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[Music]
Well, welcome to this month's Ask Your Herb Doctor. My name's Andrew Murray.
My name's Sarah Johanneson-Murray.
For those perhaps who've never listened to our shows, they're run every third Friday of the month from 7 to 8 p.m.
We're both licensed medical herbalists who qualified in England with a degree in herbal medicine
and produce our own certified organic herb extracts here in the USA, in California.
And we have a practice here in Garbovore where we consult with clients about a wide range of conditions.
Once again, we're very pleased to introduce Dr. Eamon Peat to the show. He's going to share his wisdom with us.
This week, or rather this month, the day's topic is the subject of palpitations,
but it also interweaves many current subjects related to palpitations,
which are things like the hormones, progesterone especially,
and also other factors associated with blood clots, myocardial infarcts, and other cardiac events that are pathologically bad for us.
Anyway, to cut a long story short, let's welcome Dr. Peat to the show. Thank you for joining us, Dr. Peat.
Okay, so what I think we wanted to bring out this evening was the subject of palpitations,
and I know that there's many other factors involved in palpitations, but we're going to probably home in on a couple in detail.
Does Dr. Peat want to give our listeners a detailed description of his background?
Yeah, I forgot to ask you, didn't I? My fault.
Oh, not very detailed, but I studied physiology at the University of Oregon.
I was there for several years, 1968 to '72, and the circulatory system wasn't my main interest,
but I ran across interesting work done in the 1940s by one of my science heroes, Albert Szent-Györgyi,
who happened to be studying the effects of estrogen and progesterone on the heart of animals and blood vessels.
And his work exactly matched what I was doing in animal aging and the effects of those same hormones.
So I was interested in the circulatory system as it relates to the endocrine system especially.
Right, I know your main interests are anti-aging and hormones surrounding stress and aging.
I think a lot of what we thought we knew from mainstream medical education and regurgitated popular news, the media,
it seems pretty erroneous in the light of published, albeit rarely included, research that's available.
I'm specifically referring to the ongoing hormone debate, and we'll get into HRT as a subject perhaps a little later.
But for now, with a common thread throughout tonight's topic of palpitations and the cardiovascular effects,
together with the papers that are published showing the dangerous effects of estrogen
and the beneficial effects of progesterone and testosterone as well as thyroid hormone,
what are we to understand of the misleading advertising surrounding estrogen's supposedly positive effects?
It's the standard thing that gets into the news or the science journals or the universities.
It's strongly influenced by the giant corporate interests, and estrogen happens to be a very profitable thing,
multi-billions of dollars per year, so they can control the public perception of the hormones in their interest.
Part of the idea of selling estrogen as a beneficial thing was that women live longer than men,
and since they were selling estrogen as the female hormone,
they said that it must be estrogen that accounts for why women live longer
and have lower incidence of heart disease before menopause.
So at one point, they actually did a trial of giving estrogen to men,
and when they started having more heart attacks, they stopped the experiment,
but that didn't kill the idea that estrogen is heart protective.
So for 50 years, they carried on promoting the idea of giving estrogen to women to protect their heart
and the Women's Health Initiative results came out with women having more heart attacks on the estrogen trial.
So why did they start with estrogen? Why didn't they start with progesterone?
Because there's only one product, one substance that really has the effects of progesterone,
and just about anything that is interfering with the use of oxygen has estrogenic effects.
Several extracts of soot were demonstrated to be estrogenic.
The polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons are very estrogenic.
Even cyanide has some estrogenic effects, or putting a plastic bag over an animal's head,
or irradiating any part of the animal with x-rays or gamma rays is estrogenic.
So the concept of estrogen is something very easily brought to market in a product
where progesterone is one single molecule that can't be imitated exactly with any alteration.
And what about the price difference to manufacture estrogen versus to manufacture progesterone?
Yeah, the fact that soot extracts are estrogenic means that you can produce it for less than one cent per dose
if you want to, where progesterone has to be exactly duplicated.
For years, they were extracting it from the corpus luteum of sow ovaries,
and it took tons of ovaries to produce a few grams of progesterone.
So they found how to manufacture it from plant steroids that were closely similar in structure.
Like wild yam and trillium and other herbal products.
Yeah, with a few chemical alterations, they could become exact copies of the progesterone molecule.
But since no one could patent that one substance,
they introduced small changes, making it no longer progesterone.
But they said it was close enough to progesterone that it would be better than progesterone
because they had a patent on it and could advertise it.
And they devised tests that had something in common with the real progesterone molecule,
a certain change in cells of the uterus.
