Hi everyone, I'm Gary Null. Nice to have you with us today talking about health
and nutrition issues. We're going to continue with our series on alternative
healing. We're going to look at your thyroid gland to begin with. Now you're
going to learn more about that thyroid gland and the process of the thyroid
when it's not functioning properly and how that may be contributing to a whole
series of illnesses. Illnesses that the normal process of medical examination
would miss altogether. We're also going to show you the thyroid gland and aging.
So that coming up right after the opening new segments. Recently people
have been looking, more people than ever have been looking actually, for how to
regain a sense of health and using alternative therapies. Well one of the
therapies is the whole area of phytochemicals or using plants. Now in
the plant family there are a lot of conditions that are very specific for
different conditions. For example, plants for irritable bowel syndrome. Now
irritable bowel is, well it's not a very pleasant condition to have and people
end up with abdominal cramps and they can end up with constipation or diarrhea.
And so you look around and say what works that's non-toxic? Well one of the
things that they've been using in Europe for a long time is peppermint oil from
Mintha Pipertea and it's used on a regular basis to aid in digestion and as
a carminative. And we don't know all about its beneficial effects but we do
know that it's shown to act as an antispasmodic to intestinal muscle. Also
we found that it also has some strong anti-antimutagenic activity. Also when
looking at some of the things that make a difference, intermittent claudication.
Now intermittent claudication is painful calves and sometimes it's so painful
that just sitting is uncomfortable, walking for any distance is
uncomfortable. So what do you do? Well with intermittent claudication some
people have tried chelation therapy and they have claimed that chelation therapy
has really made a difference. It's helped them. However in a recent study that was
published in a prestigious journal and reported and I believe it was the, what
was it? I saw it originally in Clinical Pearls and it was circulation, September
1994 and it was by Dr. André Van Riech and associate. And what they showed is
they took two groups of people. Both groups had pretty similar intermittent
claudication and they were over the age of 45. And they were able to determine
the intermittent claudication by peripheral atherosclerotic vascular
disease arteriography. Meaning they measured it and what they gave them was
500 ml infusion of 3,000 milligrams of EDTA plus some magnesium chloride. And
the other group got 500 milligrams infusion of saline and inert solution.
And then they watched them and then after a period of time, about three
months, they remeasured and they found that the chelation group had a 60%
improvement in walking distance. But the control group, the placebo group, had a
59% improvement. Therefore they said that there was no difference between
chelation group and the placebo group. Well there's a problem. I got the actual
study and here's what it says. That the usual response is 30%. Well to go from
the usual 30% response with drugs and other therapies to 60% is a 100%
improvement. So right off the bat there's a big improvement. But I could see
having a 60% improvement in the chelation group. But how could you also
have a 60% improvement in the placebo group? That makes no sense.
But then ah, they tell us. They tell us right in the heart of the article that
both groups received oral supplements daily. Now the oral supplements they
received on a daily basis and a fairly good amount actually have oral vitamin
chelating properties. Now what this tells me is that it was not so much the EDTA
that made the improvement but rather the oral chelators like vitamin C and zinc
and selenium. These are oral chelators. So if you want to know why you've had
clearer arteries and better circulation and less intermittent claudication, it's
because of the proper supplementation. Now of course they didn't mention this
in the article. They didn't mention that the average response is 30% and hence
the placebo and the control group or the active group got 100% improvement. And
they didn't tell people in the conclusions that gee whiz it was
probably the vitamin supplements that made a difference in the placebo group. A
faulty study, misinterpreted, and one that slants a bias against chelation
therapy. Unfortunately we still haven't seen the really ideal study to validate
chelation in the Orthodox mind. I'm Gary Naul and I'd like to welcome you to our
program. As you may know if you listen with any frequency we talk about health
issues. In this segment we're going to talk about something that affects
everyone from children to senior citizens, then to the overweight and that
is the thyroid gland. To share insights on the thyroid gland I've invited Dr. Ray
Peat. Dr. Peat has a background in biology from the University of Oregon
and he is specialized in hormone related oxidative changes. He's taught
biochemistry, endocrinology, and nutrition at several universities. And he's
authored several very good books including Nutrition for Women,
Progesterone in Orthomolecular Medicine, and Generative Energy in Mind and Tissue.
