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This free program is paid for by the listeners of Redwood Community Radio. If you're not already a member, please think of joining us. Thank you. Here. [Music] [Music] Well, here we are, July 2013. Welcome to this month's Ask Your Herb Doctor. I guess I should preface the introduction to this show by saying that I'm just not used to doing this solo at this point in time. Sarah has joined us for the last, oh, I don't know, four or five, six years now. So she's busy looking after our little beautiful baby girl.
And so I'm just going to read the introduction just as if she were here, but it just doesn't sound right to do it as an individual. So my name's Andrew Murray. For those of you who perhaps have never listened to our shows, which run every third Friday of the month from 7 to 8 p.m., we're both licensed medical herbalists who trained in England, graduating there with a degree in herbal medicine. And we run a clinic in Garboville where we consult with clients about a wide range of conditions and recommend herbal medicine and dietary advice.
So you're listening to Ask Your Herb Doctor on KMUG Garboville, 91.1 FM. And from 7.30 until the end of the show at 8 o'clock, you're invited to call in with questions either related or unrelated to this month's continuing subject of the heart hormones. And hopefully we'll get into Dr. Peat's recent work on cataracts, aging, degeneration, swelling, et cetera. So that's something to look forward to for sure. So the number here, if you live in the area, is 923-3911. Or if you live outside the area, the toll-free number is 1-800-KMUD-RAD. That's 1-800-568-3723.
We can also be reached toll-free on 1-888-WBM-HERB for consultations or further information after the show Monday through Friday, 9 to 5. Okay, so Dr. Peat, are you with us? Yeah, but there's a terrific hum on the line. I can hardly hear you. Ah. When she switched it over, it started buzzing. Oh dear, I can kind of hear it myself through my headphones. It doesn't sound that loud to me, but it's still very loud to you? Yeah, it's louder than you are. Yeah. Sue, is there anything that you know you can do?
I'll call him back in a different line. Okay. All right. So, I think basically Dr. Peat is going to be called back on a different line. I think there's another VIP line that he can be called on just to make sure that we can get a decent call from him. Okay, so I wanted to carry on the last month, or in fact the last couple of months, because the subject is so broad that it's very difficult to try and sum it up that quickly.
And there's always spin-off questions that get asked, you know, after the show's finished. So, during the weeks following, we get callers from people interested about the previous month's subject, and they ask questions themselves surrounding the subject. So, it seems to have been consistently evolving into a fairly large subject. So, the subject of edema and wetness in general as a term, as opposed to dryness, wetness of the tissue. And I know Dr. Peat's always mentioned that tumors, when they arise, are generally solid, but actually they have a higher than average water content.
And so that was part of later on this show's discussion into eye changes, mentioning things like age-related macular degeneration in particular in glaucoma. Also having very high water concentrations, and that being an interesting component, along with estrogens, devastating effects. I can't say enough about estrogen and how bad it is for women. We've done many shows regarding estrogen in the past. And again, it'll bring up the kind of sinister side of estrogen, if you like. And we've mentioned before many times that the only real function for estrogen is for implantation of a fertilized ovum.
Outside of that, it wreaks quite a lot of havoc in the female body. It also does nothing very good in the male body. But especially with females, the advancing age in estrogen is a very negative and inflammatory molecule. So we'll bring out tonight's subject of estrogen in that context, linking it to HRT and that kind of stuff. Okay, so I don't know how Dr. Peat is, or whether he can hear us any better than the previous line. Both the hum and your voice got weaker. But you still have a hum on the line? Yeah.
Yeah. Are you going to be able to manage it? Because I'm not too sure the engineer can hear you. Yeah, if you talk like this. Yeah. Okay, good. So you can hear me okay? Yeah. Okay, good. All right. Well, thanks for bearing with us. As usual, people haven't heard of you before, surprisingly enough. I know you're pretty well known across the web in terms of your articles and the work that you've been doing for 30 or more years in the field of health and hormones and your PhD research.
