(upbeat music)
- Welcome to the Weight Loss for Women Podcast,
a place where we share everything you need to know
about restoring your metabolism,
so you can eat more, train less,
and lose weight in a healthy and sustainable way.
- I'm Kitty Bloomfield,
co-founder of NuStrength and Saturée,
your one-stop shop for metabolically supportive
food supplements, skincare,
which is coming out very, very soon.
We're hoping to release it at the end of February,
and we're now formulating makeup,
which is super, super exciting.
So, I'm so pumped about this episode
because I am joined by Dr. Ray Peat
and our awesome friend, Kate Deering,
who I'm sure you all know by now,
she's the author of "How to Heal Your Metabolism,"
and she's just awesome, we love her.
I've done numerous podcasts with Kate,
so I highly recommend you go back and listen
to all of those, full of great information,
and I've done a couple of other podcasts with Ray,
one with Ray and Kate, on vitamin D and minerals,
and then the other one was the first one I did with him,
with Emma Sgourakis, my business partner in Saturée,
and that was all things metabolism and dieting.
It was just to sort of,
we talked about a bit of everything episode,
but it's actually the most downloaded episode
on the podcast ever,
and it is just so jam-packed with information.
So, if you haven't listened to his other two podcasts,
I recommend that you do.
But in this one, we talk about the estrogen industry,
the magic of progesterone,
and the importance of thyroid hormones.
So, basically, we're just doing a deep dive
into all things hormones.
So, it's a two-hour episode,
and it is just so jam-packed with amazing information,
so I recommend that you grab a pen and paper,
and take notes, and you also grab a snack,
because we all know how important it is
to keep that blood sugar balance.
So, as always, please 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,
and please give us a rating.
So, that just helps to, I guess, spread the word,
and get more people listening to the podcast.
Let's get into it.
- Hi, Ray.
Hi, Kate.
Welcome back to the podcast.
- Thanks for having us again.
Super excited to chat with Ray again.
- Yeah, I know.
We had such great feedback from both the podcasts
that we've done so far,
and Kate and I just thought it would be so great
to get Ray on again,
and just talk about all things hormones.
And Kate, as usual, has written out a very comprehensive
and thorough list of questions for Ray.
So, you know, this is gonna be a jam-packed podcast,
so I would get a snack, and get a pen and paper,
because I'm sure you'll learn heaps.
So, I'm just gonna kick things off, Kate,
with the first question.
So, what are steroidal hormones,
and how do they work in the body?
- Steroid is a very stable organic molecule.
Astronomers have found that probably
it's the most common single type of molecule
in the universe.
It's so stable.
You can find it in inner cellar dust.
But anyway, the stability of it
means that it's a convenient molecule
for organisms to deal with.
And that, on the basic shape of these
four attached loops,
and the two ends,
and a couple of the side groups of the molecule,
are able to change cell functions
in a way depending on where the electrons go
in this stable, multi-ring molecule.
And the fact that it is this more or less
flat series of rings attached to each other
made people interested in the other spontaneous forms
of three or four or five rings linked together.
And they found that the black material
condensed from a candle, for example,
that the blackness is because of the electronic
and excess of electrons circulating in the molecule
cause it to absorb light.
But at the same time, these three electrons
in this series of circular
benzene ring-like molecules causes soot.
They knew it was carcinogenic since the 18th century,
but people started to see the similarity
in structure between estrogen and the soot molecules,
and started realizing that the carcinogenicity
of estrogen was very close to the carcinogenicity of soot.
And so they were making extracts
thousands of different molecular arrangements
of the aromatic, cyclic aromatic hydrocarbonate.
And they were testing codes and they were all
to some extent carcinogenic and estrogenic
and pro-inflammatory and associated with causing pain.
And one branch of the study of those
was to modify them slightly and use them
as anti-inflammatory drugs.
And tamoxifen is when its history started out
trying to make an anti-inflammatory
anti-estrogen and anti-soot molecule.
But it turned out to be more useful as an anti-estrogen
than as the anti-inflammatory.
But from the 1930s through the 40s,
this was a big focus of organic chemistry,
and especially a couple of French researchers
identified the way the shape of the molecule
focuses the electrons in particular areas.
And so you can predict from the shape of the molecule
whether it's going to be an irritant, a pro-inflammatory,
an estrogen or a carcinogen.
And the degree of each one,
there'll be a little overlapping,
but different molecules will have more estrogen function
in relation to the carcinogenic function.
And the fact that it was so easy
to produce thousands of different estrogenic molecules,
one group found that diethylstilbestrol,
essentially two rings connected by a short chain
was a very powerful estrogen
and not quite so carcinogenic.
And that became one of the first estrogens of commerce.
And it was still being promoted as a female hormone.
Estrogen had been the first ovarian hormone to be crystallized
and it turned out that the quantity of progesterone
in the ovary was hundreds of times greater
than the estrogen content.
But still they chose to go with the very cheap,
easy to make molecule and call it the female hormone.
And the pressure of wanting to promote their product
changed the FDA's attitude
and the nature journals during this period
in the early 1940s.
Estrogen was claimed to be therapeutic
for hundreds of different diseases and problems.
JAMA alone published articles
indicating estrogen to treat more than 200 different diseases.
Over the years, that list went from something more than 200
gradually smaller and smaller
as people realized that it was causing more harm than good.
But for quite a few years, Harvard joined in promoting
as a female hormone, so-called.
They said reproduction is the main female function.
And so estrogen must maintain a pregnancy
and prevent miscarriage.
So they were advocating on selling it
to immense profits to pregnant women
with the claim that it was preventing miscarriage.
But already by the late 1930s,
abortion and miscarriage was one of the most obvious features
of all of these estrogenic molecules.
- Okay, so I'm just gonna kind of summarize
'cause I think you're referencing the DES estrogen
therapies that used to be given back in the 1940s,
correct, to treat miscarriages.
And a lot of women received the DES therapies,
which ultimately found out that they were toxic
and were not helping
and were actually probably creating more issues
than anything.
That's what you're referencing correct right now
when we're talking about all these,
the beginning of the estrogen therapy world.
- Everything about it was triggered
right from the time the pharmaceutical industry
began promoting it.
They said black was white, death was life.
- Yes, so I guess in the context of the hormones raised,
definitely just talking about estrogen right now.
I'm talking about essentially that estrogen in itself
and how it's being utilized in the medical industry
has never had any sort of good foundation
that everything they thought it was doing, it didn't do.
In fact, it was actually being more harmful.
And in today, and so we're just gonna go off some tangents
'cause this is so interesting.
So today, Ray, 'cause obviously medical industries
still promote estrogen therapy on so many different levels.
Is it at all helping anyone on any amount?
'Cause obviously they say, well, now we have the dose right.
So we were doing too much before the end.
So now it's, some women do need estrogen.
So is that true?
- It's like radiation when they started using x-rays
they were wildly, basically slowly or not so slowly
killing people, but every few years they would say,
well, we've solved that problem.
Your arm isn't gonna rot off next week.
We've reduced the dose to where it's safe.