But that let them call it a progestin or progestogen because it had something in common with progesterone.
But they implied that it supported gestation.
But in fact, these were the chemicals that were the basis for the birth control pill
because they prevented gestation.
So really, they should be called anti-progestins.
So there's so many different things that can patent and manufacture a drug from soot,
which is just black soot from a fireplace, I guess, right?
Yeah.
And all those other things you mentioned, whereas progesterone takes a lot of ovaries
and a lot of plant material to produce it, so it's much more expensive.
And also then the effects in the body, then estrogen has --
I wouldn't say -- you didn't say it has a wider range of effects than progesterone, but that it's --
Well, it does.
It affects every system, but in pretty much exactly the opposite way that estrogen does.
Any tissue that's injured will begin producing its own estrogen.
So the idea that a woman is estrogen deficient at menopause is just a complete fabrication.
Someone was measuring the estrogen manufactured in a monkey's ovary
and to measure the change from the blood going into the blood coming out of the ovary as a control,
and they measured the blood going into the arm and the blood coming out of the arm of the same monkey
and found that the monkey's arm was producing more estrogen than the ovary.
And since women at menopause still have their arms and legs,
there's no way that they're going to have a decrease in the basic estrogen.
So there's another medical myth that we've been told.
In the menopause, you're suffering from lack of estrogen when, in fact, you're suffering from a lack of progesterone.
Yeah, that has been demonstrated and published, but in books rather than journals.
The journals are so controlled by the industry that you get real science in a lot of books
that never gets into the medical indexes or journals.
Or at medical school, people are not taught what the research is showing.
Yeah, the medical schools teach what the medical journals publish,
and that's always at least a generation behind the science journals.
Like 50 years. It takes 50 years once they prove something, right?
50 years for it to come into practice?
Yeah, I compared the biological abstracts publications or the chemical abstracts on topics related to medicine to the Index Medicus,
which was the print forerunner of PubMed,
and found that typically even the most important things took 20 years before they were mentioned in Index Medicus
after they were already in a generally accepted scientific existence.
The first mention in the medical literature was generally that it was not a valid medical concept,
and like vitamin E, medical journals for several decades were saying it was a very dangerous substance and shouldn't be taken.
It's a good job it comes around, albeit slowly.
I wanted to ask you, getting to the subject of palpitations,
I know that quite a few people that we've come into contact with in practice have mentioned palpitations as being a feature of their physiology,
if you like, and they complain of it.
It may not be the major thing that they come in to consult for,
but palpitations seem to be fairly high amongst the people that we've seen.
I know that you've mentioned palpitations are being probably recognised more frequently as a sign.
So far as the heart and the hemodynamics are concerned,
I know that you've mentioned, and it's been shown in research,
that estrogen actually precipitates arrhythmias,
whilst progesterone has shown to have an inhibiting effect on arrhythmias.
So would you perhaps explain the physiological interactions at work which cause muscle contraction in the first place,
and then listeners can follow the outline and then we can get into the subject of the actual palpitations?
One of the very recent articles on that topic concluded that estrogen causes sudden cardiac death and progesterone prevents it.
And what they were talking about was the arrhythmia caused by prolonging the excited phase of the heart action.
And the electrocardiogram has several phases,
and the last phase of that is called the repolarization wave or the T wave.
And when that has repolarized the cell, the cell is ready for a good, strong next beat.
But if it is delayed by staying in the excited state too long,
the atrium might send a signal for a new beat,
and if it superimposes on that excited state, the cell can't recover enough to have a proper full beat,
so it will have a slight premature convulsive movement,
but not an effective pumping stroke unless it has fully repolarized.
And estrogen is the basic thing that tends to extend the excited state.
It's similar to what happens in epilepsy.
During periods of greatly excessive estrogen, the brain cells can't get out of the excited state,
and there's an epileptic seizure.
Progesterone prevents that by quickly accelerating the restoration of the readiness state
or the relaxed state of the nerve.
The same thing in the heart muscle or skeletal muscle.
Any kind of cell that's excited is quickly restored by either progesterone or thyroid.
Both of them have the energy restoring effect in slightly different ways.
The thyroid increases the energy production needed to relax the nerve or muscle.
Progesterone stabilizes the relaxed state so that it can hang on to the energy produced by thyroid,
where estrogen interferes with both of those processes,
slowing the action potential is what they call the excited state electrically.
Okay, good.
All right, I just want to let people know while you're listening to Ask Your Herb Doctor on KMUD.gov or 91.1 FM.
And from the 7.30 to 8 o'clock, you're invited to call in with any questions related or unrelated
to this month's subject of palpitations and cardiac events surrounding them.
