[music]
Good afternoon and welcome to your own health and fitness talk show.
I'm health integration specialist Lena Berman.
I'm here live with you every Tuesday at noon, talking to you about health care and fitness trends,
and I usually take your phone calls.
Now, this week's show is the final of two special Pledge Drive shows.
Today I'll be interviewing biologist and medical activist Dr. Raymond Peat.
He's a pioneer in the use of natural progesterone therapy, among other things, and the author of several books.
Now, today we'll be talking until 1230. We'll take our usual short musical break.
During that break, what I'm going to hope is that you will use that time,
instead of calling in to ask questions today, to call in and become a part of KPFA
by joining at several different levels. Any level will work.
However, if you join at a level of $60, you get a choice of three different books written by Ray Peat.
You can have your choice of one for $60.
The books are Women in Nutrition, Generative Energy, and Mind and Tissue,
which is about the Russian research perspective on the human brain.
So each one of these books is yours with a pledge of $60 to KPFA.
In other words, as a thank you gift, we will send along one of these wonderful books,
these wonderfully thought-provoking books.
Now, if you want two of these books, and you can choose any two that you want,
you can have that as a thank you gift for a pledge of $100.
Three books with a pledge of $150, you can get all three of Ray Peat's books.
So today, instead of opening up the phone lines for you to ask questions,
I'm going to ask you to support the show with your pledges.
I want to remind people before we get into the show that if you want information about cassette copies
of your own health and fitness, or if you need to reach me,
you just call my office during normal business hours, and my office number is 707-769-1458.
And I'll give that number out again at the end of the show.
Now, if you want to pledge during this hour, our pledge drive numbers are 510-848-5732.
Or, if you're out of our area code here, you can dial us at 1-800-439-5732.
Now, I understand that you may want to listen to this interview, and I won't blame you if you do,
but at 12.30, I will open up the lines and let you call in to do some pledging,
and then we'll get back to our interview and finish up at about quarter to one.
Let me not editorialize today.
Let me get right to my guest, because we have an awful lot to talk about,
and it's very, very, very provocative, wonderful stuff.
So, Ray, I believe you're there with us, yes?
I am.
Okay.
Introduced to many people for the first time as the researcher from whom Dr. John Lee,
author of "What Your Doctor May Not Tell You About Metapause,"
first learned about the benefits of natural progesterone supplementation,
Dr. Raymond Peat received his Ph.D. in biology from the University of Oregon,
specializing in physiology.
He has written "Mind and Tissue," "Progesterone in Orthomolecular Medicine,"
and "Nutrition for Women," including a new book,
which I believe we may be privy to at some point soon.
He's also written several articles in journals.
He has taught at the University of Oregon, Urbana College,
Montana State University, National College of Naturopathic Medicine,
Universidad Veracruzana, and the Universidad Autonoma del Estado de Mexico,
and he also founded Blake College International University.
He does independent research and private endocrinological and nutritional counseling.
So welcome to you.
I'm so pleased that you took the time out to come and be with us.
Let me start with--I want to talk about more than just progesterone today.
I want to talk about everything, but I would like, for those people who are not--
who don't know your work very well,
I'd like to ask you how you came to the conclusion that women need supplementation
with natural progesterone and not with estrogen.
In the '50s, I saw people getting estrogen therapy and dying or going crazy
or getting rheumatoid arthritis, and it was so obvious that, like,
one woman went into a mental breakdown an hour after she had an injection of estrogen,
and her daughter died at the age of about 27 after taking early birth control pills
that were high in estrogen.
And I began just keeping my ears open to the nature of the research that was supporting it
and realized that it really was all advertising,
and the research went completely in the other direction,
and so I decided to go back to graduate school.
I had been in linguistics and literature, and I intended to study nerve biology,
and I thought that that was dominated by some very foolish dogmas
that the least dogmatic work was being done in reproductive physiology,
and there I saw that estrogen explained infertility and reproductive aging.
It accelerated or imitated all of the known age-related changes.
And this is true for men as well.
Yeah, and these changes are so fundamental and general
that you can't really distinguish between the free radical damage done by unopposed estrogen
or by heavy metals or by x-rays or by anything that interferes with oxidative metabolism.
As you just said, what you discovered is that aging and estrogen dominance share symptoms.
A lot of people don't realize that when men age, it isn't that they are losing testosterone in particular.
Mostly what's happening is that they're gaining estrogen.
Yeah, for example, prostate enlargement and then cancer occurs in aging men,
and it is precisely the men who are deficient in testosterone
and have an excess of estrogen who get the enlarged and cancerous prostate.
And so what we're saying is that aging and estrogen dominance share symptoms
which include diminished cellular respiratory capacity, which causes energy loss,
and it increases your risk of cancer.
