Del podcast. I am pleased to have Dr. Peat on with me again today. So I don't think he needs any
introduction, but I will give a slight introduction. And those of you who have not
familiarized yourself yet with Dr. Raymond Peat, you can check him out at r a y p e a t.com. And
we're going to be talking today about testosterone and high cortisol. And, you know, I, I wanted to
touch on this because we're seeing a lot, or at least I am seeing a lot in my nutrition practice
of clients coming in with their blood work and having too high of cortisol and too low of
testosterone, even women. So I think it's a pretty important topic. And I wanted to ask the, what I
consider the, in my opinion, the leading authority in health and wellness, since he's been teaching
now and probably, well, I would say learning and teaching for how many years, Dr. Peat, altogether?
As early as 1960. I was doing it independently. Then I concentrated on the hormones between 1968
and 72 when I got my PhD. Yeah, I, I know you've taught at many numerous schools,
the University of Oregon, Urbana College, Montana State University, the Natural College of
Naturopathic Medicine, and you've even taught internationally in Mexico as well. So I mean,
since I consider you the leading authority based on everybody that I've looked into over the years
to try to get my information from, and as a nutritionist, I find that yours is the most
logical and the most backed with science. So I really appreciate all that you've taught me so
far. And I know my listeners will really benefit from this podcast too. So I want to talk to you
specifically about low testosterone and high cortisol, kind of a tag team of symptoms I'm
seeing. And I want you to fill my listeners in on why this might be happening. Maybe you've
seen it kind of come to fruition too. And maybe there's some listening out there that have some
of the symptoms that I wanted you to touch on with regard to it as well. So could you talk about
why maybe cortisol is so high in so many people right now and the sex hormones basically are down?
Well, it isn't the sex hormones as a group because estrogen rises when you're under stress
along with cortisol. And when the androgens in general decrease, that usually goes with a
decrease of progesterone. And that creates a susceptibility to stress. And everything harmful
practically will increase both your estrogen and cortisol. And the first barrier to harm
is the group of steroids, pregnenolone, progesterone, DHEA, and testosterone. All of
these have broadly overlapping protective effects that protect your energy apparatus,
your sensory apparatus, keep things stable and working. And
injury simply doesn't happen when you have a great abundance of those things.
You can run a marathon or swim in ice water, do all sorts of things that could kill a more fragile
person. But if you're really well supplied with pregnenolone and its derivatives down to
testosterone, you've got endurance so you don't experience stress. When something happens that
you're not abundantly producing the protective steroids, then any little thing becomes stressful.
Just walking can be a stress. Breathing harder, you will shift over to the lactic acid metabolism.
With increasing age or malnutrition, anything that interferes with the production of these
protective steroids makes you then shift over to the emergency production of cortisol.
And all of these protective steroids block the effect of cortisol so that you can take a cortisol
pill or prednisone or whatever and have very little harm from it if you're
fairly saturated with progesterone, DHEA, testosterone. Because they're preventing
the action as well as taking care of some of the things that cortisol would produce.
For example, cortisol maintains your blood sugar level so that you can keep working.
But it does it by converting your protein tissues, muscles, skin,
thymus gland, lymphatic tissues in general, and finally digestive system,
liver and intestine, will be cannibalized to make sugar and energy under the influence of cortisol.
The protective effect of testosterone was demonstrated once using radioactive
testosterone molecules. They infected it into athletes and thought that they would see
radiation coming out of their muscles, but what they saw was that most of the radiation
was coming from their heart. Testosterone is most concentrated in the organs that are most
vital to survival. So it concentrates in the heart, lungs, and brain at the highest
ratio to protein. Even though it's responsible for making an athlete's muscles bigger and bigger
under the influence of testosterone, what it's doing is preventing those being used up for energy.
So with age, if you're producing less of the protective steroids, a given amount of cortisol
might not look extremely high in relation to the standards. But if you're pregnant on progesterone,
DHEA, and testosterone are lower than average, even a moderate amount of cortisol begins eating
up your muscles and skin, and eventually it can start deteriorating your heart, lungs, and brain.
Wow, that is... I wanted to come back to the athlete kind of mentality of low testosterone
and high cortisol, because I think that's really important to talk about too. But you had said
something that kind of made me question, like, is it the chicken or the egg? Like, is it a high
cortisol response that leads to things like low progesterone, low testosterone? Or is it something
happening that causes the low progesterone, low testosterone, and leads to the stress response
of high cortisol? It's usually a gradual deterioration from poor nutrition or eating
foods that are irritating or toxic, or things that, for example, foods that suppress your
thyroid function. Thyroid is necessary to produce these protective steroids.
