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all of your different websites you mentioned on the show page. So if folks want to try some of the products, they can just click on there and they'll just go right there. You take care of yourself and say hi to your wife and thank her for taking good care of you. - I will, thank you. - All right, see you soon. - Thank you. - Bye. Dr. William Wong, who's a big fan of Ray Peat's and Ray Peat heard that. - We are listener supported, One Radio Network. (upbeat music) - Well, here we go.
Here it would be the third Tuesday and that would bring us to a time when we're grateful to have a lovely and talented Dr. Ray Peat on the air on the third Tuesday. And as long as the creaks don't rise, he said, we'll do it. He's a PhD, University of Oregon, specialization in physiology. Started working with hormones back in '68. Whoa, that's when I started radio in '68 in Armed Forces Radio. He was starting his work on hormones. Wrote his dissertation in '72. He's got a great newsletter
that comes out a couple of times a month that you have a little link there on the show pages. You can get Dr. Peat's newsletter and it's great to talk to him from time to time. If you have an email for him, question [email protected] and out to the left coast, Dr. Peat, good morning. - Good morning. - How are you doing there? - Very good, it has started raining. Winter weather setting in already. - You're in Oregon, right? - Yeah. - You get a lot of rain there? - Yeah, the weather has been pretty variable,
but we're back to the old continuous rain it looks like. The ocean is warming up and when that happens we get extra rain. Humid air condenses. - I saw the, oh go ahead, go ahead. - The nighttime rain is the traditional Northwest weather, but we have been changing over the last 30 or 40 years until it looked more like a Midwest climate. Summer rain and drier winters, but I think we're back to the old rain in the winter, night and winter. - I saw with the farmers of Albinac, they use sunspots and they're predicting
a cold and woolly winter this year for a lot of the country. We'll see how accurate that is. - Yeah, I think the sun and the submarine volcanoes are really the important thing changing the weather over the long term rather than carbon dioxide. - Yeah, submarine volcanoes? - Yeah, the Pacific is really pretty full of volcanoes that actually are warming the ocean and they have cycles like sunspot cycles. - Oh, so they put a lot of heat down there and they're going on and we don't really know. They're spitting up.
- Yeah, and they're teeming with life, primitive life forms that can live at extremely high temperatures. - And so the ocean's warm and that causes all kinds of things to happen in the jet stream and weather changes more dramatically. - Yeah, it changes the ocean currents. - It's hard to imagine that carbon dioxide is like the devil. Don't we want to keep more carbon dioxide in us by not breathing so fast? - Yeah, one of the anti-climate change people, gets up on a box and lectures in London. He has a little sign that says,
"Carbon dioxide is the gas of life." - Many people believe that. Gosh, how could you make it so, I don't know, so political stuff, who knows, right? What's going on with all that? Well, Dr. Ray Peat is probably one of the few well-known people, well-credentialed people that got milk, you know, he's got that little white mustache thing and you've been drinking milk for a long time now and you do good with it. - Yeah, there were times, like when I was living in Mexico City, when it was hard to get good milk,
the rich people would send their maids out at dawn to buy up all of the good milk and so for three or four years, I went very light on milk but the rest of my life, I've been a big milk drinker, gallon a day. - You're still doing that much, a gallon a day? - No, about two and a half quarts, I think, averaging now. - Wow, we had an Ayurvedic doctor on a couple weeks ago and she's a, Ayurveda, as you know, you probably do know, they've been a great proponent of drinking milk
for a long time, thousands of years, right? - Yeah. - I wanna read you something out of her book, I think you'll find it fun. Her name is Marianne Tittlebaum, she's a DC but we found her very, very, just, I don't know, very credible. She says, "Dairy is perhaps the most misunderstood "of all food groups. "The ancient doctors said that every food you eat "spends three to five days in each tissue "before progressing to the next. "There are, as discussed earlier, seven tissues, "blood plasma, blood muscle fat bone, bone marrow, "and reproductive fluids.