And it's a vicious circle too because estrogen not only causes the respiratory defect,
but once you get stressed and sick, even an acute stress drastically raises your body's estrogen
so that hospitalized people, men or women, typically have very high estrogen levels.
A heart attack, for example, is associated with very high estrogen levels in men.
I might mention here also that I think we've, at least those of us who listen to alternative radio,
KPFA as an example, know about the fact that our environment is full of estrogenic,
xenoestrogen-mimicking chemicals, lots of pesticides and whatnot.
Yeah, this is very old information.
In the '60s when I was starting my research, I saw that for decades people had known
that soot is full of a vast number of estrogenic compounds,
the same things which are carcinogenic in smoke have a very neat estrogenic function.
That's why estrogen was such an easy thing to commercialize by the drug companies
because you could find it everywhere.
I want to talk about progesterone, but before we talk about progesterone,
I'd like you to describe what role the thyroid plays in restoring balance when estrogen is dominant.
The liver, this was work done by the Biscons in the early 1940s.
The liver is the main thing that regulates and holds your estrogen in check.
And the liver, to do its work, requires adequate protein, nutrition, essentially,
and a basic amount of B vitamins.
But these don't work unless you have adequate thyroid to make the liver able to metabolize the protein.
You know, this would also explain why more women have trouble with thyroid function.
I think the other things you mention is that we already have estrogen and have, as you put it in the book, less active livers.
Although I'm really noticing that with increased alcohol consumption, use of pharmaceuticals,
and then what we just talked about, the estrogenic environmental pollutants,
and the sorts of infectious diseases that men are getting, that men as well are quite estrogen dominant.
But it does seem that women tend to be the ones that are red flagged the fastest for low thyroid symptoms.
Why is it hard to evaluate the adequacy of thyroid function with a blood test?
It wouldn't necessarily be so hard, but the scientific work that was being done in the '30s and early '40s
showed that respiration goes down as your thyroid goes down.
But the basic technique simply involved measuring how much oxygen you would breathe in a period of a few minutes.
And the drug companies didn't have any way to market air to be breathed in the lab,
and they came up with a blood test called the protein-bound iodine measurement
and sold everyone on the idea that this was scientific.
And it turned out that instead of 40% of the population being low respirers,
only 5% were low in the protein-bound iodine test.
And when I was in school, everyone who was overweight had been told by their doctors
that they had behavioral or personality defects, not a hormone problem,
because the drug companies convinced everyone that really needed thyroid,
since the test didn't show low thyroid that 95% of the people have some other problem.
But in the '60s, the protein-bound iodine was found to have essentially nothing to do with thyroid function.
And what remained in everyone's mind was that 95% of the population do not need thyroid.
So now, no matter how perfect the test might measure your thyroid response,
the fixed idea is that you are not likely to need thyroid.
Yeah. In fact, actually, when a lot of people who present with some of the symptoms that you describe in the book
that would indicate a possible problem with thyroid, like having an extremely low resting pulse,
and in many cases this is not someone who's athletic, their temperature is below normal, very much below normal,
pulses, as I mentioned, slow, reflexes are not quite right, they're cold all the time,
all of these things that we normally associate with low thyroid function.
And then when the doctor does a panel, they're not seeing a low thyroid in the blood.
And either over or underweight can be caused by low thyroid, so it isn't just a matter of fat people needing thyroid.
Very often, people who can't gain a normal amount of weight need thyroid.
And dry skin and falling hair are two of the very important indicators,
and those tend to increase with aging and to some extent they can be reversed by restoring the hormones.
Just a few months ago, someone found that an anti-estrogen chemical restores hair growth in animals,
and this is one of the things that thyroid researchers have suspected,
low thyroid people have high estrogen, and estrogen interferes with the development of the cell follicle, the hair follicle.
And estrogen also makes it difficult for the body to utilize thyroid, and for the thyroid to produce it,
but I mean even if you're taking supplemental thyroid, if your estrogen levels are high, it will also interfere.
So what we've got here is a situation where people are walking around with these symptoms.
Do you have any suggestions on how people are going to get their doctors to respond to this?
I mean if they're doing a blood test and they're seeing, I mean one of the ways that I've sort of intervened
is to have people have their doctors also check for antibody levels, and that sometimes gets their attention.
Well, what I usually do is go over a person's problems and have them make a list of at least five of the classical indicators of hypothyroidism.
Cold hands and feet, gaining weight when they don't eat very much, being constipated, having dry skin and hair,
all of--there are about 200 classical indicators, and if a person puts together a list of complaints,
any doctor that went to medical school is likely to recognize by the time they've named five or six classical complaints
that there could be a thyroid problem.
I'll throw in a couple more.
People who are low in--the body converts thyroid into T3.
I mean it's kind of complicated. I don't want to get into the specifics of it, but if you're too low in T3,
if you don't have enough, you also become very depressive.
