentrate on eating
and growing the way plants and amoebas and fungi and such do.
And some of the old experiments would -- in an aquarium with developing frog eggs,
as soon as the eggs would hatch into tadpoles, they would either add an antithyroid chemical
or a little bit of thyroid hormone to the water.
And if you added the antithyroid chemical, the tadpole would never turn into a frog.
It would just get it to be a huge tadpole.
But if you added thyroid to the aquarium, the tiny hatchling tadpole would turn into a tiny spider-like frog
just about the size of a fly, showing that the thyroid, which energizes the cells so that they use oxygen
and produce a huge amount of energy, this energy allows the cells to realize their function.
But when it comes on too early, they neglect to grow.
So without thyroid, all you have is growth, and that's fine for amoebas and mushrooms and trees and so on.
But in humans, it can lead to things like tumors and malformations and so on.
So the energy production is really the basis of all organized life, and that makes the thyroid, in a sense,
the main gland.
Really, if you take out the pituitary gland, which people have talked about as the master gland,
many different animals, if you remove that and give them thyroid hormone, in some cases,
the animals live 10 times as long as normal, usually about twice as long as normal,
for the lack of the pituitary gland, as long as they had adequate thyroid.
So you're saying what most people say is that thyroid is your master regulator of metabolism.
It's the thing that's going to keep your body in an efficient state or an anti-inflammatory state
where you're producing energy more efficiently than you're expending energy.
Right. The inflammatory state means that something has gone wrong.
It's interesting that doctors very often go entirely on the basis of the amount of pituitary thyroid-stimulating hormone
in diagnosing your thyroid status, but the thyroid-stimulating hormone creates all sorts of inflammatory processes,
and when you have enough actual thyroid hormone to completely shut down your pituitary,
you turn off practically all of these toxic inflammatory processes.
Right. It's interesting because, at least from our standpoint,
there's so many people that are coming to see us in our clinic, and I would say even from teaching all over,
that we're seeing all these people that are being diagnosed with hypothyroid.
What's your take on all these labs that people are doing?
A, what's the validity of these, and what do you recommend when it comes to measuring thyroid function in itself?
In the 1930s, it was standard medical practice to have a little apparatus to allow the person to lie down,
usually with an empty stomach, and to breathe oxygen for two minutes,
and they would measure how much oxygen was used.
And people who had the standard symptoms of low thyroid function would often consume only half the normal amount of oxygen in allotted time,
and that usually went with their hands and feet being cold, and their core body temperature being below normal,
and their heart rate being somewhat slower than normal.
And as they looked at the more biochemical indicators,
they saw that cholesterol was almost invariably high in proportion to the reduced consumption of oxygen and lower body temperature.
So the increasing cholesterol was like a mirror image of the decreasing metabolic rate and thyroid function.
And if you would give a thyroid supplement to someone with excess cholesterol,
it would immediately come down exactly in relation to the increasing oxygen use.
Keratin excess was another identifying feature.
The doctor would look at a person's palm of the hand, looking at the calluses.
A hypothyroid person typically would have cold and pale hands,
but usually with orange areas where the skin was thickened in the calluses.
That's because vitamin A is used directly in proportion to your metabolic rate, protein turnover, and thyroid function.
And if your thyroid is low, you barely use your keratin, hardly convert it to vitamin A.
And so the keratin typically would accumulate enough to show up as orange areas where the skin was thick.
And in the ovary, it was found that the normal corpus luteum, or yellow body where progesterone is made,
in these women who were hypothyroid, the corpus luteum would be dark red because of accumulated beta-keratin.
And that keratin would block the production of progesterone,
causing amenorrhea in the typical hypothyroid woman.
Another good indicator that was developed in the 1930s was the Achilles reflex relaxation speed.
A person kneels on a chair so their toes hang over loosely,
and you thump the Achilles tendon so that the calf muscle twitches.
Sometimes a low thyroid person won't have really any reflex that you can see,
but if they do have a reflex so their toe twitches out,
the hypothyroid person's muscle relaxes so slowly that their foot returns like a door with a pneumatic closer on it,
a little jerky relaxation.
And the electrocardiogram shows the same thing.
The T-wave is called the repolarization wave,
and it's exactly the same thing as in the relaxation of your calf muscle.
In a hypothyroid person, the T-wave is delayed and low, usually flattened out.
And the same thing happens in all of your body processes.
When your brain is tired, the nerves are slow to relax,
and so your sleep will not be as relaxing and restorative as it would be in a high thyroid state.
So just touching upon that, just for a lot of the people that are listening,
and maybe you want to clarify this a little bit deeper,
the slow relaxation of the calf muscle can give you an indication of hypothyroid.
Is it because of low blood sugar?
Is it because of increased serotonin or calcium?
If you could explain a little bit, I guess, more surface-y so people can understand that.
All of those things contribute.