So let's go to our conference call and welcome him on board. Nice to have you
with us Dr. Peat. Thanks. Could I comment on intermittent
claudication and how it relates to thyroid? Sure. It's very common for
pre-puberty people to have leg pains that they call groin pains and those people
are typically a little bit low thyroid and the textbooks used to show little
kids with horribly swollen calf muscles. They looked like they were muscle
bound but it was the accumulation of mucopolysaccharides swelling the muscle
up causing great pain cramping and so on. And in old people who are hypothyroid
something very similar happens but it includes degeneration of the blood
vessels to some extent. And you mentioned the chelation plus magnesium. When you
take thyroid it energizes your cells to make ATP and it happens that ATP binds
magnesium so you don't really take up magnesium into the cell very efficiently
unless you have adequate thyroid. And when you are low in
thyroid you tend to lose magnesium during stress and chronically that leads
to a crampy inefficient condition where you waste oxygen producing your energy
but you can't retain it because of the lack of magnesium. So in many situations
magnesium imitates thyroid function but the two together really are simply
energizing the tissue and you can go from crampy legs or many old people get
jumpy legs a funny sensation that makes their legs kick when they try to go to
sleep. You can go from that hyper activity of the legs to many other
conditions including heart rhythm problems, insomnia, muscle pains in
general, many states that are considered degenerative diseases but they are
simply low thyroid low magnesium states that prevent efficient energy production.
Good. Dr. Peat why don't we begin by you telling us about how we have a
correlation between an underactive or low thyroid function in the aging
process and then maybe include information in lay language about
insomnia and arthritis and cholesterol all these things that we don't
assume are associated with the thyroid gland but indeed are. Okay when a person
is under stress the thyroid adaptively goes down it's like a hibernation
process. That's one adaptation that works if an animal is starving for
example in the winter if its metabolism slows down its heart rate slows and its
body temperature drops it can last through the winter without eating up its
fat too fast or if it's in a famine situation or a migration if the thyroid
slows down during starvation or prolonged activity as in migrating you
can go farther on a given amount of stored energy. When people go on extreme
diets trying to lose weight they lose maybe a pound or so the first day but
then they stop losing weight if they're eating much less than a thousand
calories or on a total fast they will lose nothing but muscle after the first
day and that's because after about 12 to 24 hours your liver has depleted its
sugar stores and at that point it starts turning your muscles and other tissues
to sugar and that would destroy your body very quickly so the thyroid adapts
down under stress and so the worse the stress is or the more prolonged the
lower your thyroid gets and that means that with aging you tend to have
accumulated so many stresses that your thyroid gets chronically depressed and
unless you give it the right signals to bring it back it just stays there and
gets lower and lower. When your thyroid is low you don't store sugar efficiently
and so you are very efficient about burning up your body slowly but you
aren't efficient at repairing it and all you're doing is decaying at a slower
rate when your thyroid is down so what you want to do is stop the decay process
and begin the repair process. People have looked at patients in hospitals and they
have found that the ones with the same diseases but with a low body temperature
are the ones who are less likely to survive and go home and it's because the
low thyroid which is an adaptation to many stresses and sicknesses at a
certain point the low thyroid stops being protective and starts interfering
with the healing process and when you have been in that low thyroid state too
long you are living on adrenaline and cortisone which are destroying all of
your essential tissues. I've seen many low thyroid people who in a day produced
30 or 40 times more adrenaline than normal and adrenaline tends to lead
immediately to cortisone production depending on how efficient your adrenals
are and this high adrenaline state creates a terrible amount of confusion
among doctors and patients both because as an adaptation it makes people feel
like they're on speed sometimes to have this adaptive extreme overproduction of
adrenaline and at night it's normal for adrenaline and cortisone to rise even in
young people because it's a sort of a fasting state and they're not eating and
so they maintain these sugar producing hormones during the night but in old age
these are higher in general because of the low thyroid so that if your thyroid
is low or you're old and have low thyroid as a more or less natural thing
nighttime with the rising adrenaline and cortisone becomes more and more
stressful and insomnia becomes more and more common it's very usual for people
in their 70s and 80s to wake up after five or six hours of sleep and just get