But every 10 years or so, the dose is radically reduced.
It's the same with estrogen.
Saying that now we've solved the problem of strokes,
heart attacks, lung diseases, endometriosis, fibrosis,
fibroids, we've reduced the dose so much
that those aren't the problem.
But it's the same as radiation.
Even a small amount out of the right context
is the right dangerous.
And the right context is that the two important qualities
distinguishing the real feminizing hormone progesterone
from estrogen, which happens to all also be the male
reproductive hormone in the sense of the increases libido
and the top is involved in sperm production and so on.
So, okay, so just, okay, I'm sorry, go ahead, go ahead.
- The essential property is that it's excitatory
and progesterone is calming and stabilizing.
And so the body, when it wants to start a new cycle of life
and especially when it's under stress,
it produces estrogen to excite cell development
and preparation for making a new organism.
And so for a few hours in the monthly cycle,
for a few hours, estrogen should dominate
to start the production of new cells in the uterus,
in the breast, in the pituitary.
And those should be where it's action is concentrated.
If something interferes with the anti-progesterone,
anti-estrogen effect of progesterone,
then that effect of estrogen takes place
in places where it shouldn't,
such as the lungs are promoting lung cancer
or kidney cancer, or especially tumors of the organs
that it should be activating.
Either for a long or excessive exposure to estrogen
is extremely dangerous.
A young animal, given the normal amount of estrogen
that should be present,
if it's given that amount continuously
instead of a pulse at intervals,
continuous exposure to that same small normal amount
creates cancer and fibrosis
in every tissue of the body.
It's the failure to be interrupted by progesterone
that makes estrogen so toxic.
- And so just kind of wind back, right?
Because obviously we know both men and women have estrogen.
So just so people understand,
what is the purpose of estrogen in the female body
and also in the male body?
- In the male body is to excite,
mostly to excite libido and preparation for mating.
In the female, it does that in a more specific way,
enlarging the breasts and uterus,
the simplest test for a substance,
being estrogenic is to see if the weight of the uterus
quickly enlarges within hours of exposure.
The uterus expands with the same effect.
There is on a smaller scale in the brain and pituitary.
- So for women, obviously because they have a cycle
and they cycle with estrogen and progesterone,
can you explain when estrogen is the highest
in a woman's cycle and what it's doing in her cycle?
- It's most active at the time of ovulation
because although it becomes higher
in the middle of the luteal phase,
at the time of ovulation,
progesterone starts to be produced
in increasingly large amounts.
So even though estrogen rises
for several days after ovulation,
the even greater rise of progesterone is taking over
and preparing for surviving pregnancy.
If the progesterone fails to be produced
in a high enough amount,
the luteal defect of low progesterone causes menstruation.
The estrogen is the agent promoting menstruation,
which is effectively an early miscarriage.
- Right, can we go ahead? - So the tendency
to miscarry is the same thing that shows up
any time during the life cycle.
That the premenstrual syndrome goes
with the progesterone deficiency
and the tendency to miscarry
and any time later in life,
that same thing contributes to all of the degenerative
processes, the constant excitation
of the different tissues, uterus, breasts,
lungs, kidneys, and so on.
All of those start forming a fibrotic matrix
and that's an early step of the carcinogenic process.
- Right, okay, so with women,
obviously it's normal to have increased estrogen
certainly during puberty and as they cycle.
First explain kind of where is estrogen produced
and where are all the places in a woman
that estrogen is produced
and then also where are they produced in men?
- Well, the studies, the very early studies
concluded that the ovaries were the source.
So for 80 years or so, the assumption has been
it's part of a huge ideology of single sources,
single effects, correcting single problems and so on.
But for 80 years, the assumption was that if you took out
a woman's ovaries or an experimental animal's ovaries,
that meant that they're estrogen deficient.
I've only seen one or two groups that decided
to actually measure in animals
what the estrogen level was following
the removal of the ovaries.
And for the first week, the estrogen in the blood decreased
but after a week, it returned to the normal level
without ovaries.
And one group was measuring the milligrams
or micrograms of estrogen produced per minute by the ovaries.
And as a control, they were also measuring the estrogen
coming out of the veins of an arm.
And it turned out that the arm was producing
just as much estrogen as the ovary.
- So when you say the arm, what are you referencing?
- They were using the right arm of a monkey.
- Okay, so was the estrogen being produced in the fat,
in the muscle, where was the estrogen?
Okay.
- Even in the bone.
The osteoporotic bone is full of aromatase, making estrogen.
All of these odd facts aren't so odd
if you see that stress increases aromatase
that not only increases the formation of the basic molecule
but the same conditions that lead to the production
of estrogen from any androgen.
The same process also tends to change
the low activity estrone to the high activity estradiol
and to eliminate the enzymes that would detoxify
the estrogen molecule.
So this experience of stress by a cell
increases the quantity of estrogen
and the intensity of its chemical activity on the cells.
- So wait, I have like 17 questions
all from what you were just saying.
'Cause we have a lot to kind of unpack there.
One, I just kind of want to say, so what you're saying is,
estrogen is not only produced obviously in the ovaries,
but also it can be produced in the fat,
in the muscle, in the bone.
Pretty much, are you saying it can be pretty much
produced anywhere if the body's under stress?
- Yeah, the skin is another nature source.
- Okay, so under, obviously they realized this
after they removed ovaries from, was it a monkey?
- Well, rats were they decided to measure the actual estrogen
after taking the ovaries out.
- Okay, so essentially we realized after removing ovaries,
they were producing just as much estrogen
as they were before they had their,
I mean, when they had their ovaries.
So obviously that we can produce estrogen without ovaries.
So we can produce estrogen without ovaries.
And then we can produce estrogen without ovaries.
We can produce estrogen without ovaries.
So what exactly then is happening to women postmenopausal
and they're going to their doctor
and their doctor's doing a blood lab on them.
And they're saying, "Hey, your estrogen is low.
"We're gonna put you on some estrogen replacement therapy,
"hormone replacement therapy."
A, what are they measuring?
'Cause obviously we have not just,
there's three different metabolites of estrogen,
the estrone, estradiol, and estriol.
Are they just not measuring the right one
or exactly what is happening there
that women are being told they need estrogen postmenopausal?
- One problem is that they measure it in the serum
rather than the whole blood.
Being fairly oil soluble,
the steroids tend to stay inside cells,
even red blood cells,
progesterone the same problem.
They throw away most of the blood components,
most of the progesterone and estrogen,
and then measure what's left over,
which is a minor part of the blood steroid content.
But the rest of the body, the same thing exists.
The steroids tend to stay inside cells.
That's where they're active.
When your progesterone level declines,
all of those enzymes that promote estrogen,
the things that remove the water-soluble detoxifying units
such as sulfuric acid and glucuronic acid,
those are the product of detoxifying estrogen.
If your progesterone is low,
those enzymes fail to detoxify it.
If your progesterone is low,
the hydroxylase and oxidase enzymes add,
they reduce turning estrogen into estradiol
and eventually estriol can enter
that same process and become estradiol.