Cholesterol is converted pretty massively in the pregnenolone and the other protective steroids,
if you have vitamin A and thyroid hormone adequately. But if you're deficient in either of
those, the cholesterol will rise in your blood. That generally means that you're not making enough
DHEA and testosterone, for example. So low thyroid, which causes high cholesterol,
the real meaning of that is that you're not making enough of the protective testosterone
and related steroids. And when that happens, your cortisol and other stress hormones rise.
So low thyroid is the most common thing responsible for a bad ratio of cortisol to testosterone.
That makes complete sense. And so then leading into, like, whether it's the bad foods or
the thyroid being a result of poor nutrition, as you say, too, could it also be, like the athletes
we were talking about, maybe over-training, over-exercising that can also lead to this,
like just too much chronic output that's stressing the body in a physical manner?
Yeah, someone did an experiment putting people on a treadmill and measuring their active thyroid
hormone, T3, and they had them walk at, they kept their pulse rate at 120 beats per minute or less,
just very mild walking on the treadmill. And in an hour, they had become hypothyroid in the sense
of reducing their activation of thyroid into T3. But doctors are now being taught that
they should ignore T3, the active hormone, and think about only thyroid-stimulating hormone, TSH,
and only thyroxin or T4. But when you're, an athlete, for example, is suppressing their T3,
their thyroxin will actually rise in a reaction. And so doctors are being taught things that will
make them necessarily miss the effects of stress on your thyroid, and that leads to
misinterpretation of everything downstream. For example, when your thyroid goes down from stress,
your estrogen normally is being excreted and kept at a low level systemically by the thyroid
activating the liver metabolism. The liver solubilizes estrogen, making it leave through
the kidneys and be excreted. If your thyroid drops from stress, very quickly your estrogen will rise,
and then the estrogen activates directly on the adrenals. It increases cortisol production
and many other levels. It activates your pituitary to stimulate cortisol production from the adrenals,
and it activates your brain in many different ways through the corticotropic
release factor, CRH, to activate the adrenals and pituitary. So just dropping the
active thyroid, you very quickly turn on both the estrogen and the whole cortisol stress system.
And I would assume someone who is looking to put on muscle and maybe an athlete that's looking to
train for an event, they're not going to want excess estrogen. And so what that study you were
saying is like they were just walking and T3 was reduced. And so imagine these people, are you
familiar, Dr. Peat, with like CrossFit? Yeah, intense over exertion. The Russians were 50 or
60 years ago being accused of using testosterone because they had worked out the way to under
train, avoid over exertion, and so keep their stress hormones down and their cortisol up.
It takes really a very moderate amount of muscle building exercise to increase testosterone and
lower cortisol. The muscle itself becomes an endocrine organ in a constructive sense.
If you're under stress, your muscle will actually produce cortisol and not testosterone. When it's
properly stimulated, the muscle becomes a testosterone producing organ. It isn't just the
gonads that produce testosterone if you're doing things right.
Interesting. So pretty much this chronic output of like these CrossFit classes they're going to
and heavy lifting or heavy duty weight training and things like that.
Yeah, a woman doing just one or two minutes of mild dumbbell lifts and a few squats for the big
leg muscles can shift her balance from cortisol to testosterone.
Okay, and so any more than that? And it just takes a minute or two, two or three times a day,
whatever it takes to increase the muscle mass. It's really a very small, small amount of
muscle lifting type exercise. Okay, so that's good to know. So it's like
it is beneficial to lift heavy things, but we don't need to do these hour-long CrossFit classes
that are pushing your body to the limit and doing it every day kind of thing to where
instead of creating muscle building, you're actually inducing a cortisol response, yes?
Yes. Okay, yeah. So that's really, I'm glad we're talking about this because I think there's a
mentality out there that more is better. So if lifting heavy things is good, I should lift it
all the time and strain my body and stress my body. But the people that I've seen that exercise
the most, like my clients that have exercised the most, they're the ones that I'm seeing with
high sex hormone binding globulin and low testosterone. So can you talk a little bit
about sex hormone binding globulin, if I can say that word right? I think that is the body's
defense against estrogen. When it's high, a woman has a lower risk of breast cancer because
it keeps the estrogen out of cells. It actually tends to pull estrogen out of cells protectively.