up early because they know they aren't going to be able to get back to sleep
but this also happens in very young people who have low thyroid and when it
gets to an extreme it can lead to a hyperactive state with loss of attention
or extreme irritability and depression and a lot of strange symptoms that if
you can get your cortisone and adrenaline under control by normalizing
your thyroid and blood sugar these strange symptoms of high tension just
disappear one of the common stereotypes about low thyroid people is that they
are just lethargic and sluggish but a very large group of low thyroid people
become hyperactive because of this very high adrenaline compensating for the low
blood sugar Broda Barnes who was one of the best thyroid researchers in the 30s
and 40s wrote a book called hypoglycemia it's your liver not your mind because he
found that almost all hypoglycemics were low thyroid and that the liver simply
wasn't able to store enough glycogen to keep their blood sugar steady the high
cholesterol that develops in most people as they age is another thing that in the
30s and 40s many researchers recognized that high thyroid high cholesterol was
nothing but an indicator of low thyroid the same way low blood sugar was mostly
an indicator of low thyroid there were published studies in the middle 1930s
which showed that when you took out someone's thyroid gland immediately the
cholesterol went up and when you gave them a thyroid supplement immediately
the cholesterol goes down that's because thyroid is needed to produce products
that the cholesterol turns into such as bile acids progesterone and pregnenolone
which are youth associated hormones vitamin A and cholesterol are used up by
thyroid in producing these essential hormones and bile materials I've seen
people just like the published studies 60 years ago I've seen people
consistently in one case the cholesterol went down almost a hundred points a day
with very frequent big doses of quick-acting thyroid but usually you can
see it go down 50 points a week with very careful thyroid supplementation the
things that are happening to the national diet are mostly created creating
worse problems for cholesterol metabolism and thyroid function a couple
weeks ago in the news there was a story about hypothyroidism in China at least a
hundred million Chinese are hypothyroid and 25 million are retarded and actually
have cretinism from congenital low thyroid it's been known most of this
century that in areas where they eat beans as a staple of the diet such as in
China many types of beans including soybeans but in the Andes region just
ordinary beans are the major cause of hypothyroidism because of various
antithyroid factors in beans lentils and certain nuts peanuts for example in
Eastern Europe the cabbage and turnip staple diets were major causes of
cretinism and chronic goiter and myxedema myxedema is the name for one
type of hypothyroidism that develops in adults in which mucusy material forms in
the tissues makes the tongue thicken the skin gets coarse and inelastic but
variations of myxedema can cause a lot of strange diseases that are put down to
genetic causes more often than hypothyroidism but you can cure them in
sometimes a week or two with the right dose of thyroid for example certain
types of mitral valve prolapses are just from a an accumulation of a mucus like
material in the valve making it thick and inefficient glaucoma in low thyroid
involves a swelling and overproduction and increased thickness of the fluids in
the eyeball some types of Graves disease which most doctors think of as
hyperthyroidism but hypothyroidism which causes the pituitary to become
overactive hypothyroidism very predictably tends to cause bulging eyes
because the thyroid stimulating hormone from the pituitary causes a mucusy
material to form in the area behind the eyeball causing a protrusion of the
eyeball the mucusy materials that are overproduced also can cause blood vessel
inefficiency and rigidity and contributes to things like varicose
veins and when this material gets in the joints it causes cartilage deformities
the old textbooks used to show teenagers with deformed joints that caused the
same deviation of the bones at the elbow joint especially and the knee joint
especially with knock knees for example but in old people you see the fingers
deviating to one side because the cartilage is getting deformed the right
balance of thyroid and the youth associated hormones progesterone and
pregnenolone and to some extent DHEA will rebalance the production of these
mucus like molecules the glycoproteins and mucopolysaccharides they're called
and in just a week or two you can often correct the deformity in a permanent way
so that the joint functions without pain or distortion all of the chronic
diseases to the extent that they involve this false adaptation in which the
thyroid tries to put you into a sort of hibernation state all of the chronic
diseases tend to benefit from the right supplement of these youth associated
hormones and the history of medical thyroid treatment is necessary before a
person can understand what the doctor is doing with the tests typically a doctor
will diagnose normal thyroid function on the basis of a test of the thyroxine in