- So Ray, just for the listener,
can you kind of differentiate
between the three different estrogens
and which one is more potent
and which one is most blood,
what most doctors are measuring?
Can you kind of differentiate what each one is
and talk about them?
- Estradiol is considered to be about 10 times as positive
as potent as estrone,
but really that depends on your general health
and amount of progesterone.
And it's about three or four times as active as estriol.
But they're all interchangeable.
It just takes a bigger dose of either estrone
or estriol to have exactly the same effect as estradiol.
- So my understanding is that while in your youth,
you have more estradiol.
And then I was understanding as you go through menopause,
it's estrone that is more potent in your system
or is that not correct?
- It increases with aging, but the measurements
have all been done in the blood,
which very little to do with the actual tissue exposure
to the effect of estrogen.
Because with aging, your progesterone goes down
and the estrogen increasingly stays inside cells
and intensifies its activity.
When you seem to have disappearance of estrogen and menopause,
if you add progesterone,
suddenly you can measure a normal amount of estrogen
as it's leaving the inside of the cells
being detoxified and carried to the kidneys for excretion.
That shows that the progesterone is able to mobilize it
out of your cells in a detoxified form.
- Okay, so essentially what you're saying is,
like during youth, women are producing obviously estrogen
and then they're also producing progesterone
because they're ovulating and having a cycle
and that increased amount of progesterone
is helping the estrogen stay in the blood
so that it's more measurable.
That's why obviously in your youth you have a higher amount
and then as they age and you produce less progesterone
then the estrogen tends to stay in the tissue
and on a blood lab it obviously will show you have none
when in fact you might have quite a bit,
but because you are lacking in progesterone,
it shows that you are obviously gonna be low in both.
Is that kind of what happens?
- Yeah, around the age of 35 to 38,
the measurable estrogen is at its peak
and that's an age at which progesterone begins to decline.
There's still some monthly progesterone coming
out of the ovaries up until the first missed period.
At first missed period, there's absolutely no progesterone
production is noticeable after the ovaries.
And that means that's when the estrogens
which were already at their peak in the late thirties,
it suddenly fails to be neutralized by the estrogen
and it fails to be mobilized into the bloodstream.
So at the approaching menopause and following it,
the worse the symptoms are the lower the progesterone is
but the more active the effects of estrogen are.
That the same women who are attending to miscarry
and to have bad PMS symptoms are generally the ones
that have the problem menopause.
They're the chronically low progesterone,
high estrogen people.
And the same people that sold the DES to protect pregnancy
that they found preventing or relieving menopause
was at the next best place to market estrogen.
And so they are the ones that created the idea
that menopause constitutes an estrogen deficient state.
Before the pharmaceutical industry caught on to estrogen,
the old age condition was shown to be a state
of residual unopposed estrogen activity.
The whole doctrine of menopause has estrogen deficiency
that can be traced to the marketing of estrogen.
So essentially the marketing, and like I said,
we've been kind of talking about the DES.
It's a mouthful to pronounce that word.
So we'll refer to it as DES,
but it was a synthetic female form of estrogen
back in the 1940s that was used for miscarriages
and premature labor and complications during pregnancy.
And then they realized it didn't do any of those things
and they ended up, it actually was making things worse.
And not only that, that they have since studied
a lot of these women that were on DES
during that 30 years of time period that we used it.
And now they're showing that their children
are having all sorts of issues.
Even the children of children of DES women
are showing that they have a lot of different symptoms
and issues related to taking this synthetic estrogen.
- Yeah, anything that happens during gestation
changes your whole developmental course.
And your developmental course involves all kinds
of epigenetic so-called processes
that can be passed on for generations.
- Right.
So do you think, just going off on this other tangent,
all these women that are on fertility medications
or fertility pills and fertility as,
do you think that's going to have an effect
on these children that were born
with fertility medications?
- Born with what?
- That were basically being produced either with IVF
or some sort of medications that were used.
- Oh yeah, they've already demonstrated
that there are differences depending
on how the fertilization is done.
The whole process, other than the normal,
in vivo fertilization, everything that happens
changes at the faith of the organism in some way.
- Right, right.
So I think that we kind of just wanted to touch on this
because DES was used, I think, for 30 years.
And I think after about 10, they realized
it wasn't doing what they said it was supposed to be doing,
but they continued to prescribe it
for decades afterwards.
And they don't anymore, obviously, because it's toxic.
But when things get caught up into the medical industry,
sometimes the human's best interests aren't put into effect.
- They continue to use it in men to treat prostate cancer.
And that's an interesting sideline.
When the prostate-specific antigen came on the market
as a way to diagnose developing prostate cancer,
suddenly the number of cases diagnosed increased tremendously.
And within that year and the following year,
the deaths from prostate cancer increased
by about 50%, showing that diagnosing the prostate cancer
had a very close connection to dying from prostate cancer.
And after the late 1990s, a lot of doctors advocated
watchful waiting, not treating prostate cancer
because someone did a survey at a convention of specialists.
They were asked what they would do
if they had a diagnosis of prostate cancer.
They were treating it primarily with DES, huge doses.
And most of the specialists in treating prostate cancer
with estrogen said they would do nothing
if it was their own case.
But it took a while for them to drop the practice
of killing their patients with DES.
And there was never any scientific basis whatsoever
for its use.
Actually, estrogen promotes prostate cancer
and testosterone is protected.
The men with the highest lifelong testosterone
has the least risk of prostate cancer.
- Yeah, I know we've kind of talked about this
'cause my father recently got diagnosed
with prostate cancer and the common treatment
is to chemically castrate them
by lowering their testosterone to zero.
And that's their common belief now is that,
'cause it's thought of that it's a testosterone issue
is causing the prostate cancer
when in fact it's isn't it the testosterone
is being converted to estrogen
that is causing the prostate cancer.
And they still don't even recognize that,
which is super bizarre to me.
- That was known scientifically about 60 years ago,
but because of the investment in DES and estrogen,
those things just never got talked about.
- Right, I guess the big question is,
'cause I've certainly had conversations
with medical doctors who think estrogen
is the greatest gift since sliced bread.
And if you Google and you go into PubMed,
you can certainly find some studies
showing there's benefit with estrogen therapies
and you can talk to some women,
especially postmenopausal or doing that,
have taken estrogen and they feel better.
So what is actually happening to a woman
who gets onto estrogen therapy and says,
"Oh, I feel better now."
- It's a brain excite and several women
who decided they wanted to withdraw
from estrogen therapy when they would stop it,
they would feel lethargic and would go back on it.
But I suggested drinking coffee
and that was enough to give them the feeling
that they wanted, it's just the excitatory brain action
that convinces women that they're energized
and feeling better.
- Right, and isn't estrogen,
I mean, what is its association with,
I mean, isn't it, it increases some level of lipolysis,
doesn't it?
Isn't it there's some sort of connection with that
and with insulin?
Can you kind of talk about that real quick
where insulin and estrogen are connected?
- The insulin connection?
- Yes.
- In the history of oral contraceptives,
that was constantly a problem.