But when it's high in response, depending against estrogen, it can also interfere with
testosterone effect. So you mentioned a little bit of how cortisol and estrogen are related,
but there's another kind of player in all of this too that we should talk about, which is adrenaline.
Like are they all intertwined together as far as adrenaline and cortisol and estrogen too?
Yeah, all of the stress hormones interfere with the conversion of T4 to T3. And in fact,
instead of making the effective respiration promoting T3, they convert thyroxine into reverse
T3. They dispose of the precursor and turn it into an interfering inactive suppressor of respiration.
And those same stress hormones that produce the inactive blocking reverse T3 also tend to suppress
the pituitary TSH, making it look like you're even hyperthyroid because doctors are taught to
diagnose hyperthyroidism in terms of abnormally low TSH. But in fact, the stress, which is lowering
most people's TSH, is causing the hypothyroidism and is caused by hypothyroidism.
So a low thyroid person raises their estrogen, cortisol, and adrenaline, and these
end up to lower your TSH and make it look like you have too much thyroid,
according to the way doctors are being indoctrinated.
And so that would be why so many people go to the doctor and say, "Well, you're actually,
you have too much thyroid going on." But yet the person is exhibiting all the signs of
low thyroid, such as weight gain and hair loss and energy loss, but yet the doctor's seeing
it on the other end, right? Yeah. For 65 years, it's been known how it works, but doctors are
increasingly misinformed. I don't know what the real power for this is, but the indoctrination
has become more intense in just the last two or three years, telling doctors, "Don't look at T3,
even just look at TSH. Don't worry, even if the TSH is as high as 10, which is dangerous,
it's horribly toxic, TSH itself is an inflammation-promoting hormone. Even if a person
isn't hypothyroid in the sense of not having enough T3, if their TSH is increased, they will
get the worst heart disease signs of hypothyroidism. So part of the disease effects of hypothyroidism
are really an excess of TSH rather than the direct lack of metabolic stimulation from T3.
Yeah, and I definitely want to do a whole podcast on thyroid with you because I think that's so
fascinating with regard to how stress affects the thyroid and then conversely how the thyroid
affects everything else. But as far as talking about weight gain, I don't think people understand
the importance of women having testosterone, the right adequate testosterone. I think we always
think of it as a male hormone, but women really need testosterone as well. And what I see is with
low testosterone in women, they do have this additional weight gain, which I'm assuming is
because conversely they're also experiencing high estrogen. But can you talk about the importance of
a good amount of testosterone for women and not just men? It has to be balanced, both in men and
women. It has to be balanced with DHEA and cortisol. And normally it is unless you're
supplementing it as a drug. But all of these, especially the DHEA, is an activator of fat
oxidizing. And your muscle is the organ that is most equipped for oxidizing fat.
Your brain and heart don't do well oxidizing fat compared to glucose, but the muscles
are perfectly adapted for burning fat. And everything you do to increase your muscles,
production of testosterone and reduction of cortisol is favoring that fat burning.
So just the right amount of exercise to build muscle will shift your metabolism to safely
consume fat in your muscles while leaving adequate glucose for your brain and lungs.
And so weight gain is probably one of the symptoms of low testosterone. Could you talk
some other symptoms that people might see if cortisol is high and testosterone is low?
Depression. The whole stress system that ends up increasing your cortisol and decreasing DHEA,
progesterone and testosterone, that whole system is related to the inflammatory and degenerative
processes. And depression is how we experience that process. The body senses that it's being
destroyed by the stress hormones and it wants to stop everything, to sort of hibernate or
go into hiding until the stress is over. So what you experience is depression. Sometimes
anxiety and aggression. Aggression comes up when you're being overstressed and anxiety. It's all
different sides of the same reaction. But when your body is being damaged, you get these negative
emotions. Aggression, anxiety and depression. That makes a lot of sense because that's what
I'm seeing in the people that have those lower, you know, like you mentioned testosterone,
DHEA and progesterone and then higher cortisol. So that makes complete sense.