The thyroid allows you to take up oxygen efficiently and oxidize it completely.
And in proportion to the lack of thyroid, when you stimulate a muscle cell or a nerve cell,
it will use its oxygen inefficiently.
It will allow calcium to enter the cell and keep it in an excited state,
and it will tend to produce lactic acid rather than carbon dioxide.
And carbon dioxide produced under the influence of the thyroid is needed to carry the exciting calcium
out of the cells and allow the cell to relax.
So all of those things you mentioned are involved in the delayed relaxation.
So just to reiterate to people, or just I guess to summarize so I understand it too,
so you mentioned, you know, it's almost like everyone says, "You have thyroid problems.
Look at the thyroid."
So you're really saying that high cholesterol is a huge indicator of low thyroid
and that we can actually look at the contraction or the lack of thereof,
relaxation of the calf muscle as another indicator of -- we could say,
I don't want to say thyroid problem, but maybe slower metabolism
or maybe thyroid issue in a sense.
Is there any other things you recommend?
I know you talk a lot about pulse and temperature and things like that,
and I'm sure that's a huge topic, but maybe we can chat a little bit about, you know,
why you look at body temperature and why you look at pulse.
And, you know, everyone else is focusing on TSH and free T4 and free, you know, free T3 and TPO
and all this stuff, and I don't know if you do or don't, but maybe you want to touch on maybe if you don't and why.
Okay.
Well, the idea of free and bound hormones, it's purely a laboratory construction.
And in the case of thyroid, it usually has some relation to symptoms,
but it's a little bit analogous to reading tea leaves because the --
actually, when thyroid hormone is stuck to the albumin protein,
which is the main protein in the blood, it has no trouble at all getting into cells,
taking the thyroid into the mitochondria and the nucleus and so on.
So the free thyroid test does correspond for a variety of indirect reasons to the real available activity of the thyroid,
but it's really just a laboratory construction that should be minimized.
So even touching upon TSH, you know, what are your thoughts on TSH even in regards --
because I know a lot of the different values out there are very different, you know,
and they're always changing a little.
If you could touch upon, you know, if you even would recommend focusing on TSH that much,
and if you do, what would you say some of the values should be?
Yeah.
I don't recommend it as a way to diagnose hypothyroidism, but I do recommend if you're looking at a blood test,
I would recommend having as close to zero TSH as you can get because all of the known effects of TSH are really harmful in some way.
The main reason doctors are giving currently for not wanting to suppress TSH is they think because TSH reduces the turnover indicators of bone,
that this idea developed as a way to sell estrogen.
Estrogen was never shown to increase bone growth in humans, but it did stop the osteoclast function,
so it reduced bone turnover, and so they said this is evidence that estrogen is preventing osteoporosis
because it stops the breakdown of bone, and since TSH also stops the osteoclast and the turnover of bone,
doctors said if we suppress it, that'll cause osteoporosis, but in fact,
the indicators that were used to argue that estrogen was protecting the bones,
they named the protein osteoprotegin, meaning bone-protecting protein,
and for several years they were using that as a way to sell estrogen and other drugs that would increase it,
but pretty soon it turned out that osteoprotegin is closely associated with bone loss, osteoporosis,
osteopenia, and calcification of the soft tissues, and it turns out that thyrotropin, TSH, like estrogen,
increases osteoprotegin, increases the movement of calcium into your arteries and heart and out of the bones,
so the main argument doctors have for keeping your TSH up to not below one is often what they say,
but their very evidence is the opposite of what they think it is.
So it's interesting because a lot of doctors focus so much on TSH,
and you're saying don't focus on TSH in the diagnosis.
That was developed by the actual biological indicators that were developed in the 1930s.
About 40% of the American population showed low metabolic rate associated with symptoms,
which were cured by giving thyroid enough to bring their metabolic rate up,
but in the late 1940s, the drug companies synthesized thyroxine,
and they tested it on 25-year-old male medical students,
and in these healthy young men, they said it worked just like armor thyroid.
It worked just like the thyroid hormone, and on the basis of that almost non-existent evidence
that it was equivalent to the thyroid hormone function, they began selling it,
and they were developing tests to diagnose who needed it,
and they didn't have tests to measure very small amounts of the actual hormone,
so they measured protein-bound iodine,
and it seemed that 95% of the population had enough protein-bound iodine,
and that idea came to be accepted as the normal.
In the 1960s and '70s, the immunoassays were developed
that could actually measure the amount of thyroxine in the blood,
and it turned out that protein-bound iodine didn't have anything to do with thyroid function,
but doctors had learned that 95% of the population were not hypothyroid,
so when they learned to measure thyroid-stimulating hormone,
they applied the measurements to this meaningless doctrine
that only 5% of the population were hypothyroid,
so it's a good test, but the context and history have made it irrelevant to actual diagnosis.