So for the benefit of those people perhaps who have never heard your name before, would you just outline your academic background? Several years after I got my master's degree in the humanities area, I went back to graduate school in 1968, studied biology and biochemistry for a PhD in 1972. Okay. That's pretty much the relevant stuff. All right. Fine. Let's leave it at that. Okay. So just carrying on from the last two shows, been talking quite a lot about interwoven subjects from the heart's mechanism, its pumping action, how it's inhibited.
We've woven in things mentioning the estrogen in many different ways about how damaging it is and how it affects physiology in a very negative way. I wanted just to cover the -- and I know we have done this before in the past, maybe a year or more ago, but the very real and present danger of the environmental estrogens that we're exposed to from plastics and things like BPA. What do you know more especially about these things in terms of their negative impact? I couldn't really hear that.
Okay. I'll ask again. We'll see if we can make this work or not. The damaging effects of environmental estrogens that are found in such compounds as BPA and other plastics that have a hormone mimicking effects. Yeah. When the organism is exposed at a very early stage such as during gestation or infancy, the signals for development are changed so that the -- especially the reproductive system is changed. But besides changing the individual by giving it false signals, the DNA is altered slightly by attaching methyl groups to it as part of that misguided development.
And that means that the ability to express enzymes for the rest of its life will be influenced unless it can somehow remove those methyl groups. But typically they will last for three or four generations even without further change. So the changes that happen to one individual can be passed on for generations altering the fertility, for example, until it can tend to cause the species to just disappear. Okay. So what's your opinion about the amount of pollution that we are as an organism exposed to directly from estrogenic-like substances in the environment?
What we know about certain areas, the Columbia River and the ocean off the mouth of the Columbia, for example, they're seeing lots of fish, simpler water organisms, even mammals that are sexually malformed and developing tumors. And in Florida there have been a lot of stories about the swamp animals that are becoming sterile. Changing genders and so on. So the news reported about human health I think isn't being up to date or honestly reported because what we see in the wild animals I think undoubtedly is affecting humans to a great degree too.
I think this could be so widespread and so endemic that it's almost impossible for anyone to put a lid on it and that's why it's not being exposed as much as it should be? Yeah, because of the influence of the estrogen industry there's a terrific reluctance to admit that estrogen has these toxic effects even though it's been known for a hundred years. It's only in the last 10 or 15 years that people have really been researching in an organized way influences such as these environmental plastic chemicals and so on.
And the influence of the estrogen industry is simply going to blame any effects they see on such things as diet, smoking too much, bad way of living and so on. Yeah, rather than the root cause. Well I hope so. I mean last month was a testimony especially for me having a reasonably close working relationship with you over the last few years doing this show that you've been consistently mentioning how bad polyunsaturates are and finally it showed up in the medical literature that indeed what you've been saying is very true.
And so I know you've also said that whilst a lie spreads around the world in a moment truth is still getting a boots on. So hopefully in the not too distant future there'll be printing the same kind of things as you're saying about the estrogens in the environment and what we need to do to protect ourselves from it. Another subject around estrogens, the association of heart failure and cardiac death. What have you found from estrogens effects on those subjects?
Despite all of the 40 years at least of propaganda trying to sell estrogen to men to prevent heart attacks for example, they found that they died faster when they took estrogen. But they keep coming back trying to sell estrogen as a heart protective hormone. And the Women's Health Initiative somewhat set that back by showing that the use of estrogen replacement therapy for menopause increased the number of heart attacks as well as cancer and dementia. But despite that they're still hoping to bring back their sales to the 2002 level where they dropped off so sharply.
Just in the last day or two an article appeared from Yale Medical School doing what they call a meta analysis, meaning picking out some articles from junky medical magazines and analyzing them for the type of results basically they want. Until the Women's Health Initiative, the medical journals for 20 or 30 years were just swamped with the heart protective benefits and the brain anti-Alzheimer's effect and even the anti-cancer effects of estrogen. And despite the Women's Health Initiative, these people are now looking back at their journals and drawing out of them the kind of information they want.