If you're in the area, the number is 923-3911.
If you live outside the area, the number is 1-800-KMUD-RAD.
We're very pleased to be joined again by Dr. Raymond Peat, and he's our guest.
So people can either call him with questions related or unrelated.
Okay, so, yeah, you mentioned the other thing, that thyroid hormone is also able to allow muscles to relax
and that this is another way of showing that the energy that's necessary to allow that relaxation is made possible through thyroid hormone.
When the cell is in its excited state, besides the electrical changes that are being measured,
many other properties of the cell are changed.
For example, one of the immediate obvious effects of estrogen excess is that cells take up more water or release water more slowly.
So in this one second or a fraction of a second state of excitation of nerve or muscle,
the cell momentarily takes up a little bit of water, swells up a little bit, and then as it relaxes, it squeezes the water out.
And so if you are having the premature contraction and not letting it relax fully,
the cell is actually getting a little waterlogged with each of these false beats,
and that's an effect that estrogen has on every place that it acts, whether it's pituitary, uterus, breast tissue, or heart, or nerve.
It's causing a slight waterlogging and swelling of that cell.
So is this why so many women had heart attacks then when they did the HRT trial,
was it because the estrogen they were taking was suppressing their thyroid and causing the waterlogging and blocking the progesterone,
and they just had an elevation of estrogen?
Yeah, one of the differences between heart failure in women and in men is that the diastolic or relaxation phase is more often defective,
or obviously defective in women.
And in that poor diastolic relaxation, the cells become progressively more waterlogged and unable to relax.
And in that over-hydrated state, they also can't get rid of the calcium that comes in when the water enters.
And so it ultimately can lead to actual calcification of the heart.
There was a picture published by the Mexican Heart Institute of a very old woman's calcified heart that looked somewhat like a bone.
And there was a famous story, 19th century story, about someone who was cremated and had a limestone heart.
I think the idea for the story came because people actually do get such highly calcified hearts.
But it's really the end stage of that chronic over-hydration, over-excited inability to relax.
And this is all principally because the calcium is being taken up and deposited in the tissues.
The other thing I wanted to bring out was that the oral contraceptive use in women over 37 was related, if they were smoking,
was related to a much higher incidence of stroke and heart attack.
Yes, there have been a lot of theories about that.
I suspect that the fact that estrogen increases the carbon monoxide in tissue probably overlaps with the high chronic exposure to carbon monoxide of smokers.
Okay.
So you, let me think now.
The air pollution, carbon monoxide, is highly associated with increased heart events and hospitalizations for heart attacks.
Okay.
So in terms of palpitations, what would you see as being a kind of a route to get to in order to restore somebody's ability to have normal contractions?
There are a lot of things other than the electrical property of the heart or the hydration.
The blood volume is one of the factors.
For example, high estrogen women are susceptible to varicose veins ultimately or before that just swelling or distension of the veins.
For example, putting your hand straight down, sometimes the veins on the back of the hand swell up and the legs tend to do that in the high estrogen phase of the menstrual cycle.
And when the veins in the legs are distended, much of the body's blood supply is in the legs.
And so it isn't coming back to the heart at the normal speed.
And this means that in that condition, if the woman stands up and her blood tends to fall into her legs, there will suddenly be a smaller return to the heart.
So the heart doesn't have very much blood to beat.
So it has fast little strokes because the blood simply isn't being returned.
And so that situational arrhythmia or tachycardia is not necessarily connected to the electrical instability, but simply to the way the blood isn't getting sent back to the heart.
But that again is linked to high estrogen causing the veins to distend and to swell up.
Yeah, progesterone increases the smooth muscle tone in the wall of the veins.
And so if your progesterone is deficient, the veins bulge with a very slight pressure on them, just like holding your hand.
If you hold your hand at your waist, if your progesterone and other things are right, you won't see your veins.
But if you're low in progesterone or under stress, even at waist level, you're likely to see bulgy veins.
So there you go, women. There's a good way to see if you're aging or under stress is if your veins on the back of your hands are bulging at waist level.
I frequently look at our clients and analyze what the veins on the back of their hands look like at that level to see how well their body's responding to supplementation.
Okay, well, you're listening to Ask Your Ob-Doctor on KMUD Galliford 91.1 FM.
And from now until eight o'clock, you're invited to call in either about the subject,
which we have Dr. Raymond Peat's expertise sharing with us, which is palpitations and other cardiac anomalies,
or any other questions that people would have also.
So the number to ring if you're here in the area is 923-3911, or if you live outside the area, 1-800-KMUD-RAD.