Now, what about -- and I think from reading your stuff, Mike,
and I could be wrong and you could have just said it, I'm just hearing it differently --
there's just too many factors like adrenaline, cortisol, prolactin, estrogen,
all these things that can actually -- that are down-regulating the thyroid,
that are showing you "your hypothyroid."
It's not really the thyroid that's the problem;
it's all these other things based on the stress response or toxins or blood sugar
that are creating the lab result; is that correct?
Yes.
About 10 years ago, I started hearing people telling me that their doctors had diagnosed them
as being both hyperthyroid and hypothyroid at the very same moment.
More and more people were getting this diagnosis,
which really shows that a crisis of confusion had taken over the profession around 10 years ago,
that people on the basis of their blood tests could be both hyper and hypo at the same time,
and this misleading indicator diagnosis led them to diagnose many people
who were suffering hypothyroidism as hyperthyroid without measuring their oxygen consumption,
their body temperature, or looking at most of their symptoms
and how many calories they were burning in a day, looking at these other indicators,
people who were clearly hypothyroid and who would lose their symptoms if they took a thyroid supplement,
they were being diagnosed as hyperthyroid, having either their thyroid gland removed
or being given radioactive iodine to destroy it on the basis of a complete misunderstanding
of even what constitutes hyperthyroidism.
Right.
So I guess based on your approach, the other test, like I kind of mentioned,
is really looking at body temperature.
So maybe if you could -- because I think for a lot of people, this is probably the --
I find it's -- you don't have to pay a lot of money for it.
It's an easy task for the practitioner to get a baseline of your client,
but it's great for the client or just the average Joe that's listening
to really start to become aware of what's going on.
So maybe tell us, like, what does a low body temperature mean or low pulse or high pulse?
And why do you use these as, you know, indicators of a baseline of our metabolism?
Broda Barnes, when he was working as a physician in the '30s, he was a Ph.D. researcher
and he identified much of the physiology of hypothyroidism, but then he became a medical doctor
and he practiced most of his life in Colorado where the weather is very cool even in the summer.
And for his patients, the temperature was a very adequate way of diagnosing,
and he describes the temperature -- waking temperature he thought should be maybe around 97.8,
and then after breakfast it should rise to, during the day, somewhere around 98.6.
And in Eugene, in hot summer weather, I saw the same people who in the winter would have very low oral temperature.
I saw that in the hot, humid summer weather, these hypothyroid people were maintaining a normal core temperature,
and sometimes their hands would be cold even in hot weather, but I saw that a low metabolizing person,
given some environmental support, can manage to keep their temperature pretty close to normal.
And so I saw that their pulse rate, even when their temperature might be 98.5 during the daytime,
often they would have a pulse rate of 45 or 55 or 65, somewhere below optimal.
And that started me thinking about the factors that regulate body temperature,
and I saw some people who had extreme hypothyroidism who would oscillate between extreme depression and extreme mania.
And when they were going into depression, their temperature would be consistently low,
and once they switched over to the manic phase, they would wake up with a pulse rate of maybe 75 or 80,
and a temperature right where Broderbarns wanted it.
And so besides just the average pulse rate and temperature,
I saw that after those people would eat a big breakfast, their temperature would fall.
By 11 o'clock, they would show up a hypothyroid temperature.
And during the night, everyone tends to have more of the stress hormones,
alternating surges of adrenaline and cortisol, for example.
And the people who went past the exhaustion phase of hypothyroidism and reached the manic phase
kept extremely high levels of cortisol and adrenaline and usually other transmitters like serotonin.
And since food reduces stress somewhat, getting your blood sugar up, and daylight also reduces stress,
if you see their temperature and pulse rate fall after a good meal,
that is another thing that reveals behind those indicators that can reveal a low metabolic rate
was just being held up by emergency stimulation from adrenaline and cortisol.
So just to summarize once again for everyone I'm seeing,
what I'm saying is if we don't eat the right foods,
if we're not eating foods that provide our body with the right amount of protein, sugar, carbs, and fat,
or for any reason if our body goes into that sympathetic stress state,
it's going to provide our body with more oxygen and glucose.
So if we don't get that from our foods or downregulant inflammation,
you'll see these specific hormones inhibit how the thyroid works,
you're going to get a lower body temperature.
So even though you think you're eating healthy foods, if your body temperature does go down,
it could be the ratios, but it could actually be the quality of the foods inhibiting how your metabolism should work.
Same thing with the pulse.
I mean you're saying, I want to clarify because a lot of people think the opposite,
that if someone has a low pulse, our society believes that that actually means they're healthy.
I always use the example of like Lance Armstrong, everyone says,
well his resting heart rate is whatever it is, like 40, and everyone thinks that's super healthy.
But you're saying that people with a low resting heart rate,
that means they're actually downregulating their own metabolism because of the foods that they're eating
or the wrong foods they're eating.