As far as like the, like you'll hear a lot of people that in order to regulate their hormones,
they're being taught like with YouTube education, I call it. And of course, I'm on YouTube too,
but I'm trying to interview people like yourself that actually have valid information and valid
science behind it. But you hear a lot about fasting and intermittent fasting as a way of
improving hormones and cortisol. And I don't buy into that. And I wanted to get your opinion. Do
you see fasting as a way to improve hormones and lower cortisol? Or is it actually contributing to
the stress response in the body? Yeah. One day of fasting, the body stores several ounces of
glucose in the form of glycogen. And you can go, if you're healthy, you can go up to 24 hours
on your stored glycogen. And as the body senses stress, lowering the T3 slows the rate of
fuel use. So when your glycogen has gone away, that means you have to start using
your tissue to make glucose out of your muscles. And if your thyroid didn't slow down,
when you have this prolonged stress or fasting situation, if your thyroid didn't drastically
shut down your oxygen requirement, you would eat your whole body up in just a few days.
But since the depressive process turns off the metabolism and makes you want to hibernate,
that slows the rate of degeneration of all of your organs.
If you at least give a little bit of glucose and minerals, just some sodium chloride
and/or calcium, magnesium, and potassium during the fasting or low-calorie period,
you can greatly reduce your tissue loss on a low-calorie diet. For example, a person
on just a water fast for 10 days, they found that 80% or more of their weight loss came
from destruction of their muscle and skin mass. But if they had a 500-600 calorie diet with
adequate minerals, almost all of the weight loss was in the form of fat loss rather than muscle.
Interesting.
So a complete fast is very destructive to the body.
Yeah, and it's good to hear you say that because there's a lot of misinformation out there about
it. So I hope people will do their own research too and look into some things about fasting before
they attempt it. Because really, fasting in a nature sense, if we were out fasting, that would
mean we didn't find food. So it would be a stress response to the body, right?
Yeah. Some of the professors when I taught at the Naturopathic School were advocates of fasting,
and they talked about detoxifying by fasting. But that got me interested in what really happens.
The liver is the organ of detoxification. And when you're depriving the liver of sugar and
exposing it to cortisol, not only does the estrogen rise, but it loses its ability to
detoxify other things. The reason the estrogen rises is that the sulfation and glucuronidation
detoxifying systems are shut down by fasting. And so it's exactly the opposite of detoxifying.
In Mexico, I had been exposed to a type of insecticide disinfectant that they used on
buses and motels for a while. And it had a particular odor to it that was recognizable.
When I realized I was being poisoned by inhaling the fumes of this in public places,
I decided to leave. And as I was driving home across the desert, every time I got hungry,
I would smell this insecticide cleansing material in my exhaled breath. And for about two months
after that, every time I would have low blood sugar, three o'clock in the morning, I would wake
up and smelling on my exhaled breath, this pine-salt insecticide odor. And as soon as that
odor stopped leaving my body when I got hungry, then I went into a hyperthyroid state.
So it had been suppressing my thyroid. And I was exposing myself to it anew every time
I would lower my blood sugar by mobilizing fat. And so that was disturbing my liver function and
thyroid and so on. When you're hungry and starving, you're living on your body tissues,
including fat, but also your muscle. And that can mobilize the toxins that had been
fairly safely stored away. In animals, they were careful to make sure that the animals hadn't been
exposed to insecticides or herbicides or whatever for 24 hours before slaughtering them. And
they sampled the various tissues that the fat at the slaughterhouse was found to be full of
the whatever insecticide they had been exposed to. But the liver was the cleanest organ. After 24
hours, it had cleaned itself up and had the lowest concentration of all of the poisons.
The meat had the next highest concentration and the blood lower because it was constantly being
detoxified by the liver. So a fast is a way to maybe clean up your liver, but definitely
it's not good for your brain and immune system. Yes. And the liver, as far as I'm understanding,
is also important for things like testosterone too. So you really want good liver
production and detoxification just for the production of testosterone, right?
Yeah. In the case of progesterone, which in a woman is produced even in greater quantities than
a man produces testosterone, during the premenstrual time, the daily progesterone production
is maybe 30 milligrams a day. But the liver adapts to that very large production. And
after two weeks of that high production, the enzymes increase and start excreting
progesterone as well as estrogen and testosterone. So at menstruation, the synthesis of new
progesterone stops and for two weeks, the liver has very low exposure to progesterone,
meaning that it will have a chance to reset its detoxifying enzymes to zero. So that at ovulation,
it's all ready to let your body experience the full force of the progesterone. But if a man
is supplementing testosterone every day, if he exceeds the liver's normal preference for a level
of testosterone, the same thing happens. If he takes 30 milligrams by injection, for example,
the liver experiences the same thing a woman's liver experiences with high levels of progesterone.