And also, because I work with people in a variety of ways, including exercise, if people begin to do exercise,
they begin to gain weight if the thyroid is not functioning well.
In addition to that, what you've cautioned against is people doing what we call aerobic exercise,
but doing it in a state where they're out of breath.
So these people who do exhaustive hours of running and getting on the Stairmaster,
and they're almost breathless, and they do this for a long period of time, may in fact, or certainly in fact,
are suppressing thyroid function.
Yeah, someone put volunteers on a treadmill and had them walk for 40 minutes,
keeping their pulse rate under 120 beats per minute, so gentle exercise just for 40 minutes.
And then they measured the amount of the active thyroid hormone, T3, in their blood,
and it had gone to zero in that short time.
For people who are just tuning in, this is KPFA, and I'm health integration specialist,
Lena Berman, on Your Own Health and Fitness is the show.
It's a special pledge drive show, and I have Dr. Raymond Peat, a researcher and medical activist, on the line,
and we're discussing right now progesterone and thyroid, and we'll move on to some other very important hormones.
We will open the lines at 1230, but this time it's going to be for you to pledge,
and what you can do if you pledge is get, as a thank you gift, one of Ray Peat's fabulous books.
Now, these are self-published books. These are not on the bookshelves.
This is a special deal from KPFA.
You can get his books directly from him, but we have them here, and we will give you a book with a pledge of $60.
We'll give you two books for $100, and we'll give you all three of his books for a pledge of $150 as a thank you gift.
At 1230, we'll open up the lines at 848-5732 in this area code, or 1-800-439-5732, so stay tuned for that.
One of the things that also can happen is we have an estrogenic environment,
and then we have these dietary changes that have occurred in the United States over the last few years.
Suddenly, the food industry has been pushing polyunsaturated vegetable oils.
They've been pushing a high-carbohydrate diet, stressing the use of soy and legumes in the diet,
and in fact, it looks to me as though the cancer rates have gone through the ceiling,
and in addition to that, I think there's just an endemic problem with thyroid right now.
Would you like to comment on that?
In the '30s, one of the indicators of--it was a very reliable sign that the thyroid was low
when the blood cholesterol level was very high, and people demonstrated that if you removed the thyroid gland,
immediately their blood cholesterol started up, and if you gave them a thyroid supplement,
immediately the blood cholesterol would return to normal,
and it happens that if you poison the liver, it can't make cholesterol,
and someone discovered that if you feed the animals a very large amount of unsaturated feed oils,
it will suppress the cholesterol while also suppressing their metabolism,
and the pig farmers, for example, found it useful to add large amounts of corn or soybeans to the animals' diets
to make them hypometabolic so they got fat on very little food,
but this same procedure is so toxic to the liver that it doesn't normally in itself cause direct elevation of cholesterol
the way simple hypothyroidism does,
and even though it was established that low thyroid individuals were susceptible to heart disease
because of the thyroid deficiency,
the fact that low thyroid people have high cholesterol became attached with the thought that cholesterol could be blamed instead of low thyroid,
and the promotion of the feed oils was largely based on the idea that it would lower cholesterol and prevent heart disease,
but in fact it lowers cholesterol while causing hypothyroidism,
and just in the last few years, the research is accumulating showing that it is not really connected directly at all with cholesterol,
but heart disease is the result of plaque that develops in blood vessels,
and that this plaque is like age pigment, the product of free radical breakdown of unsaturated fats,
and that the blood vessels are most intimately exposed to both oxygen, abundant iron from the hemoglobin,
and the unsaturated fats that are either being digested or drawn out of storage,
and so you have the perfect conditions for creating free radicals during stress when the unsaturated fats are circulating in the bloodstream.
So what we're saying, Ray, is that this sort of move, in addition, not only did they introduce unsaturated fats as a panacea for saving everybody's lives,
but these were also very badly processed, they were heated, they were highly processed, which makes the free radical production even worse,
but in addition to that, there's a whole sort of mythology about diet,
I mean there are people telling us that the Asian people don't get cancer, and that soy is wonderful, and all of this,
and I know you have very strong opinions about this, and I'd like to hear you talk about them.
Well, the soy monopoly is really extremely powerful in the United States,
it subsidizes research and propaganda, medical society meetings, and books,
and it's doing just a very powerful job of diverting people's attention from this research,
which is coming out showing that unsaturated fats are intimately involved in heart disease and strokes,
and what they're doing is over and over repeating certain associations,
that breast cancer is lower in Japan, for example, than in the United States,
and when Japanese live in this country, they have the same rate of breast cancer as Americans,
but they neglect everything else that was traditional in Japan,
women didn't smoke, for example,
and green tea also,
they tended to stay at home, and they ate lots of strange shellfish,
and all kinds of foods that are simply not available in the United States.