And I think we have a caller on the line.
Hello?
Hi, you're on the air.
Hi.
Where are you from? Can I ask where you're calling from?
Oh, hi. I'm from New Jersey.
Okay, cool.
Now, my phone is really poor quality, so I'm going to try to keep this short.
First, I appreciate what you all do.
I have many questions, not only for Dr. Peat, but also for Drs. Murray.
But also I saw something -- however, today on Dr. Peat's site, I saw something that I think maybe he would want to know about.
There is a SENSA weight loss system linking to one of your pages.
And are you aware of that?
No.
Let me tell you which one it is.
It's the article "Calcium and Disease, Hypertension, Organ Calcification, and Shock vs. Respiratory Energy."
And it's in a sentence that says -- that begins, "A low-protein diet similar to that eaten by a large proportion of women,"
and then it goes on from there.
But the words "protein diet" are a link.
I pressed -- I wanted to see what you had to say about that.
I was taken to a commercial for SENSA.
Wow, thanks for warning Dr. Peat about that.
Yeah, thanks.
Would you like me to write a letter to the FTC to complain?
I'll take a look at it.
Could you email me?
Do you have my email?
No, would you like me to email the station or something?
Well, my website has my email.
Go straight to Dr. Peat's website.
It is an email address.
If you go to Dr. Peat's website and push on "contact," you can email him.
Maybe you can copy and paste the link.
Okay.
If you go to --
Okay, I'll do that.
I'll do that.
But now since this thing came up, me personally, I'm not in any danger of taking SENSA.
I assume it's junk, especially when they act like this.
But what is your understanding?
What is SENSA?
And on a physiological level, what happens when we take SENSA?
What is that?
I've not heard of it either.
Do you know anything more about it?
Is it an acronym?
Oh, okay, I'm sorry.
I've seen commercials for it where you sprinkle something on your food
and it makes you not -- and somehow you don't eat as much.
And I'm wondering if it's like -- it changes the taste of food, or so they say,
enhancing the taste of food, and therefore you don't want to eat as much.
And now that just sounds like MSG to me or something.
I've never heard of it.
Oh, okay.
Okay.
So I'm going to leave it there then, and I will e-mail the link.
Okay, and just for our listeners, if you want to contact Dr. Peat,
you can go onto his website at www.raypeat.com,
and there's a little Google search area you can put in something there.
So you put in "contact," and then it will come up with his contact details,
and you can e-mail him through his web page.
Okay, it sounds like the last caller had come across something very useful to know, Dr. Peat,
so I'm glad for that.
Thank you.
I'm going to sign off.
Thank you.
Thank you for your call.
Somebody's obviously inserting some malicious hyperlink into one of your articles apparently.
So good to hear about that.
And I would imagine that the sensor is probably chunk.
So, okay, I don't know if we had any more callers on the air.
If we do, let's take the next caller.
Well, this wasn't entirely human health related,
but somebody just wanted to say how excellent Maria, the new assistant at Garberville Vets Clinic is,
because it was a medical show, so they put that out there.
And I'll personally ask, what's the herbology of nettles?
I've been eating a lot lately.
What's the what of nettles?
Nettles, stinging nettles, like nutritionally and whatnot.
Right, well, they contain a lot of calcium, actually.
It's one of the-- probably the herbs that contains the most calcium.
So obviously, we recommend people to consume egg cells as a source of calcium because they're even richer.
But it's a very pertinent question in some ways, Michael,
because this time of year is probably the most nutritious time to eat nettles.
So when they're about 18 inches tall, you can cut them just down to more or less ground level
and steam them in a small colander inside a pan with just a small amount of water
and steam them for about 10 minutes.
When they become very limp and flaccid, they go fairly brownish in color.
And that's a problem.
And the liquid is beautiful.
It tastes so mineral rich and will contain quite a lot of calcium.
So it's one of the-- it's also an antihistamine for allergies, et cetera,
for people that are suffering from seasonal rhinitis and those kind of things.
It's the perfect time of year to make your nettle salad.
And I like to put olive oil and a little squeeze of lemon.
Absolutely.
And a little cheese on top.
And, of course, a little feta cheese.
It doesn't go too far.
Okay, good.
I don't know if there's anybody else on the line.
So, okay, it looks like there's one more caller.
Let's take this next one.
Hello?
Hi, you're on the air.
And where are you calling from?
I am in Eureka right now.
I'm from Southern Humboldt, though.
Eureka, California.
Okay, cool.