And this study so-called published by the Yale people claims that tens of thousands of women are dying unnecessarily by refusing to take their estrogen treatment for menopause. Oh my goodness. When exactly the opposite is true, they probably have a greater chance of living without it, huh? Yeah, and hearing it come from Yale, it reminds me of about 40 years ago there was a daytime television program in which Barbara Seaman debated Yale professor of medicine.
I suspect it's the same one that sponsored this recent study and she made him look like a complete ignoramus because she knew the facts and he was just quoting the medical doctrine. I suspect that Yale is now having its revenge because Barbara Seaman is dead. Okay, let me just remind people who they're listening to here. So you're listening to Ask Your Herb Doctor on KMUD Garboville 91.1 FM and from 7.30 until the end of the show at 8 o'clock you're invited to call in with any questions either related or unrelated to this month's subject.
Our guest speaker is Dr. Raymond Peat and the number is 923-3911 or if you live outside the area, 1-800-KMUD-RAD and the lines will be open from 7.30 to 8 o'clock. Okay, so Dr. Peat again, we'll just carry on a little bit more with the subject of estrogen because I know that you mentioned that varicose veins were a fairly important outward sign or a visible sign of the lowered ratio of progesterone being the good hormone, the healthy anti-inflammatory hormone. So it's a sign of lowered progesterone to estrogen. What have you to say about that?
Although estrogen is a cell excitant, the process of stimulating one kind of cell activity tends to make it retain water. The individual cell stays excited too long and in the process of being excited, the cell emits water and it has to relax a certain length of time to expel the water.
So under the influence of too much unopposed estrogen, cells tend to get more and more waterlogged and even though they're excited, they progressively lose the ability to contract fully because in contracting, the protein mechanism has to be interacting with itself rather than pushing against the host. So it's like pushing against a swollen amount of water. And that means that in a muscle such as the wall of a vein under the influence of high estrogen and low progesterone, testosterone and so on, the wall of the vein becomes waterlogged and can't contract periodically to maintain its tone.
And the same thing happens in nerves, heart muscle, everywhere in the body that estrogen is able to have its influence. And in these estrogen-dominated cells, the ability to contract becomes progressively weaker. Dr. Szent-Györgyi demonstrated the effect of estrogen and progesterone on heart muscle over 50 years ago and showed that under the influence of progesterone, if you stimulate the heart at an increasing frequency, each stroke becomes stronger. So it's an efficient way to respond to frequent stimulation.
It relaxes in between, gathers its equipment together and then has a bigger contraction under the influence of progesterone. But if it's influenced or dominated by estrogen, it's unable to accumulate that information that the stimulation is increasing in frequency. So the estrogenized heart will respond to the fast stimulation by just more of the same weak little contractions. That's basically how a failing heart behaves.
That's a typical picture of a gradually aging, failing heart. The excitatory stage is too long. It's not allowed to relax or repolarize and remove the water. It just gradually gets weaker and more feeble. You have faded into the buzz again. I'll try and stay as close to this microphone as I can without sucking it.
You mentioned in your response to that last question that progesterone and testosterone, these are two compounds that will oppose the action of estrogen and presumably then they would be useful for people that had not just women perhaps, but people that had estrogen dominant type pathologies or conditions. It's now being recognized that testosterone has an anti-cancer value as well just recently. Another study came out showing that a testosterone deficiency is a strong predisposer to prostate cancer. Let's talk about testosterone a little bit then as that's a fairly pertinent topic.
I know that when we've talked in the past about the best way to go about exercising, you've always mentioned non-stressful exercise. You don't advocate the aerobic type gymnasium workout where you get your heart rate up to 160 and you're breathing rapidly. That's not what you want. You want weight-bearing exercise that doesn't make you breathless. I know you've said in the past that that kind of exercise increases your ability to produce muscle and it's the muscle that's so important in basically helping you to maintain a good stable weight.
But that muscle also through the action of thyroid enables your body to metabolize things more efficiently because it's way more of a useful substance in your body than the fat of an unhealthy or unexercised person. The muscle also metabolizes the steroid hormones and with exercise it can actually secrete testosterone. But in a resting, idle or stressed muscle without adequate stimulation from good food and thyroid, muscles produce a lot of estrogen. In one study, they were using the blood draining from a monkey's arm as a control comparison for the blood coming out of the ovary.