Fairly early saw that estrogen created insulin resistance
and they believed that that would lead to diabetes,
among other things.
And so if you look at it from the viewpoint
of adding estrogen as a contraceptive,
it seems to be insulin and tightness in some ways.
But it simulates insulin production
and there's all kinds of conflicting evidence
that only makes sense.
If you look at the context,
being pregnant or the process of getting pregnant
the time of months that you're exposed to it
and the tissue you're looking at,
the familiar fat hips and thighs are well-recognized
as directly responding to estrogen increases
the conversion of sugar and protein and free fatty acids
in the deep hole of fat tissue,
concentrated around the hips and thighs mostly
and definitely not in the upper body, arms and face
and an excess of cortisol or other glucocorticoid
as the reverse effect increasing fat in the belly,
chest and back and face,
just the opposite of the estrogen.
But in both of these cases,
they are acting as pro insulin increasing the activity
of insulin in those tissues
and a major function of insulin is to lay down fat
to store glycogen and fat in the adipose tissue
and glycogen in the liver.
So you have to talk about what you mean
by insulin resistance and that really isn't a very good concept
because every tissue you look at,
it's going to have its own particular meaning.
- Right, so going into the context of insulin
and I'm just gonna, I'm going off on many tangents right now
because why not, obviously insulin is the hormone
that everybody associates with blood sugar
and essentially facilitates glucose getting into the cell
which I'm not really sure if that's exactly what it's done
but maybe go into a little detail about
because insulin is such an important thing
especially when we go into talk about diabetes,
it's just totally correlated there.
Can you just talk about a little bit
about what actually insulin does
and what is happening in the diabetic state?
Is it really result of insulin resistance
or is there something else going on?
- If you isolate the pancreas cells
and estrogen is a stimulant to them,
progesterone can stimulate that
but it's more likely to stimulate glucagon.
But once you get out in the organism,
you have to look at all the other things
each of the hormones is doing
and everyone seems to forget that estrogen shifts you
to a fat oxidizing condition
in which you have to do something else
with any sugar, the estrogen tends to inhibit
the oxidation of sugar and favors oxidizing fat
but that leaves the sugar possibly to be disposed of
as stored fat. Under the influence of estrogen,
a normal woman, some of the most of the studies say
that women have about three times
as much growth hormone as men.
And one study using a different technique said
it's actually 80 times as much as men.
And if estrogen is supposed to be anabolic for bone
and it is associated with huge excesses of growth hormone
which is also supposedly anabolic to bone,
then why is it that women have much smaller bones than men do?
And one of the functions of growth hormone
is to antagonize insulin
and to increase free fatty acids.
And so estrogen shifting oxidation
to lipids away from sugar,
it is also lipolytic breaking down fat to burn
or taking it from your diet to burn.
So it's providing fatty acids to be oxidized
partly by the super high amount of growth hormone
blocking insulin, increasing free fatty acids in the blood.
And an excess of free fatty acids is always associated
with diabetes.
And when you look at estrogen as a very profitable product,
you have to forget all of these very big effects
during the development of birth control pills,
we were recognizing the tendency of estrogen
to produce diabetes,
but everything which increases your free fatty acids
is the real motor behind insulin,
behind diabetes.
- Right, so essentially when the diabetic state
is often referred to having hyperglycemia
or high blood sugar,
that's the association you hear in the medical industry.
But what you're saying is it's really an abundance
of free fatty acids in the blood essentially,
and they are inhibiting the sugar.
And that's why it's staying in the blood
and you actually see hyperglycemia.
- Yeah, it's called the Randle effect
the fact that fatty acids blocks the ability
to oxidize glucose.
The highly unsaturated fatty acids are actually the ones
that are doing the most blocking of the glucose oxidation.
And here's the food industry going back
to the need to dispose of soybean oil
because they couldn't sell it for a paint stock.
And then the shifts 30 years later to the fish oil
and the N-3 series,
that happened to coincide with the intervention
of the Environmental Protection Agency
that forced the fish industry to stop polluting
the bays and surrounding land areas with dumps of fish fat.
And right at the time the EFA told them to stop polluting
with fish fat that came on the market as a health food.
- Well, that sounds about right for our community
that they've done it a few times,
but essentially you're saying
that's how the fish oil got started.
We basically had a toxic ingredient
we didn't know what to do with,
so let's encapsulate it and sell it as something good for you.
- Yeah, that was how the N-6,
so-called essential fatty acids got established.
They had already been shown not to be essential
and in fact to block oxygen, glucose oxidation.
So around by 1950 it was accepted
that they were anti metabolic and dangerous.
But then the seed oil industry took over the campaign
and showed that by lowering cholesterol,
supposedly eating the essential PUFA
would protect against heart disease.
Took about 15 years before they saw that
it was increasing death from heart disease.
- Right, so I'm basically talking about PUFAs
and basically how they,
I think they're the big problem
when it comes to the Randle cycle, correct?
They're the ones that are more inhibiting the glucose
to be able to inhibit glucose oxidation
and it's primarily PUFA.
PUFA is-
- And they're very closely connected to estrogenicity.
- They, the N-3, DHA, EPA and DHA,
I think are the two that are most increased
in the presence of estrogen.
And they are released
that their effect is increased by estrogen
and their action increases the effects of estrogen.
They themselves are estrogenic,
but estrogen increases our tendency
to store them and respond to them.
- Okay, so essentially the toxic effects
of either the N-3 and the N-6,
the EPA, DHA, fish oils,
and also the seed oils that came later,
those are estrogenic and have estrogenic response,
but also estrogen can increase the toxic effects
of those oils, correct?
- Yeah, and that whole line of research
started in the 1930s.
The animals were getting sick
when they got too much essential fatty acid.
And it turned out that they were being put
into a highly estrogenic state.
And the seed oil industry just defended itself
by saying that that's simply a vitamin E deficiency state
and has nothing to do with the estrogen.
But in fact, the vitamin E deficiency
letting the PUFA accumulate is estrogenic in itself.
So right at the beginning,
they were seeing the connection between PUFA,
vitamin E deficiency and estrogen,
but that didn't have a product to be promoted.
So it was dropped out of the culture.
- So going back,
so we're gonna like take a little turn again,
going back to estrogen and women that are being told
that they are estrogen deficient
or are being told in menopause that they need estrogen,
or even younger women.
I've even heard young women say on their blood labs
that they are low estrogen and they are all,
all those people that I know of,
they're usually having very estrogen dominant issues.
So what would you advise to them
is the best approach to correct this estrogen deficiency,
which was probably more of a progesterone deficiency,
but what would you suggest to them?
- Usually they're hypothyroid
and sometimes various nutritional deficiencies
are behind it, vitamin E and calcium, for example.
But the first thing to be corrected
is to check your body temperature, oxygen consumption,
CO2 production and basically your metabolic rate
because if your thyroid function is low,
you can't properly use your cholesterol
and vitamin A in any way,
but especially for the production of progesterone.
Your ability to metabolize vitamin A in hypothyroidism
is impaired and cholesterol is massively.
