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Hello and welcome to Hope for Health.
I'm Dr. Dan Royal.
Hope for Health is brought to you by New Hope Medical Center.
We invite you now to enjoy this informative program on health alternatives.
Thank you for being with us today.
This is a call-in radio talk show so those of you who are out there listening, if you
would like some free health advice, feel free to call us in 650-KKVV is the call-in number
or which is 650-5588.
If you're listening live on the internet or long distance, you can reach us at 800-366-8883.
That's 800-366-8883.
Today's guest is a researcher and expert in the area of female hormones and he received
his doctorate in philosophy and endocrine physiology and biochemistry from the University
of Oregon in 1972.
He has taught courses in endocrinology, physiology, the brain, and aging at such schools as the
National College of Naturopathic Medicine and the University of Oregon.
He is the author of several books, all of which I have read myself, which include progesterone
and orthomolecular medicine and nutrition for women, mind and tissue.
He also has a monthly newsletter which he's been writing since 1980 and to which I also
subscribe.
His name is Dr. Ray Peat and we'd like to welcome him to the program.
Dr. Peat, welcome.
Nice to have you with us.
You're there in Eugene, Oregon, isn't that correct?
We're here in Las Vegas where the weather is sunny and still a little warm for this
time of year and you're there where it's overcast.
I used to live there for 15 years so I know exactly what it's like.
It's raining.
Raining or drizzling because everybody walks around there without an umbrella.
They're so used to it, you know, the light drizzle.
And when it's overcast so much of the time, do you see or are you familiar with much seasonal
affective disorder where people become depressed because they're not getting enough sunlight?
Oh yeah.
About 25 years ago when I moved to Eugene from Southern Oregon where there's a lot more
sun, I wondered why I was feeling lethargic and depressed and I realized we hadn't had
a day of sunlight for about two months straight and that was when I really started getting
interested in the hormonal effects of sunlight.
And when I moved back after being in Mexico for several years, I moved back to Eugene
and started seeing graduate student young women who had moved to Eugene and immediately
started having hormonal problems, EMS and worse symptoms.
What did you do for yourself to correct that problem?
Trying to get as much sunlight as possible but when there's no sunlight then I keep a
couple of, they call them infrared bulbs but they're farmers use them for brooder lamps
to keep baby chicks warm and so on.
They have a clear front and a reflector built in but they have a warmer temperature, lower
temperature than the usual incandescent bulb and that means that the light penetrates more
deeply.
It's rich in red and orange frequencies and I keep about 500 watts shining down on me
all the time when I'm indoors.
Yeah, that sounds like a very interesting approach similar to the infrared sauna which
can penetrate deeper without having to overheat the patient.
What about using ultraviolet light?
Isn't that also a treatment?
Yeah, I have about an 80-year-old mercury vapor lamp that I use for getting extra vitamin
D once in a while but I also take vitamin D. I like to take it through my skin because
I never have much confidence in how pure the excipients are in supplements.
Taking it through my skin, it works fine for keeping my vitamin D up.
Yeah, we have the same concern in our clinic about using the best quality supplements because
a lot of products out there, especially the ones made by the pharmaceutical company which
are very cheap but very ineffective and so patients read about the great results that
you can get from taking certain B vitamins or vitamin E or amino acid and then they go
buy it on the cheap and wonder why they're not getting results.
30 years ago, I was doing a lot of counseling with allergic people.
In the summer, Eugene is near a big grass growing area and at the end of the summer,
they burn the fields and release a lot of chemicals into the air so the asthma sickness
rate is very high.
All summer, there are lots of allergic people in Eugene and I found at first that giving
them supplements and a good diet, especially rich in vitamin A and pandenthalic acid took
care of a big part of the population with allergies but there were many that didn't
improve and I found that if I got them to use natural foods and avoid all of their supplements,
all of them improved and it turned out that many, many people taking a lot of vitamin
mineral supplements every day were actually allergic to the excipients in the products.
Yeah, that's a good point.
What happens in the patient, our experience is that patients have a threshold and when
they are exposing themselves to allergens, whether in their food or in the air or even
from their supplements in this case, they all add up.
They have a cumulative effect and then you reach that threshold at which they're reactive
and sometimes lowering their reactivity to one of those agents may help lower their response,
their allergens but the allergy is still there until they're neutralized and you're able
to identify what they are and eliminate them completely.
All they've done is...
The total burden and the amount of energy you have to deal with the burden is what produces
symptoms.