"This means that the food you eat today "can sometimes won't nourish everything, "all seven tissues, for about a month or so. "The only exception to the rule is milk. "It nourishes all seven tissues in one day. "This milk is seen as one of the most nourishing foods "of all life. "This is why babies can live exclusively off milk "for the first year of their life." Do you think that's accurate with going through all the tissues like that in one day? - I think some of that is historical metaphor, but there is some basis to it,
undoubtedly because it's now known that every tissue has its rate of protein turnover, and as your nutrients change, the food you eat guides the turnover of the proteins so that you get proteins suitable for the type of food you're eating. And every tissue, like bone, is extremely slow to turn over most of its substance. Your liver is very fast, the skin and intestine are extremely fast, just a few days and they're completely remade. And the heart has a slower rate of protein turnover, but everything, the mitochondria, the energy-producing apparatuses is turning over
constantly at its own rate. And I think in general, the faster a tissue turns over, because it's kept warm and well-nourished and unstressed, high stress will make you turn over your thymus gland and muscles and skin very fast, but in a destructive way. A good, warm, well-fed condition, you do have constant turnover and renewal of your tissues. It's like a streaming, new cells are being born as the old ones are being eaten up, and so you clean out the debris at a regular pace according to the tissue. - Interesting.
And I agree with you, I think that it's been my experience. In the old Ayurvedic texts, which obviously is where this came from, they began, at some point, they often got off often very poetic, right? And very beautiful words, and they sometimes would expound a bit or maybe say, exaggerate a bit on the benefits of stuff. You know what I'm saying? Yeah, the historic, I think you nailed that. Not to say it's not true, but they were very poetic and philosophical and spiritual about the approaching of different things.
And I know one thing that I read years ago, they're big fans of ghee rather than butter, and I read one book where this fellow said, this sage, "Well, if you have 100-year-old ghee, "it'll cure anything," you know, that kind of thing. They would make these kinds of statements. So I think your point is well taken about the historical. But fascinating. Now, she's a big fan, and Ayurveda's always been a big fan of, not a big fan, but actually saying this is the best way, is to boil the milk, boil the milk for several reasons.
I think it helps with the fat absorption and also if you have raw milk, maybe gets rid of any little buggies. And they put cardamom and cinnamon in there to help do some things that I'll find it in here. What about you? Do you think, have you found any benefit in the boiling milk? Have you ever done that? - Oh, sure, living outside of Mexico City where they have cows or goats, that's the custom of everyone that puts a big pot of milk on in the morning and brings it to a boil.
And that, usually they skim off the fat that rises and make special dishes out of that or else feed it to the cats and chickens. - I wonder why you would do that. Wouldn't that fat be good? - Yeah, if a person likes it, they have dishes and puddings and things that they make out of it. They use it as a sauce on tacos and such. - Now, would there be any benefit to our listeners who can't have access to raw cows or goats' milk to boil like an organic grass-fed milk
that could get at the Whole Foods or something? - Yeah, surprisingly, the damage, nutritionally, is very small. It oxidizes some of the vitamin A and a tiny bit of the vitamin C, but milk is still basically the best source of all of the nutrients when you compare it to the number of calories and protein in it. It has all of the nutrients except iron. - How about the cardamom and cinnamon thing? Any thoughts on that? - Oh, each has its medical uses. I haven't been a big fan of them.
Mexicans put cinnamon on their chocolate drink generally. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. What about this A1 and A2 milk? That's been going around for years, and theoretically, the A2 milk, I guess, is supposed to be the most easily digestible. What is that from the, maybe the Jersey's? Or the Holstein's? No, A1 is found in the Holstein's, and then A2 is more in the Jersey's or the Guernsey's. - When I was little, we had a Holstein, and then when I was about eight or nine, we got a Jersey, which we had for 10 or 15 years.
I don't really see any difference, and I think a lot of it is just marketing to sell something for a higher price if you have the right kind of cow. - And Ayurveda says that the goat's milk is good, it's an excellent source, but it's just a little bit higher choice for cow's milk. That's interesting. Do you agree with that? Or do you know? Do you have a theory, opinion? - My own preference is for cow's milk just because I'm more familiar with that when I was in the first or second grade,
we had a Holstein and the neighbors had goats, and their goat milk was very strong smelling, and so I learned to prefer cow's milk. But if you handle the goats right, the goat milk will taste as good as cow's milk. - So you say you're drinking still a couple quarts a day. That must be, you find that's a lot of food for you, and that provides a lot of your nutrition? - Yeah, milk has always, the last 40 years, has been the bulk of my daily food. When I would drink a gallon a day,
I would maybe have a couple of quarts of orange juice and some cheese or sardines or something for a supper snack and eggs for breakfast. - And that keeps you going, that would keep you going without losing, keep your muscles going. - Oh sure, yeah. - How about you now, let's see, if I recall your revolutions around the sun, which is all called age, you are 80, 83? - Yeah, well, in October '83. - '83 in October, yeah, I'm gonna be 73 revolutions in November, we're about 10 years apart.