Well, you know, what people say about soy, and what's confusing to people, the consumers,
is that on the one hand, there's supposed to be these sort of estrogenic phytoestrogens in soy,
and there's also this concept of there being isoflavones in better,
well, let me just finish what it is so people know what I'm talking about,
which is not estrogen, but they're estrogen analogs that take up the receptor sites,
and they're supposed to protect against estrogen,
so this is confusing for people, because they think, oh, we're supposed to eat soy,
because it protects against that, and then other, so what do you say?
Well, that same ideology is being used to promote estriol as the weak natural estrogen,
but estriol has essentially the same kind of toxicity that any estrogen does,
and we should remember that DES, which caused even generations later abnormalities in cancer in the babies,
that DES is a classical weak estrogen that doesn't have the same strong concentration relationship to estrogen effects,
but it has very broad capacity to disrupt cell functions while acting in many ways like an estrogen,
and so the weakness has nothing to do with the toxicity, the weakness of binding to the estrogen receptor.
The estrogenic substances can be just as toxic whether or not they bind to the so-called estrogen receptor,
because there are so many ways that estrogen has its effects, not just the classical so-called receptor.
For 40 years or so, people recognized that estrogen had a wide spectrum of instantaneous effects.
It imitates the shock reaction and causes cells to take up water and such
in a time that it couldn't possibly be acting through the classical receptor.
So there is sort of either a signal action or a chemical action of any estrogenic substance,
which has nothing to do with the estrogen receptors,
and when you compare estriol and DES and the phytoestrogens,
what they have in common is that they are toxic to the reproductive system, will cause miscarriages and abortions.
There are strains of sheep which are known to be resistant to phytoestrogens,
and they happen to be the ones that are adapted to live elevations,
because the phytoestrogens cause abortions by interfering with the oxidative metabolism.
So if they have a special resistant hemoglobin and physiology, they can stand the phytoestrogens,
but when you test them on a range of lab animals,
these bioflavonoids or isoflavones and so on have the same drastic toxic effects that DES, for example, has.
They cause deformities in the genitals of the baby animals when the mothers are exposed to them.
So basically, just because we have listeners who are not at all scientific in their mindset,
before we go to a quick break, what you're saying is that whether you want to say that they--
whatever you want to say, what you're saying is that soy still has estrogenic effects,
which means that it's going to oppose and interfere with thyroid function,
and that people who are eating-- and we'll come back to this after we take a break--
people who are eating diets who are high in soy and also other legumes
may in fact be creating a hypo- or low-thyroid condition.
Yeah. At the time some of these claims were coming out several months ago,
I noticed a report from China that there were 100 million hypothyroid people there,
and goitrism, cretinism, and so on are extremely common in bean-eating, soybean or any kind of bean.
The Andes and all the way from the mountains of central Mexico to the tip of South America,
the bean-eating cultures have an extremely high incidence of goitr and cretinism.
Okay. Well, listen, we're going to take a very, very brief musical break,
so hold that thought, and we'll come back to it.
This is your own health and fitness talk show on KPFM,
health integration specialist doing a special pledge drive show with Raymond Peat,
researcher and medical activist.
We are going to open up your phone lines here and let you call in to do some pledging for about 45 seconds.
It's 510-848-5732 in our area code, 848-5732, or 1-800-439-5732.
If you're out of the area code, 1-800-HEY-KPFA.
For a $60 pledge you can choose women in nutrition, genitive energy, or mind and tissue, one book.
You can have two books for $100 as a thank-you gift,
or all three of them for a pledge of $150 to support this programming.
These books are not available on the bookshelf.
We are going to give them to you with a pledge.
We're going to take a brief musical break.
We'll be right back with more of Raymond Peat.
Your molecular structure is really something fine.
At first, your cellular organization is really something choice.
Your magnetism's about to make me lose my voice.
Got all my circuits open, my system's reading gold.
Your cellular organization, baby, is top of the show.
[Music]
Welcome back.
This is Lena Berman, health integration specialist.
Your own health and fitness on KPFA during a special Pledge Drive show.
You can keep calling those of you who are on the line right now,
and those who wish to get copies of Dr. Raymond Peat's books.
We have some as a thank-you gift for pledging during this hour.
The number again is 510-848-5732, or 1-800-HEY-KPFA, or 1-800-439-5732.
We are going to give you, with a pledge today, one of Raymond Peat's books.
They are women in nutrition, generative energy, and mind and tissue,
which is the Russian research perspective on the human brain.
One of these books with a $60 pledge we'll give you as a thank-you gift.
Two books for $100, or all three of his books, which are only available--
they're self-published, they're only either available from Dr. Peat himself,
or by pledging today at KPFA, we will give you these books as a thank-you gift
in show of our appreciation.
Now, you won't hear Ray Peat on any other radio show.
He is not someone who is commonly heard in the media.
He's a very special person, and he's very discriminating about where he will appear.
I have a long relationship with him, and he is brilliant.