I was interested in the heart palpitations or the estrogen and progesterone conversation,
but you had mentioned briefly that there's something to do with the effect of seizures,
of epilepsy as well with estrogen.
Did I misunderstand that?
Blood what?
There's a connection.
She's asking about the connection between epilepsy and estrogen.
Oh, yeah.
I've got an article on my website about that in detail, but it's been known for around
70 years that there's a premenstrual type of epilepsy.
And that eventually led to animal experiments in which they showed that the ratio between
estrogen and progesterone mainly is what governs the stability of nerve cells as much as any
cell.
But when the ratio is too high, just a slight stimulation can set off an uncontrollable
volley of activity, leading to seizures of different types.
It's correctable very easily by metabolically lowering that ratio, increasing progesterone
and excreting estrogen faster.
And you can figure this ratio out by asking your doctor to do a blood test for estradiol
and progesterone and looking at the ratios between the two.
Okay.
A friend of mine has exactly that with her cycle, so she'll be thrilled to find this
out.
So it's on your website, though?
There's a whole article on his website.
Okay.
All right.
Thank you for your call.
Okay.
I think we have another caller.
Actually, we had a caller who would like me to tell them more about eating nettles and
how I eat the nettles.
And the one important thing is that the nettles do not sting you once they're wilted.
They actually don't.
Or if you've cooked them a little bit.
You can chew them right on and they don't sting.
It's pretty amazing.
So what I do is I actually go with a glove and I grab the very tip of the plant and I
snip off just the very, very tip, even though they are only 18 to 2 feet, inches to 2 feet
tall.
And then I saute onions and I throw them on top of the onions.
And I've been making mainly Indian food with them, where I dump Indian curry spices and
sour cream on it and make like sog and peas and stuff.
Or else I make soups with it.
And you said to steam them for 10 minutes.
I find they cook a lot longer than you'd think for that.
So I cook them 20 to 30 minutes even.
And for people with sensitive digestions, if you don't, if all that fiber is a little
bit too much for you, if you do boil them and then drink the liquid, that's where most
of the minerals will come out into anyway.
So it's also very nutritious that way for people with more sensitive intestines.
And I'm steaming just the very, very top little growing tip that I snip off.
Not much stem fiber.
And I was thinking about chopping more of it down to feed my chickens.
But as it is, I just kind of trim the patch.
And if you're really careful with your fingertips, you can snip them off without gloves.
I was trying that.
But when you do it for a few hours, you end up getting stung a lot.
I know.
OK.
So just to remind folks, if you're listening, we've got Dr. Raymond Peat with us again,
sharing his wisdom on physiology and hormone physiology in particular with relation to
palpitations and cardiac failure.
The next question, if you let me just say again, once again, if people are in the area,
it's 923-3911.
Or if you live outside the number, the number is 1-800-KMUD-RAD.
So Dr. Peat, talking about myocardial infarct, I read an article here saying that prostaglandin
synthesis, prostaglandins being an inflammatory mediator causing kind of vasoconstriction,
is actually relieved by progesterone.
And both in angina and myocardial infarct, progesterone is a pretty important compound
if it can be got to a patient in a very short order because it will actually restore the
system.
It's very much like cortisol as an anti-inflammatory inhibiting the many different kinds of inflammation
promoting things, but prostaglandins are probably the most important ones for people who eat
quite a bit of unsaturated fat.
But it doesn't have the harmful side effects of taking cortisol or the synthetic glucocorticoids
as anti-inflammatories.
So is this like if you have a heart attack and you take aspirin very shortly after or
progesterone, do they both work the same way in blocking prostaglandins?
Yeah, they both stop the inflammatory process which leads to tissue damage and the brain
is more sensitive in many ways than the heart and there has been research going on now for
several years showing that if you can get a big dose of progesterone to someone who
has had a potentially fatal head injury, they will have a high survival and recovery rate
because the progesterone stops the progression of brain damage.
It does the same thing to any tissue that's injured, stops the progression by reducing
inflammation.
So for traumatic brain injury or myocardial ischemia or any other event like that, it's
a pretty restorative compound.
Let me have a caller on the line.
So let's take the next caller.
Hi, you're on the air.
Yeah, I came in at the end of the discussion about heart palpitations and hormonal imbalance.
I was wondering is it estrogen dominance or low estrogen that typically causes the palpitations?
It's estrogen dominance or a poor ratio of estradiol to progesterone.
So even if the progesterone is maybe fake progesterone in the form of birth control,
that can lead to the heart palpitations you're discussing?
Some of the synthetic progestins so-called in birth control or others actually have some
protective effects.