In the 1930, I think it was 1936,
there were studies showing a graph
in which the cholesterol level in the blood
rises directly as the metabolic rate or hypothyroidism
increases a mirror image.
And then when they add a thyroid supplement,
the cholesterol does exactly the same thing,
a mirror image of the rising thyroid metabolic rate
and the falling cholesterol.
It's just one of the simplest reactions.
If you're measuring the progesterone coming out of the ovary,
assuming the person or animal has adequate vitamin A
and thyroid, as you measure the cholesterol production
in the ovary, if you increase the amount of cholesterol
in the blood going into the ovary,
you directly increase the amount of progesterone coming out.
So elevated cholesterol essentially means
a deficiency of progesterone possibly caused
by a deficiency of vitamin A and thyroid.
- Okay, so yeah, so just to kind of summarize,
your steroidal hormones, or all of ours,
are produced via cholesterol, thyroid, and vitamin A.
And a deficiency in any of those
can create some hormonal deficiencies.
- Yeah, and the slowdown of your metabolic rate
slows your liver's ability and inclination
to detoxify estrogen.
So again, you get not such a tight mirror image,
but a basic mirror image of rising estrogen
with falling thyroid function.
- So that's why so many women or men
in the hypothyroid state are having hormonal issues
showing up with high cholesterol,
and certainly in a world where veganism
is becoming quite popular again,
you can see why there's so many issues.
- Low cholesterol is a very serious problem.
- Yeah, what would create someone to have low cholesterol?
(upbeat music)
- I hope you're enjoying this episode so far.
It's just so jam-packed with amazing information.
Ray is just so incredible.
And he shares his information so freely,
which I think is just incredible.
And Kate messaged me saying that she really wants
to do a monthly podcast with him on different topics.
So hopefully he will do that with us.
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Let's get back to it.
(bright upbeat music)
And I have seen, and this seems to be something that has,
I know somebody that went through some cancer treatment,
and now due to the radiation, they have a heart issue,
and due to that heart issue,
their doctors want them to have cholesterol, like 100.
Because I guess they're afraid of some sort
of artery blockage because they have a heart issue.
So is there any really scientific understanding of that?
Is that safe?
- I knew about 40 years ago,
a husband and wife, medical doctors,
who had, I think it was 85 and 120 levels of cholesterol
that they bragged about from eating a vegan diet.
I asked about them just a few years after that.
They were in their 30s,
and they were both dead.
- So obviously low cholesterol is not particularly good,
but is there any scientific backing for,
'cause I've seen it in a lot of people
that have been diagnosed with some sort of heart issue,
their doctors really want them to keep very low cholesterol.
Is there some scientific backing for that,
or is that just their, like-
- There are thousands and thousands
of medical publications you can find
on a pet net, but they're all wrong.
- Well, I would probably agree with you with that.
So essentially there's no real basis of it.
So for those listening and their cholesterol is low,
what would the suggestion be to help bring that up
to a healthy level?
- Irritation in the intestine
turns off cholesterol production when it's very intense.
It's poisoning both the intestine and liver
to the extent that they don't have the energy
to make cholesterol.
- So you're saying an irritation in the intestines
will create low cholesterol.
I don't think I've ever heard that before.
- A vegan diet, for example, can be so irritating
to the liver and intestine, endotoxin rises
and will block cholesterol synthesis.
- So then again, so if this is happening to someone
and they have low cholesterol,
and obviously they're probably having some hormonal issues,
what would be your top three things to say to them
to help improve cholesterol and hormone production?
- Orange juice and milk are very helpful
to reduce the inflammation.
Both of them are very good sources of flavonoids,
anti-inflammatory chemicals.
And they provide, the sugar is the raw material
that you need, but you've got to get the inflammation
from them while providing the sugar.
- I see, okay.
So milk and OJ for the flavonoids,
sugar needed to help get the inflammation down.
And then what else could they do?
- The milk has various anti-inflammatory things.
Just keeping a high intake of calcium,
it's very important,
but not necessarily just a calcium supplement.
- Right, and so you're saying
an increase in calcium for inflammation,
and because you want to ultimately decrease inflammation
to increase cholesterol production.
Okay, and since obviously vitamin A is super important,
what would you suggest for people to consume
to help with that vitamin?
- A minimal amount, a necessary amount of thyroid hormone.
It's only when you get super high thyroid activity
that you can lower the cholesterol below normal.
If you don't have enough thyroid
for a good liver metabolism,
it's one of the things providing the energy
to make the cholesterol.
- Okay, so I think that's kind of important
because if we're talking about low or high cholesterol,
thyroid is important.
Either way, correct?
Okay, and I mean, for somebody that is kind of,
for listening, and I mean, what would you suggest,
I mean, do you think most people need to be
on a additional thyroid support,
or can they just improve their overall metabolic health,
via food, stress reduction?
What are your thoughts for most individuals?
- Even though you perfect your diet,
there are still going to be the stored PUFA, for example,
that will keep blocking your metabolism.
So I think it's very important to correct things
as quickly as possible,
getting gradually onto the right level of thyroid function.
And a lot of people wanted to get a good metabolic rate,
better than possible.
That they want to start back out
working ideal level of thyroid,
but it takes the body weeks and weeks
to adjust every time you raise your T3 level in blood,
for example, it will increase your sensitivity to adrenaline.
So to prevent the overexcited adrenaline action,
it takes weeks of adapting
to a slowly increasing level of thyroid.
- I see, so is that one of the reasons
why some people will take T3 directly,
feel super high adrenaline?
Is it just they're taking too much?
- Yeah, the low thyroid person,
I've seen publications that they have 30 times
the average daily output of adrenaline,
I saw one person with a 40 times normal daily output,
just the smallest amount of thyroid supplement,
suddenly they start becoming sensitive
to that excess of adrenaline.
And so you have to take it for a week or two
or reach the level that increases your sensitivity,
give it time to drop your adrenaline.
Really, if you're doing it carefully,
you can probably do it in four or five months.
- Oh, wow.
So for somebody that is in that kind of
hyper adrenaline state, 'cause I certainly have seen that
when people try to take some sort of thyroid
and it just, they feel horrible
taking some sort of thyroid supplement.
Would you suggest then it's certainly wise to work
on their diet first, making sure they have enough energy,
protein and so forth before they engage
in any sort of thyroid medication?
- Magnesium is one of the most important nutrients
because when your thyroid function is slow
and you're running on adrenaline,
these cells are not making ATP quickly
in the hypothyroid state.
And the ATP is what holds magnesium in your cells.
And so the intracellular magnesium
is always low in a hypothyroid person.
And if you take, sometimes even as a little as a third
as a little as a 30 milligram dose of thyroid
the person will get heart pains spasms
in their coronary arteries.
Because if you enliven your whole body,
muscles will suck up the available magnesium
and make your blood level drop as the thyroid goes up.
And so taking a magnesium supplement
along with the thyroid will prevent the heart pains
and other signs of magnesium deficiency.
- I see.
And do you have a suggestion?