If your blood sugar is low, almost anything becomes a serious allergen.
With animal experiments, they found that the weakest allergen, if they lowered the blood
sugar with insulin, the animals would die in shock from a very weak allergen but if
they gave them extra sugar, even the allergic animals could...
They would get nothing but mild sniffles from a deadly super strong allergen.
Now, what about hypoglycemia or reactive hypoglycemia?
Patients are eating something that's raising their blood sugar and then it drops over a
short period of time.
Are those patients then...
Are these are patients that are more susceptible to allergies or that are reacting in an allergic
way?
It can become a vicious circle because normally when you are exposed to a stress or an allergen,
you put out a little extra cortisol to improve your immunity and lower your inflammation.
That can start suppressing your thyroid function and lowering your liver's detoxifying ability
and your intestine always has allergens in it and especially if you're exposed to some
special allergens, the chronic exposure to cortisol, suppressing your liver function
and thyroid function allows those toxins and allergens from your intestine to get into
the bloodstream and endotoxin is a basic substance produced by bacteria in the intestine and
that poisons our energy-producing systems, almost turns off mitochondrial function and
that wastes the blood sugar so that you can create hypoglycemia by exposing yourself to
too many of these stresses.
The quickest way to break out of the cycle is to eat a well-balanced natural diet but
emphasizing a lot of fruits.
Orange juice for example because of the high potassium content which lets you handle and
absorb blood sugar without disturbing your insulin.
The potassium itself handles the sugar without triggering the insulin and when your liver
is receiving enough sugar from the combination of potassium and sugar in the fruit, it is
able to activate the thyroid hormone restoring the poisoned function of your mitochondria
and letting you use oxygen efficiently so it can bring you out of a chronic allergic
hypoglycemic state and get you back to a steady blood sugar sometimes just in a day or two
I think you mentioned a couple of things that most people are not aware of.
Number one is that orange juice has potassium in it.
Everybody thinks about eating bananas but if you're low in potassium you can drink orange
juice and get it increased much quicker.
You also mentioned something about the liver which is an area where the thyroid is converted
from inactive to active form.
Most people don't understand.
Yeah, Bruno Barnes many years ago wrote a very good book called "Hypoglycemia, It's
Your Liver Not Your Mind" and he was one of the first people to emphasize that most of
the active thyroid, about 70% of it is produced in your liver rather than in the thyroid gland.
The gland itself in your neck produces about 30% of the active hormone.
Anytime your blood sugar falls, if you go without eating for eight hours for example,
your blood sugar is likely to fall and that your liver doesn't want to convert your tissues
to food and so your liver stops making thyroid so your metabolism decreases.
Your temperature goes down at some point when you have stopped eating so that you don't
burn up your body too fast as you would if your metabolic rate stayed high without eating.
Yeah, now we mentioned that the thyroid is produced by the thyroid, it's also produced
by the liver and we're converted there.
Doesn't that conversion also take place at the cellular level as well?
Well, the tissues produce quite a bit of it.
The pituitary gland can detect T4 because of the inactive form of the thyroid, thyroxine
and since it can convert it, it doesn't distinguish very strongly between whether you're taking
T4 or T3.
It turns off its activity whenever it sees T4 or T3 and so since it produces just a tiny
amount for its own detecting purposes, if you accumulate too much thyroxine in your
tissues, pituitary thinks you have enough thyroid but your liver not be producing any
active thyroid hormone from it at all.
In one of the early experiments studying where the hormone is active and what it's doing,
they took slices of the different organs and added thyroxine.
They found that liver became fully activated with a modest amount of thyroxine added.
The kidneys converted a little of it and were slightly activated by thyroxine.
The muscles were not activated at all but the brain when thyroxine was added was actually
suppressed because brain normally has an extremely high concentration of the active T3 part of
the hormone in relation to T4 and so locally, the too much T4 affects your brain in an anti-thyroid
direction but very few doctors are aware of the risks of prescribing plain thyroxine.
That's a good point, a very good point.
We're going to talk about that more when we come back from the break.
I'm Dr. Dan Royal.
You're listening to Hope for Health and my guest today is Dr. Ray Peeb.
We're going to take a short break and we will be right back.
Would you like to know if you are at risk for cancer, heart disease, osteoporosis, Alzheimer's
disease and more?
Don't wait until disease strikes.
With genomics testing, you can glimpse the future.
Genomics testing reveals what genetic diseases you may develop.
For more information or to order your genomics test, call New Hope Medical Center at 476-0000.