They found that the monkey's arm was producing as much estrogen as its ovary and that probably isn't a good representative of the average person because the monkey was anesthetized and so on under the influence of stress and chemicals. But basically any stressed tissue is going to tend to produce estrogen. But a well exercised strong muscle begins producing testosterone and stops producing estrogen. So muscles in their own right can secrete testosterone? Yes. I was always under the impression that in the male, the main site of testosterone production would be the testes.
But is there anywhere else in the body that testosterone can be secreted from? I think the skin is known to produce testosterone among other steroid hormones. It might be the body's biggest endocrine synthetic factory. We often forget about the skin being the largest organ of the body but it's true enough. I have another question for you and again it's kind of related to cholesterol. I know that you've mentioned a previous study that positively associated an improved outcome from heart failure in relation to an increased cholesterol level. Dr. Peat, did you hear that Dr. Peat?
Not exactly. Let me say that again. An increased cholesterol is associated positively with an improved outcome from heart failure. Yes. That pretty much can be generalized to other muscles. Everyone is hearing the bad news about the anti-cholesterol drugs that cause muscle breakdown. Sometimes the muscle breaks down so completely that the proteins leaking from the broken down muscle poison the kidneys and can even kill the person. But that's because cholesterol is a stabilizing factor for the skeletal muscles and if you stop cholesterol synthesis,
the muscles are very susceptible to damage and those same processes are known to occur simultaneously in the heart muscle. The leakage of those proteins that can damage the kidneys, they always assume it is coming from the skeletal muscles but the heart under those chemicals is known to leak the same proteins. Okay. Interesting. Okay. I think I've got one or two more questions and then we'll get into the current interest that you have in looking at the similarities or the links between cancers and tissue states, the wetness especially with eye disease.
So that'll be a new and interesting look at the approach to treatment for age-related macular degeneration for instance. I just had another couple of questions related to cancer. I know you've had in your previous newsletter you've mentioned the link between hypoxia which is a kind of oxygen deficit and cancer. Yeah. The thing that's in the research a lot lately is the hypoxia inducible factor which is a protein that shows up.
At first they were seeing it wherever they cut off the oxygen supply but that same protein can really be induced by cutting off the glucose supply too. So it really should be called the energy deprivation protein. They call it by its name, its initials HIF hypoxia inducible factor. It's not so much related to oxygen deprivation as sugar deprivation. Yeah. Energy deprivation. Okay. And that has been studied primarily in relation to cancer and finding ways to block that protein production
and it turns out that just getting enough glucose and oxygen delivered to the tissue is a very simple way to inhibit that protein. So tell me this. In all of the bad processes, steam oxygenase with carbon monoxide production, nitric oxide synthase, lactic acid production, prostaglandin production causing inflammation, activating aromatase and so on, then lactic acid in turn activates the HIF hypoxia factor. So once it gets started, the inflammation tends to promote more inflammation and hypoxia. Now forgive me for being thoughtless perhaps but hypoxia as a state of low oxygen
and being a negative thing which is what we always normally would associate a low oxygen status with being dangerous and life-threatening, I know you've always promoted a CO2, a carbon dioxide rich environment as being a beneficial cellular matrix as it were to have a higher carbon dioxide content. So what would necessarily, I mean I know you've mentioned that the hypoxia inducible factor you've just talked about is probably more accurately termed a glucose lack. But is there anything negative about hypoxia?
If you think of the hypoxia as turning on lactic acid which then turns on all of these other inflammatory signals, then you see that carbon dioxide turns off the production of lactic acid. Simply the ability to turn off lactic acid production is one of the basic protective features of carbon dioxide. Okay, good. It's the association then between lactic acid and carbon dioxide that's the important thing. Okay, all right, you're listening to Ask Your Ab Doctor on KMUD Galbraithville 91.1 FM and from now until 8 o'clock you're invited to call in with any questions
either related or unrelated to this month's subject of the heart, hormones and cancer and the eyes. Okay, the number if you live in the area is 923 3911 or if you're outside the area the 1800 number is 1800 KMUD Rad and our special guest speaker is Dr. Raymond Peat. Okay, so I think we'll probably get into the next subject of which I think you're probably going to be writing a newsletter at some point here maybe but as yet you haven't.