And the man throws off the testosterone very quickly. So after a week or two of being exposed
to high testosterone, he is now excreting it very fast and probably is getting about as much
estrogen effect as testosterone effect. And the medical use of testosterone, they sometimes give
50 or 100 milligrams at once. So their liver experiences this gigantic overdose, where it
should be four or five milligrams per day in the young man. The liver goes into a testosterone
destroying condition. So with regard to things like since we're talking different diseases and
stuff too, and with regard to the liver, I wanted to get your thoughts on cancer and how high
cortisol can play into that. My mom actually died of stomach cancer at 45. And she lived a very,
very stressful existence, both physically, she was like an overexerciser, she was emotionally,
she was emotionally stressed, mentally stressed from work and hardly slept. And she also starved
herself quite frequently to achieve a body shape that she was looking for. And I'm convinced the
stress is what killed her. But how, in your opinion, does chronically elevated cortisol
and it's related to like, how is it related to things such as the
below behind the rise of estrogen and cortisol and the fall of thyroid is the tissue level of stress.
And in the alimentary canal, histamine and serotonin are massively produced 95%
of our serotonin in the body comes from the intestine. And stomach ulcers can be produced
just by an excess of serotonin. And the intestine is involved in all stress, but especially
in prolonged, ultimately carcinogenic stresses. And as the histamine and serotonin increase in
the digestive system, that allows endotoxin and nitric oxide to rise. All of those interfere with
our ability to produce respiratory energy shift over to the lactic acid production. And lactic acid
activates the stress hormones and promotes inflammation. And lactic acid is carcinogenic
in itself. It not only is produced by cancer, but it promotes all of the features of cancer,
inflammation, accelerated cell division and so on. And the serotonin is one of the most powerful
activators of the cortisol stress hormone system. And it acts powerfully on the part of the
hypothalamus that makes the CRH, corticotropin release hormone. And that is produced not only
in the brain, but in all of the peripheral tissues. And it's a promoter of tissue inflammation and
shift of metabolism. Stomach cancer and intestinal cancer are very deeply involved with excess
serotonin, which is really a base activator of the whole stress system. It works directly on the
pituitary as well as on the brain and other tissues. And incidentally, other tissues besides
the adrenals are potential cortisol producers. Even our skin can make cortisol when it's under stress.
So she had some pretty intense habits that led to a stress response such as, you know,
sleeping maybe two or three hours a night, burning the candles at both ends. She was an overthinker,
overanalyzer, overexerciser. Are there like certain habits, not just foods, but certain
things people are doing like just overachievers in life, people doing too much that are also
creating the stress response in the body that can contribute to that loss of all those important
hormones? Yeah, regular sleep is a powerfully protective thing. It should be somewhere in the
range of six to nine hours every night, but the regularity is very important. It becomes a built-in,
almost a machine-like, once you get a schedule set. And any variation of that schedule puts the
whole 24-hour cycle into a stress pattern. So it isn't just the number of hours, but the regularity
with which you get those hours of sleep that is anti-stress. And hypertestosterone and DHEA
are promoters of restorative sleep. Cortisol really interferes at all levels of sleep
restoration as well as daytime maintenance. And prolonged starvation, for example,
anorexia nervosa. Usually it's young women, and they've given, made MRI pictures of their brain
during and then during the recovery. And during the anorexia, their brain, especially the frontal lobes,
shrink. And then when they refeed, it rebuilds itself. So it's actually causing brain damage to
fast too much. And a stressful pregnancy with too much exposure to estrogen and the associated
cortisol does the same thing. Androgens, DHEA, and testosterone and progesterone protect the
athlete, the brain, heart, and lungs are protected by those. But prolonged exposure to high estrogen,
even in pregnancy or in anorexia, will shrink the frenulobes of the brain that handle long-range
perspective. But I liked what you said about it can be rebuilt. I think people aren't aware that
if even if you've had a really strong cortisol response for a long time, you've been in a stress
response for a long time, that if we can do things to mitigate that, we can actually get our body
back into a calm state. There is a way to do that. And it doesn't have to do with taking ashwagandha
and all these things. There is a really safe way to do it. And so can you talk about that? Can you
talk about like how we can rebuild? It's very much like exercise, but you have to stop the stress
first before you can exercise effectively. They know that a given activity, for example, taxi
drivers have a bigger part of the brain that handles memory. They know every street in a big
city and that requires a bigger part of that brain. One of my first students at the necropathic
college was a taxi driver who decided to study medicine. And she was just spectacularly able to
put things together. Unlike the students who had just gone to college. She had this global ability
to perceive how things interact. And that kind of exercise works best if you maintain the protective
hormones, even supplementing pregnenolone, progesterone, GHGA, and testosterone combined
with the kind of mental activity that you want to develop. That will, in a relatively short time,
rebuild and it changes your attitude. Learned helplessness, for example, from prolonged stress
can be overcome. Yeah, I've heard you talk about learned helplessness. Can you expand
on that a little bit for my listeners? Yeah, that can be repaired with any of these protective
hormones or with behavioral insight. But the stress process that causes you to become helpless or
obsessive or over analytic or whatever, stopping the stress is the first thing. And that requires
good nutrition. And good nutrition should include plenty of carbohydrates so that you don't have to
rely on the cortisol to convert protein amino acids into glucose. And usually
something more than 100 grams per day of carbohydrate, preferably in the form of sucrose.
