[Music]
It was in the 1970s when I started seeing many women who had been on a fasting diet.
And something I noticed when I would suggest that they measure their inches around their
thighs and hips and belly rather than paying so much attention to their weight.
The fat is very light compared to protein and water.
And so when they lose weight quickly, it's often the protein that is disappearing.
And the fat, if you're fasting for a week or 10 days, they have found that the great
majority of the weight loss is in protein and water with hardly a dent in the fat.
Welcome to the Win At Life Podcast, a place where we share everything you need to know
about restoring your metabolism so you can break free from restrictive diets
and build a body and life you love.
I'm Kitty Blomfield, co-founder of NuStrength and your host for this episode.
Today, I'm sitting down with Dr. Ray Peat and my business partner and friend, Emma Sgourakis.
I found Emma and Ray Peat's work shortly after I got divorced and it changed my life completely.
Today, I'm so passionate about sharing it with other women and I'm constantly sending
people to their articles because they're packed with such great free information.
In this podcast episode, we asked Dr. Peat a ton of questions.
We chat about PUFAs, which is polyunsaturated fats and the beginnings of the health myths
surrounding them, PUFAs versus other fats, how PUFAs impact your metabolism, how and why your
anti-aging creams and other products might actually be pro-aging, the effects of fasting
on your metabolism and immunity, the importance of muscle mass, why excess estrogen increases
chaos in the body, why the body actually needs sugar, what causes diabetes, how and why caffeine
can bring on a stress reaction, the protective effects of coffee and actually, in fact,
Emma started drinking coffee when she fell pregnant, a healthy range of body fat for women.
You'll actually be surprised at what this is. HRT in the pill, what causes menopausal symptoms,
the importance of and demonization of dairy and so much more. As always, take a screenshot
and share your biggest takeaways on Instagram stories and tag me at K-I-T-T-Y-B-L-O-M-F-I-E-L-D.
Let's spread the word and free other women from restrictive diets.
Hi, Dr. Ray Peat and everyone knows, well, actually, everyone who follows me will know
who Dr. Ray Peat is because we talk about him all the time and reference his work.
So I've got two amazing people on the podcast today, Dr. Ray Peat and Emma, everyone knows Emma,
my friend and business partner in Saturée. Welcome.
Hi. Hi, Ray.
I just wanted to say thanks again for coming on the podcast and answering all my questions.
A lot of the women that follow me are like me and have come from a background of
super restrictive diets and get really sucked into the diet industry. And I actually remember
when I found your work, Ray, and then I also found Emma's. It was at the same time after I'd
gotten divorced and I was just punishing myself eating nothing and exercising like crazy.
And then I stumbled across Emma and Ray and started working with Emma and it really
changed my life completely. And I'm really so, so grateful and super passionate about, you know,
sharing it with other people. You just have such a wealth of knowledge. And I always say to people,
go to his website, go and read his articles. There's so much great stuff there just for free
that you can utilize yourself. So Emma and I have written out a list of questions that our
clients, I should say my clients typically have. So I guess I'll just perhaps read through the
questions and then Ray, you can answer them and Emma can jump in when she wants to. So
the first one is around polyunsaturated fat. So regarding polyunsaturated fatty acids, oils,
PUFAs, as we refer to them, and their instability when exposed to heat by an oxygen that you've
educated about for decades in the nutrition realm. How would you explain to someone new to
this concern about PUFAs, the issues of applying them topically on the skin, and therefore how
skincare products loaded with these oils should be reconsidered? Because Emma often talks about,
and we talk about, you know, not eating them. But I guess one thing also too, that I did for
a very long time was use a lot of really crappy moisturizers and things and just rub them on my
skin. So I'll just let you start with that question. The PUFA question has been scientifically
manipulated since about 1940. At that time, coconut oil was very popular as a better substitute of
cooking oil. People were doing very well with lots of prepared foods containing coconut oil. But
about 1950, the petroleum chemists discovered how to make paint and plastics out of petroleum.
And the seed oils such as cottonseed oil, and soy oil in particular, had been used primarily
for making paints and plastics because they oxidize so easily. They solidify.
And when the petroleum industry displaced the seed oils from the paint industry,
the growers of soybeans and other highly unsaturated oil seeds had to find a new market.
One market was feeding them to pigs. They found that they fattened the pigs tremendously.
They didn't eat so many calories, but they put on fat much more economically. And despite
knowing what they did to pigs, they wanted to expand their sales. And so they resurrected
an old, discredited study claiming that the polyunsaturated fats are nutritionally essential.
The claims said maybe less than a gram a day might be required, but the scientific basis for
even that amount was discredited already in the 1940s. So on the basis of publicity rather than
science, in the 1950s people were taught that eating these polyunsaturated fats would lower
their cholesterol, prevent heart disease, and many other things, neglecting the fact that they were
proven to be great for the pig industry to fatten pigs economically, that they do exactly the same
thing to people. They stimulate the laying down of fat. And in the process, the same thing that
happens when they make paint or plastics out of the seed oils, that happens in the body. They
oxidize as soon as you warm them in the presence of oxygen. They instantly begin degrading,
turning into solid materials if the concentration is high. Otherwise, just breaking down into toxic
fragments, besides stimulating fat production, they taint the fat so that in the future,
as you draw out these fats to metabolize, they are more poisonous than when they went in.
An experiment anyone can do to see what happens even at room temperature to a bottle of
soy oil, for example, if you connect a rubber tube to the top of a bottle of oil
and put the other end of the tube in a cup of water. After a few hours, you'll see the water
rising in the tube because the bottle of oil is consuming oxygen as fast as if there was
a little animal in the bottle burning the oxygen. Just spontaneously at room temperature,
the oils are beginning to harden and breaking down consuming oxygen. And if you imagine raising
the temperature from room temperature to body temperature, 98.6 degrees, that process happens
even faster. And on the skin, these oils, as unstable as they are, are exposed to air pressure
oxygen, very high concentration of oxygen, making them break down even faster. And if the cosmetic
product that you're putting on your skin happens to contain traces of iron or other metals,
that will catalyze a faster breakdown and conversion to toxic materials.
And besides producing the toxic carcinogenic irritants on the surface of your skin,
the skin has a barrier function so that when we're immersed in water, we don't get water
logged very fast. It's like we have a sort of a rubber suit that is a barrier against the water.
But this is build up of the dying skin cells. Several layers of compacted,
keratinized skin cells are impregnated with oil sebum formed by our skin oil glands.
So it's the same idea as putting grease on your boots to keep the water out. But the grease
goes right in, right through the leather. And our skin being impregnated with oil
easily takes up anything oil soluble. So what you put on your skin, some of it is going to very
quickly, if it's an oily material, it's very quickly going to show up in your bloodstream.
And by the time it gets there, these polyunsaturated oils are going to be
broken down. And to different degrees, toxic, your immune system, blood vessels,
every tissue is slightly poisoned by them. And Ray, just sorry, just to cut in there for the
new listeners, because we get a lot of women who start to follow us and they're not so familiar
with the different types of fat. Could you please just list out examples of the fats that
you're talking about these polyunsaturated fats? A safflower seed oil, cotton seed oil, which was a
staple for many years. Soybean oil, canola, sesame oil is fairly high in them. Olive oil
is relatively safe because it's only 8 to 12% of the toxic oils and it contains antioxidants.
Coconut oil has only 3% of the toxic oils. And so as much safer, butter is about 3%
of the toxic oils. But butter, some of these toxic PUFAs, the small percentage in butter,
some of them have been converted to trans fatty acids. And the trans fats, which are formed
by the cow's rumen bacteria, these happen to be especially protective against the polyunsaturated
fats. So the trans fats that occur naturally in butter are protective, where the artificially
produced trans fats are chemically different and they are in themselves harmful. But butter,
despite having 3%, has so many protective factors that it's probably the safest of all
oils to consume. And Ray, what about, could you talk about fish oil and krill oil? Because
that's something that prior to finding you and Emma, I used to take a heap of, I remember I competed
in some fitness competitions and at one point my coach had me taking eight tablets per day.
And a lot of women come to us and they're taking these fish oils. Can you please talk about those?