So I know when we've spoken you've mentioned that your research is showing that wetness as opposed to dryness, the wetness in the eye associated with cataracts is the same kind of wetness that's found in tumors. It's found in the heart during heart failure and also in the brain during brain disease. Yeah, despite the fact that the failing heart becomes hardened even calcified and tumors are stiffer than healthy tissue and even with age in a very serious dementia the brain can become sort of rubbery with so many connective tissue cells.
So despite the fact that the tissue is becoming firmer these thick degenerative states actually contain more water so that if you dry a piece of the organ it loses much more weight than a healthy organ would. In relation to the given amount of nucleic acid and proteins and so on these degenerative tissues have a very high percentage of water but besides the actual percentage of water,
the water changes state and becomes relatively more like free bulk water. It can be frozen where the healthy cell is functioning somewhat as an antifreeze binding the water so that it isn't as free to move out of the cell or to be frozen or otherwise subject to influence. Do you think we do actually have a couple of corners on the line but do you just quickly to rephrase what you said are you saying that the water found in these tissues during these type of pathologies is not electrically the same as regular water?
Well if you freeze say you have a lens that has cataracts in it and has a much higher percentage of water per protein molecule and if you freeze that it will crystallize easier than a healthy lens and this can be studied in an MRI machine because you can very clearly see the difference between the water that's bound firmly to the cell in the way it should be or the water that's just sitting there as excess useless water plugging up the cell function.
Interesting. Alright well let's not keep these corners we've got I think we've got three corners on the line now so let's take the first corner. You're on the air? Hello you're on the air. Okay a corner was on the air so it's not there anymore. Okay for some reason. Okay so. We had another person that didn't want to wait but she wanted to know if black cohosh was effective for menopause.
Okay so bit of a convoluted question because black cohosh is typically used in the literature for menopause decreasing night sweats but I think there is also a lot of research coming out of Europe which actually prevents the use of black cohosh as a kind of more of a kind of estrogen stimulant.
So I've always kind of viewed black cohosh with a little bit of caution. It's not something that I would say straight away would be useful but there are other ways to lower your estrogen state because the whole point of the black cohosh was that it was more of an estrogen replacement. I've heard some ideas that it was an anti prolactin factor. I don't know what the current state of that idea is. Yeah I'm not too sure about that either Dr. Peat. And what did you say Sue?
She wanted to know what the best herb would be for menopause or herbs. Well really it's probably as much about your excess estrogen as anything else. I know Dr. Peat in terms of menopause you would probably suggest that excess estrogen is one of the main causes and to bring that down into line with the anti-estrogen hormone pregnenolone or progesterone would probably be the most efficient way of doing it.
And usually thyroid. Right. Because the cholesterol tends to rise at menopause and if thyroid is adequate that will keep turning the cholesterol into more of the pregnenolone and progesterone to protect against estrogen. Good. Okay so there's another caller on the line. So let's take this next caller. You're on the air. Is this for me? Yeah you're on the air.
Hello this is David. You know and I know this is kind of a deep subject and I've heard you ask questions before about water Andrew and I've read different things that Dr. Peat has written about like poly water and different types of more structured water. And I'm just curious you asked the question just a minute ago and I don't know if I understood the answer but when we have these tissues that are experiencing edema and we have you know what we're calling H2O is that water considered to not be structured at its optimum?
And in line with that kind of a similar question is it seems like I've heard that I think I've heard this from Dr. Peat in these different discussions that do we produce our own water at times and is that a more structured water? And then the other question is like when we drink orange juice or we drink milk and say we're drinking raw milk versus pasteurized milk is the water content within those foods is that considered a very optimum structured water? Okay Dr. Peat did you hear those questions clearly or?