This is the man who turned everybody's minds around about the use of estrogen,
or we're still working on changing their minds anyway.
What we're talking about right now is the fact that not only because of
the environmental situation in our environment with the chemicals and whatnot,
but also by the way that people have been eating over the last few decades,
there is an increase in the number of people who are suffering from thyroid disease,
and particularly low thyroid.
A lot of it's undiagnosed, and we've been talking about the role of diet.
And what we were just saying is all these people who say that the Asian diet is healthier--
Ray just shared with us a statistic, which is a hard word to say--
that there are 100 million Cretans, people with thyroid disease, in China.
That's significant.
So the other thing is the use of high-quality animal protein to increase energy.
Part of what we're talking about when we talk about thyroid is increasing oxidation and energy,
respiration and energy in the cells. Yes?
And I'm not sure of all of the ways in which protein supports thyroid,
but in effect the liver seems to think we're starving to death
if we don't get adequate high-quality protein.
It has the function of making albumin and other proteins to maintain blood physiology.
And if it's deficient in the right amino acids that you get from high-quality proteins,
such as milk and eggs, it acts as if it's starving,
and it sends out signals to draw on the body's own protein tissues,
but to prevent the rapid breakdown of the body's own tissues
when you're not eating enough protein.
The body senses the changed chemistry and very quickly suppresses the thyroid.
So there is this known connection between a protein deficiency or imbalance
and an adaptive suppression of the thyroid.
So that's one of the important outcomes, is that people on a low-protein diet,
their thyroid turns down so that they don't eat up their own tissues.
It's the same as going on a fast.
You lose weight for the first day, but then your thyroid is suppressed,
and after day one you lose only about an ounce a day or something.
Yeah, I don't like fasts because I think they also have a detrimental effect on metabolism,
even if people are drinking juices and stuff.
You like people to use, along with milk and eggs and animal protein--
and I should mention that these need to be clean source, as clean as you can find,
because obviously the dairy and meat industries are fond of putting hormones in their products,
so you do need to be aggressive about locating stores that sell free-range and ask questions.
Really watch out for your food source.
But using some form of animal protein,
and you like mixing this with fruit as a carbohydrate and also white potatoes.
Why don't you like the use of grain?
Because the plant defense system puts its worst toxins in the seed to prevent its next generation,
and these toxins turn out to apparently have been evolved to make the seed undesirable to animals
by blocking their digestion, poisoning their metabolism.
So it takes pretty fancy treatment to make them even digestible and useful.
That's where the traditional leavening process comes in.
It helps to detoxify the grains.
So the worst grain material is one which is not traditionally processed.
The American native cultures found that by boiling their grains with alkali,
they would detoxify them enough that they weren't terribly poisonous,
but still they weren't adequate nutrition in themselves.
The particular type of calorie in grains,
their protein value should be discounted because the protein is of such low quality,
not just the quantity, but the quality is the lowest protein known.
So if you count them as calories, what you see is either unsaturated fats or starches,
and the white refined flour, for example, is essentially pure glucose.
Starch is made up of a chain of glucose molecules where fruit sugar is half fructose and half glucose,
and glucose is a powerful stimulant to insulin and the synthesis of fat.
So the grains are well designed to cause obesity.
These complex carbohydrates, which are chemically pure glucose,
stimulate fat production and increase the appetite so that they start the chain of putting on fat.
The fructose component of fruit sugar does not have that powerful effect on insulin.
It's very slow and indirect.
The fruit comes with many of the minerals which work in place of insulin
and have a slightly suppressive effect on the insulin.
And the fruit has a strange side effect.
It happens to promote cholesterol production,
and that's one of the reasons I emphasize having plenty of fruit sugar because the fructose,
while it doesn't cause obesity, it does help your liver to produce more cholesterol,
which is then available if your thyroid is functioning,
to turn into the protective hormones pregnenolone and progesterone.
Now, we're running out of time.
We've got about six minutes left, and I know that there are some other issues that we want to cover, albeit quickly,
so I apologize for this because they're important.
And as usual, I may need to reschedule another show with you, particularly when your new book comes out.
Coconut oil, you know, you made a dent.
There are nutritionists talking about how great coconut oil is and how it's a metabolic stimulant,
so much for the idea that saturated fat is nasty.
I think what we're talking about is that if your thyroid is not functioning well, if it's suppressed,
either through diet or stress or environmental things,
your body needs the cholesterol from these sources in order to create these hormones.
If your thyroid is suppressed, you then will have problems with cholesterol.
Yeah, when I see someone with above-average cholesterol, I think they're in pretty good shape
because I've seen people drop their cholesterol levels 80 points a day, 60 to 80 points,
by using quick-acting thyroid when they had to pass a health exam, for example.