Yeah, and it tends to go with fertility problems, hormonal problems, low testosterone, increased estrogen,
a lot of degenerative problems.
Right.
So that's great.
I mean I think that's important for people to understand because it's such an easy tool, you know,
to do at home and during the day to see what's going on.
Let's talk about the hormones a little bit so people get an idea of, okay, we know what a thyroid is.
Let's talk about some of these hormones like T3 and T4
and where most of this -- what is most of this conversion happen in the body?
Because everyone thinks it's the thyroid and maybe you can kind of enlighten us maybe where most of this is happening.
Well, Brode Varnes was one of the first people to notice the importance of the liver in thyroid function.
The Biscons in 1942 to '45 were showing how the liver regulates hormones,
but they were concentrating on estrogen.
And if the liver was lacking thyroid or protein or some vitamins,
the Biscons showed that your estrogen would skyrocket in proportion to the reduced function of the liver.
And there's this antagonism focused on the liver between estrogen and thyroid.
And the thyroid works partly by increasing protein synthesis,
but partly by simply energizing the liver so that it is able to detoxify everything that shouldn't be in the body.
The liver should remove 100% of the estrogen that reaches it in circulation.
So the body should be able to produce estrogen in the ovary, for example,
send it to do its work in the uterus and breast and so on,
but then it should immediately be destroyed by the liver.
And if your thyroid is low, the liver loses the ability to detoxify estrogen
and practically everything else harmful.
And the liver happens to also be the source, as Brita Barnes discovered, of the most active thyroid.
He said it's about two-thirds of the thyroid used by the body is produced in the liver.
And if your liver isn't getting enough sugar, enough glucose, or if it doesn't have enough selenium,
it is unable to convert thyroxine into T3.
If you can completely knock out the liver and your thyroid will excrete about this ratio of three parts of thyroxine
to one part of T3, and so as long as your thyroid is working,
your liver will be getting a little bit of T3 and will be able to keep functioning,
other things being equal.
But if you're under stress, for example, don't have anything to eat for about 24 hours
or are exerting too much energy in proportion to what you're eating,
your liver isn't getting enough glucose to convert the three parts of thyroxine produced in your gland
into the active T3.
And so you will have this drastic decrease in production of the active triiodothyronine, T3,
most of which comes from the liver when it's well fed with sugar.
If the doctor prescribes only T4, it will work fine in anyone who doesn't need it,
such as 25-year-old healthy men, but women, because of their higher estrogen level,
have many times the incidence of thyroid problems and liver problems that men do,
and it's because of the centrality of the liver to the activation of thyroid hormone
and the liver's essentiality for eliminating estrogen that a little problem with either thyroid
or estrogen means that your liver will allow estrogen to increase in the body
as it decreases its production of active thyroid hormone,
and that in turn slows the liver even more so it has a vicious circle.
Did everyone get all that?
Good stuff.
So what you're saying is we need selenium to convert T4 to T3,
and so I'm just kind of summarizing it for myself and for the listeners,
so I can kind of follow along here.
And selenium, I think we need to ask the question, which we'll get to,
is where do we get that from besides, you know, what foods?
We need glucose to make the conversion, and we should talk about that,
because I think that's huge in our society.
When it comes to foods, we should say the right vegetables and things like that.
Most people are staying away from the right types of sugars which could be creating this,
and that's probably going to be a whole show in itself.
But at the same time, from maybe exogenous sources or the body's inability to detox it,
blood sugar issues, excess stress, but the estrogen itself will block the T4 to T3 conversion as well.
But also, I don't want to use the word clog up, but back up the liver,
and it will just keep backing up the liver, which can create the hypodermic-like symptoms.
And once that happens, the estrogen can reach the point at which it starts inhibiting the thyroid gland itself,
the thyroid gland to produce the proper ratio of three parts T4 to one part of T3.
It does that by breaking down the thyroglobulin, a colloidal kind of glob of protein inside the follicles of the gland.
This has to be digested as needed, breaking each protein molecule down
and releasing these free thyroxine and T3 hormones.
And estrogen inhibits the proteolytic enzyme that releases the hormone.
So first it slows down liver function, but then it reaches a point where it will even block the thyroid itself.
And this is where women tend to have a high frequency of goiter thyroid enlargement.
They call it Hashimoto's thyroiditis, but most often it's what they used to call colloid goiter,
where since estrogen stimulates the stress hormones in the brain, increasing thyroid stimulating hormone,
estrogen causes the pituitary to drive the thyroid harder.
Meanwhile, it's blocking the ability of the thyroid gland to secrete it, so it tends to enlarge the thyroid
and then they get diagnosed as having thyroiditis.
Progesterone happens to activate these proteins that allow the thyroid to secrete.
I advise women who have an enlarged thyroid not to take progesterone
until they've taken care of the enlargement of the thyroid,
because progesterone will normalize the protein so fast that sometimes they'll go into a slightly hyperthyroid state for a few weeks.
