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Hi Ray, how's it going? Hi, very good. Awesome, well thank you for doing this today. I think this is going to be great. I'm really looking forward to this question and answer session. What we've done, I have some help from my wife, and we compiled a list of questions from the basically a northern California birth community and listeners of the podcast and just in general we've kind of gathered an assortment of questions. They might be all over the place, but I've
tried to compile them in a way that kind of makes sense. But before we get into the questions and hear your thoughts, could you go into your background a little bit, especially as it pertains to women's issues, pregnancy, and human development in general? In 1968, after studying many other things for about 12 years after getting out of college, I went to graduate school at the University of Oregon specializing in reproductive physiology. I did my dissertation in 1972 on oxidative changes in the uterus with aging.
That had been one of my lifelong interests was the physiology of aging. It seemed especially relevant to the process of reproduction because I had seen publications in the 40s and 50s in which they saw that when you make a graph of the baby's birth weight and head circumference, that both of these increase with each subsequent pregnancy so that the older the mother is, the bigger her baby's brain is. That held true up until about the age of 38. At that time, women were having many more babies each, and so it tended to be the
third or fourth or fifth baby by the time she reached her late 30s. At that point, instead of increasing the last birth before she became infertile, the last baby tended to be lighter with a smaller head. But the general drift of both aging and parity was for the birth weight and brain weight to increase steadily. That was sort of in the background. I had started out intending to study brain physiology in graduate school, but I found that that subject was completely dogmatic, whereas the reproductive physiology actually tolerated a scientific approach.
Oh, that's great. So one of the questions, actually this leads right into one of our first questions. I love that summary of your background as it relates to pregnancy and child development issues. One of the questions from a woman was directly related to kind of what you spoke to, and it's maintaining fertility as a woman ages. This is kind of a general question, but what could a woman do to maintain fertility as she does get older? The failure of progesterone around it starts statistically happening in the
mid-30s. Estrogen production and concentration in the body tends to increase steadily from the 20s, about the age of 20, up until the late 30s. That's about the time when aging and stress symptoms start becoming noticeable. Sometimes a woman is gaining excess weight around that age, and any kind of nutritional or environmental problem limits the ability to produce progesterone. As the ratio of estrogen continually increasing and progesterone reaching a limit determined by stress and nutrition, at that point you start getting the signs of menopause and infertility. So there are two
processes that tend to extend fertility as well as lifespan in general. One is that the liver metabolically, when it's healthy, excretes 100% of the estrogen arriving in the circulation to be made soluble for excretion in the urine or put into the bile for excretion. The estrogen that goes into the bile, it tends to be reabsorbed if there's not enough fiber in the diet. So keeping a steady increase, a steady supply of fiber running through the intestine allows the liver to get rid of the bile- excreted estrogen. And the other,
it's a sulfated or glucuronidated water-soluble form of estrogen that goes out in urine. To make that, the B vitamins and protein are the most essential nutrients. So keeping up the B vitamins and in general good nutrition, adequate protein and calcium keep the liver able to minimize estrogen. As it reaches the liver, it should be a hundred percent excreted so it doesn't build up steadily with aging. And that in itself makes the problem of producing adequate progesterone manageable because it isn't against this rising tide of estrogen
with aging. Vitamin A, protein, adequate minerals, a balance of calcium and phosphate, and vitamin D are the main limiting factors for making progesterone. Vitamin A is used almost a one-to-one relationship with the amount of progesterone you produce. Thyroid hormone travels on the same protein in the blood as vitamin A and that protein with the vitamin A in thyroid are taken up by cells along with cholesterol and are used in the conversion of cholesterol to progesterone. So it's essential to maintain a good level of cholesterol in your blood to be able to keep producing adequate progesterone.