So it's no problem at all to get your high cholesterol down to normal,
but to get low cholesterol up to normal so that you have the defensive anti-cancer,
anti-aging, anti-stress hormones, fruit is really the only practical thing I know of
that will help the liver recover from the toxic unsaturated fats and estrogens
and other things that block cholesterol production.
Ray, what is going on when someone becomes hyperthyroid?
You know, Graves' disease or the other--
Well, there are three kinds of Graves' disease, hyperthyroid, euthyroid, and hypothyroid.
So Graves' disease is not synonymous with hyperthyroidism.
And very often people are diagnosed as being hyperthyroid on the basis of having elevated thyroxin
in their blood in spite of very often having many signs of low thyroid.
And so you can't go by the standard idea of what hyperthyroidism is.
Occasionally I see someone who is really hyperthyroid, and that is generally a corrective process.
If they just, for example, eat some exaggeratedly nutritious foods, lots of eggs,
maybe some liver, plenty of very concentrated food,
usually the thyroid is unloading its excess and will correct itself in anywhere from three months to a year.
That's a very short answer for a complicated question,
so I apologize if we're giving a short answer to something that's complicated.
There have been publications on different ways to treat it,
and the outcome of the good studies was that radiation and surgery are almost never right.
The conservative treatment, either using diet or a drug just to control the symptoms,
practically always leads to resolution without the damage of surgery or radiation.
We only have about two or three minutes, and it's terrible to do this in the last seconds of the show,
but I wanted to say something about pregnenolone and DHEA.
Mostly when you like using these, it's when people are over 50 when the levels of DHEA decrease.
If someone tests -- there are tests now, you test DHEA levels -- if you test low,
should you not try pregnenolone first since it's the beginning of the chain, the pathway of hormones?
Yeah, pregnenolone is essentially always safe.
It stops the stress reaction and will --
whether you have, for example, Cushing's syndrome with too much cortisone
or Addison's disease with too little, pregnenolone, like progesterone,
will put you right down the middle and correct whatever is wrong.
And it's protective even if it isn't correcting a disease process,
and it will very often correct the DHEA level.
But I interpret the blood tests or saliva tests of DHEA really as indicating more about liver function
than about your need or actual tissue levels of the DHEA.
Without doing a tissue biopsy, I don't think there's any clear way to evaluate your DHEA status,
and it's better just to correct everything else.
So who should try pregnenolone?
Anyone who's over 48 or 50 and feeling like they've suddenly run into an energy wall.
If things are just -- like their skin is deteriorating and looking old
and they have no energy and are depressed and so on,
it very often is just because their glands have sort of hit the barrier of accumulated iron
and unsaturated fatty acids that make stress poison your adaptive system rather than stimulating it.
Okay.
You know, I have to let you go, and I'm really sorry,
because we really didn't get a chance to talk about the use of progesterone in fertility issues
and to prevent ADD-type children and stuff.
So what we'll have to do, if it's okay with you, Ray,
is get you back on to talk about the new book,
because I think all of that will be in the new book.
Is that not true?
Yeah, that book will be called "Female Hormones in Context."
And we're still looking for someone to print it properly.
So I'll be in touch with you, and we'll reschedule as soon as that book is out.
In the meantime, I really want to thank you for your generosity.
I want to thank you for donating the books today,
and most of all donating your time and being so patient with us as you explain these very complex issues.
Raymond Peat, thank you so much.
Thank you.
Okay. Talk to you soon.
Bye.
Well, now it's your turn.
Ray has been generous with us.
Now we need you.
And as usual, what I'm coming to you and asking you to do is creating a context for this show,
because this show means everything to me.
It's the most important thing I do in my life.
It's a realization of a dream.
And for me to have the opportunity to interview people like researchers like this,
who are not in the mainstream, who have avoided the mainstream so that he is not beholden or under any obligation to lie to you.
He's not connected to any companies, which is a hard thing to find these days with researchers.
And he has kept himself very pure.
He's a very political person.
The information he's giving you is not in the mainstream,
and you won't hear it anywhere else but KPFA.
This is the second show I've done with him.
I'm going to get him back on to talk about his new book.
This is absolutely groundbreaking information.
He's a very, very important researcher.
We're giving away three of his books today.
You want to call us now.
The numbers again are 510-848-5732 or 1-800-439-5732.
And the books are "Women in Nutrition" for $60,
"Generative Energy," which is a fascinating book.
It's very political, and it also talks about the whole context of biology,
also about all the stuff we were talking about today.
"Mind and Tissue," which is also for $60.
It is the Russian research perspective on the human brain.
This is also about energy and self-function.
It's talking about how important the brain is,
how the metabolism and the behavior adaptation and stress in the brain, so brain health.
Each book is $60.
It's a thank-you gift for pledging $60.
You can have two of the books for $100.
You can have all three for $150.
I don't see any callers.
Come on, people.
Do you like this information?
You guys clamored for me to get him back on.