Yeah, organisms that live in the cold climate
can't produce saturated fats because saturated fats are solid at room temperature or even the
semi monounsaturated solidify at cold ocean temperatures. So especially in the
cold northern or southern hemisphere oceans, the organisms, starting with algae, produce
highly unsaturated fats that remain liquid at right close to freezing temperature where the
algaes thrive. And the fish eat the krill and plankton and things that consume the algae
produced fats. And so the fish load up on the extremely highly unsaturated fats that are stable
at 40 degrees Fahrenheit or at close to zero degrees Celsius. And in the cold environment,
their body temperature is so low, these highly unsaturated fats don't break down
terribly fast. Fish farmers have experimented and found that if you're growing salmon
in an artificial environment and feeding them fish oil and then measure their physical endurance,
how fast and how far they can swim, and then you change their diet and it gives them a more
saturated fat as saturated as possible for their living temperature, just enough so that it stays
liquid. But a more saturated animal type fat improves even the physical endurance of salmon.
So fish oil isn't so great even for fish, except when they're at an extremely low temperature.
And the fish oils have many fatty acids with four and five double bonds, where seed oils grown
in a cold climate, for example, like soybeans, will be very rich in a three double bond molecule,
linolenic acid or a two double bond molecule, linoleic acid. But in proportion to the number
of double bonds a molecule contains, it is more unstable at a higher oxygen exposure.
So the four and five double bonds mean that they're extremely susceptible to immediate
rancidity or oxidation. By the time they reach the bloodstream,
they are already oxidizing and becoming immunosuppressive.
The
krill oil is just a small version that the animals have assimilated the
algas polyunsaturated fats and pass it along to the bigger fish, but it's essentially the
extremely mostly four and four and five double bonds in each molecule. And a great series of
studies in France looked at the effect on the thyroid hormone. They had noticed that the
metabolic rate slowed down in proportion to how much unsaturated fat a person was eating.
So they not only are easily stored in our fat, but they slow our ability to oxidize
and get rid of fat. And the French were wondering what the mechanisms are that cause
our metabolic rate to slow down in proportion to how much fish oil or seed oil is present.
And they found that the enzymes that produce the thyroid hormone in the thyroid gland
are blocked in proportion to how many double bonds are in the fatty acids that they're exposed to.
And then once the hormone gets into the bloodstream, the protein that carries thyroid hormone
throughout the body is inhibited from carrying and delivering the thyroid hormone in proportion
to the number of double bonds. And once some of it gets delivered to these cells where it's going to
be active, if the cells contain polyunsaturated fats, their response ability to respond to the
thyroid hormone is blocked exactly in proportion to the number of double bonds in the molecule.
And so with olive oil, which has a great high percentage of monounsaturated fatty acid,
that has only a mild effect on blocking the cell response, the transport and the formation
of the thyroid hormone. But linoleic acid, a major PUFA of seed oils, it has twice the blocking
effect as the monounsaturated. Linolenic three times the effect, fish oil four to five times
the anti thyroid effect. And that's only looking at one hormonal system. When you look at the
enzymes involved in making progesterone, for example, the enzymes are blocked in proportion
to the number of double bonds. The carotene molecule happens to have an extremely high
number of double bonds, and it will block both your thyroid hormone and your progesterone
production. So that if you eat too much carotene, it has an effect similar to the
PUFA in accumulating in the corpus luteum of the ovary to the point that the corpus luteum becomes
a red body and no longer can produce progesterone. But the PUFA themselves
have that same steroid blocking effect. And Ray, could you also, sorry, I know
these questions weren't what we sent you, but just as you're talking, I'm thinking about
other things that our clients ask us about. What about grain fed, soy fed, corn fed
animals versus, sorry, versus pasture raised animals? Could you talk about that?
Yeah, the reason cows can make their protective saturated fats, they turn the PUFA,
which is a very high component of the fats in grass and hay and even cereals. The rumen bacteria
are able to saturate, hydrogenate the naturally occurring PUFA in grass. But the grass,
living fresh grass, also contains a large amount of vitamin E in proportion to the PUFA,
which our grains have concentrated the PUFA, but don't have much vitamin E in proportion.
So the cows that eat fresh grass have a lot of vitamin E in their rumen, and they're able to
destroy 98% of the PUFA occurring in the grass, roughly, leaving about 2% for the
residual toxic PUFA and some trans fatty acids that are intermediate between PUFA and saturated fats.
The grass also naturally contains other nutrients, but the main thing is that the high vitamin E
content is necessary for the cow to destroy the PUFA, the great majority of the PUFA.
Great, thank you. Emma, did you have any more questions you wanted to ask around the PUFAs
and the skin? Yeah, it really comes to that conclusion, doesn't it, Kitty, as to why
we're doing what we're doing. With everything considered that you just talked about, Ray,
in regards to PUFAs and their potential toxicity, and when we consider that some of the main pillars
of that wellness industry, anti-aging kind of push, and you look at the PUFA-laden skincare products,
the fish oils, eat more salmon, drink your carrot juice, talking about carotene,
it should be a reminder to everyone to question everything that they're being sold, and that
marketing is a powerful thing, but it's not necessarily based on any fact whatsoever.
It just makes you realize that these things that are sold as being potentially anti-aging are perhaps
pro-aging. Yeah, some of the dermatologists, 40 years ago, were studying exactly that question,
and in one experiment, they shaved rabbits so their skin was exposed to sunlight,
and one group of rabbits got a diet high in polyunsaturated fats, the other only saturated fats,
and the skin exposed to ultraviolet light with the presence of PUFA wrinkled and aged very quickly.
On the saturated fat rabbits, the skin was very resistant to burning and aging. That's because
multiple double bonds act as an antenna reacting to ultraviolet light, and in your skin,
when you've eaten something rich in PUFA, your skin becomes hypersensitive to
being excited, turned into free radicals, and oxidized by ultraviolet light.
In the absence of PUFA, your skin naturally contains several substances
that are sensitive and destroyed by ultraviolet light. For example, riboflavin vitamin B2
is easily destroyed by either blue or ultraviolet light, but ordinarily,
the surroundings don't amplify that. Occasionally, a vitamin B2 molecule will break down and become
toxic when exposed to light, but when you have PUFA in your skin as well, anything that has
become excited and damaged by ultraviolet light, such as vitamin B2, then spreads its excitation
to other sensitive molecules in the environment, and the PUFA acts as an amplifier
or a spreader of the free radical breakdown oxidizing process.
That stimulates the production of prostaglandins and a whole cascade of other inflammatory materials.
Yeah, incredible.
Did you have anything else, Emma, that you wanted to ask around that?
I could go on for three hours.
I think if that's not enough to make people question the ingredients or what they have
been applying to their skin or ingesting, obviously, it's a very important topic,
isn't it, for everyone to understand and why we harp on about it so much.
As Ray pointed out, some of the polyunsaturated oils look out for the ones that
can sit at room temperature or below and remain liquid. You've got to question that.
It tends to be those more old-fashioned fats that remain rather solid at room temperature,
the ones your grandmother probably had sitting on a bench. The drippings, the butter, the coconut oil,
these make a lot more sense.
Something that people my age probably remember, but I think you're too young
to remember the lard. They used to sell lard in blocks and it was solid at room temperature.
A pound of it would be a rectangular block that kept its shape.
Now, if they sell lard, it has to be in a tub because it's semi-liquid at room temperature.
When I was a kid, they were still feeding the pigs a better diet and their fat
reflects very closely. Like chickens and pigs and other non-ruminant animals, what they eat
shows up very closely in their fat composition. For many years, even the government sources were
calling lard a saturated fat. Then an analysis about five years ago found that it was more than
30% PUFA, extremely toxic with fat. Someone recently decided to try making safer pork,
that they have a pork farm. By changing the diet, feeding them residue from, I think, a beer factory
and produce from their farms rather than a soy and corn-based diet, that they had the pork fat
analyzed and rather than being 30-some percent PUFA, theirs was slightly higher than butter,
4% a fraction over 4% PUFA. Their pork would be extremely safe to eat because of the
closeness to our natural high-body temperature stable fats.
Even more of a grass-fed tallow would be a better choice unless you're able to access
a high-quality lard. I remember when I first started working with Emma and you would always
talk about what your grandparents used to eat. It made me think back to my grandma, who's dead now.
When we would go to her house, we'd have eggs cooked in butter. She'd actually squeeze oranges
and drain the pulp out for us and cut up fresh fruit from her garden. She made heaps of ice cream
and custard. She made the best custard. She cooked with lard and she made a lot of
roasts and steak and kidney pie and kidneys on toast, lots of organ meats to my granddad,
which at the time I didn't like it much. She really did eat this way, homemade cakes and biscuits with
butter and flour and sugar. Then as she got older, I just remember someone diagnosed her
with lactose intolerance and she started drinking almond milk and soy milk and really moved away
from that diet that we used to eat when we were kids, which is so crazy. It's such a shame.