Awesome. So Ray, when you talk about vitamin A and the B vitamins, would it be preferable to get these from food sources rather than supplemental sources? Yeah, the supplements always contain manufacturing contaminants and breakdown products. Vitamin A, for example, is extremely oxidizable and many people get serious side effects when they take vitamin supplements that they don't get at all when they eat foods that are very rich in those. So eggs, milk, and cheese and liver, for example, are very safe sources of vitamin A to some extent
vitamin D, but if you don't get sunlight then you will need a supplement of vitamin D. Okay, great. That's great. Now for progesterone, if a woman is obviously supporting an environment where natural progesterone continues to be adequate or optimal, that's great, but as a woman ages and progesterone levels decrease, does it make sense for a woman to supplement progesterone more as she ages? Yeah, in the 1950s, Katharina Dalton in England, at that time, the main progesterone product on the market was injectable in oil solution. She was treating women with premenstrual syndrome with these monthly or
twice-monthly injections of progesterone and found that the women who suffered from PMS tended to have their previous babies before they had come in to have their PMS treated, their previous babies had a very high likelihood of being premature, underweight, and mentally not up to par. And she found that the patients that she had treated adequately for PMS were having healthier pregnancies and if they continued having a PMS symptom in the pregnancy, she would continue treating their PMS symptoms. And many of these women had previously had monthly bleeding episodes right up into the fifth or sixth
month of pregnancy and then they would deliver prematurely. And she found that by preventing the symptoms of depression, anxiety, headaches, and so on, that she prevented the monthly bleeding episodes and the babies were carried to full term. And after doing that for about 15 or 20 years, someone mentioned to her that her patients' babies were remarkably intelligent. She said that isn't very likely because the women who deliver prematurely are known to have babies with an average IQ of about 95. She did a study and found that her
babies were averaging about 130 IQ. So the younger siblings were all many IQ points better, just the difference was simply the mother was a little older and was getting progesterone support. Wow, that's awesome. Ray, there was a poll going around I saw recently where there were women who wrote in and answered the question, "Is progesterone supplementation being effective?" And a lot of the women said yes, extremely effective. They noticed positive effects from the progesterone and then some women said they weren't seeing positive effects. Can
there be a reason that some women would see positive effects from supplemental progesterone and then other women maybe would not? Some women have a much higher need and many of the products simply aren't able to deliver enough progesterone to be effective. I think it was 1951, there was a study of using the commercial progesterone that was available at that time for treating uterine cancer. The treatment, it turned out, the doctors examining the changes saw just remarkable improvements in the uterine cancer, but they were giving
what they considered to be a maximum dose, many, many injections of, I think it was a couple hundred milligrams per injection. They would give several of those per day, but they never mentioned that the patient was being anesthetized or they didn't even mention a sedative effect, but it's now recognized that when you get the amount of progesterone that the placenta produces in the latter half of pregnancy, those amounts of progesterone are strongly affecting the nervous system, preventing childbirth pain, for example, with an actual
anesthetic effect and having a sedative effect improving the quality of sleep. So what they were demonstrating in that 1951 study was that even injecting hundreds of milligrams of progesterone, it wasn't being available to the bloodstream. It was dissolved in oil and it was simply staying in the muscle or fat tissue where they infected it, and when you take it orally in a powdered form, the particulate, even micronized progesterone, as it touches the lining of the intestine, a small amount of it is passed into the cell structure and in
that form in the intestine and as it moves from the intestine to the liver in that form, both the intestine and the liver have the enzymes to solubilize it, the way the liver handles estrogen, and so any of the powdered estrogen or progesterone preparations that touch the intestine tend to go into the soluble form and leave the body quickly. And if it gets into the circulation as a sulfated progesterone, that will have its own sedative effect, but definitely doesn't follow the metabolic pathway that natural
progesterone produced by the ovaries or in the brain would have. And the closest you can get to a natural supplement of progesterone is when it's dissolved in oil and taken orally. The digestive system has the ability to break it up into micron-sized particles for absorption directly through the intestine into the lymphatic system where those particles are transmitted directly to the bloodstream. So it circulates as fat-dissolved particles through the general circulation, bypassing the liver repeatedly because red blood cells and these chylomicron particles are not recognized as
something for excretion. They pass through the liver over and over and can be absorbed by the uterus, brain, all of the tissues. Wow, that's great. So would you say if you are taking a progesterone that gets into that metabolic pathway, for example, like dissolved in vitamin E and you aren't noticing effects, would a good gauge be to just try taking more? Yeah, a fourth of a teaspoon of the solution containing 100 milligrams will, for a man, that amount will likely bring on sleep very quickly. For a woman, it will have a definite
relaxing sedative effect. And a dose of that sort during pregnancy, the tendency of any given dose of progesterone that is sensed to be adequate, the ovary when you're not pregnant or the placenta when you are pregnant will be stimulated so that there's a positive feedback between a given dose and the ability of the ovary or the placenta to maintain and increase its production of progesterone so it can have a catalytic effect. There were studies in which women who were giving signs that they were about to miscarry at maybe the third or fourth
month of pregnancy were given an injection of progesterone and it was two-thirds of the group went from the third month when they got that injection all the way to a full term. One third of the group needed another injection around month six and they then carried it to full term. So there's a positive feedback catalytic effect that one good strong dose will often solve the deficiency problem. Wow, that's great. One woman, it's kind of related, one woman asked a question about miscarriage. You mentioned miscarriage and thyroid.