the blood and sometimes backs that up with the normal range TSH or thyroid
stimulating hormone the TSH usually is somewhere in the range between 0.5 and
6 units and a person will be called normal when it's anywhere in that range
but when it's above one unit in other words when it's just anywhere above the
lowest normal range the TSH is already causing excess production of the
mucopolysaccharides that tend to load up the various tissues but still a person
will be considered normal in terms of the blood thyroid tests because the
thyroxine is defined as the thyroid hormone itself on the basis of some
studies that were done 50 years ago the thyroxine is said to be normal in a
range of for example from 4 to 12 units if you took any other biological
indicator and and gave it such a wide range 4 to 12 in the case of thyroxine
or 0.5 to 6.0 in the case of TSH you would have for example blood sugar
ranging from the level at which it causes convulsions and death up into the
low diabetic range and you would call all of those normal or cholesterol
ranging from the range of the low cholesterol that is associated with
cancer and strokes up into the very high like three or four hundred milligrams of
cholesterol so it's a very strange thing that thyroid is given such a definition
that makes almost everything get called normal what happened was in the 1940s
forty percent of the American population was known to benefit from thyroid
supplement and they had a low oxygen consumption but a drug company came out
with a blood test that was called the protein bound iodine test and it seemed
like a rational scientific thing to say that if a person had plenty of protein
bound iodine in their blood their thyroid would be okay because people
knew that an iodine deficiency caused hypothyroidism at that time so the blood
test found that 95% of Americans had plenty of protein bound iodine and when
I was in school all of my fat friends with the traditional symptoms of low
thyroid had been taught to say no I don't have a glandular problem I'm just
lazy and gluttonous that was passed through the whole culture in the late
1940s and early 50s then in the 60s it turned out that the protein bound iodine
test had essentially no relationship to thyroid function and now it's a standard
textbook point that high doses of iodine can be used to suppress a highly active
thyroid when it turned out that the protein bound iodine test was proven
invalid it goes up when your estrogen is high for example knocking out your
thyroid function new tests were brought to the market actually measuring
thyroxine and what happened was they kept the standard idea that only 5% of
the population was hypothyroid even though the test used to establish that
concept was proven completely meaningless so what we have kept is this
doctrine that 95% of the population don't need thyroid and no matter what
kind of test we use we have to stretch the test to fit the doctrine that only
5% can get thyroid. Dr. Peat we're coming up to our halfway mark in this segment
of our program we're going to take a 60 second station identification break and
when we return let's get into some of the other conditions that a low thyroid
can affect our cholesterol level arthritis like symptoms has melatonin
being found to inhibit progesterone and stimulate estradiol secretion and how do
we help the thyroid I'm Gary Noll back in 60 seconds. I'm Gary Noll and I'd like
to welcome you to our program. In this segment of our program we're going to be
continuing with a discussion in part about our thyroid and I've invited a
very articulate he's soft-spoken but he is you can see the professor in him and
the educator because he's being very methodical he's giving us the larger
context he's giving us the cause and effect and so we're learning an enormous
amount about conditions that we didn't know were related to the thyroid gland
in all ages and all body types. So let's continue with Dr. Ray Peat P-E-A-T and
Dr. Peat let's continue with our discussion. Okay you mentioned the
hormones estrogen and how it relates to melatonin with increasing age people
have made the big thing of the fact that melatonin which peaks about 3 a.m. in
everyone that this peak is a little bit smaller in old age but it happens that
thyroid is being increased with aging as the thyroid decreases the melatonin
decreases because when thyroid is active your melatonin comes up as an
antioxidant defense against the high metabolic rate that thyroid can
stimulate so when your thyroid is low your melatonin is low when your thyroid
is high the melatonin is high in an illogical adaptation because it is an
antioxidant but the function of melatonin all by itself when it isn't
surrounded by the appropriate other conditions melatonin in studies done in
pig tissue by a man named siratkin pigs are relatively close to humans in having
daytime habits nighttime sleep and so on which is very important for melatonin
because it's a nighttime dominant hormone in pigs he found that melatonin
suppresses progesterone and raises estrogen and this happens to be the same
thing that low thyroid does so if the melatonin rises in proportion to your
thyroid it doesn't matter that it is having these pro-estrogen anti