Now correct me if I'm wrong, you actually talk about it in your book,
because everyone talks about hypothyroidism, we're kind of skipping a beat here,
but you talk about hyperthyroidism, and I know you're against unsaturated fats and things like that,
but when people are hyperthyroid, it's probably the only time, and correct me if I'm wrong,
you recommend people having small amounts of cauliflower juice or cabbage juice
to actually use the estrogen and the excess cortisol to downregulate the thyroid.
Is that true?
Well, yeah, except that's mostly for the person's relationship with their doctor.
Several people have told me that before they had their thyroid destroyed by surgery or radiation,
they said they had a chronic pulse rate of 125 per minute,
but they never felt so good in their life after having the thyroid gland treated.
They were back to feeling their normal bad self,
but people usually feel great when they're in the so-called hyperthyroid state,
and the reason I tell people how to use cabbage juice and such to slow their pulse
is that their doctors become a danger to them,
tending to bully them into having their thyroid gland suppressed.
All right.
So we talked about TSH, T3, T4.
I know a lot of people out there come in with lab values where they have a high T4 reading.
What does that mean, and what are some of the symptoms, and what are most doctors recommending?
What do you recommend?
It very often goes with hypothyroidism because if your liver can't activate it,
if you aren't producing so much estrogen that your gland gets shut off completely,
your gland will go on producing hormone,
and you'll get along in your daily life with a little bit of T3 coming out of your thyroid gland,
but that gradually allows the T4 to accumulate because your liver isn't using it up,
and that tends to slow down even the production of T3 if you get a very high T4 level.
And what originally got me interested in this interaction of T4 and T3
was a patient at the medical school in Portland
who was a slightly hypothyroid woman who was prescribed T4 for a few months.
On one grain of equivalent of T4, 100 micrograms,
she got even more hypothyroid symptoms, and her doctor increased it to 200 micrograms,
and a few months later she was even worse.
So I think he reached 400 or 500 micrograms of T4,
at which point she went into a myxedema coma and was taken to the hospital unconscious,
and they injected T3, pure T3, and she came right out of the coma.
But her symptoms got worse directly in proportion to the increased dose of T4,
and after seeing that extreme example,
I have run across probably 100 women with less extreme effects,
but it isn't rare at all for a woman to get worse symptoms,
noises in their head or electrical sensation in their body or swollen muscles
or any of the thousand symptoms of hypothyroidism as a result of taking too much T4.
Great stuff here.
So let's talk about going back towards hypothyroidism and talking about how, you know,
we know, or I should say I know and maybe people don't,
but things like blood sugar dysregulation, adrenaline, cortisol, pituitary,
all these things can create hypothyroidism, but at the same time,
how does hypothyroidism affect these things such as blood sugar, adrenaline, cortisol,
pituitary, parathyroid, digestion, liver? I mean, how does it really affect our physiology?
When you aren't able to oxidize your sugar all the way to carbon dioxide,
you produce lactic acid very easily.
Even at rest, a person will keep producing lactic acid as if they were under strenuous exercise,
and the lactic acid turns on a lot of inflammatory mediators which have systemic effects on your bone and skin,
hair growth, everything.
Lactic acid itself acts as a toxin, and gradually, if you're experiencing that year after year,
it leads to a tendency to fibrosis and arthritis and so-called connective tissue diseases in general
from an imbalance of the inflammatory mediators, histamine and serotonin especially,
and a tendency of the soft tissues to calcify, so it contributes to hardening of the arteries and heart failure.
So, I don't want to say that it's kind of like an end-all, be-all, but, you know,
from meeting yourself and then chatting with you, it's almost like if we can get people to regulate their blood sugar,
eat the right foods, or regulate their thyroid, it's almost like you can affect so many systems in the body
which can actually help with joint pain, digestive problems, lack of energy, menstrual problems, edema.
I mean, the list just keeps going on and on and on.
Is that true?
I mean, it's almost like we're focusing on one system, but it's like killing two birds with one stone type of thing.
We're focusing on this one system, but we're getting so many other benefits.
Yeah, because the energy production in the proper way is really what shapes everything.
The body is constantly renewing itself moment by moment.
Like overnight, people have measured that there's a 60% turnover of brain substance in one night
just because the brain has a high metabolic rate.
And if you aren't renewing yourself at a high rate, you're allowing errors to accumulate.
And one of the reasons thyroid and other problems get worse over time is that our diets, on average,
contain a significant amount of thyroid-inhibiting substances, especially the polyunsaturated fatty acids.
And the French did a series of studies that really define how that works.
Long ago, people knew that polyunsaturated fats blocked proteolytic enzymes.
And in this French series of studies, they saw that the first effect of too much polyunsaturated fat
is to block the ability of the thyroid gland to secrete the hormone by breaking down the thyroid globulin.