Do something now to avoid future health risks.
Call 476-0000 and get your genomics test today.
Feeling tired?
No sex drive?
In pain?
Can't lose weight?
Call New Hope Medical Center.
At New Hope, patients receive proprietary diagnostic and healing therapies without the
limitations of traditional medicines such as genetic testing, Vax-D, oxygen therapies,
bioidentical hormones, nutritional IVs, health spine rejuvenation, lifestyle counseling and
more.
At New Hope, patients get real answers to real health problems.
Call New Hope now at 476-0000.
Get healthy and call 476-0000 today.
We're back.
I'm Dr. Dan Royal and you are listening to Hope for Health.
Again, my guest is Dr. Ray Peeb and if you have a question for either the doctor or his
guest, you can call us here at 650-KKBB.
That's 650-5588 or long distance 800-366-8883.
Dr. Peeb, you mentioned that thyroxin has a suppressive effect on the brain.
I think it's important that we discuss that in a little more detail because the audience
may not understand that thyroxin is T4 which is the same thing as synthroid which means
the most common thyroid medicine being prescribed through conventional medicine has no active
thyroid in it.
That's true.
But because of I think it's the result of pressure from the pharmaceutical industry
making their synthetics, the FDA has begun forcing the producers of the natural thyroid
products such as Armour Thyroid USP to put on their label the ingredients in terms of
T4 and T3 but natural thyroid contains neither of those.
It's a protein with only the tiniest trace as a contaminant sometimes of thyroxin or
the active T3 but now people look at the label and they see T4 and T3 even listed on natural
thyroid products and it just isn't there.
When you digest the protein, your digestive system releases those hormones and the gland
when you digest it or when it digests itself in normal functioning, that protein breaking
down releases about three or four parts of thyroxin for each part of the active T3 and
that's why your liver has to convert the thyroxin which is about 70% of the output of your thyroid
gland.
And similarly, when you take a supplement of Armour Thyroid, when you digest it, it's
in that same ratio so your liver still has to activate three quarters of it and that
means that you can't go very far wrong when you're taking the natural substance because
the ratio entering your blood is within the range produced by your normal gland so your
liver can make the decision as to whether to activate it or not.
Yeah, it's a good point.
Typically the natural type thyroid and there's a number of different types have a ratio of
about four to one, T4 to T3 and then what we will typically do in our practice is increase
that ratio of three to one by adding a little bit of Cytomel which is just pure active T3
but when we do that, usually it's because the patient has developed antibodies to their
thyroid which you can see in Graves' disease or I've seen it in cases where the patients
are taking thyroxin, the synthetic, Synthroid for example and now because they've introduced
this foreign substance into their body, it's attacked and so the body now requires more
thyroid to overcome that.
In fact, that one patient I saw recently who said, "Gee, they put me on thyroid and I started
gaining weight and then every time they changed the dose, I gained more weight and they wouldn't
believe me."
So we checked her thyroid antibodies and sure enough, they were very high but every time
they gave her the Synthroid, she developed the antibodies and then they upped the dose
and the situation just got worse.
I wouldn't say it happens in every patient but I've seen it enough that I'm very skeptical
and never used the thyroxin.
When I was teaching at the Naturopathic College in Portland, someone from the University of
Oregon Medical School Hospital told about a woman who had been prescribed, I think it
was the equivalent of one grain of thyroxin, about 100 micrograms I think it was and she
got a little worse and more hypothyroid and they kept increasing the dose and when they
reached 400 micrograms of thyroxin, she went into a myxedema coma and they took her to
the hospital unconscious and kept her alive until someone figured out that she wasn't
converting T4 to T3 and it had simply turned her brain metabolism off to the point that
she was no longer conscious and when they gave her T3, she recovered immediately to
full functioning.
Yes, so it's important to have a healthy liver if that's where three-quarters of the conversion
is happening and isn't it true that if you're taking let's say the thyroxin, the inactive
thyroid and it's having a suppressive effect on your brain and can't it, isn't it true
that it can build up in your brain and cause other symptoms if it's not being converted?
Yes, many people have told me that when they were given supposedly the right dose of thyroxin,
they began getting symptoms like ringing sounds in their ears and prickly sensations, fairly
common symptoms of hypothyroidism but they would start when they would go on thyroxin
and when they added T3, the symptoms would go away and be okay.
What's very interesting is I have many patients come into my office and they've seen other
doctors and they tell me that, "Oh, my doctor checked everything."