After I had him on the first time, I was overwhelmed with calls.
The station was overwhelmed with calls.
This book is not available on bookstore shelves, easy for me to say.
These books are only available directly from Raymond Peat.
His information about where to reach him, how to get consultations,
about his newsletter and his other books are all in the back of these books.
You can get online with him and with us by now calling and pledging and getting these books.
All three of these books are fascinating reading.
You will not find these concepts anywhere else.
If it weren't for him, women would still be being given estrogen without even any question.
By goodness, he and John Lee became friends and John Lee started to promote progesterone.
Ray Peat is not someone who goes out and toots his own horn.
He's not easy to find.
He has a busy practice.
He's researching and writing books.
He's not interested in selling an idea.
His books are phenomenal and you have an opportunity that's rare now.
You can support the station.
You can support the show and enable me to continue to bring you this kind of very unusual information.
It's based on my 15-year relationship with him that he's willing to do these shows.
You won't hear this on another radio station.
Support us now.
So please call us.
It's 510-848-5732, 1-800-439-5732 or 1-800-HEY-KPFA.
Did you like that show, Summer?
I did.
I was listening upstairs to it and the first time I had heard him when he was talking about the progesterone,
I thought it was very interesting, an interesting perspective he had on the whole issue.
But I'm sitting here looking at this book, Nutrition for Women, and on the back it says,
what he talks about in here is chronic fatigue, premenstrual tension, breast pain, skin, nutrition and hormones,
estrogen and anxiety, the danger of iron supplements.
So I think that it's very, these are very useful books.
If you would like to get a copy of one of the three that Lane is offering today, you need to give us a call at 510-848-5732.
She's offering as a gift, as a gift for subscribing to KPFA, Women in Nutrition for a $60 pledge,
Generative Energy for a $60 pledge, Mind and Tissues for a $60 pledge.
And if you're running into busy signs, busy on the phone right now, we're getting a really good response.
So if you would like to get a copy of these books, we will let you know when a line is open.
Keep calling.
Sometimes it keeps ringing and then it cuts you off, but don't give up.
These books are well worth having.
I think probably the best package we're offering today is to get all three of the books for $150.
I mean, because what you're essentially doing is protecting this type of programming.
You're also letting me know what you want.
But by getting all three, these are, it's a phenomenal package, because Women in Nutrition is particularly about women and nutrition.
It does cross over to men in nutrition as well, because it's the same issues of hypothyroidism.
Generative Energy is almost like a dissertation on the relationship between biology and ecology,
and it's a call against reductionist thinking, but it has solid information about all of the historical perspective on the research we've been talking about,
about thyroid and energy, and it makes it possible for you to really understand what's going on.
It's a real call to action.
He's very political.
And Mind and Tissue is very provocative, because it is hearkening back to Reich and trends in Eastern Europe about energy and cell function and the brain.
Very interesting stuff, considering what's going on with attention deficit disorder and all of these things that we're seeing.
And you can have all three of these books for $150, and you support the station, and you support the show.
I think it's really wonderful when folks that we bring in, especially folks that Mayna brings in on this show,
are willing to make available to our listeners this information.
They're giving us these books at no cost for us, because they believe in KPFA.
They believe in our listeners.
They believe this information is information that you could benefit from.
You're not going to go to your regular medical doctor and get this kind of information.
It's like, "This is what we do for this. Take this pill. This is what we do for that."
Well, and as a matter of fact, I think that I'm going to order some additional copies of Generative Energy to give to some of my clients,
because I think they need to give this to their doctors, because doctors are not getting it.
I mean, I'm getting clients who are having their doctors call me, and they're saying, "Why do you want me to check her thyroid?"
I mean, it's like they're being receptive. They're listening.
But if I could shoot over a copy of Generative Energy...
So go into your doctor's office armed with this research. 1-800-Hey-KPFA, or 510-848-5732.
Write down the number. If you're not getting through, you can continue to call after the show is over.
We will continue to give you some books for some period of time afterwards.
Oh, yeah. You can keep calling in.
Why don't you talk a little bit about what's coming up? What's coming up in terms of programming?
Well, actually, next week's show is going to be fun. I've got sexologist Dr. Lonnie Barback.
There was a question about whether to do this for the pledge drive, because it's so close to Valentine's Day.
So it's going to be a little late, but we're going to still talk about her new book, which is "50 Ways to Please Your Lover."
I'm ready to read this book.
So you may want to pick up a copy of this book ahead of time, and then listen to the show.
You know what I have coming up that's really exciting is I noticed that Dr. Oliver Sacks was going to be in town.
So I called his publicist, and she said, "Well, yes, he would be glad to appear."
She's coming live. I'm going to be sitting here talking to him.
I can't tell you what it means to me to have access to these people. It's dying and going to heaven.
I really have just realized a dream by doing this.
And you make it possible by joining the station. It's because of you.