You've been doing so well. I know. It's just delicious food. I think about mum too. We
ate butter for a long time and then I remember when she started switching us all over to margarine
and we used to have Nuttelex and it just tastes yucky compared to beautiful yummy butter. It's
another example, isn't it? How industry, the financial interests and how powerful marketing
is that it convinced an entire generation that something manufactured in a factory could be
superior to something as beautiful as butter. It worked, didn't it?
Yeah, I know. The same thing has happened with eggs. In the 1930s, eggs contained a lot of
cholesterol and very little PUFA, but every 10 years or so, measurements have shown that the
cholesterol content of eggs has been decreasing so that they, at one time, were a high cholesterol
food and safe because of the low PUFA content. Now they're an extremely high PUFA food with
just sort of a survival minimum of cholesterol decreasing every decade for 70 or 80 years.
So if Ray someone wanted to eat eggs, what should they look for?
If you can find them from some farm with independent ideas like the pork farmer,
if they feed table scraps more saturated foods and let the chickens graze and find bugs
and vary their diet, but basically feeding them more like a human food diet, the eggs taste better.
Actually, I've noticed that the taste deteriorates when they brag about the high PUFA content.
The saturated fats make them actually taste better as well as having more of the valuable nutrients.
It's also nice for the chickens. You see those terrible cage farms where they're all shoved
into those tiny little cages and they never get to see light. I think it's just like animal cruelty
as well. It's so awful for the animals. Absolutely. Do you have any more questions
on PUFAs Emma? Emma's been working away on the skin care it's taken her a year and a half.
Because she's just been trying to get something that's, yeah.
Oh, just trying to yeah, but it's something and as will probably come to find as we get it out there
hopefully and help to educate people on these things. I'm sure there'll be a level of backlash
in industry because it rattles what so many products are based on, but it's the fact that
we couldn't find much available that was 100% saturated. There's a need for it. Certainly not
an easy task to take on though, wasn't it? Extremely necessary, but yeah, probably that's terrific
on that information. And if you want to jump into your other questions on diet related topics.
Okay, great. Okay. So the first one is around a lot of the restrictive fad diets. So fasting,
keto, low carbs, I did all of them for many years and literally starved my body
because I was so focused and I wanted to lose weight and I wanted to be skinny and I wanted
to be lean. And I just thought that, you know, this was the best way to do it. And obviously
I achieved that, but it was very hard to sustain. And I ended up with all of these issues, like
regular and painful periods out of miscarriage and poor sleep and digestive issues and constipation.
So Ray, you know, so many of the women that come to us and that listen to this podcast have cycled
through one or more of these restrictive diets to try and lose weight. Can you please talk about
the effect that they have on the female body, on thyroid, on hormones? You know,
because I think women just don't realize what these diets are doing to their body.
It was in the 1970s when I started seeing many women who had been on a fasting diet
and something I noticed when I would suggest that they measure their inches around their
thighs and hips and belly, rather than paying so much attention to their weight.
The fat is very light compared to protein and water. And so when they lose weight
quickly, it's often the protein that is disappearing. And the fat, if you're fasting for
a week or 10 days, they have found that the great majority of the weight loss is in protein and
water with hardly a dent in the fat. But if you eat a diet that's fairly balanced, but low in calories,
you can lose moderately little protein, but a lot of fat. And I was seeing women
when they would look for the changes in diameter of their thighs and calves and hips,
they would ask them to contract their calf muscles and nothing would happen.
They had atrophied, the calf muscle should be very big approaching the size of a cantaloupe
in a big person, big, big, plump muscle. But these dieters had no visible muscle at all,
just at little strands embedded in a sort of shapeless cylindrical mass of fat. And that's
because they had been repeatedly on a near fasting diet. They've been destroying their good
metabolizing tissue. A study was done on these women who were claiming that they gained weight,
even on a reducing diet of 1200 calories a day, or even less. In the experiment, they put them in a
locked hospital ward where they knew they couldn't be sneaking food and found that even on 800
calories a day, some of them could still gain weight because the muscles which normally consume
a big part of our calories, the muscles had simply atrophied to almost nothing.
So the first thing to worry about is getting enough protein to rebuild your muscles. But
on the second day of a fast, from 12 to 24 hours of a complete fasting, the reason the protein loss
begins is that as soon as your blood sugar falls from fasting and burning up your
stored glycogen, immediately your thyroid function falls. The conversion of
thyroxine to the active hormone, T3, falls almost to zero. And if you're under stress,
that can happen even between meals. Falling blood sugar, if you don't have stored glycogen,
will immediately knock your metabolism down so that you're living on maybe 700 calories a day
for the normal person should be burning 1700 calories a day at rest. So the thyroid hormone
precedes, when your thyroid slows down, the function of that is so that your muscles won't
eat up your proteins, converting the proteins to sugar for energy. If you didn't knock your thyroid
down, pretty soon your heart and lungs and brain would get depleted of a protein and fail to
function. So the cooling your metabolism is sort of like going in the hibernation. When food is
scarce in the winter, a bear drops its body temperature, slows its metabolism, and can get
through the winter without eating. So the falling T3 activity is defensive in that sense. But it's
glucose that is needed in a fair abundance to convert thyroxine to the active hormone.
And when that is happening, then you can assimilate protein as protein thyroid is actually our basic
anabolic hormone, it builds muscle. And in its absence, atrophy sets in sarcopenia,
loss of the muscles and immune tissue fails. The thymus is eaten up and converted to sugar
at a very early stage of fasting. So you're not only destroying your ability to
function and burn calories, but you're making yourself susceptible to all sorts of sickness by
damaging the immune system. And once you get your anabolic T3 restored, then the protein in your diet
will be assimilated for restoring your thymus and rebuilding your muscles.
So Ray, would you, I guess from that, Ben, you know, you're talking about muscle is good,
it's good to have more muscle or try and maintain that muscle mass.
Yeah, the basic thing that happens with aging frailty is the progressive cumulative loss of
muscle mass. Muscle is not just burning calories, but it is, among other things, it's an endocrine
organ. When it's functioning well, it is actually producing androgen-like steroids.
When it's under stress, it's emitting cortisol, making the problem worse by breaking down
proteins by shifting the ratio towards cortisol away from the anabolic androgenic hormones.
So would you, because another thing that women do, and I was the same, is I would just do heaps of
cardio because I was like, oh, I've got to do cardio for fat loss. And I would go into the,
I'd get up in the morning and have my black coffee and I'd go and train fast and I'd do an
hour of HIIT training, and then I'd do an hour of weight training with no food. Would you recommend
that women do some strength training versus, you know, running for hours and hours?
Yeah, because in one experiment, people were put on a treadmill at a very moderate,
fast walking, not even a run, so they didn't raise their pulse rate above 119 or 120 beats per minute.
That's barely a borderline aerobic activity, but after just one hour of that kind of
moderate walking, they found that the T3 level had already dropped close to zero.
But if the person had a generally good health after a few hours rest, their T3 would come back
because they could get their glucose up and their cortisol down. But it doesn't take very much of the
aerobic type exercise to start the metabolic collapse of losing your active thyroid hormone,
turning on the catabolic steroids, cortisol. So would you say then, you know, because I do
strength training and I also like to get out in the sun and I walk my dog Winston every day, so
would you, like low intensity cardio is okay, like walking and bike riding and, you know,
like how would you measure that? Like, I mean, one thing I try and do is if I'm just breathing
through my nose, you know, if I started to run, obviously, I would. Yeah, you should be able to
keep breathing through your nose. You don't want to get out of breath. And so your nose breathing
should be adequate if you're exercising too hard and you should recover. Your breathing and heart
rate should in just about three minutes, they should come back to your resting rate.
And Ray, what about this is just in line with the restrictive diet. So another really popular one
for women is keto. And sometimes I'll get women saying or people just saying, yeah, but you know,
you don't need carbohydrates. Your body can make energy without them. So that means that they're
not necessary. Can you just talk about keto and comment on that? Oh, sure. The way your body makes
carbohydrate is by destroying protein. And the things we were just talking about lowering your
T3 is one of the things setting you up for a catabolic reaction. As soon as your body needs
more glucose than you're eating, it turns on the hormones, especially cortisol use in breaking
down protein. And so your body can't tell whether it should break down the protein you just ate
or the protein in your muscles and thymus gland. And one of the consequences of shifting
away from a steady abundance of glucose from your diet and short glycogen,
once you shift over to the cortisol breakdown of protein to turn it into
carbohydrate, that is knocking down your thyroid function. And the thyroid, besides being
anabolic to your protein and immune system, restorative, it's also an essential thing
to regulate many systems, including the retention of salt and magnesium.