'Cause certainly everyone will now be asking
how much magnesium, what type of magnesium?
- Milk will provide enough magnesium
when you're getting enough calcium.
But there are lots of other sources
that make magnesium carbonate is good
except the physical form of it can irritate the intestine.
And so lots of people get headaches
and congestion from magnesium supplements.
And magnesium glycinate is the only one
I haven't heard many people getting headaches from.
- And it would just be a hundred, 200 milligrams.
Is that kind of the suggestion or-
- Yeah, that's enough to make a difference.
- Okay.
So, and I hope, do you still have time Ray?
I know we're a little bit fantastic.
Okay, so kind of taking a turn
'cause I know a lot of women are still on,
hey, I'm going in the menopause.
My doctor's again telling me I have low estrogen.
For those women, what is the suggested protocol?
What would you suggest?
Do they need to get on progesterone?
Or is it, again, they need to work on their health
and supporting their system cholesterol production,
maybe thyroid?
Like what would be the suggestion to these women
that so many of them are coming up and saying,
my doctor's saying, I need estrogen?
- Yeah, a little bit of everything.
Good nutrition,
reducing the worst stresses,
not necessarily hormonal,
but just making your life easier
so that you don't have so much burden on your liver.
The thyroid, vitamin A, calcium, vitamin D,
all of the anti-inflammatory,
basically anabolic substances are helpful.
- And what about men?
Because obviously we know men produce estrogen too,
and from what I understand, later in life,
men can actually have higher levels of estrogen
than even women.
So what about that?
- The sicker a man is, the higher his estrogen is.
And in old age, it's common for a man's estrogen
to be higher than a woman's.
- What would be the symptoms of that for a man?
- Development of fresh tissue is one kind gynecomastia.
and a slowing metabolism,
emotional changes becoming depressed or anxious.
- And with men that have these symptoms,
is it safe?
Because obviously you can dose women with progesterone.
Is it safe to dose men with progesterone?
- Yeah, for acute problems,
for example, it's traumatic injury
will cause a huge surge of estrogen.
And so for any trauma, progesterone is a general
antidote to the injury,
whether it's burn injury or fracture,
concussion or whatever.
Migraines, I've used it myself
when I unwittingly became hypothyroid
from drinking fluoridated water.
Big, single dose, maybe as much as 100 milligrams at once,
right in the middle of a horrible, horrible migraine,
blocked the first pain
and then the nausea and the visual effects
all within about two or three minutes
from maximum migraine to absolute peace and sleepiness
in the space of three minutes.
It's happened twice at intervals of two or three years.
And that's similar to it's effect in epilepsy.
Just a week or so ago,
and wrote about his son
who was having nocturnal seizures every night.
And he started taking,
I think he said 30 milligrams of progesterone at bedtime.
And starting that night,
he didn't have another night seizure for about a month,
I think it was,
but he didn't take his progesterone at bedtime
and had a night seizure,
but he said it didn't have the after effects
that the seizures normally did.
But I've known several youngish men
who had been diagnosed as clinically epileptic
who cured the whole thing with progesterone.
- So for men, is it safe to take continually?
Is there side effects to possibly taking it for men?
- Well, progesterone is unusual in that
a dose acts as a primer
for your production of your own progesterone.
And so for more than 40 years,
I've been saying that for progesterone replacement
isn't the right idea
because one dose of progesterone
should stop the symptoms immediately
and correct your body
so that it makes its own progesterone
that activates thyroid function and secretion
and helps with reducing whatever stress
is initiating the excitatory processes.
In arthritis of different kinds,
I've seen the same thing.
A single dose, for example,
a friend said that every afternoon
or working at his bench,
his knee would swell up.
He showed me his knee looked like a pink football.
He couldn't see the train itself.
It was so painful he couldn't work.
And just the application of one bottle
of progesterone that we got at the drugstore
covering his whole leg.
He never had his afternoon arthritis again.
And over the next, I guess it was 45 or 50 years,
I knew him.
He never had arthritis again, just one dose.
And our plumber was crippled,
could hardly get up the steps one step at a time
and said that he was about to retire
because his cartilage was crumbled and unrepairable.
He gave him a bottle of progesterone,
told him to rub it all over his leg.
He went out to his truck, put on the progesterone
and went about his work about an hour later
on one of his trips out to his truck.
He came up the steps more quickly
and was walking more smoothly.
I mentioned, he said he thought it was better.
But the next morning, all the work had been done.
The next morning, he knocked on the door and said,
"I just wanted to show you this."
And he ran down the stairs and back up the stairs.
And I never gave him any more progesterone,
but at first I asked his wife a few months later
how his knee was, and there was a long silence.
Then she said, "Oh, he did have a bad knee, didn't he?"
And about 10 years later, he was still working.
And I asked him if he had ever had more trouble with his knee.
He had forgotten all about it.
It didn't acknowledge that he ever had a knee problem.
- Wow.
So for most women, certainly that I know,
it doesn't seem like a single dose is ever the magic.
It seems that they do it continually.
So if a woman has to constantly take progesterone--
- It means she's hypothyroid or malnourished.
- Okay, so essentially what you're saying
is someone shouldn't have to.
They should be able to take smaller dosages or a big dose
or maybe not as often.
And if they're properly supported,
they shouldn't have to continue using it.
- Yeah.
- Okay, so for those women that are feeling that,
hey, if I don't have my progesterone, I don't feel well,
then you're suggesting that it's either,
hey, you might need to work on thyroid or taking a thyroid
or making sure you get more calories or nutrition.
- And checking your vitamin D
and drinking one or two quarts of milk.
- Okay.
And for anybody that is thinking about vitamin D
or has thoughts that they don't know if they should take it,
I definitely recommend listening to the podcast
that we did with Dr. Peat on vitamin D.
I do have some other questions about progesterone
because there's lots of thoughts
because progesterone essentially in our body
can convert into cortisol or estrogen.
- Yeah, the cortisol issue is pretty clearly defined.
When you take a big dose of progesterone,
it inhibits your adrenal production of cortisol
and lowers your ACTH so the pituitary stops
supporting adrenal progesterone production.
So that's a good evidence of its anti-glucocorticoid action.
But Hans Selye in defining the effects
of each of the steroids, removed the animals' adrenals
and so the effects of stress within a few days
of having the adrenals removed, a very slight stress
would cause them to die.
But he noticed that the pregnant females didn't die
from the absence of the adrenal glands
until they bore a litter
and then the first stress would kill them.
So that gave him the idea that progesterone might be substituting
for the adrenal glands and, he found, he removed the adrenals
and then give them a supplement of progesterone
and they lived out their normal life.
No signs of adrenal deficiency.
Showing that progesterone has protective anti-cortisol
actions at the high end and protective aldosterone-like
effects at the other end.
- So I think what you're saying is that progesterone
when cortisol is needed will convert into cortisol.
- No, no, it has intrinsic.
- Or act like cortisol.
- Yeah, and it has intrinsic effects of
all of the other, aldosterone, for example,
progesterone is acting in place of aldosterone
that can even tend to lower the aldosterone you have.