So thyroid and progesterone are related, I imagine. Can you talk about thyroid and miscarriage in the same line? Yeah, everyone who is hypothyroid becomes subject to an excess of estrogen relative to the other protective hormones, progesterone, pregnenolone, and DHEA and to some extent testosterone. When the thyroid is low, the tissues accumulate water and shift their metabolism, their energy production towards lactic acid formation rather than carbon dioxide. The carbon dioxide that should be produced under the influence of thyroid has a relaxing sedative effect on the uterus, tends to
deliver more oxygen to the fetus. When your thyroid is low and you don't produce that carbon dioxide, you make a lot of lactic acid which has an excitatory effect on the tissues, tending to over activate contractions in the uterus, causing stress to the fetus and triggers cortisol production which tends to produce delivery. The thyroid acting on the liver is lowering estrogen which has the tendency to shift metabolism towards lactic acid. The estrogen itself activates cortisol production and excites contractions in the uterus. The direct effect of thyroid and cholesterol on the ovary or the
placenta is to increase the conversion of cholesterol to progesterone so that at every level of metabolism, thyroid is working towards maturing the pregnancy, keeping the delivery of sugar for the development of the embryo's brain, keeping the progesterone high and the uterus relaxed. Great. So then would thyroid sometimes be appropriate as another supplement? It could be used by pregnant women? Even before getting pregnant, there have been many studies showing that thyroid hormone for both men and women is the most important single fertility hormone
there is. I've known dozens of men and women who were unable to get pregnant. Usually the very first month they supplement thyroid, they're pregnant. Some of them after 10 or 15 years of trying, all it took was one month of thyroid. So it's good to start early. Another study looked at women who had used a supplement of progesterone even for just one month preceding conception, where the normal percentage of birth defects in that study was 4%. Those women who had, even for just one month, who had used progesterone before
conceiving, there was only 1% incidence of birth defects. So progesterone has a very powerful stabilizing effect on the chromosomes and thyroid is working right along with the progesterone, stabilizing the genetic system. Wow, that's great. Ray, you mentioned the lactic acid or the lactic metabolism being maladaptive for a developing fetus. A lot of people seem to be into intense exercise. Can over-exertion and intense exercise actually be not really what we want for a healthy pregnancy? Yeah, if you look at just athletes, not pregnant athletes, but just men or women
either, one of the definitions of over-training is to look at their lungs' ability to diffuse oxygen. One study found that athletes who thought they were in great condition but who were over-training had a tremendously deficient ability of their lungs to emit oxygen to the blood. The over-training gave them a chronic oxygen deficit and lingering lactic acid level in the blood. They found that those athletes who had elevated lactic acid even 12 hours or more after their exercise, those were the ones whose lungs had taken up so much
excess water that the diffusion pathway was about twice normal. So no matter how fast they breathed, they just couldn't get efficient oxygenation. The same sort of thing happens under the influence of too much estrogen. A study in, I think it was mice, gave one injection of estrogen and then monitored the ability of oxygen to move through their lungs. They found that 95% of the diffusion capacity was knocked out in an hour following a single overdose of estrogen. Wow, great. I'm going to go back to a general question here from a
woman. She asked, "What is the most important piece of advice that you would give an expecting mother?" To eat well. That means keeping protein up, having a good ratio of calcium to phosphate in the diet, be getting around 100 milligrams of good protein every day, and something like a one-to-one ratio of calcium to phosphate if possible. Great, that's awesome. Thanks, Ray. Another question here from a woman, "What are your thoughts on the common suggestion that a pregnant mother should be consuming high volumes of water?" Water can be very
dangerous. Your requirement for protein and calcium means that during, once pregnancy gets going, two quarts of milk a day is kind of the minimum, along with maybe a quart of orange juice. With two or three quarts of those going in as food, you have very little need for other liquid. If you don't balance your water intake, especially with sodium, but also with calcium, magnesium, and potassium, sodium is very often the most important mineral lacking in pregnancy, and if you add water to your regime without balancing it with
salting your food to taste, that can have a very bad outcome. In the 1950s, when the drug companies devised new chemical diuretics, they decided pregnant women would be a good market for them, so they invented the idea that you shouldn't gain so much weight during pregnancy. And almost every doctor in the country fell for the advertising for diuretics and taught women to control their weight gain, and to do that largely with the water pills. That had really a disastrous effect on the outcome of millions of pregnancies. The progesterone
is pretty much the basis for the body's ability to regulate water and salt accurately, but you have to take in a generous amount for the progesterone to be able to regulate it. In two different studies of preeclampsia, in which the women were developing high blood pressure, knowing the physiology, when progesterone is deficient, you tend to retain water without sodium, potassium, calcium, and so on. And so they tried giving pretty big supplements of table salt to these women with eclampsia, where the standard medical prescription was to have them avoid salt and take diuretics. These two studies
supplemented several grams per day of table salt and cured the preeclampsia, regulated their blood pressure, and that same principle works anytime your progesterone is deficient relative to estrogen. You seem to be retaining water, but it's really that you're losing sodium too fast, and balancing your minerals will help you get rid of the water. How that works is that albumin in the blood forms the negative charges on albumin molecules bind the positive charges of sodium, and that combination of electrical charges binds water around
that cloud of molecules. And if you don't have enough sodium, the albumin can't retain its water. The albumin tends to fall out of solution going into your tissues or out your kidneys. The preeclampsia, high blood pressure women tend to lose a lot of albumin in their urine. And how these researchers cured the preeclampsia with sodium, it was because the sodium allowed the albumin to stay in the bloodstream and to attract water to it, pulling water out of the tissues and keeping it to increase the volume of blood needed to perfuse
the placenta and uterus. So water without sodium, especially with the diuretics that were being sold to American and European and Australian women, the excess water and diuretic combination and salt restriction is a very deadly mixture. Wow. Ray, one woman who works with families who are becoming pregnant, she's worked with midwives and she's worked with pregnant women directly. She said there definitely seems to be an increase in preeclampsia. So what you're saying is it sounds like this, and I'm asking you I guess, could