What has been your experience, I know you paint, do you have to do other things, have you found to keep your muscles from, what's that word they use for it, they always have a word, doc, - Atrophy. - Sarcopenia. - Sarcopenia, yeah. Do you have any thoughts on that? - Yeah, I noticed after about 10 years of just sitting around studying my shoulders, got less rounded muscles, I could see in photographs that my shoulder muscles were smaller because I wasn't working regularly, but just moving around, my leg muscles have stayed huge
after not going skiing, for example, for 10 years, someone told me that my leg muscles must be getting weak from just sitting around reading all the time, but I tested myself doing one-legged sit-ups and every 10 years I would do 10 one-legged sit-ups and didn't notice a significant dropping off with time. I haven't done it for 15 years though, I don't know whether I could still do 10. - Do you do any other kind of exercise regularly? - No, just every 10 years I would test myself. (laughing) - How often do you exercise?
Oh, every 10 years, I knew. That's great, that's great. So you like orange juice, huh? You still like orange juice? - Oh yeah, when good stuff is available, it should be thoroughly ripened. The commercial stuff, they're used to selling unripe oranges and so if they accidentally get ripe oranges they add acetic acid to it. A lot of the, for example, the concentrated or canned varieties very often have acid added but the acid etches the enamel off your teeth so ripe oranges are safer in every way. - So you would want to rinse out your mouth
with clear water after orange juice? - Yeah, clear water, maybe even baking soda if it's very acidic. - What do you think about taking baking soda regularly, some people advocate that, a quarter teaspoon or stuff. Do you think there's any value to that? - Yeah, I know people who do as much as a teaspoon two or three times a day and think it improves their endurance and strength. But even if a fourth of a teaspoon, two or three times a day, people say that it helps reduce inflammation and I know people who used to get
swollen legs when taking a long airplane trip when they took a teaspoon of baking soda in water before getting on the plane, they stopped having the swollen feet. - Well what's going on there, do you, can you surmise what you think metabolically is happening with the baking soda, sodium bicarbonate? - Yeah, the sodium lowers your aldosterone very quickly and aldosterone is a general stress hormone that tends to go up with cortisol which damages tissues but aldosterone causes a shift towards inflammation and fibrosis so the chronic elevation of aldosterone leads to heart disease and circulatory disease
and kidney disease so chronic intake of a little extra sodium such as you get with that small doses of baking soda, that has a chronic anti-stress effect keeping your aldosterone lower and that lets you lose the sodium fairly quickly and the bicarbonate part is quickly changed, there's an enzyme carbonic anhydrase that changes carbon dioxide to bicarbonate and bicarbonate back into carbon dioxide and at the surface of your cell when you're losing the sodium through your kidneys, your cells change bicarbonate into carbon dioxide which is more soluble
in the living cell so it goes out of your blood more or less at the same rate that the sodium is leaving your blood, bicarbonate into your cells, sodium out of your body so what it amounts to is the same as breathing a little extra carbon dioxide and therefore failing to hyperventilate and low thyroid people hyperventilate and blow away the carbon dioxide they should be keeping in their cells and so the supplement of baking soda is imitating to a degree the normal thyroid function, keeping your cells more charged
with carbon dioxide which is a stabilizing thing that has tremendous ramifications everywhere. When you are at a high altitude there's less oxygen and the oxygen normally is in your lungs, it exchanges with carbon dioxide and so at sea level high oxygen pressure pushes more carbon dioxide out of your blood, at a high altitude the lower oxygen tension allows you to retain more carbon dioxide and people have less dementia, heart disease and cancer at very high altitudes and live longer and that's very likely mostly the effect of retaining the proper
amount of carbon dioxide and so if you at moderate altitude if you're breathing more carbon dioxide like adding a supplement it can be with baking soda that extra carbon dioxide is to some degree imitating a high altitude or a better thyroid functioning. - Fascinating, so the low thyroid folks, do they tend to breathe more, have more breaths per minute and then have less carbon dioxide which we know is good, is that right? - Well relative to how much oxygen they need because the oxygen requirement is very low