There's one called drospironone that is probably the closest to natural progesterone that they've
come up with in function and it's being used to treat heart failure for example where natural
progesterone would be the best overall treatment but this is a patented drug that is now being
accepted because it opposes the pro-inflammatory effects of aldosterone, the salt regulating
steroid hormone which progesterone is the natural antagonist of that.
But this synthetic is a very relatively safe drug for protecting the heart against failure
and fibrosis and inflammation.
But are you aware that they use that progesterone in the birth control pill?
I think there is either that or a very similar one in a European birth control pill.
I don't know how personal I'm allowed to go or if I'm allowed to talk about a particular
product.
I'm curious because I had a terrible, terrible time while on the Mirena IUD and that type
of synthetic progesterone is what I believe, not knowing much at all, triggered my intense
bout of palpitations.
I'm wondering if you're familiar with Mirena.
No, I don't know.
I'll look up the actual drug name in Mirena and then maybe we can help you out a little
bit better there.
Yeah, I'm wondering if there was maybe, I just have no idea.
To me it was the only thing that could have caused my palpitations.
I had it removed and I'm still experiencing them sickly during ovulation and I'm wondering
if that's just kind of normal as my body adjusts.
Like I said, I don't know if I'm allowed to ask too much personal stuff.
Was that an IUD did you say?
Yes.
Yeah, a progesterone releasing IUD.
Just the presence of an irritant in the uterus will lower your natural progesterone.
So even if it's releasing progesterone, I think it's likely that the effect is by reducing
your ovaries natural production.
And over time my body should begin to produce natural progesterone again, hopefully?
Yeah, as soon as the irritation stops and if your diet and everything else are good,
it will recover quickly.
Okay, so I looked it up and it's levonorgestrel releasing intrauterine system.
That's the progesterone form.
But I guess if you said the presence of an IUD is going to be increasing estrogen and
irritating the whole system, then graded raw care is a great way to lower estrogen, keeping
your proteins up and saturated fats.
Those things that all help get your...
What was the first thing you mentioned?
Graded raw carrot.
Okay, cool.
Well, there you go.
It was just so interesting.
I turned on the radio and this is exactly what I've been experiencing.
So thank you very much for your input.
Thank you for your call.
The graded raw carrot, by the way, is there basically to mop up excess bowel estrogen.
And other toxins.
Yeah, and other waste products.
So it does have a very real effect in lowering excess hormone from the bowel.
Okay, so we've got two more callers on the line.
Actually, they're both.
I asked for them.
The first question was a comment saying that juicing nettles is excellent, best spring tonic ever.
So juice your nettles in a wheatgrass juicer.
And the second question, it's a little long, a little long for me.
When progesterone is rubbed into the skin, apparently it doesn't go into the body except as one big lump.
And would you please talk about skin progesterone?
It sure does.
Dr. Peat, go ahead.
What was the last phrase?
It doesn't go into the body.
Into the skin.
When it's rubbed into the skin, it goes into the body as what did you say, Michael?
As a big lump, according to the caller.
But, you know, comment on skin progesterone.
It's very absorbable, right, Dr. Peat?
Yes.
If you stick your finger in it and if you're familiar with the taste of progesterone, in about a minute you can taste the progesterone.
Same idea as putting DMSO on your skin.
The progesterone just goes right through so that you can get the systemic effect pretty quickly through your skin.
Right.
I've rubbed on a lady who had heart failure, I've rubbed olive oil on her arm.
And then I rubbed progesterone, probably about a teaspoon of progesterone, which had about 90% vitamin E and 10% progesterone.
And within half an hour, the veins on the back of her hands were completely flattened.
And to start with, they were very elevated.
So it definitely gets absorbed into the skin pretty quickly.
It's just quantity and quality.
Quantity of how much you use and the quality of the product.
Okay, there's one more caller, so let's take this next caller.
Actually, it's another. I asked a question for them.
How do you spell your name? And you don't have to answer this.
How old is Dr. Peat?
How old?
How old are you, Dr. Peat?
76.
And he wants to know how you spell your name.
P-E-A-T.
Like the peat moss that you can burn.
That smells wonderful to burn.
We tell people regularly. I'm surprised Mark had to ask.
Anyway, okay, I think he's talking to another caller who's coming on in,
but at this point in time, he's not flagging me that there's anyone actually there.
Okay, so I wanted to pick up where you left off last,
talking about aldosterone as being a bad compound in the body
that I think we're naturally exposed to as part of the kind of kidney and renin-angiotensin system.
Yeah, there are several things that will start that process towards hypertension
and inflammation and degeneration.