But with the adrenal gland, there won't be any aldosterone
and so the progesterone itself is intrinsically
balancing the minerals the way aldosterone should.
- Okay, so our adrenals will produce our progesterone
certainly as women we obviously produce it during ovulation
but also when we are not ovulating,
we produce progesterone via our adrenal glands.
Is it produced anywhere else besides that?
- Progesterone, yeah, the brain and the skin,
the skin is a pretty big source of progesterone
and the brain, they haven't tried skinning animals
to prove that it's all coming from the brain
but if you remove the adrenals and the ovaries,
you can see the DHEA and progesterone,
they tend to be stabilized to some extent,
not enough to make you resistant to stress
but there is a big boost in DHEA
and the small increase in progesterone.
- Interesting, there are some medical doctors
that I have read that say that they're trying to talk
against everybody, that people shouldn't supplement
progesterone and one of the reasons,
not everybody, but they're saying one of the reasons
that you might not take progesterone
is if you're already in a stress state,
that progesterone can increase your cortisol.
Is that a correct statement?
- No, it's always anti-glucocorticoid.
- So if somebody is, so I know of somebody
that was taking a very, very high amount of progesterone
200-300 milligrams and after six months of doing that,
she was getting kind of hyperadrenaline symptoms
and then when she stopped taking the progesterone,
the symptoms seemed to be alleviated.
What exactly could have been happening in her?
- I'm not sure.
- So she was also taking a thyroid medication too
and she decreased that as well,
but the doctor assumed what it was was the excessive amount
of progesterone that she was consuming or taking
because it seemed to correct
once she stopped taking such a high amount.
So I thought maybe it was just that her body
wasn't even utilizing it properly
'cause it was such a long time taking it.
- Did she take it continuously or?
- She was taking some continuously, yes.
She was taking some, even though she was still
having a period, she was taking some
in the beginning of the cycle,
she would take more after ovulation
'cause initially it was helping her feel better
and then it wasn't.
- The reason the body interrupts it every two weeks
is that continuous exposure to your own progesterone
is gradually activating the liver's excretory enzymes.
And so after a month or two of continuous progesterone,
it leaves your body very, very quickly.
So a dose of it will have a much reduced effect
but not last very long.
- Okay, so essentially because she never took a break,
basically it was just once she took,
but why would, so why would getting off of it
feel better then?
Was it that her body was becoming more sensitive to it?
Her own progesterone?
- Yeah, the liver just takes two weeks to recover.
- Yep, that's about what it took her to feel better.
- Yeah, as soon as the liver stops,
it's exaggerated excretion
then your natural progesterone cycle is going to work.
- Okay, yeah, so I think that something to just come from
is that yes, progesterone is good,
it's better to produce it.
You should, if you need it, a single or a just low doses
can be the thing that helps.
And if you need it continually,
then you probably need to look at other things
that could possibly be creating your issues.
Is that a correct statement?
- Yeah, I think of it as a practice for getting the stress
down and restoring your natural cycling.
- What about for the women that try progesterone therapy
and it makes them feel worse?
Maybe initially they start it with their cycle,
maybe they're taking it in their luteal phase
because maybe they're either,
maybe they're not actually ovulating.
And so they start taking progesterone
to kind of mimic a normal cycle,
but it makes them feel worse.
What could be happening?
- It's important to watch what's actually happening,
checking your temperature,
a pulse rate and the other signs that you can measure
the quality of sleep and appetite and so on.
Some women, since they're taking it many years ago
the idea of taking drugs on the skin or through a little patch
and a estrogen patch or a travel motion sickness patch
was about, some as small as a nickel or dime,
some about like a quarter.
I knew quite a few women who said progesterone
didn't do anything at all.
I put it on my wrist to ask how much.
I said an area about the size of a quarter.
Those people believed they were taking progesterone
but essentially getting zero change in their body.
So it's important to go by actual signs
such as temperature and pulse rate.
It should increase the stroke volume of your heart.
And so decrease the frequency of the heartbeat
on the average while maintaining your temperature
at a higher level.
- Okay, so if they're taking it and it's working properly
they should have an increase in temperature and pulse.
- Yeah.
- Okay, and so like again, if they are taking it
and they all of a sudden feel worse,
my understanding was that maybe that progesterone
was pulling estrogen from the tissue.
Could that be happening?
And that's why they were feeling worse?
- Except that it comes out in the detoxified form.
It's not harmful when it's being detoxified by progesterone.
- Oh, so the estrogen and the tissue
that is being pulled from the tissue isn't harmful.
So that will not create a estrogenic response then?
- Yeah, because it's in the water soluble.
The estrogen activates the enzymes inside the cell
to stop producing it and to make it water soluble.
And that causes it to leave the cell
in a water soluble form.
And in that form, it doesn't get into other cells.
So it can't act on you,
but it tends to go right out through the kidneys.
- I see, I see.
So the women that end up taking some sort of progesterone
and like I said, don't feel well,
then what is happening to those women?
- Most often they are using it
in inadequate amounts on their skin.
Whenever I've been present and watch how it's being used,
I never saw it fail or make anyone feel worse.
- I see, okay.
So essentially you're saying
maybe they're just not getting enough
and that could be the reason it's not working
and that could be a crazy issue?
- Yeah, sometimes usually after I had given a talk,
someone would come up after the talk
and one of private conversation about their problems.
So I would give them some progesterone and sit there
and watch their reactions and you could see it happening.
But in some cases it went up since I was there
to see that they weren't getting drunk
or going to become unconscious.
I let them keep taking a big dip on their finger
at 50 to 100 milligrams at the time
and just watching and it would often get up
to 200 or 300 milligrams, not feeling any effects at all.
Then with one more dip,
suddenly the problem would just totally disappear
a radical switch, which would be in blood vessel problems
or depression, it's a transition that happens
in just a matter of seconds or a minute or two.
- So they just kept dosing and dosing,
dosing, nothing, nothing, nothing.
And then finally at 200 or a high dose,
it just, boom, that it worked.
And you were saying it's because
there could have been a blood vessel issue?
- Um, yeah, I didn't have any tests or a way of knowing,
but it was apparently that they were
under the extreme influence of stress hormones
that were controlling their circulation,
brain circulation or hand circulation
in these parts of the body.
Suddenly the circulation would be restored
and their functions would be normalized.
- Yeah, so I think for those who are listening,
Ray was talking about when,
I think to find the magic dose for you,
I think you normally recommend,
don't you normally recommend about like 10 milligrams
every 10 to 15 minutes until you have symptoms reduced?
- Yeah, if the person isn't very sure
of what its effects are going to be,
it's good to set aside a block of time
so you can patiently pay attention
to how you're feeling and watching.
One thing to watch is the veins on the back of your hand.
They'll typically be bulging and feel fairly hard.
And as you take the small amounts of progesterone,
at some point, suddenly the veins will disappear.
- Yes, the vein thing in the hand,
'cause I think you've always said
if you raise your hand up and then raise it down
and you show bulging veins and that is a progesterone.
- deficiency.
- Yeah.