in a low thyroid person so they don't need to move very much air. Like a quart of oxygen will last a low thyroid person maybe minutes where a high thyroid person would be gone in seconds. I've seen it in labs where we were practicing doing the basal metabolic rate test by rate of consuming oxygen and for example the typical old fashioned machine contains two liters of oxygen and I didn't know that I was hyperthyroid. I didn't have any signs of hyperthyroidism but in the standard test I emptied the machine
in half the allotted time so it was the tracing on the graph paper was almost a vertical line where it was supposed to be about a 45 degree angle to the right and according to the standards I was about four times the normal oxygen consuming rate of which a doctor would say oh that's dangerous hyperthyroidism but I was fine, no health problems at all. - Very interesting. Do you put much stock in taking the temperature to gauge thyroid function? - Yeah, when you're producing energy at a high rate say 150% of the average, you're maintaining
your blood sugar level because you're using the sugar efficiently, not wasting any. The hypothyroid person wastes sugar at a terrible rate because they aren't using oxygen properly. So if you're using sugar efficiently that means you don't experience hypoglycemia and so you don't produce very much adrenaline to regulate your blood sugar and so your adrenaline level is low, your stress level is low and everything metabolically is running efficiently. You're turning over your proteins but in a renewal way rather than a stress produced way. - Here's an email from Beth about thyroid
so I thought I'd throw it right in there. Dr. Rapi, do you think fluoride and chloride in a tap water and bromide in breads are having a major effect on our thyroids? - Yeah, I didn't know they were still putting bromide in bread. - I don't think they are generally but maybe this lady knows. - Yeah, it isn't good if it's there. It should be avoided and fluoride I think, I was for a while using a supplement of T3, thyroid reactive thyroid hormone and when I would go to San Francisco
or an area where they have fluoridated water, I would get a migraine headache. And I looked up the amount of fluoride ions in water and the amount of T3, the number of potential sites for the fluoride to stick to. And a glass of fluoridated water is enough to knock out a day's portion of the active thyroid hormone. And since I was using that active thyroid hormone, it was very quick and very noticeable that if I drank fluoridated water, for example, in my coffee or orange juice, I would get a migraine from extreme hypothyroidism.
- Cynthia writes in, I take 60 milligrams, one grain of natural thyroid every day. It seems my TSH levels are normal, one or two. My doctor likes that. Does Dr. Peat think that if I just keep doing this, that my thyroid will never be able to make this what it needs to on its own? - I've seen several people who were hypothyroid who when they took the amount that brought their oxygen consumption up to the right level had recovery of their own thyroid function and could stop taking it. It doesn't happen very often,
but I've seen several people who cured their low thyroid by supplementing thyroid. - So explain what you mean, taking the oxygen level. How do we know? How would you know? - Well, if you're sick with low thyroid, you have a variety of symptoms. And these individuals responded to supplementing their thyroid the way any hypothyroid person does. But in a few cases, they were able to maintain their metabolic rate and stop taking the thyroid because the thyroid had restored, the supplement had restored their anti-stress metabolism, lowered the adrenaline and cortisol,
and allowed the tissue to start metabolizing by itself. And producing its own thyroid. But usually a person's body is loaded up with anti-thyroid substances, polyunsaturated fats built right into the structure of the cell. Not only in the fat tissue, but in their muscles and brain and so on. Especially after the age of 20, the tissues start building polyunsaturated fats right into the structure. And when you're under stress, you release some of those polyunsaturated fats into your bloodstream, where they interfere with thyroid function. So the average person in their 20s or 30s or older
needs to, if they're hypothyroid, they benefit from taking a supplement for at least a few years until they can change the composition of their body. - Are they better off to take the lowest possible amount when they're doing that? I mean, just to make it work, to help it make it work on its own? - Yeah. If you happen to take too much, you will get breathless, consume too much oxygen. I've done it many times. And just standing up to answer the telephone, I would start panting and had to cut back on my thyroid.