Low blood sugar is enough to start the process signaling your kidneys to send out renin
and starting the process to produce aldosterone.
Not eating enough salt is another thing that raises the aldosterone.
If your blood vessels leak for any reason, if something makes them permeable,
such as hyperventilating, you lose a little blood volume,
and anything that lowers your blood volume or sugar or sodium
will cause your kidneys to activate the process that ends up increasing aldosterone,
and the aldosterone has the central function of making you not lose sodium so fast.
Keeping the sodium inside your bloodstream helps the blood to absorb water
so that it doesn't form edema. It stays in the circulatory system, nourishing the tissues.
But the side effects of that essential regulatory aldosterone,
the side effect is to lose--instead of losing sodium, you lose potassium and magnesium,
and the loss of potassium and magnesium are very important in causing the heart rhythm problem.
The repolarizing restorative process of the heart muscle means that the cell can retain magnesium and potassium
and excrete the excitatory sodium and calcium.
And so if you're restricting salt or having hypoglycemia or losing blood volume for any reason,
your aldosterone is going to tend to make you lose the stabilizing magnesium and potassium,
and all of your cells will tend to become unstable electrically and functionally.
Excellent.
Is this why pre-menstrual women tend to swell?
Is this another reason why, because of the dropping progesterone, they have rising aldosterone?
Yeah. Protein deficiency is another thing that will start this whole process.
And salt deficiency?
Protein, salt--
Sugar.
Yeah.
Hypoglycemia.
Another excellent reminder. Thank you, Dr. Peay.
I know you've mentioned several times on many different shows how important sugar and salt are,
contrary to popular belief.
I think we've got one more caller on the line, so let's take this next caller.
I think there's another coming in.
Caller, you're on the air?
Yeah, hey.
Hi. Where are you calling from?
Phillipsville.
Phillipsville, California, folks. Okay.
Go ahead.
I'm on the road. I'm in the studio.
I am sorry, but I tuned in less than ten minutes ago, but this information is very relevant to me.
I would like to continue dialoguing with you after the show, if that's possible.
I am dealing with lupus myself, and I have a grand mal seizure once a month in association with my menstrual cycle.
For a while there, it was typically the night before my period started.
I have a grand mal seizure, and it seems to me because of my response to B vitamins that it's associated with a drop in my progesterone.
I've been listening to you guys just now, like talking about protein levels and aldosterone.
I've also registered as having low sodium for an extended period of time, but my doctors debated about the source of that,
because I also have SIDH, syndrome of inappropriate anti-diuretic hormone.
I was just retaining too much fluid, but I also just incurred a brain injury, so cerebral salt wasting was another diagnosis.
It seems like these things all go together, though, from what you're saying, sodium and progesterone.
Behind the balance of aldosterone, estrogen, and progesterone is the thyroid function.
Thyroiditis is something that goes along with lupus, too.
Low thyroid is the main cause of that inappropriate loss of sodium.
Hospitals don't seem to realize how important that sodium loss problem is,
especially in older people, but under the influence of estrogen, it happens, too.
I know from my research that seizures that go along with lupus,
and catamenial epilepsy, go along with low progesterone or low estrogen.
It's my own assessment that it's low progesterone, but I just had my blood drawn a couple days ago.
I'm finishing my menstrual cycle right now, but I had a regular sodium level.
It seems like maybe cerebral salt wasting was what was going on.
I'm just saying, I'm sorry for coming into the middle of your show.
I'm going to try and get a copy of it myself, but I really would like to dialogue with you.
Okay, no problem.
At the end of the show, if you either call in, or it's probably the best thing, you can call in and make a--
What we can do is give our contact details at the end of the show, and we work with Dr. Peat.
Also, you can listen to the whole show on the audio archives on kmud.org.
If you want to listen from the beginning, you might find that interesting.
What's the name of this whole show? How do I find it?
You go onto kmud.org, and you go to audio archives, and then you do Friday Night Talk,
and you look for today's date, which is March 15th.
It doesn't say the title of our show on there, it just says Friday Night Talk Show.
Then you scroll down until you find the date, March 15th, 2013.
You can either listen to it or download it.
We'll give our contact details and Dr. Raymond Peat's contact details at the end of the show.
Are you guys not around here?
No, we're in Garboville, and Dr. Peat lives in Eugene, Oregon.
Oh, well, dang. Okay. Well, cool. Thank you, sir, for introducing.
We'll look forward to hearing from you. Thank you for your call.
Okay, next caller.
Yes, interesting program. I hear mostly women calling in.
I have a case of-- I think they call them rope veins in one leg.