But when it comes to thyroid, I've never seen that happen.
The doctors will look at just the T4 or just the TSH, they never check the antibodies.
So the patient never really gets a complete thyroid evaluation even though they're told
by the doctor everything is fine.
So when you're checking the thyroid, in your opinion, what's the best test to be looking
at?
The way they did it in the 1930s before the drug companies came on the scene, basically
took control of the journals and the medical schools and made everyone over the next 30
or 40 years forget how to treat thyroid patients.
The way they originally did it was to look at symptoms and when they saw definitely too
many symptoms, they would give them a basal metabolic rate test, how much oxygen they
consume at rest and that's really the absolute way to determine what's happening.
It doesn't matter how much is in your blood, if it's being blocked, for example, if you
have eaten too many polyunsaturated fats or too much cabbage or other antithyroid factors,
you can have an excess of thyroid hormones in your bloodstream and still not be consuming
very much oxygen.
Some people are 20, 30, 40% below normal in oxygen consumption and the ideal way would
be to give the dose of thyroid until the oxygen consumption is at least normal except Americans
on comparison with other countries where they don't eat so much the artificial food, Americans
on average are about 25% hypometabolic or hypothyroid.
And so the practical thing really is to go by symptoms and checking as many of the physiological
indicators, for example, reflex reaction time, the speed of your reflex, you can flash a
light in a person's eye and the pupil is slow to respond if they're hypothyroid.
The body temperature tends to be usually but not invariably tends to be much below normal
when you're hypothyroid.
An excess of stress, strength, and cortisol can artificially raise your temperature.
So those can go up in hypothyroidism.
So temperature is just one of the indicators and there's a reflex, the Achilles tendon
relaxation rate.
If you have a person nail and thump their Achilles tendon so that it makes their toe
twitch away from their body, that a person with almost any thyroid function will have
the reflex but what you watch is how quickly your foot relaxes back to its resting position.
And a hypothyroid person's foot looks like it has a pneumatic door closer on it.
It carefully or in jerks returns slowly to where it was at rest.
But a person with good thyroid function, the jerking foot looks like a piece of rubber.
It relaxes and bounces.
It comes back so fast.
Yeah, and I checked that in almost all of my patients.
I'm glad you mentioned that.
My guest today is Dr. Ray Peat and we're talking about the thyroid and other hormones.
If you have a question for us, you can reach us here at 650-KKVB.
That's 650-5588.
You can also find Dr. Peat on the internet at www.raypeat.com.
We're going to take a short break and when we come back, we'll continue our discussion
about the thyroid and other hormones.
We'll be right back.
Hi, I'm Dr. Dan Royal, Medical Director for New Hope Medical Center.
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allergies, and even prescription drugs.
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That's why at New Hope, we emphasize health optimization, not disease management.
For more information, call New Hope Medical at 476-0000.
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We're back.
I'm Dr. Dan Royal.
Thanks for staying with us.
My guest today is Dr. Ray Peat, and we're talking about the thyroid and other hormones.
I wanted to bring something to your attention, Dr. Peat, and that is something I see frequently
in my practice and throughout America.
It's the high blood fat issue and the whole cholesterol industry that's been built up
around that.
I would think that one of the signs of high cholesterol would be a low thyroid because
normally if you have a healthy metabolism, you should be able to process those fats fairly
effectively since the liver is the place where that's happening, where those fats are being
made, being broken down.
It's also the place where the thyroid is being converted.
What do you think about that?
The liver is a big source of disposal of the cholesterol, but the ovaries, the gonads,
and the brain itself and the adrenal glands all use considerable amounts of cholesterol.
For example, in one experiment, blood containing a known amount of cholesterol was pumped into
an ovary, and the amount of progesterone coming out corresponded exactly to the amount of
cholesterol going in.
If you lowered the cholesterol, you lowered the amount of progesterone being produced.
That same conversion happens in the brain and adrenal glands and various other tissues
to some extent.
If you're forcing your cholesterol down with a drug, you're likely, for example, many studies
have shown increased rate of accidents, cancer, and even suicide and death by homicide.
I think it was one of the major events in the people who were drugged to lower their
cholesterol.
The Framingham study following people over many years found that people whose cholesterol
was below 200 when they were over the age of 50 were much more likely to become demanded
because cholesterol makes those protective hormones, makes progesterone, for example,
in the brain, which is extremely protective against all kinds of injury and toxins.
I'm glad you mentioned that.
I love it when the side effect of medication is death.
That's all we need.