And then if the thyroid manages to secrete it,
the transport of it on proteins in the blood is inhibited in proportion to the unsaturation.
So the fish oil, many five and six unsaturated bonds are the most powerful,
almost total inhibitors of thyroid transport.
But linoleic acid with three double bonds inhibits about 50%,
and linoleic acid with two double bonds inhibits about 30%.
So it's proportional to the number of double bonds, the transport.
And the same thing happens inside the cell.
The responsiveness of the cell to thyroid is inhibited in proportion to the amount of unsaturated fats.
And carotene, even though it's not a fatty acid, is highly unsaturated,
and it has that same effect of interfering with thyroid function just because of this series of unsaturations.
The accumulated unsaturated fats in the body turn on other antithyroid processes,
so it isn't all immediate and direct, but they make you more susceptible to turning on prostaglandins,
which promote inflammation and increase the tendency to produce lactic acid.
And they interfere, apart from the thyroid, they interfere with the mitochondrial oxidative energy production.
So after you're 30 or 40 or so,
almost everyone has accumulated enough of the PUFA to cause a whole range of metabolic problems.
So while we're kind of on the topic of, I don't want to go too much into PUFAs,
but let's go and chat about just estrogen levels and how, we talked about how they block hypothyroidism,
but how hypothyroidism can raise those.
And I think it's a huge concern because most, I shouldn't say most,
but a lot of women are being prescribed these medications, number one.
Most people are having issues with detoxifying their body of these estrogens, number two.
And having this unopposed estrogen in the body can lead to specific dysfunctions or diseases like clotting and edema,
fibrosis, cysts and all these things.
There are very close interactions between the increased estrogen, and you mentioned clotting,
estrogen increases serotonin dominance.
And serotonin and estrogen both promote and are promoted by the polyunsaturated fats and the low thyroid condition.
So it forms sort of a polar cluster with the energizing thyroid and the good nutrients, sugar, minerals, protein,
and so on, maintaining and energizing the structure.
The emergency stress things, the prostaglandins, serotonin, histamine, cortisol,
and estrogen are all on the short-term defensive side, but when they become dominant,
they deform the proper regulatory systems.
All right.
There's a special problem with the basis for diagnosing estrogen deficiency because in the absence of anti-estrogen substances
such as progesterone, the estrogen in the blood can go to a very low level because the estrogen is staying inside cells.
Progesterone knocks it out of cells, inactivates it, but causes it to appear in the bloodstream on its way out the kidneys.
So in the absence of progesterone, doctors will measure a low level of serum estrogen and prescribe it,
even though they're under that situation, it's very likely that their tissues, breast and uterus in particular,
are actually overloaded with a chronic supply of estrogen.
I wish I could summarize that.
I'm at a loss on that one, so I'm going to move on.
I highly recommend everyone relistening to these shows over and over again because it's an hour plus of information
that you could literally sit down and probably take 50 pages of notes on.
I want to talk about CO2, carbon dioxide, in the thyroid because I know you're a fan of CO2,
but from reading your stuff, you talk about the thyroid and you talk about carbon dioxide.
How do thyroid hormones raise CO2 and what are the advantages of having higher CO2 levels?
That means that you're oxidizing things completely.
If you oxidize fats completely, you get rid of any toxic effect from the free fatty acids,
but you also stop producing lactic acid and stop that whole route of inflammatory harmful processes
of free fatty acids and lactic acid.
But the carbon dioxide itself binds to all of our proteins, for example, hemoglobin in a diabetic.
They look at the amount of sugar or fragments attached to proteins such as hemoglobin,
but it's actually the breakdown of fatty acids which contribute about 95% of these glycated proteins
that accumulate in diabetes and aging.
But when we're producing enough carbon dioxide, it not only protects the cell by removing the excitatory calcium,
but it also binds to all of our proteins that have a lysine group or another amine group exposed.
And these amines are where the breakdown products, free radical fatty acids
and so-called glycation end products, it's where they bind.
And so carbon dioxide binds protectively to proteins, keeping them in the native youthful state,
which happens to be the things called hormone receptors are in a different state
when there's adequate carbon dioxide.
Insulin is in a different state.
Growth hormone, all of our peptide hormones can bind carbon dioxide becoming a different substance.
So all of our hormone system is deranged if we just hyperventilate and blow out too much carbon dioxide
or if we're hypothyroid, basically we're in effect hyperventilating even at rest,
producing lactic acid instead of carbon dioxide.
So what you're saying is the more, I should say, the more CO2 we're essentially producing,
it allows our thyroid to work more efficiently, which is basically those levels are downregulating lactic acid
and serotonin and all these inflammatory markers.
Is that correct?
Yes, the CO2 is in itself anti-inflammatory.
A lot of hospitals are now recognizing that they were killing patients by giving them pure oxygen
or even hyperventilating them, and they can prevent most of the hospital-induced lung failure
and a lot of brain damage by giving them carbon dioxide or just hypoventilating them
so they accumulate their own carbon dioxide to a protective anti-inflammatory degree.