But I've seen people, well, on myself, for example, when I was judging just by how I felt, I would supplement the thyroid. And one morning I noticed I had dents in my throat beside my Adam's apple where the thyroid gland had been, had been about the size of my finger, pressed into my throat. And I realized I'd shrunk my thyroid gland. So I stopped taking the quick-acting T3. The next morning, my neck was smooth. And I've seen several people who were taking too much thyroid and have shrunk their gland.
And in just one or two days, it comes back massively. - If one is taking some thyroid meds, as we call them, what's the role of taking supplemental iodine if you're not taking a thyroid or if you are? - Foods such as milk and eggs always contain thyroid even though seafood is the known reliable source of trace minerals, selenium and iodine particularly. But since thyroid is a fertility hormone, animals can't produce eggs and milk if they're very hypothyroid. So you're assured that milk and eggs will always contain some iodine and some equivalent thyroid-supporting substance.
So there was a study back when iodine was sometimes used as a dough conditioner instead of bromine. And at that time, the average American diet contained several times the ideal amount of iodine. And it has been about 60 or 70 years since there were hypothyroid, low iodine areas in the United States, like the Great Lakes region was a famous greater belt. But since food technology has started using so much iodine, there hasn't been any iodine deficiency zone in the US. And what happens if you take even twice,
two or three or four times the amount needed by the body? You start interfering with the function of the gland. And often people supplement more than a milligram up to as much as 10 milligrams a day, and that seriously damages the thyroid. Every couple of months, I hear from someone who has damaged their thyroid by taking several milligrams a day of iodine. - Is that a lot of milligrams? - Yeah, the required amount is about a tenth to a fifth of a milligram per day. And taking a half a milligram per day,
chronically looking at a big population, that's enough to increase the incidence of thyroiditis and eventually thyroid cancer. - So it sounds like what I'm hearing you saying is with some good foods, milk or eggs, and then we're gonna get plow or fish, we're gonna get enough? - Yeah, yeah. And it's seriously dangerous in the long run to supplement too much iodine. - Yeah, yeah. I do really well, and others have too. They've mentioned with this, you know, the salmon, you can get, you know, the little thin slices. What do you call that?
I guess smoked salmon and things like. You think that's a generally good food? - Yeah, it's nutritious, but you can overload on polyunsaturated fat if you eat salmon all the time. - Oh, there's poofas in salmon? - Oh yeah, a lot of poofa. - Really, what are they doing there? I thought that's a fish. - Yeah, the cold water fish eat algae, and the algae is the source of-- - Of the poofas. - Poofa. - Yeah, yeah. So you tend to, you like to gravitate more towards the warm water fish.
- Yeah, as far as it's available, but a small amount. There are some low-fat fish that come from pretty cold waters. Cod and sole are the lowest-fat fish that I know of, and I think they're safer than salmon if you're gonna eat fish every week. - Oh, really? Okay, can you stay right there? We're gonna take a little break here. Patrick Timpone on Radionetwork.com. - One of the most powerful antioxidants ever is actually Brown's gas. Well, hydrogen, and the machine that we have, the AquaCare machine, makes Brown's gas, which is, it's kind of different
than actual molecular hydrogen, Brown's gas, and that's what George's machine makes, the one that we promote. It's very quiet, and you can bubble in the water and then breathe it, and they have a whole little setup there which is digital, and depending on your body weight, you know exactly how much to put in there. You just dial that in, and when you do just the water, you can just dial in 100% of the Brown's gas going into the water, drink the water, and then if you're gonna drink it
and make water at the same time, it's fine because you'll still make plenty of hydrogen in the water. It's just a fascinating, most abundant just gas or thing in the universe, hydrogen. It's just like, I think, 96% of everything that's out there, and so we have a great little machine that we promote, and if you use promo code 1RADIO, you get a 10%, and look upon it as an investment in your health. They're a couple thousand bucks, but this thing has got a lifetime warranty, lifetime warranty, and also a one-year,
no questions asked money back if you don't like it. Now that's pretty cool. Lots of safety features that most of the hydrogen Brown's gas machines do not have, and that's important 'cause hydrogen, molecular hydrogen, and making Brown's gas, it's a very energetic substance. Let me put it like that. I mean, you can do hydrogen cars and hydrogen whatever. It's volatile, so you gotta be careful with it, but your body likes it. It's one of the biggest antioxidants and anti-inflammatory. Good things are going in my body with lower inflammation. I can feel it.