We've got a caller on the line.
Do you have a question for our guest, Geraldine?
I do.
I'm really enjoying the program.
When I was 16, in Santa Monica, they thought I had a broken jaw.
They used the x-ray machine and took many plates of my jaw.
Then right after that, my thyroid really went out.
Of course, I've had a terrible problem all my life.
I'm wondering what do you recommend having a problem trying to get medication.
I have trouble sleeping and gaining weight and just the whole thing I've got.
What do you suggest for a medication?
What would you give for a good medication?
I used to take...
The usual thing is to check the diet, make sure the person is getting enough good protein
because a protein deficiency makes the liver unable to activate the thyroid hormone the
same way a lack of sugar does.
You need at least 80 grams of high quality protein.
For example, milk or cheese or eggs will give you good protein to make the liver able to
process the thyroid.
A low thyroid function, the symptoms you mentioned are very classical hypothyroid symptoms because
the brain needs energy to go to sleep properly.
Hypothyroid people have been given EEGs which show that they never can get into deep restful
slow wave sleep.
They stay in superficial sleep which isn't restful and even worse than that, they often
have insomnia and have trouble going to sleep because when your nerves or your muscles are
not producing enough energy, fatigue accumulates and they're unable to relax.
It's the same thing as the Achilles reflex test.
You're slow to relax any cell, any muscle or nerve and when you get fatigued, your brain
needs thyroid to relax.
A doctor that I visited, I think it was in either Reno or Las Vegas, had insomnia for
two or three days and I suggested Cytomel.
The next day he said that stuff is better than opium.
He said he was sound asleep 15 minutes after taking a little bit of the active thyroid
hormone.
Oh, that's wonderful.
I haven't heard of that.
Yeah, there's nothing better than sleep when you really need it.
Most people, it's interesting, my patients have the misconception that if I give them
thyroid somehow it's some kind of amphetamine that's going to keep them up at night.
What they don't understand is just what Dr. Peat said, thyroid helps you to relax and
helps your reflexes to recover.
He mentioned the pupillary reflex of the eye as well as your Achilles tendon reflex as
well as now the body being able to relax and go to sleep at night.
Does that help with your question, Geraldine?
Oh, I'm very grateful.
I want to thank you very much.
All right, thanks for calling.
Thank you.
Dr. Peat, one of the things I think we should also mention is that if the thyroid is having
a problem, the adrenals do tend to take over and as you mentioned, cortisol levels can
be elevated and this can also interrupt the sleep-wake cycle because cortisol should actually
be low at night and high in the morning.
When the sun goes down, various things happen.
For example, the red light or sunlight that penetrates deeply into your cells activates
processes that protect you against lipid peroxidation and free radicals and it just takes about
an hour of darkness and your mitochondria start losing efficiency because the free radicals
start interfering with them.
When darkness has lasted for several hours, your blood sugar becomes a problem and that's
why your cortisol rises after you've been asleep for a couple of hours.
It keeps getting higher and higher until dawn and that allows you to stay asleep because
the cortisol is breaking down your protein, turning it to sugar, letting the thyroid function,
letting your nerve cells repair by getting enough sugar.
But the combination of reactions to the low blood sugar, if your liver didn't store enough
glycogen, very quickly, early in the night, you'll have an adrenaline reaction trying
to get more glycogen out of your liver to compensate for the low thyroid function.
Low thyroid people very often have 30 or 40 times more adrenaline being produced than
a healthy person and that keeps you awake or makes you wake up with a start after you've
been asleep for a while and the adrenaline makes your heart beat faster and wakes you
up but it triggers increasing cortisol and the cortisol will start damaging your tissues,
making your muscles gradually be converted to sugar to keep your brain working during
the night.
And these low thyroid people who compensate with very high amounts of adrenaline and cortisol
will sometimes wake up with a temperature of 98.6 or 99 degrees which is definitely
not in what most people think of as the hypothyroid range, 95 or 96 degrees.
But if you take their temperature out an hour after they've had some orange juice and other
food in the morning, you'll find that their temperature is down in the extremely hypothyroid
range.
It's only the stress hormones before breakfast that keep them up to a normal temperature.
It's fascinating how this relates to each other.
We're going to take another call.
Yolanda, do you have a question for our guest?
Yes.
Thank you, Dr. Peat.
I happened upon you guys' radio show today by accident but I think it was to my good
fortune.