That's awesome stuff, man.
It's fascinating.
Let's just skip it a little.
What do you -- I know this is -- you really can't give 100 recommendations,
but let's talk about people that don't even have a thyroid.
What are your recommendations?
Because I got some questions about people, you know, I don't even have a thyroid.
What do I do?
Obviously nutrition is key and all those things,
but do you recommend them being on specific thyroid hormones?
If you lived in a non-industrial culture,
they would not have to remove the thyroid when they sell a chicken or a fish,
and they would throw the beef and pork thyroid glands into a sausage mixture,
and so you would get dietary thyroid if you were eating the way people did even in America until 1940
when the FDA came in, Agriculture Department, banned the sale of thyroid in food.
But looking at the natural diet,
everyone would be getting the equivalent of half a grain of glandular thyroid extract
just as part of their ordinary animal food diet.
Shrimps, oysters, crabs, everything like that that doesn't have a vertebrate type of thyroid gland,
eating those you get some thyroid in your diet.
Milk contains some thyroid.
So babies who otherwise would be cretins, as long as they're breastfed,
they don't need a thyroid gland.
They get enough thyroid in their mother's milk.
After Three Mile Island, a lot of babies were born without thyroid glands,
but no one noticed the breastfed babies didn't have a thyroid until they were weaned,
and then they became hypothyroid drastically.
So eating the right foods, avoiding the polyunsaturated fats
and the hard-to-digest types of starch in a lot of beans, for example,
have starches that we can't digest.
Those irritate the intestine, create endotoxin that interferes with thyroid function.
So avoiding the toxic foods and emphasizing sweet fruits, milk, cheese, eggs, shellfish,
and among the meat, beef and lamb, if you include the fibrous parts
that industrial societies tend to throw away, like in Mexico,
you get the skin in various preparations.
In Asia, they eat the tendons, ears, snouts, tails, and everything that are very rich in gelatin,
which is a prothyroid protein because it doesn't contain the precursors to serotonin.
Besides certain meats that you just mentioned and the more gelatinous type of proteins
and the dairy, the non-inflammatory proteins,
what are some other nutritional recommendations that you can maybe just enlighten us on
in regards to the prothyroid or pro-liver, even to help the liver to detox?
So it's not always the thyroid.
If you get the liver to work properly, we'll get that benefit for the thyroid.
So what are some nutrition therapies that you recommend?
Years ago, I read that women had a drastic hormone change when they were taking antibiotics,
and I realized that was probably because of the hormonal effect of intestinal toxins.
So I had some women measure their blood, estrogen, progesterone, and cortisol,
and then eat a carrot a day for a few days and remeasure it.
The carrot has antibiotics, and the fiber can't be digested in the toxins by bacteria
because of these antibiotics.
And after just a few days of a daily carrot,
their hormones were back in a very favorable state, reducing estrogen and cortisol, increasing progesterone and thyroid.
So you're saying that carrots--I mean, most people are going, "This is kind of silly,"
but you're saying that a carrot, because of what the carrot is made up of,
actually helps the GI system in the liver to absorb toxins and to actually detoxify them.
So you're saying people that maybe have thyroid issues or liver detox issues,
that using carrots as a therapeutic tool will benefit them.
Yes, a raw carrot, not a cooked carrot, because the carotene is an antithyroid factor.
But you can even rinse off some of the carotene after you grate it or shred it.
But a lot of hypothyroid people control their symptoms for years just by having a daily raw carrot
because of that cleansing effect on the intestine and the liver.
What other foods are going to enhance that T4-T3 conversion?
I mean, I love which--we're hoping for it to do a whole show on sugar because it's a huge topic.
But you talk about glucose, you talk about selenium.
What are some other foods that people should be eating to actually help bring the thyroid to an efficient level
but also help with that conversion, that T4-T3 conversion?
The very sweet, low-fiber foods, filtered orange juice,
well-strained orange juice from sweet oranges is the safest that I know of.
And there are several tropical fruits, probably 100 tropical fruits that are very safe and helpful.
One very odd food, if you have a centrifugal juicer, you can juice a raw potato
and then cook the juice like you would scramble an egg and get rid of the starch.
But you have a very safe, high-quality protein and mineral formulation.
In practice, good orange juice and a few other tropical fruits are very good for your liver and thyroid balance.
Now, why do you say really good, strained orange juice?
Because I know you've mentioned that before.
Any of the indigestible fibers, the commercial orange juices,
they've learned enzymically to create new chemical substances that they sell as pulp.
It's a type of fiber that can't be digested and can't be removed from the juice once they've chemically altered it.
So you want to avoid the commercial pulpy so-called orange juices.
And if you make it yourself, just running it through a strainer is enough so that you don't feed the bacteria with these fibers that we can't digest.