progesterone effects because the thyroid is doing exactly the opposite to those
hormones and is taking care of the situation because thyroid gets rid of
the excess estrogen while producing being totally responsible for producing
progesterone but if you take melatonin out of context as he did in the pig
study you're going to get exactly an anti thyroid effect deranging those
hormones in the direction of stress and aging some of the current publicity that
is used to promote the fact that melatonin makes you go to sleep it
happens to be also and a thing that goes up during hibernation and its function
is to lower the body temperature and remember the hospitalized patients who
the ones who had the lowest temperatures were the least likely to survive because
as the the thyroid goes down and your body temperature falls you lose a
lot of your immune functions and tissue repair capacity so lowering your body
temperature does make you hibernate and it does make you sleep but you don't
want to use something out of context to force that the studies that have been
used to advocate melatonin possibly anti-aging effect were done on mice and
rats and that it turns out that they are very opposite to human beings and pigs
because they work at night in general and sleep in the daytime and so
melatonin for them has exactly the opposite meaning that it does for people
and pigs and for example in in humans and rats melatonin raises prolactin but
in humans prolactin knocks out progesterone production and causes
infertility and stress and osteoporosis for example but in rats it happens and
mice it happens that melatonin raising prolactin for them prolactin raises
their progesterone and progesterone has the pro-life anti-aging effect so
melatonin has been confused by a lot of this rodent based research which is
opposite in many ways to what it does in people and pigs the effect of thyroid on
the liver is to not only make it store energy to keep up the blood sugar and
prevent the stress cortisol and adrenaline reactions but it is to
activate the liver so that it can destroy a hundred percent of the
estrogen arriving at the liver the liver when it has adequate protein and thyroid
is just absolutely efficient at getting rid of the estrogen so when you lower
the thyroid function you raise the estrogen that is allowed to circulate in
the organism that happens not only from low thyroid or high melatonin but from
malnutrition especially protein deficiency doesn't let the liver have
this detoxifying function so low protein amounts to low thyroid in many ways and
leads to excess estrogen abnormal risk of blood clotting stroke and heart
disease and so on if you look at the ovaries when in a dog or a cow for
example they have removed the animal's thyroid the ovaries develop a polycystic
condition instead of just one dominant egg follicle preparing for ovulation the
ovaries fill up with a lot of these fluid filled chambers and ovulation is
abnormal and they develop the tendency to produce an excess of estrogen so at
many levels low thyroid leads to an excess influence persistence and
overproduction of estrogen and it's interesting that the accumulation of
fluid it's one of these mucopolysaccharides again that swells up
fills up these many cystic follicles in the ovaries it's the same sort of
material that fills up the eyeball in glaucoma which is also promoted by low
thyroid and high pituitary hormones the there are these integrating factors that
in some ways the it's like an all-or-nothing function for the body the
direction of estrogen dominance or the direction of thyroid and progesterone
dominance and low protein used to be just sort of a laboratory experiment but
in the last three or four years books have come out advocating almost a
protein-free diet and so I've had the chance to see many people who have
absolutely low thyroid symptoms with high estrogen simply because they're not
eating adequate protein it it probably should be something like at least 50
grams of the highest quality protein available and one thing that happens in
the vegetable diet heavily based on cabbage family or beans lentils and nuts
these proteins in quality rank about 15 times lower than the highest quality
proteins and so even though a person might think they're eating nothing but
protein-rich foods beans and nuts the quality is so low that their their liver
simply can't respond to the thyroid besides that the beans and nuts have
many anti thyroid factors the some of these are being promoted in for
different effects that they achieve the bio flavonoids the essential so-called
essential fatty acids or the unsaturated fats these are among other things
pro-estrogen and anti thyroid so it's a combination of low protein and a whole
lot of thyroid inhibiting chemicals that the population is being exposed to that
is increasing the incidence of a lot of these degenerative diseases the
unsaturated fats show up first in animals after weaning in in some
experiments when the pregnant animal is given a certain amount of these bean
oils soybean oil for example or corn oil the mother's body protects the fetus
from absorbing these and the little bit that gets into the fetus tends to be
expelled into the fetuses intestine showing that the developing embryo and
fetus act as if they don't want to absorb unsaturated fats the nursing baby