it be from something as simple as not having enough salt and consuming way too much liquid? Yeah. Salt and protein, milk especially, because it comes with the calcium. Awesome. You mentioned earlier the B vitamins, vitamin A. Are there any prenatal vitamins that are on the market that could be good apart from just getting the vitamins and nutrients we need from food? I don't really know of any. Traditionally they have emphasized iron and the idea that women need more iron than men isn't true because estrogen gives women a powerful
advantage for efficient absorption of iron. From a meager diet, estrogen makes you attract into the intestine about ten times as much iron as a man would. And the reason so many women seem deficient in iron isn't that they're losing some every month with menstruation, that's true, but since the average diet contains enough iron if they're absorbing it efficiently, the real cause for the apparent anemia is low thyroid function. Thyroid is what governs the formation of red blood cells and as the red blood cells form, if you have enough copper in
your diet that will attach the iron. I would guess it's more than half of the diagnosed iron deficiencies in women are really thyroid deficiencies. The temperature of your arms and legs powerfully governs your ability to make red blood cells and if your thyroid metabolism is low, your arms and legs tend to be cooler than optimal and so you slow down your production of red blood cells. That's great. Ray, one woman, I'm trying to connect some of these questions here, one woman had a question about iron, speaking of iron, and her
teenage boy, she wanted to know is there a way for us to help my teenage boy, my son, lower iron levels even though he's not eligible to donate blood yet? Is he having symptoms of iron excess? I don't know anything other than the question I got from the woman. If a person simply goes on a milk and cheese heavy diet, a couple of eggs per day will provide the required amount of iron from them without an excess. If you just go without meat, meat or fish, things
that are higher in iron, the milk and cheese are so low in iron, within a couple of weeks you will probably have normalized your iron stores. You can often go on for many weeks without developing an iron deficiency on a milk and cheese based diet, but at some point you'll start craving foods that are rich in iron when you actually start needing iron. Awesome, that sounds like a good rule of thumb. Now iron excess is similar to like polyunsaturated fat excess, right? Over time that can be really problematic. Can
you talk about that at all? Yeah, those interacting tend to start causing problems about the age of 45 or 50 or so. With aging, just eating an average diet, because the polyunsaturated fats tend to go into storage while saturated fats are preferentially oxidized, just an average diet after several decades, your tissues become very high in the polyunsaturated fats. On a typical American-European diet, we're all getting more iron than we need and so the liver and marrow and so on become overloaded with iron. A
stress that makes us short of oxygen, the same thing that leads to lactic acid production, it's a shift in the reducing direction away from the oxidizing direction that turns iron atoms in the sources of reactive electrons producing hydroxyl ions that cause tissue deterioration. And when the tissues are overloaded with phospholipids that have been constructed out of polyunsaturated fats, our very tissue structure starts being attacked by these hydroxyl activated free radicals of producing chain reactions of inflammation of toxic breakdown products that tend to destroy mitochondria and put the cell
over into the glycolyzing lactic acid producing condition. Interesting, so while there are several foods a pregnant woman should definitely be aiming to include in her diet, polyunsaturated fat is something a pregnant woman should be trying to avoid. Yeah, the studies in various species but for example cows that they're easy to study because they're used for meat and so the studies there are large amounts of tissue to examine, they find that newborn calves brains and other tissues are what we would, dieticians nowadays would say are
deficient in the so-called essential fatty acids, but eating hay and grass and so on, very quickly the tissues start acquiring these polyunsaturated fats. But even though the cow was eating a diet rich in the grass PUFA, polyunsaturated fats, the newborn calf was completely free of these in its brain and looking at humans, they are now saying that the full-term newborn baby typically is deficient in the essential fatty acids so they want to give them a supplement of these to make the tissue start accumulating them faster. But if you look
at the brain metabolism of a healthy full-term newborn, their oxygen consumption is very high and their free radical toxic breakdown products in the blood are extremely low and in the first couple of years the brain and other tissues of healthy kids tend to be borderline deficient in the so-called essential fatty acids and their brain metabolism and brain function ability to learn language quickly are very high and as the brain gets more and more saturated over time with the PUFA, the learning ability and the brain
metabolism are slowing down. That process in an Alzheimer's brain, for example, prematurely aging, the polyunsaturated fats are extremely high and they are bound up with cholesterol so that the available cholesterol is very low but the potentially reactive toxic fatty acids are very high. That's a process you want to get to as late as possible and so you don't want to supplement the baby with these unstable highly oxidizable polyunsaturated fats. Many of the best hospitals now give premature babies intravenous soybean emulsion because of this absurd doctrine of essential fatty acids in the brain. Simultaneously at the
University of California Riverside, professors found that animals brains were damaged by a single injection of soybean emulsion. Forty-five years previous to that, someone else demonstrated that injecting this soybean emulsion, intralipid for example, into a rat's carotid artery, 17% of that injected emulsion stuck in the brain, was taken up directly into the brain as soybean oil, causing changes, microscopically visible changes from that one dose of soybean oil. So almost all the doctors in the country are going to be pushing pregnant women and their newborn babies to either eat fish
oil or supplement with various kinds of polyunsaturated fats. It's basically an advertising campaign for industry that is counterfactual. Seems just fraudulent. Yeah. So clearly to avoid maternal stress, one way to do that is to limit polyunsaturated fat as much as possible. Yeah. What are some non-dietary ways a woman can reduce stress during a pregnancy? Oh, doing interesting things. Just avoiding things that are fatiguing. Resting as much as feels right. Activity that feels good is fine, but whenever it seems desirable to rest, that's very important to do. Fifty years ago, it was recognized that bed rest
sometimes was all that was needed to have a healthier delivery, but recently I heard doctors saying that there have been no controlled double-blind studies showing that bed rest was helpful for preventing miscarriage, so they didn't advocate it. Wow. Great. Thank you for that. This is so great. One woman asked, "Can you talk a bit about cholestasis and why that might occur during pregnancy?" About what was the word? Cholestasis. Say it again. Cholestasis. Am I saying it right? Oh, of the biome. Yes, yes, yes, yes. High estrogen is known to be the villain.