I can just feel it. I don't know why. I just feel more comfortable in my body after breathing this gas. Just, it's a nice thing, and here's more on it from George who makes the machine. This was previously with George Wiseman about his AquaCure machine making hydrogen, gas, and water out of the same hose. Listen. Your body accepts that gas and uses it to heal everything. It's like the fountain of youth. It's astonishing the amount of ailments. In fact, in scientific studies, and they have over 1,000 scientific studies now,
they are showing that it either helps the body heal directly or indirectly from virtually every ailment that ails any water-based life form, but it works just as well on animals and plants and lizards and birds and everybody. - And you're saying this because this machine called the AquaCure split into five different parts. - Six. - I got hydrogen, oxygen, electro, enhanced water, water vapors, monatomic hydrogen, what else? - And monatomic oxygen. - Oh, the monooxygen. And that's what your machine does? It splits it? - Yes, it makes that mixture inside the machine,
and all that comes out a single hose, the same hose. - Gas? - As a gas, in gaseous form, yes. - And you breathe it or you put it in water? - So if you bubble the browns gas into this water, into, let's say, distilled water, it will go to a negative ORP, and when you drink that, it actually gives your body an electrical energy, these electrons. Instead of sucking energy from you, it gives it. So you can have water that is healthful and not healthful just by the energy that's in the water.
- You wanna get one? Me too. Ours is on the way. Check this out. Lifetime warranty on the machine itself, and then a one-year, no questions asked, money-back guarantee if you like the machine, within a year. I mean, have you ever heard of a warranty like that? The AquaCure. Use promo code 1RADIO, promo code 1RADIO, for a 10% discount. It's in our store on oneradionetwork.com. And keep in mind the idea of dehydration, surely the lack of hydrogen. Dehydration really helps your body to become hydrated. Really nice machines. Wayne Blakely is with us,
and he makes the Living Streams products. There's two different bifidos. Let's talk about the straight product that is bifido, and then there's bifido 2. What is the bifido used for? - The bifido is used as a probiotic nutrient which has curcumin in it and turmeric in it, which has certain minerals and nutrients in it that helps the body, especially absorption of your food. Curcumin is the most researched supplement in the world. The researchers don't really understand how curcumin works in the body. And curcumin is very hard to digest in the digestive tract.
So we pre-digest the curcumin, which has, we buy our curcumin from India because it has a mineral in it called yttrium. And we use the bacteria to break down the yttrium, the correct bacteria to break down the yttrium so our body can assimilate it, so we can absorb our food correctly and it stops plaque in the body. - Pretty cool stuff, isn't it? Weighs on it. And the lack of bacteria in the soil in this country is the whole issue, why yttrium is in short supply. Very unique products, Living Streams. He's talking about the bifido,
and it's in our store on oneradionetwork.com. The Ayurveda lady that was on the show, we're gonna have her back on, Dr. Tittlebaum. She was really, really big on moringa too, as an incredible tree nutrient, herb, whatever you wanna call it. And if you wanna get a real natural whey, full-fledged whey, whey has a moringa product that's in a probiotic. Very easy to absorb, and you get a big bottle of it, and you can just, you can drink a lot of it. And moringa's pretty amazing, what's going on with moringa.
So, fun things are all in our store. Excuse me, all in our store on One Radio Network. Had a cough there. If you would like to get more information, you can talk to Wayne's protege or helper, Marilyn, 360-912-2981. 360-912-2981. She can give you more insights on this or that, or what is good for, we have some things for perimenopause. Wayne's very careful, he doesn't say a lot of stuff, because, oh, you know the FDNA, they get all carried away, can't make any claims, and I understand. But Marilyn can give you some information.