And something that surprised some of the keto researchers on the ketogenic diet,
they found that aldosterone, the salt regulating hormone was increased on the ketogenic diet.
And at the same time, the cortisol was increased. The function of aldosterone
it serves to maintain a good blood pressure. It's normally produced by anything that creates
inflammation and tends to go up with high blood pressure caused by inflammatory signals.
But the aldosterone itself is perceived by the body like cortisol as a sign of dangerous stress.
And the aldosterone increase inhibits the ability of your cells to use oxygen for energy production.
And it activates the production of parathyroid hormone, which has that anti metabolic
shifting parathyroid hormone shifts you from oxidative energy production to glycolysis,
the wasteful conversion of glucose to lactic acid. And so that's another
drain on the glucose, but especially a suppression of your whole energy system.
One of the good things about weight lifting exercise is that when you're constructively
building the muscle, you support the muscles ability to produce androgens rather than cortisol.
So you're taking care of the cortisol excess problem when you're doing the
gentle safe muscle building exercises.
Awesome. Emma, did you have any other questions you want to ask around the diets?
Yeah, well, I think just, you know, keeping in mind that picture of a woman who's constantly
going through and putting herself through restrictive diets, chronically under eating,
perhaps doing more cardio and seeing the muscle wasting as opposed to muscle building and that
constant stress. How then does something like estrogen then throw things even worse when you
consider, you know, estrogen accumulation with aging, perhaps having been on the pill for many
years, perhaps going on HRT post-menopause. How then does estrogen just further create,
you know, increasing chaos in that woman's body?
Yeah, in the 1930s, around the time that just before the polyunsaturated fats were discovered
to be very toxic, estrogen was considered a toxic inflammation, promoting hormone.
And it was only a huge propaganda campaign by the estrogen industry that created the idea that it's
the female hormone. Males, old men who were under stress, or younger men who had either a traumatic
accident or is very sick, men's estrogen will rival the peak estrogen production of young women.
So it's absolutely not a female hormone, it's just a stress-related or traumatic
response hormone. It helps to renew self-production, which seems to be why it's associated with a
traumatic injury. It has the effect of creating new cells. And in uterus, that's what it does. It
causes uterine growth and preparation of a rapid multiplication of the lining of the uterus
in preparation to receive the implanted embryo. But that function is wound-related in effect.
It creates a small injury reaction in the uterus to multiply cells,
preparing it for the later action of progesterone to mature the cells. And
it was very early recognized to be interacting, causing the toxic effects of polyunsaturated
fats to increase. And all of the effects of polyunsaturated fats were seen to be
amplified by estrogen and vice versa. Estrogen and polyunsaturated fats were both protected against
by vitamin E. So vitamin E was thought of as an anti-estrogen drug, as well as protecting
against age pigment formation. That was one of the early toxic effects of PUFA, was it increased
age pigment formation exactly the way estrogen does. And so the combination of estrogen with
PUFA gave you a maximum rate of that age pigment accumulation, which happens in the brain
all of the organs, as well as on the skin. And vitamin E was found to be anti-estrogenic
and anti-age pigment formation. It will even help to remove the pigment once it is developed.
But more recent research has found out one of the other interactions between highly unsaturated
PUFA, such as in fish oils, and the effect of estrogen, very similar to the way they interact
with preventing the transport of thyroid hormone through the bloodstream. They act on the proteins
that transport estrogen through the bloodstream, loosening, preventing the binding by the transport
protein, liberating the estrogen in proportion to how much of the highly unsaturated PUFA you're
exposed to, liberating the estrogen to go into cells and produce its estrogen effects.
So several different levels are known in which PUFA and estrogen interact to interfere with
oxidative metabolism to disturb just about every differentiated maturing function of the organism.
X-rays ionizing radiation, for example, synergizes both with polyunsaturated fats,
which are sensitive to any high energy radiation, and synergizes with estrogen effects.
And all of those effects are protected against by both vitamin E and progesterone.
Yeah, thank you. I guess it goes to show as a reminder for women who've gotten to a certain
place, and they're not feeling good about themselves or their bodies, and if they can look back,
and I suppose acknowledge they've been chronically under eating, you know, for decades, perhaps,
they've probably been on the pill, perhaps exercising in a strenuous, you know, highly
stressful way, not to be so hard on yourself, because all of these things collide in, you know,
create the situation they're now in, but to, yeah, work towards making the appropriate changes
as Kitty, you know, teaches. I think give it time, you know, you can't undo 20 years in 12 weeks.
No, never. Yeah, I wish. We all want it to go faster. Do you have any more questions, Emma,
before I move on to the next question? No, this is great. Yeah. Okay, great. Ray, could you please
talk about sugar, and why we need it and why the health and fitness industry has just demonized
sugar? Because I when I mean, when I found Emma, I was eating zero sugar, I wouldn't even eat fruit,
and I made my own almond milk and anything with an ounce of sugar, I just completely cut out of my
diet, because I was so convinced that it caused cancer, and it would make me gain body fat.
But obviously, you know, Emma helped, and you helped to reeducate me, and now I eat lots of fruit and
juice and ice cream and custard, and I'm so much happier. So could you talk about sugar, please?
Yeah, the anti sugar industry probably started with the calling, the wasting disease of diabetes.
People would once they were diabetic, they would get skinnier and skinnier, and finally die of
of a starvation, basically, because they couldn't use their sugar at all. And they called it the
sugar disease because the sugar was the protein was being converted to sugar, but they couldn't
use the sugar. And so it would show up in the urine, making the urine sweet.
And thinking of diabetes, as caused by glucose, a fit of what when the PUFA industry started
creating their myth about the essential unsaturated fatty acids that went with the demonization
of cholesterol, cholesterol, which is actually protective against the toxic effects of unsaturated
fats, cholesterol was given the blame for heart disease. And since sugar was given credit for
causing diabetes, one particular doctor, I think his name was Yudkin, Y-U-D-K-I-N,
proposed that the fact that sugar helps to raise cholesterol, that sugar was the demon
behind heart disease, where the actual mechanism known is that the breakdown of the polyunsaturated
fats are creating, among other things, lipofuscin-like chemicals that irritate and inflame,
first of all, the blood vessels. And that sets up a process in which cholesterol is detoxifying,
binding to, and to some extent, blocking the toxic effects of the polyunsaturated fatty acids.
So this famous book around early 1970s added to the demonization of sugar saying it causes heart
disease, as well as diabetes. But continuing research was showing that what causes diabetes
is the, it's called the Randle effect. When you are forced into stress to draw protein
or amino acids and fats out of your tissues, the free fatty acids in your bloodstream
turn off your ability to oxidize glucose. And that's a very well-established mechanism.
Increased free fatty acids can immediately turn off your ability to oxidize glucose. So
under stress, where you're liberating fatty acids, you, in effect, immediately become diabetic.
And when you can't assimilate, produce energy from your glucose, that means you can't activate
the thyroid hormone. So that's part of why the fats, shifting your metabolism towards fats,
has such a destructive effect. The actual diabetic can't produce any energy from
glucose. And so they have to tear down their protein. And even that doesn't work. So they
die by wasting away that the so-called type 2 diabetic is generally overweight and
still has lots of circulating free fatty acids that are blocking the ability to oxidize glucose.
But even though you can't oxidize it, some of it is being, in an emergency metabolism,
being converted to lactic acid. And the lactic acid adds to the general degenerative inflammatory
processes. But the biology and biochemistry of it has been very clearly established that
at every level of blocking the tissue's ability to consume and efficiently metabolize glucose or
to the action on the pancreas, free fatty acids will kill newly regenerated beta cells in the
pancreas. And constantly, the pancreas is attempting to regenerate converting stem cells
in the new beta cells. And to survive the beta cells, the need to oxidize glucose.
But as long as there's free fatty acids, the newly born insulin producing beta cells
will be killed by the blocking effect of the fatty acids. The same sort of thing
happened in claiming that sugar causes or supports cancer. It came from completely
misunderstanding or getting Otto Warburg researche backwards. He showed that in cancer
cells, the presence of oxygen no longer is able to suppress the formation of lactic acid.
That even in the presence of oxygen, cancer cells will keep converting glucose to lactic acid.