Just keeping your thyroid up, I think, is the essential thing. Thyroid and progesterone are the treatment as well as the prevention. Awesome. Okay, thanks. And another woman wrote, "The occurrence of cesarean births, specifically, have tripled, have more than tripled in the past 30 years, from about 6% of all births to now around 31% as far as statistics go." Wow, that's crazy. "How might this impact the generation being born by cesarean?" is the first question from this woman, and the second question is, "What effect might this have
on future generations?" I think the main statistical thing is that it's being done for the convenience of doctors and hospitals. They don't like to sit around waiting for the woman to be ready to give birth, and I think it often results... they have a mechanical calendar model of when the delivery should happen. For example, if a woman is just slightly hypothyroid or just has a less than optimal ratio of progesterone to estrogen, they can mature the brain properly if they just stay pregnant for another month or so. There's
nothing wrong with prolongation of pregnancy if the woman is still healthy and eating well, getting enough sugar and other nutrients delivered to the baby. Just by an arbitrary definition of when the pregnancy should terminate, the hospitals are creating a lot of underweight babies, and if the baby is underweight, its brain is underdeveloped. And in those last three months of pregnancy, there's a tremendous... at month six, I think it's about twice as many brain precursor cells as will be there at full term. So during that last
month, if you slow down the death of these brain precursor cells, you're going to massively increase the number of functional mature brain cells when the baby is born. And the process of brain growth is fastest in the last month, and if that's allowed to continue, the future of the baby is going to be healthier in every way. The brain is in control of the circulatory system, the immune system, metabolism, and so on. So it isn't just that the baby will get in the heart ridge, that it will have good immunity, circulation, general vitality if the
brain is allowed to mature. That was great. Wow, you really you really covered a lot in that one. That's amazing. And I, yeah, it's just so sad that the doctors are on schedule and that's determining, it seems like, when they want women to give birth rather than just the natural course. Yeah, many things are tending in the same direction. For example, multiple vaccinations, I think, various environmental pollutions, but one of those is multiple vaccinations and other over-medicalization. The history of birth weight and brain weight have been
pretty steadily increasing for a hundred years or so. In the 1980s, in three countries, Japan, Germany, and the United States, brains stopped growing. In Germany, the body kept growing, getting bigger, heavier babies, but without a bigger brain in proportion. In Japan and the U.S., there has been actually a downward trend in head circumference at birth. Wow. Ray, you mentioned autism and vaccination, I mean, sorry, you mentioned vaccination. Your recent, one of your recent newsletters, which I thought was so great, and people
can subscribe to that by writing to you at Ray P. Newsletters, at gmail.com, is that right? Right. It was just, it was great. Can you, can you briefly talk about maybe, several women actually asked about the autism connection with vaccinations and autism in general, why is autism increasing? Could you speak to that at all? Yeah, there have been several studies showing that a woman's estrogen balance during pregnancy strongly corresponds to the risk of autism. Estrogen creates inflammation and lactic acid excess. Inflammation in, during gestation in animal experiments creates behavior that resembles autism.