She doesn't do medical advice, neither do I, or nobody on our guest list ever do medical advice. It's all up to you. But anyway, these probiotics work like probiotics are supposed to. LivingStreams, OneRadioNetwork.com. - We talk about your health, wealth, and well-being on OneRadioNetwork.com. - Well, it's an honor to have Dr. Ray Peat on our show, and he's consented to come on on the third Tuesday, and we're here. So, Dr. Peat, thanks so much for coming on from time to time. People like you. People like you. You're a rock star around here.
They just like you. What do you know about vasovagal, S-Y-N-C-O-P-E? An emailer is talking about the vagus nerve gets activated due to stressors, the heart rate slows, blood pressure drops, blood vessels in the legs can dilate, the blood pools in the lower part, flowing to the brain, and maybe nausea, and things like that. And this lady, Mona, wants to know that what besides the stressor is causing the vagus nerve to react so? There has to be more to it than simply being a response to being hot, emotional, scared, when in a normal life setting.
- Yeah, low thyroid people tend in that direction. And I wrote some newsletters a few years ago on shock, and the history of shock goes back a few hundred years, but it really became a major aspect of physiology just a little over a hundred years ago, the beginning of the 20th century, when one of the pioneers was George Washington Krile, who's a son at the Cleveland Clinic, which was founded by G.W. Krile I. The son was a pioneer in both thyroid therapy and breast cancer treatment. He innovated the lumpectomy rather than the horrible radical mastectomy,
and he practically eliminated thyroid surgery, went from over a thousand surgeries a year in the clinic to just about a dozen, by understanding how the thyroid can be treated. But his father was the real pioneer that led to that understanding of the thyroid. And his thyroid work grew out of his surgical experiments in which he really explained more than anyone else what shock is and how the vagus nerve governs shock. And what happens in shock is that signals are sent to all of your body cells, turning off the ability to use oxygen.
And the use of oxygen is what thyroid is in control of. The more thyroid you have, the more oxygen your cells can use. Within a broad range, that means that your metabolism becomes more and more efficient as you use more oxygen. So the low thyroid person is wasting their energy. But in shock, it's even worse than hypothyroidism. It simply turns off the mechanism for burning, for using oxygen and burning any fuel. And so it imitates death, basically. But when a person in shock is cut, their blood stays bright red.
They aren't using the oxygen in their blood because the tissue is simply switched off metabolically. It's like turning off a thyroid in a nervous or electrical way rather than a chemical way. And the George Washington trial showed that stimulating the vagus nerve was the basic signal for turning on shock, whether it was caused by loss of blood or pain or fright or whatever. The signals through the vagus system were able to switch off, basically, the life process temporarily. And that process is easier to trigger the lower your thyroid function is.
You become more of a vagal organism when your thyroid is lower. But people generally, if they're going to keep functioning at all, they compensate for that exaggerated activity of the vagal nervous system by pumping out extra adrenaline. Their adrenal glands become overactive and they run as much as 40 or 50 times the normal amount of adrenaline production, compensating for that abnormal activity of the vagal opposing system. The parasympathetic system is the vagal system and the adrenaline system is the sympathetic nervous system. And so, surprisingly, many people are running with both sides
of their autonomic nervous system running at an extremely high rate. And if something interferes with their production of adrenaline and sympathetic activity, then they drop into the vagal state and move toward shock, fainting, for example. - My goodness. Well, a lot of questions there. So, Kyle, is that K-Y-L-E? And this work seems, it kind of feels like this is long ago. - I didn't understand the question. - Kyle, this work with GW Kyle, was this long ago? - Kyle, C-R-I-L-E. - Oh, C-R-I-L-E. Oh, Carl, okay. - Carl. - Carl, yeah. Long time ago?
- Yeah, the senior trial died, I think, in the 1940s and the junior died not long ago in the '90s, I think. - And what did he do to lower all these surgeries that he went from thousands to a handful? What did he do? - Oh, supplementing thyroid, basically. - Oh, he just gave supplemental thyroid. - Yeah, things they were calling thyroid cancer. It was just a minor condition that he could turn off just by giving them a full replacement dose of thyroid. - Really? Was he using TSH and all that as a metric?