He didn't say anything about glucose causing cancer, just that cancer cells misuse their
sugar. And when they deprived of energy, cancer cells are a sign of stress, the body in response
to any kind of a tumor increases its cortisol production and breaks down good healthy protein
based tissue to convert the amino acids to glucose to continue feeding the cancer.
But the cancer is perfectly able to consume amino acids and fats. It's just that the stress
breaks down the healthy body so fast that it tends to keep supplying glucose. But the cancer
is also living on protein and fats. So the idea that sugar causes cancer got it exactly wrong.
If you withhold carbohydrate from a cancer patient, the wasting process is accelerated because
the body will raise its cortisol and break down the good tissues faster to keep the cancer energized.
When you look at the effect of different kinds of carbohydrates,
starches are made up of chains of pure glucose, where the fruit drives
sucrose, our standard sugar, is a molecule composed of one half glucose and one half fructose.
And glucose is a powerful stimulant to insulin production, which turns on fat synthesis, among
other things. And fructose doesn't stimulate insulin, sometimes it even inhibits the production
of insulin. So when you eat a pure starch, you're eating pure glucose, which gives you
a powerful insulin reaction, which quickly lowers your blood sugar. And the lowered blood sugar
increases cortisol production. And so you get a tendency to lay down fat from the insulin
and tear down protein from the cortisol when you get a bouncing up and down blood glucose.
And sucrose, especially when it's taken with fruit, comes with many other nutrients,
especially potassium and magnesium, which are stabilizing
the metabolism and keeping a high metabolic rate.
Thyroid hormone is our basic maintainer of both sodium and magnesium
functions. If your thyroid is low, your aldosterone rises, and you lose magnesium.
And in proportion to how low your thyroid is, you tend to lose sodium too, despite the aldosterone.
So you can't just look at the amount of magnesium, calcium, sodium, and potassium in the diet.
You have to look at how the thyroid is responding to those. So your requirement
for most of those, especially magnesium and sodium increases to the extent that
you've suppressed your thyroid.
Ray, just something that I've noticed, people will message me on Instagram
saying that they've been diagnosed with, and this relates to sugar, with type 2 diabetes or PCOS,
and their doctors put them on Metformin, and it seems to be becoming more of a regular thing.
Could you talk about that?
Yeah, the insulin in the 1950s, they were already seen, possibly because it was made
from pig pancreas, but it was turning out to be killing the death rate from diabetes
increase after the introduction of insulin, oddly. So people were realizing that insulin
wasn't doing anything for public health, and they first introduced a chemical
that lowers the ability to make energy from glucose, and that caused it to be wasted.
And so it would lower your blood sugar in proportion to how fast you're wasting it.
But after 10 or 15 years, that was taken off the market because the wasting of the blood glucose
took the form of lactic acid, and acidosis was killing more people than the diabetes.
But Metformin came on the market when the previous closely related chemical
was taken off the market, and now it has become sort of a wonder drug that they're using for
everything, even though now and then there's a publication saying that it can cause lactic
acidosis the way its predecessor did.
And Ray, could you comment on, because a lot of women will say,
or they think that white sugar, cane sugar is poison, but they'll say that it's completely
different to the sugar found in fruit or juice. So could you talk about white sugar and sugar
found in fruit and juice? Oh, well, it's mostly fruits do contain sucrose, but a lot of them
contain some free fructose and free glucose, as well as other minor sugars. But sucrose
in fruits, the main advantage is that it comes with lots of antioxidants,
anti-stress factors, anti-inflammatory, the flavonoids, for example, and potassium
and magnesium. And so it's part of a very complex, valuable nutrient, even with quite a bit of like
1% amino acids that can add to your protein balance. But if you're getting good nutrition,
then where a person would think nothing of eating a bowl of white rice or a potato,
which contains lots of starch, the idea of getting a similar amount of calories from white sugar
has been demonized. But if your nutrition is generally good, there's nothing wrong with
white sugar. In fact, it's very low in allergens, so it's safe. It can lower your cortisol
when you're under stress. So it has many protective effects. In the late 19th century,
there were two doctors, one in France and one in England, who cured their classical
wasting diabetic patients, patients who were losing pounds every week of tissue
and had maybe a two-month life expectancy, feeding them all the sugar they wanted.
They reasoned they were going to die soon, so quit tortured them by depriving them of what
they were craving. And it happened that giving them a regular diet of beef and potatoes and milk
and whatever the standard diet was, as well as any amount of sugar that they craved,
they would generally eat 12 ounces a day of white refined sugar, as well as their
regular diet. And instead of dying in a month or six weeks, they recovered,
went back to work, no longer diabetic. And when you look at the mechanisms,
keeping the blood sugar up to their cravings was lowering their cortisol, stopping the destruction
of their tissues, also stopping the poisoning of the pancreas with the free fatty acids.
So it actually turned around the fatal disease. It helped them make their own glucose
and return to health and a normal diet in just a matter of a few weeks.
The beef, the glucose, or the sugar causes diabetes, was sustained and became part of
the background of the insulin treatment and then of the Metformin. I think Tenformin was the
preceding, very toxic glucose waster.
And so, Ray, would you say then, because I remember when I was, I always referenced back
to studying when I worked with Emma initially, because it was just like all these light bulbs
were going up in my head and it just made so much sense. And a lot of women think, and I used to
think the same thing is, "Oh, I cut all the sugar and carbs out of my diet and I'd get all these
cravings." And I'd just think, "Oh, why am I so weak? How can I stop getting these
cravings?" And would you say that the cravings are your body's way of telling you that you
actually need some fuel and you need some sugar versus that you're weak?
Yeah, the cravings for nutrients as essential as sugar and sodium, for example, are very good
indicators, close biochemical indexes of your actual need. And for example, I used to eat huge
amounts of sugar and never gained weight, a tremendous number of calories. As soon as I took
thyroid supplement, my cravings for food in general came down to more normal level and I
no longer crave sugar all the time. I could go hours without eating or getting a headache from
dropping blood sugar. The thyroid, by keeping the blood sugar up, will stop the sugar craving
and it even affects the cravings for salt. A hypothyroid woman, for example, suffers from
both sugar and salt cravings premenstrually. And after studying the effects of sodium balance
in pregnant women suffering from hypertension and preeclampsia, some studies showed that
all they needed was adequate protein and the salt supplement and their blood pressure and
preeclampsia was cured. I saw the similarity in the premenstrual syndrome. Women would restrict their
sodium as the doctors prescribed and still retain 5 to 10 pounds of excess water in the premenstrual
two weeks, swell up and become miserable. And when I suggested why not follow your cravings,
you crave salt crazily during the premenstrual time, why not try salting food to taste?
And the women who did that no longer had water retention or PMS and same thing happens even in
old people. They put them on a salt restricted diet and they become unable to sleep normally
and retain water and get lots of very serious symptoms. A few friends who were in their 80s
heard about the PMS women following their salt cravings and they try to, they no longer needed
their high blood pressure drugs and their sleep immediately returned. They could sleep soundly
when they were getting enough sodium. It's amazing how we've been, we really underestimate
the incredible innate intelligence of our bodies and we've been very much discouraged to just
go with our cravings and listen to our instincts. It's sort of so many answers are right there but
it's yeah and then did you say Kitty when you have these kind of cravings, what is our immediate
reaction? It's like oh how weak am I? How you know I mustn't succumb to them instead of going
wow was my body trying to tell me? Cultural conditioning has created a great fear of both
sugar and sodium and that same sort of cultural distortion deriving from totally unbiological
purposes. It has demonized milk. There's great political ideology growing up.