The various things that contribute to inflammation during pregnancy include the aluminum adjuvants in vaccinations, not only the intentional aluminum adjuvant, but a lot of the junk. For example, if they grow the vaccine in a culture, the vaccines are known to contain contaminants from the culture medium, milk protein, egg protein, various things known, synthetic chemicals known to be used in some of the culture media for producing vaccines. All of this junk is there producing inflammation. The purpose of the adjuvant is deliberately to produce an inflammatory state to activate the immune system to produce the
antibodies, but an inflammatory state in every study that has investigated it in humans and animals both. Inflammation during pregnancy damages the nervous system of the fetus. The whole outcome of the organism's health is deteriorated by inflammatory conditions during pregnancy. Wow. Ray, this question actually is, I think, related. Someone said we seem, and you talked about any kind of stress, any kind of inflammation in pregnancy which comes from stress, it can be detrimental. Someone said we seem to be so caught up recently with this idea of hormesis in our society, like that if you do
something that's stressful that we're going to have like positive adaptation from it. That's another advertising ploy. The radiation industry was a leader in developing the whole idea of hormesis. If it's something that we produce in making atomic bombs or in doing our CAT scans and so on, or radium technologies and so on, it goes way back to trying to explain away why some certain commercially valuable amount of poisoning isn't something that you can sue the industry for because it's really good for you. In the 1950s, the Atomic Energy Commission was getting data that
they were exploding bombs in Nevada. They were causing cancer in people in Utah and all of the downwind states, but especially in the nearest towns in Utah. To explain away the radioactive elements they were seeing in babies' teeth and the increasing mortality in small children with leukemia and bone cancer, to explain that away, they invented the idea of hormesis, that these small doses are actually good for you. Incredible. They called their big project, one of their projects, they called it Project Sunshine. That was the one
looking at the strontium-90 in babies. Oh my gosh. It sounded nice to call it Project Sunshine. Unbelievable. Wow. Ray, one woman asked in relation to the autism subject, she said, "If kids already have autism or they are on the spectrum," what's a good way to go about this? Are there any things we can do to mitigate some of the effects of autism? Yeah, everything that's good for the brain of the developing baby is probably still good at any age for helping the cells to mature and function. Pregnenolone, progesterone,
DHEA, all of these are at any stage of life, they're essential brain hormones. There are some drugs that have been developed in relation to blood pressure and heart disease that probably are working on part of the inflammatory system. For example, ACE inhibitors, conferring enzyme inhibitors, and enzyme receptor blockers, and calcium blockers. All of these stabilize the living state of the cell. The way they're explained isn't necessarily very illuminating, but what they're doing is protecting cells against things like high estrogen, high lactic acid, deficient sugar, and deficient carbon
dioxide, and so on. Oh, good to know. Awesome. Now, so Ray, this question is still related to pregnancy, during pregnancy. "What would be the best course of action," this woman asked, "for someone who experiences frequent migraines?" My own migraines were one of the things that got me interested in studying brain physiology. And when I was about 10 years old, I noticed that girls were much more likely than boys to have migraines, and that got me interested in the physiology of estrogen. And the two techniques that I came across, someone in the 1960s told
me that eating a carrot every day often prevented headaches. I tried it, and it worked. And the method, someone studying fertility had one group of women who had frequent infections, and so they gave them a series of antibiotic treatments, and they found that their cyclic monthly migraines had disappeared when they were taking the antibiotic. And it turns out that a carrot a day or an antibiotic has the same effect. The antibiotic is suppressing the inflammatory bacteria in the intestine. The carrot is, to some extent, suppressing them and carrying
them out of the body. Following up on the antibiotic effect, they saw that the women taking the antibiotic had lower estrogen, lower cortisol, and higher progesterone. Same thing, we tested a few women without and with a daily carrot, same thing happened. Their estrogen and cortisol went down when they ate a daily carrot. And then supplementing thyroid, I found that I wasn't so bound to my carrot addiction. The thyroid itself helps to lower estrogen and cortisol and keep your progesterone, DHEA, and pregnenoline up. And once when I, for example, in San
Francisco, I was taking my thyroid supplement and not realizing that fluoridated water knocks out T3, destroys T3 totally. And I became suddenly very hypothyroid and developed a migraine. And I happened to have the progesterone and vitamin E. I took about 100 milligrams on my tongue. And within seconds, the visual flashing effect started right at the center of my visual field, quieted down, and this area of visual quiet spread quickly during about 30 or 40 seconds, covered my whole visual field. And a sense of well-being kept flowing.
And after about a minute, all of the sickness and headache had disappeared and I got sleepy. I experienced that effect twice, exactly the same effect of about 100, 150 milligrams of progesterone, quieting the visual effect within seconds and totally knocking out the headache in about two minutes. Wow, that's amazing. Ray, with the carrot and the antibiotic, is like twice a week activated charcoal, would that be kind of a similar deal? The animal studies suggest, yeah, that it's doing much of the same. It has an antibiotic effect. The
pores in the charcoal act as catalysts and break down endotoxin. So it's working chemically as well as an antibiotic. Great, awesome. This woman, Ray, asks about PCOS or polycystic ovary syndrome. She says, "How can I begin to correct it?" Having a vitamin D blood test probably is helpful. Vitamin D is one of the things widely recognized as helping it. And the animal experiments in which they would remove the thyroid gland and then give a gonadotropin to increase the estrogen production, that combination boosting the ovaries while
cutting out the thyroid will reliably produce polycystic ovaries in animals. And so that implies that you would want to start with normalizing the thyroid and then check on the balance of estrogen to progesterone, probably needing a supplement of progesterone to balance the overactive adrenals. When something like a hypothyroidism limits the ability of the ovary to make progesterone, the adrenals become hyperactive in response to the estrogen excitatory action. The adrenals aren't as good at making progesterone, so they make lots of testosterone, which has the same anti-excitatory protective effect.
But that becomes a vicious circle and you can break it with thyroid, progesterone, and vitamin D. Oh, great. Ray, this woman asked about labs too. You said about the labs, getting a lab done during pregnancy. One woman asked, "What are the most helpful labs? Are there any other labs that would help during pregnancy to best understand current health status?" Yeah, making sure that your thyroid is good. Temperature and pulse are very important. Waking temperature and pulse rate and middle of the day, another measurement. And any blood tests that would validate a good thyroid function.