- No, not at all. TSH measurement came in later, really, and he was measuring it enough to realize that people developing these symptoms of thyroid cancer, nodules and so on, were experiencing the same condition that iodine supplementers experience with a very high TSH. And so he understood that TSH was driving towards thyroiditis and eventually thyroid cancer. And so he would give usually three or four grains of armor thyroid sufficient to lower the TSH to zero. And then these people, without thyroidectomy, or maybe just partial removal of the cancerous part, would live a normal life.
- My goodness. - Just keeping their TSH down so that any surviving cancer cells wouldn't be stimulated by the TSH. - My goodness. Three or four grains. Now a grain is 16 milligrams. I mean, that's a lot, isn't it? - Well, two grains was the average dose for just the run of the mill. - Was it? - Low thyroid, middle-aged person. But sometimes just to have good functioning, some people took three or four or even five grains. The armor company sold tablets of five grains. - Really?
- And veterinarians found that that was the right dose for cocker spaniels. And a couple of breeds of dogs needed about five grains a day. And quite a few people, they sold bottles of, I think it was 500 five-grain tablets. - Wow. - And $10 or so. And I've seen a few people who needed more than five grains, 10 or 15 grains a day to cure their problem, and then they would settle in on four or five grains a day for maintenance. - My goodness, it seems like a very high dose,
what we hear around, but I guess. So how did this Carlisle, how did he judge the dosage if he wasn't using the labs? - Oh, the basal metabolic rate was still in use through the 1940s and into the '50s. Then the chemical, the first test was a blood test called protein-bound iodine. Came in just around the same time that Synthroid came on the market. - Oh, sure, yeah. - And it turned out 20 years later that it was an absolute meaningless thing. But at the time, I was in junior high at the time,
and several of my fat friends said they had learned that they didn't have a glandular problem because the protein-bound iodine showed that they had a fully normal amount of protein-bound iodine in their blood. And so they had discovered that they were just gluttonous. - So they brought this med thing out right when the Synthroid came out. I mean, the test. - Yeah, yeah. - Yeah. - It really was part of a marketing system. - Those rascals. - And what they did was blame the problem on the patient rather than supplementing with Armor Thyroid,
which was a good, reliable product. - My goodness. So back to Mona, who brought up this whole vagus. So she might have, on both ends, working overtime with the sympathetic, with the vagus and then the adrenaline, right? How would then, how do you lower all that down? Is it just looking after Mr. Thyroid? - Using your temperature and pulse rate, you can come fairly close to the old oxygen consumption test, which that's still the ideal way to prove hypothyroidism. But you can make a very good guess
by taking your temperature before you get out of bed in the morning and checking your pulse rate at the same time. If you're, lots of the low thyroid people are running on high adrenaline, which rises during the night, and that tends to push up the cortisol. The adrenaline sometimes will cause 90 or 100 beats per minute heart rate when you're waking up, sometimes following a nightmare. And if the cortisol goes up higher than average, it always tends to rise around dawn. But the higher your cortisol rises, the higher your waking temperature will be.
The adrenaline speeds your pulse at dawn, the cortisol raises the temperature and helps push the heart rate back down by bringing your blood sugar up. So just that one measurement can be ambiguous, high adrenaline, high cortisol, or low, both of them. But if you then take your temperature and pulse rate an hour or two after eating, the food will lower your adrenaline and the daylight and food will lower your cortisol. And very often these people who woke up seeming to have a very normal 75 beats per minute pulse rate and a 98 degree temperature,
these people will sometimes drop to a 55 or 60 pulse rate and at 96 or 97 degree temperature at 11 o'clock in the morning. - And what does that tell you if that happens? - That they're super low thyroid. - Ah, okay. So the Broda-Barnes thing wasn't kinda sorta right. I mean, if you had a 98, according to Broda-Barnes, and you were good, but this whole adrenaline and cortisol thing, you're saying that maybe not. - Yeah. In hot, humid summers in Eugene, I first started questioning Barnes's temperature measurement. He worked at Fort Collins, Colorado,
where it never gets very hot and humid for very long. And I saw that people in this hot and humid weather, even very hypothyroid people, kept a normal temperature. But usually with a normal temperature, they would get a slow pulse rate. So I started adding the two together, but then I saw that a very stressful nighttime would make both of the indicators sometimes look normal at dawn or waking. And then they would go down on a cool mid-morning or afternoon. - That's fascinating. That's a very, very, very interesting.