Yes, my article on the poly water question talks about some of the ranges of influence how far a certain surface can influence a structure such as in clay. The water in ordinary clay is structured differently from bulk water but there's also a question of how long the influence of that surface can last. Gerald Pollack at the University of Washington has there are some videos on the internet that you can see his demonstrations of some of the odd behavior of water even in a fairly bulk situation.
But ordinarily it doesn't make any difference whether you drink water that has been boiled recently or frozen recently. It's mostly a matter of degassing that makes it behave differently according to its recent history. It's safe to drink tea or coffee water that's been boiled but what matters is the state of the water inside the cell and that's governed by the energy of the metabolism and the ratio of things like carbon dioxide to lactic acid.
In the lens the proteins in other hard tissues collagen is the main protein that gives it stiffness but in the lens the main protein is called crystalline and it happens that crystalline is very well ordered with reference both to the structure of water and to the wavelength of visible light so that the water surrounding these proteins in the lens is so well ordered that it doesn't interfere with or reflect or absorb the light passing through it.
So it's an essential protein for maintaining the transparency of the lens and this protein if you compare it to collagen or albumin or other common proteins the protein can bind very firmly much more water about twice as much water as other proteins and hold it under its influence. So really the water of the lens and the protein is in a tight system in a normal state but when the energy processes fail and you absorb influences such as estrogen, polyunsaturated fats, lactic acid, various toxins,
then the energy is unable to repair the system and the water gets out of control of these proteins and starts becoming ordinary bulk water that interferes with the passage of light and lets junk accumulate such as broken down fragments of polyunsaturated fats. Acrolein for example breaking down from the N-3 proteins is a major factor in cataract formation.
Okay, I want to make sure that fairly quickly because we do have a couple more callers but that last caller also asked if we produce our own water and is the water in milk and OJ an optimum type of water? The water that has been filtered through an orange tree or a cow is at least very purified compared to the water that you get out of the plumbing. I know you're not very keen on water just per se drinking water you'd much rather people drink something that has nutritional value.
Yes, and we do make quite a bit of water metabolically when we eat carbohydrates in particular. Some of the oxygen that we are using to produce energy, some of that becomes water and the metabolic water is just intermixing with the water that we get from the food itself. But the nature of the oxygen contained in carbohydrates can influence the metabolism of the cell. The hydrogens as well as the oxygen are a mixture of isotopes of different weight in everything that we eat or consist of.
We have a mixture of these different weight isotopes and heavy water, deuterium oxide, slows down our metabolism so there's a slight difference in the water that we get from tropical sugar versus beet sugar that's grown up in a high altitude. Because the rainfall is separating the heavy water from the light water. Interesting. So there is a slight difference in the quality of the water depending on where the fruit grows. Yeah, far out. Andrew, and I know I'm going to say this real quick, I'm sorry, but I just want to make sure I understand one thing.
So in a way, the water, like you were talking about in the lens of the eye, it's structured so that it's almost like crystalline and that it actually structures the different materials that it's intermingling with? Well, the protein structures the water and then the water emits things selectively. Okay. Okay, well, hey, thank you for that. That's really interesting. Thank you very much. All right, thank you for your call. Okay, we have two more callers, so let's take the next caller. You're on the air? Hello. Hi, and where are you from? What's that?
Where are you calling from? Oh, hey, I'm calling from just Laytonville down here. Okay. And I'll be real quick. I know you got another call and a great show, very, very interesting here. Thank you. I hate to backtrack here, but I take about 100 milligrams of metropolol. Okay. You know, it's a cholesterol thing. I've been taking it every day for like five years. I also take isosorbide. It's a time-released nitroglycerin, you know, for my heart. Right, you have angina. I've had like seven heart attacks in the last nine years.
I'll take my answer off the air, but with this much metropolol, is this something I should be concerned about? Should I, you know, like talk to my doc about it? Okay, Dr. Peat, what do you think about that? I don't know that drug. Do you know what class it is? I don't either. One moment. I don't know if the call is still there or not. Hello? Hi. Did you hear Dr. Peat? He was asking if you knew what kind of, what class of drug metropolol was in. I take it for my cholesterol.