I've got a 12-year-old, if you can believe it, with a diagnosis of hypothyroid and really
how we found out or how I received the diagnosis is I took her in to a pediatrician to explore
whether or not there could be some explanation for what I considered a weight gain that did
not seem to correlate with her consumption.
In other words, it didn't seem like she was eating enough to be gaining the weight at
the rate that she was.
They did a number of blood tests and I guess her T3 came back really high.
Then I was referred to a pediatric endocrinologist and there are not very many here in Southern
Nevada so I had to wait several months.
Let me just make a comment about that, Yolanda.
One of the problems that I see in the thyroid testing is what they're checking is T3 uptake
which is a mathematical guesstimation.
They're not usually checking T3-RIA which is a more accurate assessment of the active
thyroid.
If your child has been diagnosed with hypothyroidism and the T3 is elevated, that doesn't make
sense.
That's a total contradiction in terms.
Right.
What happened was when I went to the pediatric endocrinologist, he wanted to run his own
series of tests.
I'll be honest with you.
This has been a couple of years ago and I can't remember exactly but he was the one
who gave me the diagnosis based on his set of tests.
I can't remember what was too high for the T4 and TSH.
He takes TSH, T4 and we do it every six months.
He did the antibodies you were speaking of early as well.
She was not positive for the antibodies.
What is the medication she's taking?
She's taking and that's why I wanted to talk to you because I was like, "It sounds like
you all aren't recommending the Synthroid."
She's on 0.88 of the Synthroid and has been for two years.
Absolutely not.
That would not be our approach based on what you've heard in this program.
It's like Gorder, you know what I mean by that?
There are three times when women are more likely to become hypothyroid and you can very
often see the signs even if they aren't experiencing any symptoms.
You can see the thyroid gland enlarging around puberty and again at pregnancy and again around
menopause.
What happens is they've studied it with slices of the tissue in a culture dish.
As estrogen rises, the brain senses that you need more thyroid hormone, puts out more TSH
but the estrogen blocks the enzymes that digest that protein in the thyroid gland so it stops
secreting the active hormone and progesterone happens to activate those enzymes and allow
the gland to secrete.
You can pretty much depend on the slowing down of the thyroid whenever there's a situation
that raises estrogen and puberty is the most common one.
Typically girls in their teens will have an enlarged thyroid compared to boys because
that's the standard effect of estrogen even when you're healthy.
So what we would typically recommend at New Hope Medical, I'll just kind of give you some
free advice here, we would typically put the patient on a grain of the natural thyroid
and have them take it twice a day.
The reason for that is because natural thyroid has a half-life of about 8 to 12 hours.
The body's actually utilizing it, digesting it, processing it as opposed to hanging around
for 24 hours waiting for the body to convert it to active thyroid if that's actually happening
with the synthroid.
We're going to go ahead and take a short break.
We thank you for calling and when we come back we'll take another caller.
So I'm Dr. Dan Royer, you're listening to Hope for Health.
My guest today is Ray Peat and we will be right back.
Would you like to know if you are at risk for cancer, heart disease, osteoporosis, Alzheimer's
disease and more?
Don't wait until disease strikes.
With genomics testing you can glimpse the future.
Genomics testing reveals what genetic diseases you may develop.
For more information or to order your genomics test, call New Hope Medical Center at 476-0000.
Do something now to avoid future health risks.
Call 476-0000 and get your genomics test today.
Feeling tired?
No sex drive?
In pain?
Can't lose weight?
Welcome to New Hope Medical Center.
At New Hope, patients receive proprietary diagnostic and healing therapies without the limitations
of traditional medicines such as genetic testing, Vax-D, oxygen therapies, bioidentical hormones,
nutritional IVs, health spine rejuvenation, lifestyle counseling and more.
At New Hope, patients get real answers to real health problems.
Call New Hope now at 476-0000.
Get healthy and call 476-0000 today.
We're back.
I'm Dr. Dan Royer and you've been listening to Hope for Health.
Our guest today is Dr. Ray Peat who is an independent scientist with a background expertise
in female hormones and we've been discussing thyroid today and we're going to continue
that discussion with our caller on the line.
Stan, do you have a question for Dr. Peat?
About the thyroid and Dr. Wilson who's a DO, what was that side e-mail?
Is that a prescription item or was that an over-the-counter supplement?
No, that is a prescription item.
Okay.
Dr. Wilson who's a DO, he's done years of research on the thyroid where it's kind of
a little bit subclinical where the doctor tells you it's normal for people who are running
temperatures of like 97, 97.1 and they have like cold hands sometimes, cold feet and they're
very, very sluggish in the morning hours.