But the ratio of progesterone to estrogen is very important. Some fertility clinics found that women whose progesterone was not 50 times or more higher than the estrogen were the ones who didn't get pregnant. So, if they had 50 to 100 times as much progesterone as estrogen, they were the ones that would get pregnant. And then their ratio would tend to stay very good, heavily towards progesterone. And that's something that should be tested about at least twice during a pregnancy to make sure that the estrogen isn't creeping up.
In animal studies, if you make a graph of estrogen and progesterone, all of the animals studied, there is a constant increase, just a straight line of both progesterone and estrogen, but with the progesterone being many times higher until the day of delivery. The recognition in the medical world that most pregnancies are defective turns up as advice that your progesterone should level off after month six. But all of the animal studies say that the best pregnancies turn out when the progesterone has continued to rise
steadily right up to the last days of pregnancy. Wow, that's great. The same woman, Ray, asked, "Is metabolism linked to the length of gestation?" Yeah, a good high thyroid metabolism, keeping your blood sugar steady, letting you keep the progesterone increasing, not letting the estrogen get out of proportion. Since estrogen dominance triggers cortisol production, cortisol triggers premature delivery. So you want to keep your sugar intake high enough that your cortisol doesn't tend to rise terminating the pregnancy. Okay, great. And is that because in general sugar can help? Yeah, the sugar is the
primary limiting factor for brain growth. Chickens, for example, have very small brains. The egg holds only a certain amount of glucose and some of the protein can break down to make glucose, but an egg is a closed world. The brain is known to stop developing when the glucose present in the egg is used up, but experimenters made a hole in the egg and then at the day that they knew that the glucose was reaching zero, they injected either glucose or amino acids that could be turned into glucose, and they found that the
chicken's brain kept developing for the rest of its gestational period, producing chickens with bigger brains than it ever happened naturally. So the amount of brain development in the case of a chicken isn't developmental, it's environmental. The egg just didn't hold enough glucose to finish making a smart chicken, and if your glucose is limited after the six months of pregnancy, the brain stops developing. In the 50s, experiments were done on dogs and other animals, and they found that if they gave a little bit of insulin, lowering
the mother's blood sugar, the cell division in the fetus's brain came to a stop. If they added estrogen, same thing happened. Blood sugar dipped, the brain stopped growing. On that note, Ray, would you say anything to a woman who has been tested as a gestationally diabetic? Oh, that was... First, there was the real diabetes, which was defined as high blood sugar and excess urination, leading to wasting away. The body tissues were being turned into sugar, so it was a wasting disease. So they developed a market for insulin, and
they found that they could create a new type 2 diabetes and have a new market for selling insulin and then other drugs to lower the blood sugar. That market was saturated, type 1 and 2 diabetes. They came up with gestational diabetes, but the old obstetricians, several of them have told me that they observed that women, diabetic women, so-called, who had high blood sugar during pregnancy often had babies with very large heads. I happened to talk to one of those women. Her doctor had sent her to me for a weight loss diet, and her
blood sugar was only 130 or so, but the doctor told her she needed to stop gaining weight and not have another baby like the previous one. I said, "What's that baby like?" She said, "He's two years old, wears an adult hat, and reads adult literature." So I don't think the invention of gestational diabetes was very constructive. Great. Ray, this question comes from a woman. She's asking about extended breastfeeding, and she says she's asking if for those who are extending breastfeeding beyond two years or more, would there be
any additional considerations as far as diet and supplementation? Yeah, drinking lots of milk. Some women whose milk seems to be limited, just drinking, adding a quart of orange juice to their diet, getting their sugar and potassium up, is sometimes overcoming limited ability to lactate. But if you're doing it chronically for more than a year, you need to make sure you're getting lots of calcium and protein yourself. Awesome. Same woman asks, "Does the continued production of high levels of prolactin involved in breastfeeding necessary to lactate, does that have a negative impact on the breastfeeder
itself?" If you keep your thyroid function up, you won't experience bad effects from that prolonged... the prolactin does guide metabolism towards producing milk, and thyroid is the other. It keeps your ability up to produce the sugar if you're getting lots of protein and carbohydrate and minerals in your diet. The thyroid supports the lactation and it keeps your pituitary from over producing a stress-induced prolactin. So it would be good to have both the thyroid and the prolactin test maybe a year into lactation. Okay, great. That's awesome. This woman asked about childhood allergies. Actually there
were several women who wrote in about childhood allergies, specifically eczema, and they're asking what might this be caused by and how can we mitigate or help that. Some studies found that the women who were urged to supplement with things like fatty fish, high intake of omega-3 fats, those were the women who had the most allergic children. So it's prenatal inflammation again. Those fats aren't really very compatible with pregnancy and so they create a tendency to suppress the thyroid and maintain inflammation. If a kid is having allergies, you should check especially their vitamin D