I see. I see.
Of the proteins, of the common convenient proteins, cheese and eggs and shellfish are very high-quality
and associated with prothyroid other nutrients, calcium, for example.
Same with your saturated fats.
I know you're a huge advocate of coconut oil because it's prothyroid.
It helps the liver store glycogen and it helps the body detox from unsaturated fats.
But someone actually had a question about coconut oil.
It is prothyroid, and I know you have a science and a philosophy on what type of coconut oil you recommend and why.
Maybe you can answer that for one of the listeners.
Well, I've had many very delicious, crude, simple, homemade coconut oils that are great for ice cream and puddings and such.
A lot of people are allergic to those aromatic, tasty things, and so just for safety, it's good to have it completely filtered so that there is no free fatty acid breakdown product
and none of the solid particulate coconut matter or even the aromatic stuff, just for safety to avoid allergies.
But any of the purely saturated fats are anti-inflammatory.
So it's just that the coconut oil with the short chains, it's very quickly metabolized.
And so for things like losing weight, weightlifters have caught on to using the fractionated coconut oil to get even the shorter average chain length
because it intensely increases the metabolic rate to have those shorter saturated fats, and they're anti-inflammatory, anti-histamine, and so on.
Right.
Any other nutritional recommendations?
Most of the listeners probably, some practitioners, some lay people, any other nutritional recommendations that you can toss in there in regards to proteins, fats, or carbs, lethargy, thyroid?
Yeah, people are probably going to continue eating some vegetables just because they like them, but I encourage them to cook them to death.
Cook them as much as like 40 minutes of boiling makes them a lot safer.
There were experiments in the 1940s with rats.
They fed a selection of vegetables, either canned vegetables or the same vegetables raw, and the ones eating the canned vegetables thrived and were well nourished.
Even rats couldn't live on raw vegetables.
Right.
Awesome stuff, and I'm sure there's more in regards to the thyroid, but of course, I mean, we could spend hours talking about this, the hormonal implications, the liver, digestion, you know, what foods to eat,
but of course, we can't take up the next six days of your life as much as I'd love to.
Is there anything else you'd love to -- I mean, we're taking some callers now that we have a little bit of time left.
If you call from 858, I'm not going to answer the phone, but you're welcome to call in, anyone, 347-426-3546.
If you've got a question, when you call in, tell me the area code you're calling from and ask Ray the question,
but is there anything else you want to add, Ray, in regards to thyroid that you think is important for the listeners to know?
Nothing occurs to me.
Nothing comes to you?
Yeah.
All right.
Well, I'm kind of out of all my questions.
I had a slew of questions, and like I said, I don't want to take up tons of your time because we really appreciate you coming on and educating us on this,
so we just want to say thanks, me and Jeannie, all the listeners, we're getting great e-mails and people just loving the shows and your information,
so we really appreciate it.
Okay.
Thanks.
So I want to wish you a happy day, and I guess we'll chat again.
Okay.
Very good.
Bye.
Have a good one.
Bye.
All right, guys, there you go.
That's about an hour and 15 minutes of Ray P talking about the thyroid, nutritional therapies.
Just one thing I want to say is, you know, if you're a practitioner,
really understand the why behind what you're doing before you start telling people to do this or that or take this or eat a carrot.
I think that's important because I think people can easily, especially now,
well, all this information is all over the web and all over Facebook and YouTube.
I think people are, you know, and once again, this is my story, people just jumping on board
and starting to, you know, eat gelatin and eat salt,
and I think we're going to run into the same problem as every other system out there,
and it's going to give the philosophy and the science a bad name.
So I really recommend you reading his articles, reading his books, listening to the shows, taking notes.
I mean, I have to read his article ten times.
I mean, they're just so deep and you can get so much information.
So I highly recommend it.
And at the same time, don't just think you can eat a carrot and you're going to help your thyroid.
And, you know, there's so much more to his philosophy than just eating a carrot or eating gelatin.
So really understand that.
So if you're the layperson and you're listening to the show and you just started eating a carrot,
and you're like, "Well, this is going to help my thyroid,"
just realize there's many pieces to the healing puzzle and there's many facets to this program,
and we had them for an hour and 15 minutes.
So just realize there's a lot more to it than that.
And if you've got questions, give us a call.
Like I said, give us a call and set up a consult with us,
and we can kind of helpfully educate you and let you know how we work.
We do have a caller, but unfortunately he's gone.
I'll maybe take the caller.
Let's see what we've got going on here.
Hello, 63, you're on the air, but Ray's gone, unfortunately.
Did you have a question?
No.
That's why I don't take callers.
Anyway, guys, I really appreciate everyone tuning in.
Share the show.
I'll be emailing Ray to set up the April show.
Not sure what we're going to be talking about next, but really appreciate everyone's support.
And if you're confused, guess what?
That means you're actually learning.