It's been going on since about 1850 when the need for cheap labor in the factories
wanted women and children to work in the factories and someone invented the
nipple on a baby bottle so that the women could stop breastfeeding so they could go work in the
factory. Those outside pressures convinced doctors that breastfeeding was bad. In the 1930s
my aunt was a nurse at that time for example and she was taught that she should feed her kids the
approved nutritious synthetic formula and then the formula companies saw the market and they began
educating not only European and American women but in the third world countries
teaching women who didn't even have clean water for mixing the formula but to promote their sales
they were convincing even the poorest women in the world to buy their formula because breastfeeding
was bad. So for about at least 50 years the medical indoctrination which they don't want to
recognize that ever happened the medical profession prefers to erase that from their
history but from 1930 to 1960s the medical profession was heavily discouraging breastfeeding
prescribing even heavy doses of estrogen to dry up lactation to cause premature atrophy of the
breast and lots of women died from blood clots and strokes in their the time when they should have
been lactating because of the treating them with such high doses of estrogen and finally in the
1960s 50s and 60s studies were being done showing that breastfeeding produces better development
of the face the shape of the mouth and jaws is altered when when a bottle is substituted
for breastfeeding and the defenders of the formulas have created their own nutritional standards
incorporating all of this mystical stuff about the essentiality of PUFA and analysis of many baby
formulas has found that naturally when they put polyunsaturated fats in a dehydrated formula
everything that's dehydrated is going to be degraded by oxidation and so if there's
PUFA in the powdered formula it is highly oxidized and toxic but that's sold to the public
because supposedly it's an essential nutrient but what they're selling is is a highly degraded form
of it. Isn't that scary to criminalize women who are formula feeding their babies and that have no idea
it's just encouraged it's just it's it's a big reminder isn't it that we need to you know keep
practicing common sense um you know the marketing is strong and the pressures are strong but it's
bring it back to simplicity do you have any more around the sugar before I move on to the next
question Emma uh no no that's fantastic yeah it's good eat the sugar everyone plus it's Haitian
and when you crave it you crave it for a reason yeah just stop and obviously I mean it's it's
again common sense but when you when you get that overwhelming sugar craving
it's just you know don't necessarily reach the the donut in the office but um keep the the fruit
bowl full drink some orange juice a bit of extra sugar to your coffee it's yeah choose choose your
better form of sugar but it's it's it's necessary it's your body screaming out and warning you that
blood sugar levels are crashing and stress is about to to elevate oh speaking of coffee that
reminds me that a black coffee on an empty stomach gets into your circulation so fast
that if you're on the borderline for stress the the caffeine accelerates your burning of sugar
and so it can bring on a stress reaction if if you don't accompany it with a food or cream and sugar
or something like that and the coffee itself is one of the most powerful anti-stress factors
in the world it has just about every protective function that you could imagine for example it
will if you use it on the skin or have enough from internal use of coffee the caffeine is powerfully
protecting against PUFA breakdown in the skin it quenches and blocks free radical damage
is both anti-inflammatory and anti-oxidative in the skin protects against skin cancer
and keeps the liver functioning against all kinds of stressful factors
so coffee isn't just a stimulant drug but it's it's an extremely powerful protective factor
actually on that topic Kitty you and I were just discussing this recently but
this is for me way back in my first pregnancy when I discovered years Ray a couple of years
before that but I um we were talking about coffee and I'd never been a coffee drinker because I was
in the health world and coffee is not a good thing apparently or so I thought and the more
research I did the more I figured that actually coffee is incredible so when most women embark
on pregnancy one of the first things they recommended is cut back on or avoid coffee
completely I actually took up coffee drinking as you know as I was pregnant um and that's when
I brought it into my diet having learnt about all its protective factors and the importance
for the baby's lung development and so many other things so I was I was doing the opposite but
that's when I you know learnt to embrace coffee and you know haven't let it go since obviously
because you come to love it as well but it's um you know quite a controversial topic because
it's one of the first things recommended to a pregnant woman to to cut out
uh you know it's really important to make sure that you don't go out of it too
too intensely and until you give it a chance to work a friend of mine was sure that she
would get the shakes and feel very stressed if she had even half a cup of coffee but she was
taking it on an empty stomach and not using cream or sugar in it I suggested that she
start with a small amount adding cream and having it with breakfast in just a few days of doing that
suddenly her whole problem of keeping her blood sugar up having all of the stress symptoms that
she normally had if she didn't constantly eat during the day after just two or three days of
getting the right use of coffee she was able to go all day without the shakes
and her endurance greatly improved no more blood sugar problems absolutely and this is another
reminder about context isn't it you don't talk about something in isolation but when something
like coffee is done correctly in a person who's got relatively stable blood sugar levels and it's
eaten with or after food and sugar and milk or creams involved um coffee should actually
calm a person as opposed to induce stress and if it's if it's inducing any kind of stress
whatsoever you should reassess pull back and look at your diet as a whole and how you're doing it
because it should be something that you know only adds to your well-being when it's done correctly
even I noticed now um you know because obviously before I met you and fan Ray I was you know
getting up drinking the black coffee empty stomach now I'll have a big breakfast with eggs
and parmesan cheese and lots of fruit and then I'll have the coffee and I have a cup of milk with it
and I have sugar and collagen but even now I noticed if I don't have adequate carbs with it
I noticed that I have get low blood sugar symptoms after but as soon as I add more fruit or add more
sugar I feel nice and balanced after it's just really interesting I think when you just even
experiment on yourself you can notice these things uh yeah I I got conscious of of the effects of
protein one morning when I had uh uh uh to be in a hurry I ate just a couple of scrambled eggs
and didn't have my usual uh milk and juice and at that time potatoes or something with them
and for the next several hours I was having extreme hypoglycemia and I realized that
that very often happens with eggs dieting women will very often have a breakfast of
nothing but eggs and that powerfully stimulates insulin and you get a rise of insulin without
sugar to back it up and so very quickly after eating two eggs you can suffer hypoglycemia
if your liver isn't well stocked with glucose so with one egg I find that it takes at least
10 ounces of orange juice not to have a drop in the blood sugar so with two eggs
it's more like a pint of orange juice to balance it yeah I think because women are so and we've
talked about the sugar and carbs like I used to be so scared of sugar and carbs but when i
actually started to track my food and experiment I realized oh how much carbs I actually needed and
you know obviously in time after I you know ate more and stopped flogging myself with cardio and
doing more strength training and just lowering all the stress my body's it seemed like my body's
ability to handle carbs just became better and better and now you know I eat quite a lot of carbs
and sometimes I even surprise myself and think oh wow it's amazing how much you actually how much
I actually eat now um but I think so many women are so scared to eat carbs because they've just
been so demonized or they've restricted for such a long period of time you know they're
things have all been their metabolism's downregulated um and you know as soon as they eat
the carbs they start to gain weight um and you know like women I think we're all anyone who's
diet for a long period of time we just get so obsessed with our weight and I think a lot of
women find that hard initially when they're introducing the carbs would you find that too
Emma oh sorry yeah absolutely um it's something that they don't want to see even a you know a
kilogram appear but perhaps their you know impression of themselves and where they should
be is is warped by what they see in social media um and they do they need to acknowledge you know
how long have they been in this depleted state and potentially running on stress and there's
probably an adjustment period in between where the body's going to need a few extra
kilos on it to help it repair and Ray this relates just to this question it's not in the
questions but just made me think of it while we're talking about weight um and body composition you
know you talked before about taking the measurements and looking at the body composition versus the
weight what would you say is a healthy range of body fat for a woman you know like being obviously
too super lean isn't very good and being severely obese isn't good what what do you think's a good
range um the the fat produces some very important hormones when you aren't under stress and so
fertility for example uh uh requires a certain percentage and generally it's the uh subcutaneous
fat that is typical of females uh uh uh around the hips in in particular hips and thighs
should be uh very well padded with subcutaneous fat and some something around 30 percent
of the body fat body weight can be fat and favorable with health wow that's incredible
to think so what what would you say because a lot of women would go or 30 body fat that's way too
much you know when would you say what percentage like is it getting to be a real problem because
I think that women you know um really want to be lean you know like when how low is too low
um the ones that I've seen having problems it was done in the teens
wow so you think you know like Emma and I have talked about this I know obviously you can't go
this is exact body fat percentage because everyone's different and you know like you want to look at
their subjective and objective measures metabolism but would you say that you know under 22 percent
under 23 under 24 like you know when does it start to be you know you mentioned teens under 20s and
I've been very low body fat under in under 20 percent and I experienced lots of issues you know
poor sleep irregular cycles um now I'm obviously my body fat's a lot higher and I feel a lot better
so you know like do you think 22 percent's too low or would you say more getting to under those 20s
I think that's sort of the the borderline range I think people are usually
generally feeling better when it's a little over 25 percent and probably 25 percent is safe
yeah which is like you know I think a lot of women will listen to this and go wow
hey Emma like you and I Emma and I were messaging about this because