Was Dr. Wilson on target with the temperature situation of subclinical thyroid?
I'm going to let Dr. Peat answer this with you after.
Is that okay?
Okay.
And can I also ask him, he recommends that as Dr. Wilson after 20 years of research that
the armor thyroid T3 will really properly fix this issue and kind of resetting the thyroid,
unclogging it so that you get a proper amount of T3 in the blood and the doctors just look
at T4 when we get these blood tests.
Correct.
I'm giving you a lot but you want me to hang up and listen?
Yeah.
Is that okay?
Okay.
I hope you can remember all of it because it's a lot in there.
We will.
Okay.
Thanks a lot.
You're welcome.
Okay.
So first I think we should clarify that Wilson syndrome is primarily referring to that reverse
T3 that's another element of thyroid testing that can be assessed.
And so I think that the question you had Dr. Peat was how accurate number one is the basal
body temperature?
And number two, can the problem of Wilson syndrome can be corrected with T3?
Yeah.
The thing that I mentioned about the stress hormones causing a falsely elevated normal
appearing temperature, that's something that you should watch out for.
If someone has had an unusual diet without enough protein or if they're in the menopause
years, it's very common for women to experience excess cortisol around menopause.
And that's one of the major things that causes the deposit of fat around the trunk at menopause
and the weakening of the bones.
Cortisol accelerates dissolving of the bones and deposition of fat.
And people with those symptoms, even if they're younger, they should be checked for excess
adrenaline and cortisol.
And a protein deficiency is a common cause of that whole pattern.
The reverse T3 rises when you're under stress and exposed to too much cortisol and a very
bad diet can be enough to put you into that chronic stress state.
And the quickest way out of it is with a supplement, a reliably formulated supplement of T3.
But the armor thyroid and a traditional product made by the same company called ThyroLarve,
which was a synthetic made to be equivalent to the natural thyroid, those will provide
enough T3 for most people.
But there's people who almost always prefer to have a little more T3 than that if they
want to quickly get over their symptoms.
Yeah, that's a good point.
And what I found in my testing of patients is that reverse T3, in terms of being able
to document, is actually quite difficult and rarely seen.
But there are so many other factors by which you can diagnose hypothyroidism, some which
we've talked about in this program, such as the low T4, low T3, the high TSH, the thyroid
antibodies, not to mention the clinical conditions that need to be looked at.
So for example, you could have a patient that has normal thyroid function, but yet they
have clinical symptomatology, signs and symptoms of hypothyroidism.
What are you going to do?
Most doctors would not treat because, well, the lab says they're fine.
Well, you don't need a doctor to diagnose a patient who's fine in the lab work.
You need a doctor who can assess whether the patient needs thyroid, even though the lab
is abnormal, and be able to explain why.
The traditional doctors did fine just going by signs.
And as many of the measures as they knew were reliable, such as oxygen consumption and the
cholesterol level, and they would look at the palms of a person's hands.
A low thyroid person can't convert carotene to vitamin A, and so they will typically accumulate
orange in the calluses of their hands and feet, and their skin, their hands and feet
are almost always cold because their metabolic rate is low.
Even though their core temperature might be kept up by adrenaline and cortisol, their
fingers and toes are likely to be cooler than other people's at the same environmental temperature.
And cold feet, interestingly, can cause serious inflammatory problems elsewhere in the body.
So a first aid for some of the symptoms of hypothyroidism is just to get some wooly underwear
and thick stockings.
And you can also keep your extremities warm because you can actually cure anemia even
without correcting your whole metabolic situation just by keeping your long bones warmer, reducing
the inflammatory substances produced in cold feet.
Yeah, that's very interesting.
And you can also correct that by supplementing the adrenals so they don't have to put out
so much adrenaline by using the natural DHA and pregnenolone hormones.
But some of the clinical signs of hypothyroidism, which are very obvious and, of course, taken
together, should raise your index of suspicion, and they include fatigue, overweight or obesity,
and edema, among other things.
Anyway, we have a caller on the line, and I think she has a question for our guest.
Earlene, did you have a question you'd like to ask?
I'm 36, 70, and I have had all...
I'm diabetic.
I don't take any insulin, and I don't take any diabetic medicine.
I've been trying to control it with diet.
But what I'm worried about is my arthritis seemed to get worse after I had the hysterectomy,
and I have osteoarthritis, not the other kind.
I was wondering if this had anything to do with hormones.
Absolutely, hormones are related.