That's all I know. Right. Yeah. I'm not too sure. The only safe way I know to lower cholesterol chronically is by increasing thyroid function. In 1936 or 7, people demonstrated that if you remove a person's thyroid gland, their cholesterol level goes up as a mirror image of their oxygen consumption going down. And when you give them a thyroid supplement, the cholesterol will fall as the oxygen consumption increases. That's a very simple mechanism that doctors prefer to prescribe drugs with the toxic side effects.
And just lowering the cholesterol, even if the drug didn't have other side effects, the cholesterol is normally destined to turn into DHEA, progesterone, testosterone, and so on. So if you push down the availability of cholesterol by any mechanism, you're going to tend to deprive the body of those steroids that it should be forming. You guys are great, man. Thanks for all the information. You're welcome. Good night. Good night. Okay. So were there any more callers on the air, Sue? Yeah, one more. Okay. So let's take this next caller. Oh, okay, they've gone.
Okay, they've hung up. Okay, well, the number here, if you live in the area, is 923-3911. Or if you live outside the area, the number is 1-800-KMUD-RAD. And the lines are open to 8 o'clock. So guest speaker, Dr. Raymond Peat. We're covering his latest work on the similarities between the component or structural components of cataracts, the conditions like macular degeneration, tumors, and heart failure in terms of the heart muscle. So I just wanted to ask you this next -- oh, who's there? We had two very shy callers that didn't want to go on the air.
Okay. One question is regarding the thyroid supplements, does it matter if it's T or T3? That's one question. And then I'll ask the other one. Okay. All right. Well, there's two. There's T4 and T3. So it would very much matter, depending on what their situation was, which one they may or may not be short of. So Dr. Peat, how would you best answer this? Because this is your subject.
Well, if the study that led to the substitution of thyroxine or T4 or the natural combination T3 and T4 was a test on male medical students, average age in the early 20s -- Okay. -- and being male, they didn't have the problems that typically females have about five or ten times the incidence of thyroid problems. So they tested thyroxine on a population that was extremely inappropriate for testing a thyroid product, and they said it works just like natural thyroid. And since it was a commercial proprietary material, they preferred it to the natural product.
But after about 10 or 15 years, the actual active hormone, T3, was identified and studied, and it was found that this is what women lack, typically causing them to have five or ten times the thyroid problems that men do, because estrogen interferes with the glands' secretions of both T4 and T3, but it especially interferes with the liver's ability to convert thyroxine to the active hormone T3.
So many women actually get worse symptoms when they take thyroxine because it suppresses the little bit of T3 that their thyroid gland is producing, yet doesn't add to the amount of T3 that should be produced by the liver. Okay, excellent. And is there another reason why the excess estrogen found in postmenopausal women or even menstruating women works against them, works against their thyroid? I didn't hear that. Okay. I just said that that's the main reason why menstruating or postmenopausal women are at more risk in terms of low thyroid function.
Yeah, and some of the typically female problems, such as endometriosis, are just amazingly responsive to the proper thyroid supplementation, because once the thyroid goes down, then estrogen goes up, and since the estrogen blocks thyroid action, it becomes a vicious circle. Yeah, got it. Okay, well, there is another caller on the air, so let's see if... Well, no, it's the caller who didn't want to go on the air, but they wanted to know what the effects of cannabinoids are on cancer. Dr. Peat.
Well, on cancer, I think people are still exploring that. There are some suspicions that it might actually slow cancer growth. Others worry that it might make it worse, but mostly it's used to prevent the stress symptoms, and for that, it's effective.
So, what do you... just talking about that a little bit more in terms of, as much as anything else, helping me understand more about it, because, again, I think I'm probably on the fence in terms of not knowing enough one way or the other, but in terms of the plant and its relationship to hops, both in the cannabaceae, hops express a lot of pro-estrogenic compounds,
which is why the hop pickers during hop picking in August in England would lose their periods, such was its powerful effects on the hormone system. Do you look at those compounds as being pro-estrogenic, and if you do... Oh, definitely. Hops is a very powerful estrogen. Right. Is there any similarity, given that the plant's in the same family? I'm sure there's a lot of overlap. Almost every plant has some estrogenic or anti-estrogenic material, but mostly they're estrogenic because it's a defensive material that, for example, acts like birth control pills for predators.