also is highly protected so that if you look at the respiratory enzymes in their
mitochondria in all of their organs especially the brain during embryonic
and fetal development and even during nursing these are extremely deficient in
unsaturated fatty acids that are called essential fatty acids and in some
experiments they found that the brain didn't develop properly if the baby if
the developing fetus didn't have saturated fats in sufficient quantity
and if an extreme amount of unsaturated fats were fed to the pregnant animals
the baby's brain was inhibited and this is being reviewed in the last few months
people are pointing out again that an excess or even a high normal amount of
the unsaturated fats causes retarded brain growth in late fetal development
or during the nursing stage even though the the fetus in the mother's body or
receiving only maternal milk even though it is protected against the unsaturated
fats at some point the young animal begins eating food from the environment
and when you analyze the mitochondrial oxygen using enzymes you see that at
this point they start absorbing the unsaturated so-called essential fatty
acids and as they absorb the unsaturated fats such as linoleic acid their
activity declines the respiratory enzymes themselves begin to act more
slowly and when you look at the whole chain involved in oxygen consumption
which is essential for the high metabolic activity of young animals the
whole chain from the respiratory oxygen using enzyme all the way back to the
production of thyroid hormone and the transport of the thyroid hormone at
every stage conceivable the unsaturated fatty acids linoleic and linoleic and
it's worse in proportion to the number of double bonds so that linoleic is
about half again as inhibiting as linoleic acid to the thyroid and to the
respiratory enzymes so the newborn or newly weaned animal has an extremely
high respiratory rate and its brain is growing at a very fast rate but as it
absorbs these environmental vegetable synthesized fats its metabolic rate
slows down its thyroid function slows down and you get a curve of slowing
activity from weaning bending sharply at puberty and leveling off in the 20s and
then going downhill this curve is very closely similar to the curve of loading
up of the tissues with the unsaturated fatty acids and you can restore the
activity of the respiratory enzymes simply by changing the dietary fats but
a complete change since since the fat layers the adipose tissue since it
stores what the animal has been eating it takes typically four years for a
complete exchange of fat even after you've made a complete change in your
diet but momentarily if you for example take half an ounce of coconut oil you
get a burst of thyroid like activity and your cells respire more intensely for
about an hour until that fat is burned up but after about two years of a
changed diet you've burned up roughly half of your stored inhibiting
unsaturated fats and your metabolism stabilizes at a much higher level so it
to to correct the age-associated decline of thyroid function and of respiratory
energy production you could take a thyroid supplement or you could simply
change your diet away from the inhibitors the fatty acids are one type
of metabolic inhibitor there are a few others for example the age pigment is
something that is constructed inside our cells every time we're under stress and
don't get enough oxygen in effect iron is released from storage put into an
activated state in which it can attack the unsaturated fats that happen to be
in the cell at the time and the combination of the unsaturated fat and
the iron and the stress turns these unsaturated fats into age pigment or
lipofuscin which accumulates in all of the tissues it's found as the main
material in cataracts in the lens of the eye in the atheroma in the wall of blood
vessels that are deteriorating from age and stress in the heart that is aging
and susceptible to all kinds of malfunction in the Alzheimer's brain and
so on the age pigment accumulates and it in itself gets an enzyme function which
bypasses the good energy producing system so after a certain point even
changing your diet away from the the toxic inhibiting fats won't do the job
of restoring your thyroid function if you have accumulated so much of this age
pigment because it is going to waste any oxygen that your cells can receive the
at this point a whole system of degenerative conditions sets in in which
the mucoproteins increase because of the stress conditions which are basically
the same as the low thyroid conditions all of these lead to accumulating
mucoid materials accumulating the blood vessels are lined with this material the
white the red blood cells can't pick up oxygen as efficiently because of this
mucopolysaccharide layer the lung sacs get expanded and thickened so that the
air doesn't diffuse through them efficiently and that increases the
susceptibility of the aging animal to stress a smaller stress makes them more
acutely oxygen deficient and that produces the age pigment at an even
higher rate the several people are working on ways to remove the age
pigment you can take brain cells in culture which have age pigment in them