well I get lots of questions about it and women are like I really want to be lean Kitty I want to
be lean um but they're also struggling with so many of the other issues and I think the fitness
industry really portrays that like lean look as healthy yeah and I guess it's your priorities
isn't it it's they'll say I want to be lean but we should twist that around a bit and say I want
to feel good I want to sleep well I want to keep stress down I want to look you know look good and
look young in my skin um and just leanness being you know the top of their list which does not
necessarily bring health some big studies done by the the military of
average average sized women and men both they found doing any kind of daily work even often
office work both men and women worked better more efficiently if they were getting at least
a hundred grams of good protein every day I would consider 80 grams of good protein
sort of a minimum but according to the army study the actual health and productivity was
better at at a hundred grams or higher and ray would you say if you're active or doing strength
training would you want to eat a bit more protein probably you can increase muscle building by
increasing the protein because some of leucine for example acts like insulin and is
anabolic for muscle so you can actually push the anabolic effect with increased protein
but I think for longevity it's better to skimp on on protein as long as you're keeping your
your carbohydrate up so that you don't experience stress
do you have any more questions around that well before I move to the next question
yeah you can move on that's great um so Ray could you please comment on uh because we get
so many women you know again have done all the restrictive diets and then they have all of these
cycle irregularities like I did or they'll have miscarriages can you please talk about
what actually causes this uh yeah stress increases your estrogen to progesterone ratio
and you experience stress more easily when something is interfering with progesterone
production uh most often low thyroid is responsible because thyroid and estrogen
are inversely related if a woman takes as much thyroid hormone as makes them feel just right
maximally efficient they might reduce their menstruation to the extent that they don't even
know they're cycling but there's such a close inverse relationship between thyroid and estrogen
you can pretty much control your estrogen level by adjusting your thyroid
and when you're under stress you suppress your thyroid function and so your estrogen rises
and estrogen by creating inflammation and inefficient metabolism in the uterus
causes are reduced the estrogen is wasting both glucose and oxygen and so it's starving
the tissues and will cause miscarriage because it kills the embryo and causes inflammation
and contraction of the uterus so that both damages the embryo and tends to expel it prematurely
and thyroid is the basic thing to lower the estrogen get your progesterone back up so that
it is anti-inflammatory relaxes the uterus and protects the the embryo my dissertation advisor
did research testing the effect of just a little bit extra estrogen on animals that have been
fertilized at the the first week when they were ready to implant the embryo just the tiniest bit
of extra estrogen caused them not to implant the embryo the second week when it was implanted
it took just a little more estrogen and they would kill the embryo and expel it each week of
advanced development of the embryo it just took a little more estrogen added to kill the
embryo and caused miscarriage and that was short that was in the 1940s 50s
but that was already known that estrogen causes miscarriage in the 1930s
and despite that knowledge the estrogen industry managed to convince the world that estrogen was
not only the female hormone but was helpful for pregnancy and preventing miscarriages so they
sold DES diethylstilbestrol until in the 1950s they were selling it with
support from Harvard Medical School and the FDA and so on selling it to prevent
miscarriages then with the development of the birth control pills it finally came out that DES
was causing cancer and not at all preventing miscarriages pretending to create miscarriages
so the whole medical establishment was lied to hundreds thousands of lying publications in all
the best medical journals saying such things as estrogen prevents miscarriage prevents cancer
prevents epilepsy everything that they claimed that estrogen did for benefit it turned out estrogen
was causing the disease rather than preventing it Emma do you have any other questions to ask
around that um no that's I mean look I'm just thinking for the women who start to reflect on
how many years they might have been on the pill given that that's pure estrogen women who are
being you know recommended to go on HRT it's just it's just so so common and to think of the
unnecessary ramifications of that um just yeah question the things that you're on and how that's
probably inhibiting your your progress actually this just made me think of something Ray could
you comment on then I guess because I was the same I had irregular and painful periods and
when I went to see the doctor they're like just take the pill or you know get an IUD put in or
get the copper get the Mirena get the copper IUD get the I don't know what the shot's called the
dipper I can't remember what it's called and then you know the bar so you know could you just talk
about why these hormonal contraceptives are so dangerous for women yeah the IUD works by
blocking the production of progesterone and so that leaves any estrogen you produce unopposed
and has all of the expected consequences estrogen promotes the growth of fibroid tumors
and many endometriosis for example is driven powerfully by an excess of estrogen
and even though for years progesterone was recognized to block endometriosis
the easiest way to do it is to supplement thyroid to lower the estrogen while raising
the progesterone and the effect of the pill they they knew in the 1930s that the pill creates
miskin's miscarriage or it kills the embryo even before it can implant
and they didn't want to call it the miscarriage pill so they invented the theory that it's
preventing ovulation there is never any confirmation that it really prevented
ovulation but it does block the production of of progesterone and so the lining of the uterus
is thinner progesterone is what thickens and matures lining of the uterus
in preparation for a successful pregnancy but under the influence of chronic estrogen
first it's that's killing the any embryo that is in plant that is fertilized and prevents the
implantation because it's depleting the oxygen availability needed for implantation
but it continues to block the formation of the corpus luteum which makes progesterone
and so you just don't have any thickened lining to menstruate
yeah it's really sad isn't it how so many doctors just tell women to go on the pill and
from such a young age too oh and it's very you know it's a convenience thing too for women and
I you'd hear it all the time too you sort of might allude to them you know looking into the pill and
perhaps questioning taking it um and one of the first things you'll hear from young women is
oh but it's so convenient as a you know contraception and but I'd be terrified to
come off it what if I felt pregnant and all the concerns that way but look at the bigger picture
and how how dangerous it is and is it worth it for the sake of convenience you know there's other
ways to avoid conception um think of your overall health and longevity and Ray what about menopause
so we get a lot of women message us and they've been to the doctor and they're going through
menopause and the doctor says oh you're blowing estrogen you need more estrogen can you talk
about what causes menopausal symptoms and about this misconception yeah in both animal studies
our lab was working on animal aging and so the equivalent of of menopause was
the concentration of everyone's work and people worked on different
in interpretations and the official medical view was that uh the running out of eggs in the ovary
some doctors still talk about that that that eggs are depleted and no longer uh uh ovulate just
because they are are used up because you only have as many as you were born with or developed
very early in in your life and so they they blame the ovary as the source of menopause
but we were everyone in our lab working on a different part of the problem showed that
it wasn't a pituitary particularly it definitely wasn't the the uterus
but the the amount of estrogen exposure that the pituitary received caused the pituitary
to age so it's it was ultimately estrogen aging the pituitary causing the failure of the
uterus to be receptive but the estrogen effect on the uterus
was continued even after the animals equivalent of menopause and from the very oldest animals
some of their uteruses showed all of the signs of collagen accumulation a dark coloring
looking like an exaggerated form of the pregnant uterus which existed because of aging
and senescence not a lack of estrogen and my concentration was on showing that in
in the aging hamster all of their tissues showed increased influence of estrogen
with aging and one of our lab people Gerald E. Parkening later went on when the assays for
the actual tissue content of estrogen became available he showed that in other animals the
actual tissue content of estrogen increased in old age I was just showing that the signs of estrogen
were all increased in old age and when you measure estrogen in the blood
the active form of estrogen is oil soluble but not water soluble
and that means it stays inside oil loving cells and it doesn't get out into the bloodstream
when you're detoxifying it under the influence of thyroid and progesterone
progesterone activates enzymes that attach a sugar molecule or a sulfuric acid molecule
to estrogen making it leave the cell which no longer will dissolve water soluble molecule
and it goes right to the kidney and is lost in the urine because it's water soluble
so if you're low in progesterone the amount of estrogen inside the cell
increases but you don't see it in the bloodstream because it's only in the active state not in the
excretable water soluble state if you give the animal adequate progesterone
it's able to detoxify both thyroid and progesterone activate the enzymes that detoxify it
get it out of cells to leave it in the urine and when you measure the blood level of a person
approaching menopause in their late 30s the estrogen is reaching the highest peak ever
while the progesterone level generally is dropping off after about the age of 35
so the while thyroid is decreasing with age the actual amount of estrogen circulating
in the blood reaches the peak and the first failure to menstruate what has happened in the blood
is a loss of progesterone and with loss of progesterone you no longer
detoxify and excrete estrogen and so it begins staying inside cells
so after the progesterone disappears and you're no longer have periods then the estrogen in the blood
gets low because the estrogen is at work inside cells causing symptoms such as hot flushes
arrhythmia atrial fibrillation becomes epidemic after menopause because
estrogen blocks the buildup of the energy and readiness to beat but progesterone strengthens
the heartbeat and prevents arrhythmia estrogen destabilizes the heart just as it destabilizes
every cell asthma and seizures very frequently increase and become a problem after menopause
and that is in proportion to their the body's exposure to active intracellular estrogen
so would you I guess advise women to not take HRT then? Yeah that's a pure
sales point the same as giving it to pregnant women to prevent miscarriage
if it has any benefit it's a placebo. Do you have any other questions Emma around menopause?