and thyroid level. Sometimes supplementing those will make an allergy disappear. Awesome. Thanks, Ray. A few more here. These questions I think are great and they're obviously directly related to some concerns and some thoughts and just things that these women think I think are important, which is great. This woman asked about reversing autoimmunity in the toddler. Oh, progesterone has the most immediate effects against some things like rheumatoid arthritis and estrogen for a long time has been known as the main villain. Women have at least five times the incidence of all kinds of
autoimmune diseases as men and so it's been known for several decades that estrogen creates these. Way back in the 50s, women who were getting the early estrogen treatments were coming down with horrible rheumatoid arthritis and other autoimmune conditions, but the estrogen industry has diverted attention from that. Just by stopping taking supplements, I saw one woman in a week go from totally incapacitated by rheumatoid arthritis to having no symptoms just by stopping her medical estrogen supplement. Another woman with scleroderma was getting a hardening of the backs of her hands and her face just by stopping
the estrogen. That cleared up. Adding progesterone has the same effect as withdrawing from estrogen. Normalizing thyroid function and maintaining a good level of progesterone and vitamin D. So far I haven't seen it fail to stop the so-called autoimmune symptoms. Dry eyes is another one. Sometimes thyroid load does it, but all of the natural stabilizing factors, vitamin D, calcium, adequate protein, as well as the thyroid and progesterone. That's great. Ray, this woman asks, "What is actually considered early puberty in children?" Another woman asks about preteen hormones and should I honor
craving that my child might have for sugar, for example, or should I let them eat as much sugar as they want? It's important not to keep sugar in your mouth steadily so it satisfies the appetite, but then rinse the mouth to reduce cavities. What was the first question? Yes, sorry about that. I kind of asked a few questions at once. The first question was, "What is actually considered early puberty in children?" It's just a statistical thing. I looked at the average age of puberty in girls
in areas that were coconut-based economies. Their average age was 18. In animal experiments, polyunsaturated fats acting like estrogen, increasing estrogen production and activity, you can bring on puberty earlier with excess PUFA in the diet. My interpretation was that the coconuts in their diet were protecting against the estrogenic effects of polyunsaturated fats. The tendency in the last several decades has been for puberty to come earlier and earlier so that even 8 years old isn't considered extreme anymore. It had been that 9 years old about 40 years ago was notable as
early puberty, but 8 years, I think now, is in the same position that 9-year old puberty was 40 years ago. Wow, that just seems awfully early, for sure. Back to the sugar question, because I kind of put those together. You mentioned something about keeping sugar in the mouth too long. Does that just mean maybe rinsing after you've consumed sugar being a good effective measure? Yes. Rinsing with water and salt or what? No, just plain water. Okay, great. Ray, there's two more questions here. One woman asked,
actually three more questions. This is so great, by the way. Thank you so much for doing this. This woman asked about endometriosis, how that developed and why the tissue can become displaced in various spots in the body. The estrogen effect is to activate cell division and at an extreme, it increases the motility of the cells and the looseness. Progesterone should come in quickly and change the development of the tissue into glandular tissue. I think the basic problem is low thyroid function. When your estrogen isn't eliminated quickly and progesterone isn't produced
abundantly and quickly, then the endometrial cells keep getting the stimulus and besides growing excessively, they lose their tissue integrity when there isn't enough progesterone. It's the same effect in the cancer cell. Cancer under the influence of estrogen becomes more likely to metastasize and progesterone makes it tend to stay put. All of the women that I've known who had very serious endometriosis, I cured it immediately when they corrected their hypothyroidism. Just an immediate turning off of all of the symptoms. - Awesome. That's great, Rick. All right. I saved these last two
questions because I thought they were kind of more general parenting kind of topics. The first was from someone who said, "What do you think is the ideal learning environment for a young human together with a young family?" - Together with what? - Together with a young child and the family. What's the appropriate or what's the optimal learning environment? Also schools, et cetera, is the question. - I think the optimal thing is to have an interesting environment and that includes having adults talking about interesting things, constantly being
engaged in doing something that's interesting, which could be working. Any activity that is meaningful to the adult is going to be a learning experience for the kids. Experiencing adults being interested in life, I think, is the most important thing for kids to see that the world is intrinsically interesting and a matter for exploration, not for indoctrination. - That's awesome. Ray, that's so great. The last question is, I guess, kind of related because it was, "Does Ray have any kind of parting message
from this for parents?" I think you might have kind of talked about that, but the question was, "Would you have any kind of overriding message that you would give to parents of our next generation of people?" - To be watchful for imposed doctrines and ideologies and procedures, being critical of medical doctrines is just a starting point. The world, the culture has some very dangerous things that it wants to impose. You have to be watchful for the multiple ways those keep turning up. - We certainly have our work cut out for us, don't we? - Yeah.
- Ray, you're such a...I mean, this is such a bright light in so many ways. I really enjoy this. I also know that there's so many women who are going to listen to this and so many families and so many men and so many children who are actually going to hear this. I think we're all grateful for your time and your knowledge and your experience and your thoughtfulness. Thank you so much. - Okay. Fun talking to you. - Likewise. Until next time. - Bye. - Okay. Bye.