And pretty much my veins have always kind of stood out.
I'm interested if any of these dietary thinners, some of these treatments you were talking about,
like what would happen if I rubbed progesterone on my skin as a male?
I heard earlier, I think you mentioned, that it caused some heart problems.
Is there some treatment for that that isn't quite so drastic of what I've read online?
Although some men do use progesterone very successfully often for varicose veins,
I think the best thing is to start with pregnenolone, using it orally, because that will normalize.
It can produce testosterone, DHEA, as well as progesterone.
And so it will tend to keep your hormones more in balance than applying big doses of progesterone.
Okay. What was the name of that again?
Pregnenolone.
And you can find it at-- where are you calling from, caller?
Just outside of Redway, a little bit.
Okay, yeah, so at Chautauqua they'll have pregnenolone.
Pregnenolone.
Pregnenolone. And it's a precursor for all of our steroid hormones.
Oh, okay. Okay. All right, great.
Okay, just to make sure that you heard the name, it's Preg, as in pregnant, Pregnenolone.
Preg, oh, okay.
Yeah, P-R-E-G-N-E-N-O-L-O-N-E.
Okay.
But it's a-- it's found in men and women. It's made from cholesterol from our liver,
so it's a very common hormone in everybody.
All right, Michael says he's got a quick question here he can squeeze in before the top of the hour.
About how much sodium should a 155-pound, 42-year-old male intake?
Your taste and craving would be the best way to judge because everything affects it.
Your thyroid hormone, if your thyroid is a little bit low, you need lots more sodium in your food.
If your thyroid function is good, you can get along with a very low sodium intake and not have any problem.
The reason women tend to have salt cravings around the ovulation or premenstrually or in pregnancy is because
the excess of estrogen and low thyroid or low progesterone causes them to lose sodium.
But if your thyroid and hormones are good, you don't have to worry at all about adding salt to your food.
Okay, Michael says it's all about your tastes.
And also, too, if you're having a comprehensive metabolic panel done, you'll see a sodium level on there,
and sometimes if people are not sure how much they should be eating and they're not really craving it,
sometimes it can be low even in that sort of situation.
And on that same test, the albumin works with the sodium and thyroid to regulate the volume of your blood
and therefore all of these functional energy electrical systems.
Okay, well, thank you so much, Dr. Peat. I think we're going to have to call this the top of the hour.
Thanks so much for your help, and we'll just give out your details.
Okay, thanks.
Okay, all right, so Dr. Raymond Peat, physiologist and endocrine specialist,
can be reached online, has a wealth of information, lots of articles,
some of which were already mentioned by the people this evening,
lots of articles that are fully referenced, scientifically referenced journal articles.
His address is www.raypeat.com, and so the articles can be looked at,
and he can also be contacted from that page, so lots of information,
most of which you won't find anywhere else, folks.
I'll tell you this, most of what he's producing, it's there in research.
It just doesn't come to the mainstream attention.
Like you said, it can take 20 or 30 years for supposed new ideas to actually come to light.
Well, not just new ideas, proven ideas.
Proven ideas.
I mean, proven, not ideas, proven science.
Proven facts.
Okay, so anyway, a wealth of information there, and don't be surprised if what you read
doesn't sound like the things that you hear on TV because you're not likely to,
so what you're going to get from him is where the actual facts are.
So go and take a good look, and yeah, email him if you want.
Okay, so for those people that have called in tonight, thanks so much for your calls.
Our details are?
We can be reached toll-free 1-888-WBM-ERB, which is 926-4372,
or that's the toll-free number, or locally, 707-986-9506.
Okay, we have a website, but it's not worth looking at, folks,
because it's far too outdated, so don't even bother.
But we have email addresses, and that's another good way,
so Andrew or Sarah@westernbotanicalmedicine.com.
Thanks so much for people calling in.
I really appreciate your input, and Dr. Peat, once again, thanks so much.
We look forward to joining you next month on the third Friday of the month.
[Music]
And came on thanks Jessica Baker of Jade Dragon Acupuncture
for her support of Redwood Community Radio.
Practicing traditional Chinese medicine, Jessica treats conditions
ranging from psoriasis to post-traumatic stress.
Located at 607 F Street in Arcata, Jade Dragon Acupuncture can be reached at 822-4300.
And support for K1 comes in part from Golden Dragon Medicinal Syrup,
an anti-inflammatory, anti-fungal, antibacterial, antioxidant medicine
made without heat or ice.
Golden Dragon Medicinal Syrup is organic, edible, topical, cosmetic, and water-soluble.
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