Oh no I mean I could go on and on I'm conscious of your time Ray maybe just very very briefly but
when a woman starts to see for example their their periods shortening perhaps you know forties
fifties perhaps alluding to menopause coming on the things that they could possibly do to
push out their period length and maintain menstruation I mean obviously we want to
push out menopause till as late as possible for their own protections. Oh sure at one of my talks
there was a gynecologist in his 70s and after my talk he said yeah that progesterone is good stuff
I've been giving it to my wife for I think he said 20 years and he said she's 63 and still
menstruating and she looked like a very healthy woman in her 30s but she was 63. Wow amazing.
We love Porgest-e. Oh yeah just gonna bathe in it. Any other questions Emma? We're nearly there
so poor Ray is probably thinking of it. Another food I think that's been really demonized and
again I was just I didn't have any dairy I went I remember my mum took me to see this naturopath
when I was 12 and she said I was lactose intolerant so then mum I drank soy milk almond milk you know
all the yucky non-dairy cheeses ate all them till pretty much and then I obviously fell into dieting
and dairy was heavily demonized so I continued to not consume it and then obviously I met Emma and
and then started to read your work and I was like oh wow and now I just eat I drink heaps of milk
and eat ice cream and love cheese but why is it why is it Ray that dairy has been so demonized
can you talk about that and then why is it really important to have dairy in your diet?
I think part of it is derived from the fear of breastfeeding but that has gone along
with a changed conception of what people are and once they were convinced that breastfeeding
wasn't necessary then the idea of milk itself being necessary that was the next thing in line
and doctors shortened the period that they used to recommend a year of breastfeeding
and that has gradually become shorter with many doctors now recommending shift entirely
to a vegetable or bean-based diet a very horrible toxic diet replacing
a continued breastfeeding because they're increasingly indoctrinated that milk isn't an
essential human nutrient and it can be replaced simply with the chemical amounts of abstract
proteins abstract fats and carbohydrates and so on all of which when you look at them in detail
they're toxic and destructive and nothing has been even approaching the health supporting effect
of breast milk but that same negative view towards the absolute importance of breast milk
extends to milk and to call it something almond milk or soy milk or oat milk it's just ridiculous
because they're equating milk with any white emulsion that holds oil in a suspension that
makes the milk mimics the water turn white has nothing to do with milk it's it's really a
criminal distortion of language like selling a petroleum jelly calling it butter would be
just as realistic and honest and so a lot of it is driven by that history of
antagonism towards breastfeeding is spreading over to milk in general
but I think there's along that same history the social meaning of of women and femininity
has changed and I think there's a lot of misogyny involved in people who are neurotically
hating milk there are lots of people who refuse to eat anything white like the white of an egg
because it resembles milk it has become a real borderline psychotic condition
in our cultures the hatred of milk a very bizarre beliefs grow up around it and be
any kind of event that happens gets blamed on on milk absolutely the opposite of what
the real biological effects are so Ray someone had trouble tolerating milk so they drank milk
or ate dairy products and they got an upset stomach you know runs bloating gas why is that
usually because they're hypothyroid and the antibodies that are important for governing
inflammation in the intestine are deficient if you're low in thyroid and progesterone
and so your digestive system is not flexible and introducing something that you haven't eaten for
years simply they're the enzymes aren't there the energy isn't there to quickly produce those
enzymes and the experiments done about 40 years ago in san francisco in the chinese ethnic population
who are defined as lactose intolerant the adults have to know lactase
enzyme measurable in their intestines they had them start drinking half a glass of milk at the
time with meals and after just a few weeks of doing that they had as many lactase enzymes
in their intestines as anyone those those few experiments are done carefully really
ridiculed and dismissed the idea of genetic lactase intolerance you simply have
deinduced the enzymes first along that it takes an adaptive process supported by
a good endocrine function to restore those enzymes
so I guess if you're someone who can't tolerate dairy then I guess go slow
is the takeaway when you reintroduce it just introduce a little bit and then gradually build
up yeah you don't if you don't have the lactase enzymes a whole glass of milk that can cause
diarrhea but if you take just a part of a glass with a meal and do that repeatedly that small amount
doesn't cause any diarrhea so it gives you exposure to the lactose which induces the enzyme
that will metabolize the gene is there all it has to be is induced to to be in functioning again
that same thing happens with everything in the system like if you if you keep taking progesterone
every day of the month you induce so many excretory enzymes in the liver
that you're excreting the progesterone at an abnormally high rate that's why the body
stops producing so much estrogen for two weeks of the month to let the liver reset
its enzymes so that a moderate amount of estrogen of progesterone has its full effect
that happens with anything you're exposed to the enzymes will adapt to it if you give them
the tissue a couple of weeks Emma do you have any other questions or anything else to add
no that's great thanks for that clarification Ray and I think again it sort of goes slow like you
said Kitty and it's amazing what the body can do and the functions that can that can be reinstated
when you give the body time
yeah it's fascinating and dairy is so delicious too I can't imagine now not eating ice cream every
day or cheese it's even the terminology isn't it when people call you know soy milk or nut milk a
replacement for dairy milk it's but by no way is it a replacement it doesn't replace
the loss of protein doesn't replace the calcium levels by any means the minerals
it doesn't even yeah and and they all contain polyunsaturated fats that slow your metabolism
and increase your tendency to gain fat where many studies show that milk besides the high calcium
content and adequate magnesium content an increase of milk in your diet is the single
simplest way to lose excess fat
one percent milk usually has enough of the fat fat soluble vitamins so you can drink
two liters of low-fat milk per day and generally eat eat at least as many calories as normal and
still lose weight actually just one quick question then we'll wrap it up because it just made me
think about a question I get all the time you know of course you want to try and get the best
quality milk that you can from pasture-raised animals and I know I've spoken to this
to Emma about this all the time a lot you know women come into our program and they're on you
know on a tight budget not everyone can afford to buy raw you know organic milk is it okay
just to drink you know like you mentioned one percent pasteurized milk ? Yeah that's what I
drink in the US generally but I go by the taste of it different brands taste better than others
and uh that usually means that they they aren't putting bad additives in the milk
but uh the ideal thing is to get a one percent milk straight from the the dairy before they've
added anything to it in the US they require that one percent milk contain added vitamins
A and D but to add those they use an emulsifier which can be allergenic
so if a person has uh some kind of an allergic symptom from the vitamin added milk
then they can worry about getting it direct from the the farm without added vitamins
so you don't necessarily need to drink raw milk I don't know there's a small difference
in nutrition but uh pasteurize is fine so just yeah I mean we're quite lucky in
Australia aren't we Emma our milk is just we don't have there's only very few brands that have the
added vitamins in Australia I don't know about the availability of low-fat milk without vitamins
usually the the whole milk doesn't have added vitamins yeah we're really very really lucky here
Ray we are like the majority of our milk doesn't have the added vitamins in Australia I notice a
lot of our US clients always say oh it's really hard to find the low-fat milk without those added
vitamins yeah I've heard that the emulsifier they use contains polyethylene glycol
and polysorbate 80 both of which are potentially dangerous allergens
wow okay great that's awesome Emma do you have anything else to add
what was that oh I'm just asking Emma if she has anything else to add I think she's just got her
phone on um on silent sorry sorry I was just saying we're lucky here aren't we Emma with the milk
we're lucky in Australia yeah it's not been made a rule that reduced fat milk has to have those
vitamins added so we can just have them with the fat removed and nothing else added um there's
a few that you know you can choose by choice that have added vitamin D but um most of them are just
yeah the fat removed and nothing else added to them and I mean of course if I had some cows sitting
at the back of my house you know if I had a farm I'd be eating the raw drinking the raw milk and
eating the raw cheese but I think a lot of clients get really worried they're like oh Kitty you know
I can't afford to buy all this raw organic milk and organic products and it's good to know that
you know you can just you know get your good old regular milk with nothing else added
low fat and that's still going to be fine
yeah no we've got good options here I think
well that's um we might wrap it up now Ray I'm so sorry we've taken up so much of your
time it's just once you get on a roll and then we have all these other questions
you're just a wealth of knowledge I really appreciate you coming on and on the podcast I
just was just thinking oh wow there's just so much great information in there that our
clients and listeners are just going to love and to hear it straight from him no it would really
really appreciate your time directly and it's yeah an honor to have you on yeah thank you thank
you so much everyone okay thank you important subjects to get discussed absolutely no we really
appreciate it ray thanks so much talk soon bye bye
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