But it can be, if you're very active physically, as 200 or 300 grams a day of
carbohydrate, especially sugar, can be restorative to the brain.
I'm so glad you brought this up because one of my next things was to talk about the dangers of
sugar-less diet. So like, I think people are all about talk about the dangers of how dangerous
sugar is, but you actually talk about the dangers of a sugar-less diet and how our body runs on
glucose and therefore if you don't take it in, your body will simply make it from its own bodily
tissues such as breaking down muscle like you were talking about before. So I think we don't know the
dangers of going sugar-less, actually. We know too much about eating sugar but not enough about how
much we actually do need to eat it. Yeah, all of the things that trigger the stress hormones
involve interference with glucose metabolism. Hypoglycemia itself is a powerful activator of
the stress system. Excess of free fatty acids which will block the ability to use glucose
will activate the stress hormones. Lactic acid which results when you're not using your glucose
properly, it's a sign that there's in effect a deficiency of glucose that activates cortisol
production. All of these stress signs, inflammation, overexertion, these require
more glucose to suppress inflammation to get energy production going.
And so the obvious way to stop the stress reaction is to provide enough glucose and oxygen
along with the other nutrients. If you provide only protein and fat as your bulk nutrients,
you're going to increase your cortisol just to convert the protein to the amount of glucose
that your brain and blood cells need. And that cortisol, even though it's being fed with protein,
is going to have all of these indirect actions that are harmful in the long run. It's going to
change the way your immune system works, for example. Yeah, and so as far as the glucose in
your diet, we know from listening to you that's important. So that's why on the last podcast we
talked about how ketogenic and low-carb diets are actually causing some of the stress response as
opposed to helping with cortisol. So are there certain foods, I mean I know you've mentioned
sugar in different forms like fructose and sucrose, but are there different foods that
can actually help lower cortisol and increase things like progesterone and testosterone?
Yeah, the reason I talk so much about milk and orange juice is that they are the most available
foods that have the most components that tend to shut down excess cortisol production, lower
adrenaline, reduce serotonin, nitric oxide, all of the harmful mediators of inflammation and stress.
Everyone can, with some luck, can find good milk and sweet orange juice. Each of them
has hundreds of beneficial factors. The calcium itself in milk and the minerals,
potassium and the other minerals in orange juice, lower the stress factors in multiple ways.
Most people are having a borderline calcium and vitamin D deficiency in most of the world.
When you're borderline in vitamin D and calcium, you increase your parathyroid hormone. If you're
borderline in your mineral, especially sodium intake, your aldosterone and entratensin increase.
These parathyroid hormone and aldosterone interact very closely and turn off your energy production,
shift you over to wasting sugar, increasing your cortisol, destroying your protein tissues.
So getting your aldosterone and parathyroid hormone as low as you can
will at the same time increase your metabolic efficiency and so reduce your exposure to the
stress hormones. That's great information. So I'm also assuming that foods that help with thyroid
production would also lower a stress response in the body and therefore help with hormone
production too? Yeah. People are being misinformed about what thyroid does. It isn't a stimulant and
a catabolic hormone. It is anabolic and the anabolic function goes with what should be a
reduction of adrenaline and cortisol. So it is required for deep restorative sleep and relaxation.