The known effects of heavy marijuana smoking are definitely estrogenic, but some of that could just be that any kind of smoke is estrogenic. Right. Is there any parallel? I know carbon monoxide is present in abundant quantities when you smoke. Is there any way... and I've seen blood work from clients who are smokers. They always seem to have a pretty high CO2, which you would say is a good thing.
Is there a beneficial... I'm not saying smoking is good and we should all start smoking, but is there anything more simplistic or is there something more dangerous at work than just getting a little bit of extra CO2 in your system? Well, the carbon monoxide can accumulate and have some chronic harmful effects, such as on the liver function, but I think the real danger of smoke is the polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, which are inflammatory and estrogenic and carcinogenic.
Anything you burn is going to produce some of those and then any smoke of a plant material is going to produce some dioxin-type material. Right. Okay. I certainly do have more I want to ask you about in terms of your work looking at tissues and wetness and tumors, but for fear of running over the show, I don't want to ask any more callers on the air.
Yeah, I think we do have a couple waiting, but I think we're going to carry this one on next month. I think there's enough interest in it certainly to bring out more callers. So, Dr. Peat, I think it'll give me an opportunity to let people know more about you and I'll thank you very much for joining us. Okay. Hope you've got a better line. I do too. I'm sorry for the listeners who've perhaps found a little difficulty in hearing Dr. Peat and I'm sorry, Dr. Peat, that you've had difficulty hearing as well.
Okay. So, just to wrap up the show, the next few minutes that we have, Dr. Raymond Peat has a website and his address is www.raypeat.com. There's something in excess of 50 or more scientific journal articles that are fully referenced scientifically. So, it's not just hearsay. He's been, why do you call it, he's been crying out loud from a distance for quite some time now.
I'm glad that people are hearing what he has to say and I'm glad that he's being vindicated by current scientific literature being in accord with what he's been mentioning for 20 or 30 more years. So, his website there, www.raypeat.com, is an excellent source of information. I would encourage you very much to go check it out. For those people that have tuned in to this show, thanks so much for calling. It's always very helpful that you call in and that we know that the people out there that are listening and want to know more.
I think it's always good to have that kind of doubtful mind that wants to seek out more information and not just be fed what it is that comes through the TV and from adverts and commercial newspapers, etc. So, our toll free number is 1-888-WBM-ERB. Sarah or I can be reached Monday through Friday or maybe Sarah can't at this point in time, folks. I guess she has a baby. I've got to start thinking that she's right there right now.
But, okay, I can be reached Monday through Friday, 9 to 5, consultations or whatever at the end of the show. If you have other questions relating to this month's show, that would be fine, too. Okay, so thanks so much for joining us and for those people that have ears, let them hear. [Music] Okay, I want to give folks just a real quick look at the weather along the coast. The next few days are going to be patchy fog, lows in the high 50s and highs in the low 60s, so around the 60 degree mark.
And then inland in Redway, it's calling for high on Saturday tomorrow of 96 going up to 99 on Sunday, so hot inland on the weekend. Support for Cayman comes in part from Golden Dragon Medicinal Syrup, an anti-inflammatory, anti-fungal, antibacterial, antioxidant medicine made without heat or ice. Golden Dragon Medicinal Syrup is organic, edible, topical, cosmetic and water-soluble. Information is available at [email protected] and by phone at 707-223-1569. Well, it is 759, you are listening to Redwood Community Radio, KMUD Garberville, 91.1 FM, KMUE Eureka Arcade at 88.1 FM, KLAI Laytonville, 90.3 FM, and in Shelter Cove at 99.5.
We're also on the web at kmud.org. It's 76 degrees outside. Stay tuned for Bunked Up with Cousin Mark. [Music] Behold, I am Ponta Delta. I am not of your world. But fear me not, I will do you no harm. Loan me your funky mind and I shall play with it. For nothing is good unless you play with it. And all that is good is... Please remember that this program is supported by the listener members of Redwood Community Radio.
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