It's because of you that I do the show. It's a volunteer basis. I spend two days a week doing this show.
And I do it because it's a feedback loop. You give back to me. I give back to you.
I encounter these researchers. Their ideas get out.
We're part of the solution. We're becoming part of the solution together.
Well, let's give the numbers again. 1-800-439-5732.
If you were getting busy a few moments ago, now we do in fact have a few lines open.
Or if you're in the 510 area code, 510-848-5732, call and ask for either one of the books that Lane is offering today,
Women in Nutrition, Generative Energy, Mind and Tissues, for a $60 pledge each.
Or just go ahead and go for the $150 pledge. It's less than about $10 a month on the EFT plan.
You can also put this on your MasterCard or your Visa.
You can do it the way it works best for you.
You can even consider taking out a gift subscription if you are a subscriber already.
Consider upgrading your subscription. Or if you are a new listener to this show, call in now.
Become a new subscriber. You can also subscribe at the $45 rate if you can't afford $60.
And you'll still get a copy of our program guide every month.
The number again, 510-848-5732. There's a couple of lines open now.
You have an opportunity to get in there now.
We have only a few more moments before we need to move on to the next show.
A couple of lines open here, folks. 510-848-5732 or 1-800-439-5732. You can call us right now.
I want to ask you, Lana, what is the most important thing you want listeners to know about Ray Peat's work?
The thing that's most important is that he--
You remember the old days where there used to be these bumper stickers that said "Question Authority"?
Well, that's what Ray Peat is about. He says, "Look, if you go back and you look in the research files, all the way back,
there is evidence of many of the things that mainstream nutrition and mainstream medicine, if there is such a thing, are toting as being healthy."
Maybe not. Maybe it's not healthy.
You know, one of the things that's important about him is that--
And he challenges me constantly because there are things that we disagree about.
You know, we've had arguments about whether to supplement the diet with essential fats.
And he says, "But, you know, radiation decreases, you know, inflammation, too."
I mean, he's very thought-provoking in terms of what is the balance here and what is the bill at the end of using these various things.
And he goes back and he's got the research to support his work.
It's not that he's some kind of guy who's making this up.
He's researched a lot of this stuff.
But it's also his passion and his sense of love for people.
And he can be--you know, in a personal conversation, he can be sort of a little, like, annoyed with people.
But as soon as you start talking about this stuff, I can feel how desperately he wants people to protect themselves and be healthy.
How much of a passion it is for him.
He works very hard.
510-848-5732.
There is a line open now if you are getting busy.
Give us a call now.
We--you know, I really think that this show has gotten a tremendous response from listeners.
And part of it is because you are questioning authority.
Like Ray Peat, you're questioning and you want to know more about how to keep yourself healthy.
So if that's something that's important to you, call in now.
Get a copy of these three books for a pledge of $150.
You can have three of these books by Dr. Ray Peat.
You know, something wonderful that Robert Crayhlen once said to me, you know, a nutritionist who's been on a lot, who's popular,
is that a truly intelligent mind will be able to contain conflicting ideas at the same time.
So whatever you read or hear from Ray Peat, even if it kind of flips a switch or you go, "Huh," that process is creative.
It will help you to dig deeper into yourself and to experiment and use your body as a laboratory,
not in an irresponsible way, but in a way that's guided by knowledge.
So that's the only way to find health is to find that equilibrium and homestasis in each one of you and only with knowledge.
It's the only way you can do it.
1-800-439-5732 or 510-848-5732.
You can pledge at the $60 rate, the $45 rate.
If you can only afford to pledge $25, then KPFA can use it.
It's very helpful for us to know what kind of response we get to the different shows that we put on the air here at KPFA.
Right now we're getting a good response and we really need, in fact, you know, I found out this morning that we haven't made,
we're not getting, we're not close to our overall goal.
We've got a ways to go.
So don't feel today if you haven't been able to call in, you know, while we're here talking on the mic, that you can't still call in and support us.
It's very important that the station make its goal of $400,000 before Wednesday.
So, you know, if you've been waiting and holding back, now's the time to do it.
510-848-5732.
We've got a line open.
Now I'll tell you another thing that's interesting.
I was listening to the radio the other day and I heard Andrew Weil.
I know a lot of people like Andrew Weil, but a woman called in.
This was on KQED, I guess I can mention that on the air.
And a woman called in and said, "I have bleeding fibroids and I don't want to have a hysterectomy."
Right?
And Andrew Weil said, "Well, yeah, it sounds like you're estrogen dominant.
So the first thing to do is to eat more soy and get more exercise.
And then there are surgical techniques where they don't have to remove the uterus."
And I'm sitting there going, "What happened to natural progesterone?"
Hello? Hello?
You know, I mean, it's like Andrew Weil talks about this stuff as if he invented it.
And that's not all the information.
It's not all the information.