And one of the things that should be checked, in my opinion, is the female hormones along
with the thyroid and other more comprehensive testing to give us a bigger picture of what's
going on.
But as Dr. Peat, when I mentioned earlier, as a woman goes through menopause, this is one
of those transitions in life where the hypothyroidism issue can manifest.
And some people also have the theory that when you're in pain or inflammation all the
time that your cortisol level may actually not be quite high enough, and so that's keeping
you in pain all the time.
So these are some issues that should be considered.
What do you think, Dr. Peat?
I had a friend who was in his 70s and had an accident and immediately started developing
arthritis and was crippled pretty suddenly by arthritis in his hands and feet and knees.
And he luckily had a doctor who had been educated in the 1930s who immediately tested his thyroid
because stress and injury can lower your thyroid.
And my friend was grumpy and said, "I didn't go to have you fix my thyroid.
I wanted you to fix the arthritis."
But within two weeks, his arthritis cleared up and he lived 15 years more, never any more
arthritis.
In the 30s, it was standard knowledge that arthritis was usually a sign of hypothyroidism.
Yeah, that's a good point.
Any trauma in your life like having a baby or having a surgery, these things can trigger
hypothyroidism because it's such a stress from which you may not recover.
And as Dr. Peat said, you need a doctor with a little more intuition who uses his right
brain and can diagnose these problems without being wholly reliant upon the lab.
Anyway, we thank you for calling, Earline.
We're going to take a short break, and when we come back, we'll continue our discussion
with Dr. Ray Peat.
I'm Dr. Dan Royal, and you're listening to Hope for Health.
We'll be right back.
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I'm back.
I'm Dr. Dan Royal.
You're listening to Hope for Health.
My guest today has been Dr. Ray Peat.
He's been sitting down our show here, but we're going to go ahead and take one more
call.
Bill, you're on the line.
Do you have a question for our guest?
It's not mostly a question.
I was born with Wilson's disease and have lived with it through diet and nutrition.
I have kept it under control.
I was on KKVV for about three and a half years with stepping to the other side of health.
I have a vague idea to Wilson's disease from the inside, so to speak, having had it and
had it all my life.
One of the things that people will tell you is that you can't live without fat.
I'm living proof.
I'm past 75, and I'm living proof you can live without eating fat.
If sometime in the future you ever want to get around to discussing Wilson's again, I'll
be more than happy to call in again.
All right.
Appreciate your call.
Thanks, Bill.
You have a great day.
Thank you.
You too.
I think that eating saturated fats, they can have some therapeutic effects.
I'm also an advocate of fruit-centered diet.
There are animals that live on fruit, for example, the squirrel monkey, which lives
about three times as long as other animals of its size and has an extremely high metabolic
rate.
In the wild, it lives exclusively on fruit.
That's sort of a way to think about the effect of fruit on your physiology because the fruit
contains the things needed to stimulate your thyroid function and protect against stress.
It is possible to live entirely without fat in your diet because your body can make the
saturated fats that it needs.
That's a good point.
Saturated fat is what the thyroid needs, and you can get that from coconut oil, which I
use in my own cooking.
On the other hand, you have a lot of patients who are taking these unsaturated fatty acids,
which are actually inhibiting the thyroid.
The more unsaturated the fat is, the more thoroughly it inhibits the thyroid.
It inhibits secretion, transport, and reaction to the thyroid.
In the early part of the last century, several researchers showed that animals on a fat-free
diet were completely free of spontaneous cancer and lived longer than normal.
That's very interesting, but at the very least, a patient, if they're taking unsaturated fat,
should be combining it with saturated fat so they have some kind of balance.
Anyway, we're coming to the conclusion of our show.
Thank you.
My man in the sound room over there is roaring like a lion.
Dr. Peat, any concluding remarks for our listeners today?
Well, there's a book that you might be able to find in a big library or a used bookstore
that is really a great introduction to the amazing things that thyroid can do.
It's "The Thyroid" by Thomas McGaffick.
Okay, "Thyroid" by Thomas McGaffick.
I appreciate being with us, Dr. Peat.
This has been very interesting, and I hope it's been interesting for you, our audience.
I'm Dr. Dan Royal.
You've been listening to Hope for Health, which is brought to you by New Hope Medical
Center located here in town, where you can find us at 215 N Pecos.
We invite you to tune in again this same time again next week for another important program
on health alternatives with Hope for Health.
Until then, you have a great life.
By my own fame.
Isn't it great?