and one experimenter added vitamin e to the cultured brain cells and found that
in just two weeks the age pigment had been consumed or eliminated from the
cells but in that experiment they administered the vitamin e dissolved in
ethyl alcohol and they had to do a control experiment giving just that
amount of ethyl alcohol it turned out to be almost as effective as the vitamin e
so it's been known to be in a free radical quencher it breaks the chain of
lipid peroxide production and so that suggests that there are probably many
antioxidants that would help to eliminate age pigment but the first
problem is simply to slow or stop the production of it by avoiding overloading
on the things which are known to produce it such as soy oil corn oil excess iron
and so on even chronic heavy meat eating tends to make American men overload their
tissues with iron and it happens that the immune system works better in people
who by national standards are deficient in iron in other words our standards
seem to be too high on what they recommend for adequate iron it would be
a little bit better to eat less iron so Dr. Peat we only have about six minutes
to go in our program yeah I think it'd be good if you took that six minutes to
explain how to build up a healthy thyroid gland to help overcome these
conditions okay the first thing is to make sure you're eating adequate
protein such as milk cheese eggs I'm naming them in order of declining iron
content milk is designed to allow the newborn baby to escape or grow into the
overcharge of iron it's it's born with so milk is a way of helping to unload
the body from iron milk milk and cheese are actually deficient in iron and then
eggs and shellfish ocean grown fish and particularly shellfish are beneficial
because shellfish use copper as their blood instead of iron or ordinary fish
use iron and so you can avoid iron by occasionally substituting oysters
lobster shrimp or crab for fish chicken or meat vegetables are in general
moderate to high sources of iron but bread and pasta products have iron
supplemented in this country and that in itself I think is reason to totally give
up bread and pasta because you are actually seeing a serious increase in
iron overload diseases in this country after assuring that you have a good high
protein intake then getting your calories in a safe and non-toxic way is
the next thing and since the unsaturated fats are produced according to the
coldness at which the organism grows because our bodies live at 98 or 99
degrees Fahrenheit their fats any organism that lives at that temperature
such as palm trees in the tropics these fats have to be stable at high
temperatures but at refrigerator temperature they harden and so organisms
like fish that live in cold water or soybeans or or grains that live in cold
climates have to have unsaturated oils in proportion to the coldness of the
environment otherwise the cells couldn't metabolize the oils would harden and in
those cold temperatures the unsaturated oils don't get rancid very quickly as
soon as you eat an oil from a cold living organism it starts turning to
peroxide varnish structure. Okay now remember don't get don't get too
technical we only have two minutes to go and you got to summarize. Okay the ideal
calorie source I think is tropical fruits and tropical oils especially
coconut oil and any tropical fruit that lives at a high temperature papayas the
custard apple family pineapples anything that that is full of carbohydrates is
likely to be reasonably low in iron and high in all of the other vitamins and
reasonable for minerals and they are important as a source of magnesium meat
and shellfish and fish and so on give you quite a bit of magnesium but the
fruits are a major source of magnesium without overloading us on iron and the
toxic substances because fruits in general from the tropics have small
amounts of the thyroid inhibiting substances. Seeds in general have the
thyroid inhibiting substances for a variety of reasons namely the worst of
them is that plants evolve poisons to prevent their seeds being eaten because
they wouldn't have a next generation if animals found the seeds palatable and
safe to eat so the worst poisons plants have are put in the seeds and they turn
out to be metabolic inhibitors enzyme inhibitors but the fruit generally is
evolved to serve to distribute the seeds so it's evolved to be safe to the
animals. Potatoes are the only vegetable protein which is of quality equal to egg
yolk it's actually a little higher in quality because it contains precursors
to the essential amino acids it has more protein in effect than it actually has
in substance and people misjudge potatoes because they're given as two to
four percent because wet potatoes are measured where beans are measured in the
dry state and have 40% protein but that you have to divide the bean protein by
10 to make it equivalent to potatoes. So you're saying potatoes are
good. Dr. Peat we're out of time I want to thank you very much for being with us
a very informed guest very educational. Dr. Ray Peat author of good books
including Nutrition for Women, Progesterone and Orthomolecular Medicine
and Generative Energy. I'm Gary and all of you want a copy of today's show call
212-799-1246 and ask for the program on thyroid. See you tomorrow.