Doctors tell people that it's a stimulant and the catabolic hormone exactly the opposite of the
truth. So what foods as far as your favorite foods are pro thyroid that would help lower that stress
response? Avoiding the polyunsaturated fats is a universal benefit as far as possible. Not to add
for example fish oil or algae oil to your diet. Not to use safflower, canola oil,
none of the liquid oils. Those are all anti-thyroid, anti-progesterone, anti-DHEA and so
on. And in effect they increase your stress hormones. They are the precursors for the
prostaglandin like materials which amplify all of the inflammatory and stress reactions.
So just cutting out the polyunsaturated fats shifts you, increases your thyroid function
and lowers the stress hormones. So therefore that leaves us with saturated fats which I would assume
are pretty good at helping to lower cortisol as well. Do they help increase progesterone and
testosterone? I guess the main goal is to lower the cortisol so that those particular hormones
will rise, correct? When you are not eating the proof of polyunsaturated fats, if you eat extra
calories, you produce the saturated fats. And so your tissues will gradually, over a period of
several years, gradually become more saturated. If you look at the ratio of saturated fat to
polyunsaturated in your tissues, the saturation index corresponds to lifespan. Animals with the
highest saturation index, the lowest polyunsaturated fat in their tissues have the longest life
expectancy. And a lot of that is related to thyroid and these protective steroids.
Wow, so I'm assuming that you're pretty saturated then for being 82 and you are just the epitome of
health. And so I assume based on your diet, you're pretty saturated then, huh?
I hope so. I don't eat a completely ideal diet. It takes a lab to prepare food to get rid of
all of the toxic fats. In the 1930s, the lab intended to demonstrate that taking out all of
the fat would cause a deficiency of the essential fatty acids. But this guy had lifelong headaches
and blood pressure problems. After, I think it was three or four months on this fat-free diet,
he stopped having his headaches and his blood pressure normalized. And as long as there was
any information about him after that diet, he never had a recurrence of his health problems.
So far from producing deficiency diseases, this extreme laboratory-defined
fat-free diet cured his lifelong health problems.
Wow, that's incredible. So there is some validity to watching your fat intake and making sure that
you have good glucose intake. And so where does protein fit into all this? What are your favorite
sources of protein for lowering cortisol and increasing those hormones we've been talking
about like progesterone and testosterone and DHEA? Gelatin happens to be fairly close to
an ideal protein for an adult. Milk protein has a fair amount of tryptophan, cysteine,
and these are pro-inflammatory amino acids that are used in growth. Milk is ideal for growing
and has anti-inflammatory, anti-stress factors. But for an adult, I think it should be supplemented
with something like gelatin as an extra protein which lacks the pro-inflammatory
growth-related amino acids. So that's interesting. So you could almost do like blend your morning
coffee with a little collagen gelatin and some milk and make almost like a little protein smoothie
that way with a little coffee, huh? Yeah, I use about 8 or 9 ounces of milk with an ounce or two
of extremely concentrated coffee for my breakfast meal. You sound like an espresso lover. That
sounds like a concentrated coffee that's an espresso and that's what I love too.
Yeah, you don't get an excess of water that way. Yes, that's true. Well, Dr. Peat, I could go on
and on and on, but I know that you are getting ready to work on your next newsletter and so I
want to touch on that a little bit. I want to let people know that they can actually sign up for your
newsletter which is amazing and they can sign up via to receive it through the mail or also through
email and it's $28 I believe for email, the newsletter, and then it's $38 to get it through
the mail? Yeah, and that's for 12 issues by monthly. So it's for two years, 12 issues.
Yeah, and they can do that by emailing raypeatsnewsletter@gmail.com and I'll have all
that information in the show notes as well. And I also want to encourage you guys to go check out
all of his articles at raypeat.com because that's where you're really going to get just a cornucopia
of information that will just blow your socks off. So Dr. Peat, I just so appreciate your time. I
love, love, love talking with you and sorry we had a little connection issues today, but I really
will take any part of you that I can get. So I appreciate your time today. Okay, thank you.
And you guys stay tuned for more. Hopefully next time we can talk about the thyroid a little bit
more Dr. Peat, if that's okay with you. Okay. Okay, sounds good. Thanks everybody for listening. Bye
for now.