- Yeah, okay, I got two more questions
and then we'll be done.
Can you just give it a brief summary
of all the things that progesterone
can actually do and help people with?
And again, this can be your own
and that's why it's so important.
But as far as how it helps with things
like blood sugar control, sleep and so forth.
- If you name some physiological or anatomical problem,
maybe it'll be something that I haven't heard
the progesterone benefits.
But for example, two people who had grease burns
in the flesh turned their leg red.
And it looked like it was going to blister, getting,
since they had some progesterone at hand,
immediately applying the progesterone.
The major burn simply disappeared.
No lingering pain or blistering.
And several other traumas.
People happen to have progesterone at hand.
Just the most ridiculous damage
could disappear in a very short time
if they got the progesterone in time.
- So basically progesterone can be utilized
for pretty much everything you're saying.
And I have seen it being used.
I've seen it be used remarkably well
for a variety of different things.
So, and it's quite safe.
I mean, it's pretty hard to OD on progesterone, correct?
- Yeah, well, once I did it accidentally,
someone was making margaritas
and thought they were putting in a spoonful of pregnenolone
and got the wrong container
and put in probably 4,000 or 5,000 milligrams of progesterone
and probably had only about 1,000 milligrams
mixed with alcohol.
And then suddenly I couldn't tell exactly
where my hands and feet were.
And for about half an hour I watched my feet
when I walked.
- So Ray OD'd on too much progesterone, almost,
'cause you weren't getting it in the powdered form obviously.
But yeah, so that was a little different
than the stuff I used to do, but very interesting.
Okay, final question, Ray,
is what is the basic difference
between your natural progesterone and a progestin
that the medical community likes to prescribe?
- The reason the progesterone exists
is that drug companies were aware of the success of estrogen
because of the variety of problems that women have
and they knew that progesterone couldn't be patented.
And so they added a little change to it.
The way you make a new drug that you can patent
is just by some random change,
not designed intelligently in any way.
But if it still passes the test of being a progesterone
and happens that testosterone passes the test,
that they use to define a progesterone.
So the definition of a progesterone,
it causes a particular kind of change in users.
But the reason they wanted to have their own patented product
was simply that they could claim that it was,
like progesterone or substituting for it.
But one of the ways they got it to be preferred
over actual progesterone was to claim
that natural progesterone is destroyed in the stomach
by the stomach acid.
And so there, it could be taken as a pill.
But one of the processes of refining progesterone
is to boil it in the hydrochloric acid.
So it was a total whole cloth invention
that had served to shift the medical industry
towards prescribing a defined pill
rather than the natural hormone, which isn't patented.
- And so essentially medical doctors are taught
in medical school all about progestins
and not really ever discussing natural progesterone.
Is that pretty much how they're being taught?
- Yeah, they're all harmful.
A lot of them were very estrogenic,
quite a few of them were androgenic, women would grow hirsutism
from anything that is chemically
not exactly progesterone.
It's going to have anti-progesterone effects,
not to mention the androgenic or estrogenic effects
or even the glucocorticoid-like effects.
So any progesterone, so-called,
other than natural progesterone
is going to have anti-progesterone effects.
- So if you were going to tell any woman
going through pre or post or menopausal,
what would be your advice if their doctor said
you need some progestin and some estrogen?
- You need which?
- You need estrogen and a progestin,
and that's going to get you feeling better.
- If I didn't know better,
I would ask the doctor what he means by progestin,
why not natural pure progesterone?
And whether you knew about the toxic effects
of all of the so-called progestins.
- Yes, yeah, so I think the overall message is
we don't need any excess.
Most women don't need,
well, let me ask this question real quick.
Does any woman ever need additional estrogen?
- I've never run across a situation
where you would suspect that there could be
an official estrogen production
because any sickness or injury
to just about any part of your body
and almost any type of cell can produce estrogen.
It's an injury and sickness reaction,
trying to create a new life to get out of this sickness.
So anything that you do to hurt the organism
is going to activate estrogen production
in one or many parts of the body.
- So that would be a no.
I would guess if somebody had maybe a pituitary issue,
I know someone that had a hypothalamic obesity
and I think they had a non-working pituitary.
So they were young,
I'm guessing that person might need estrogen for growth.
- No, because the stress,
so these things turn on aromatase
and the activating enzymes.
Tissues are autonomous in their ability
to react to stress by an increasing estrogen.
- So a woman that has non-functioning ovaries
or doesn't have the proper communication
between the pituitary and the ovaries
and isn't producing estrogen via the ovaries,
does it need to be even put on any sort of estrogen therapy
to create a cycle?
- They're probably overlooking
the actual estrogen that's there.
The shock, one of Hans Selye's studies showed
that estrogen imitated the shock reaction,
the first phase of the stress reaction.
So estrogen's effects are shock-like effects.
And so you can shock the body with a dose of estrogen.
And sometimes that can rouse the tissues defensively
to start producing more progesterone.
But in many cases, if you don't have the resilience
to make enough progesterone,
what your body does to respond
to one of the shocking doses of estrogen
is to increase the androgens.
The polycystic ovarian syndrome, for example,
you can secrete it in dogs and cows
by getting an injection of gonadotropins,
increasing all of the gonadal hormones
and removing their thyroid gland.
So the combination of activating,
especially estrogen and androgens
against a low thyroid background
is what is enough to bring on the polycyclic ovary syndrome.
And in that syndrome, the androgens are high,
but the progesterone is low.
And then the androgens androstenedione and androstanediol
and DHEA and testosterone are all sources
for the stress issues elsewhere to make estrogen.
Okay, a combination of estrogen poisoning
which can be brought on by the estrogen shock.
- I see, so just to sum that up,
PCOS is normally characterized by excess androgens,
but that's certainly how it's described in the medical world
and also maybe some sort of insulin resistance
that goes along with it.
But essentially you're saying
that it's an increased amount of androgens
that usually those are converting into the estrogens
and that's creating the issues.
- Yeah, and the failure to produce enough progesterone
was really part of the problem
but we'll let it go down that pathway.
- Gotcha, so sum that up, estrogen is bad.
Not bad, I want to say, I don't ever say bad.
So excess estrogen is certainly not what you want
and progesterone is like the superhero of all of it.
Yes?
- Yes.
- Yeah, I love when you agree with me.
Well, Dr. Peat, that was awesome.
Kitty, are you still there?
I know, I love to take over this time here.
- No, it's so good I'm here
and listening and learning so much.
That was amazing.
- Yeah, Ray, I always get very honored
and Kitty lets me come on her show
and I get to talk to you
and she just lets me take it
'cause I tell her I'm such the super fan.
So I appreciate you.
- Come back with such great questions and really thorough
and it's always well thought out and logical.
- Well, that's only 'cause Ray has all,
you have the plethora of information
that I'm so grateful that you are willing
to share with us ongoing basis.
So I thank you so much for coming again today.
- Oh, okay, thank you.
- Awesome. - Thanks, Ray.
Take care. - Thank you so much, guys.
Bye.
- Bye.
- Bye-bye.
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