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You're listening to Holistic Living, brought to you by EastWest Healing and Performance. And now, here are your hosts, Josh and Jeanne Rubin. Holistic Living Welcome everyone to our new episode of Holistic Living. Today is July 17th, 2013 and today we luckily are getting Ray Peat back on our show. It's been a while. It's been a lot of pastoring and begging to get him back on the show. We finally got him on. He's a busy guy. Today we're going to be talking about energy metabolism.
It's going to be a 60-minute show. We're going to try to keep it as simple and efficient as possible. We will be taking callers. Love Talk is having some technical difficulties with my call right now. So, I'm not showing a calling number. The typical calling number that we use is 347-426-3546. If you call that number, it says there's no show scheduled. So, I'm having some technical difficulties because this is how we get Ray on the show. So, just bear with me for the next minute or two. Hopefully, he pops up. Jeanne pops up as well.
So, we can get them both on the show and get the show rolling. I guess I'll take care of some announcements or just FYI type of information. Of course, if you're interested in learning more about us, of course, you're calling in to learn about Ray Peat. First, of course, if you want to learn more about Ray's work, you can visit his website at RayPeat.com. R-A-Y-P-E-E-T.com. I'll give you a little background on him for those of you who don't know who he is. We've interviewed him many times. If you go to our website, EastWestHealing.com.
Hold on one second, guys. I need to refresh this. I just got a message from BlogTalk. I apologize. Bear with me. The calling number, once again, it's actually different. It's not the number that I gave you. It's 760-454-1100. Once again, 760-454-1100. We will be taking callers. Be patient. I want Ray to be able to answer the questions. I just sent you the numbers so this will be going on soon. If you want to learn more about Ray, go to his website, RayPeat.com.
He's got great articles. He sells his books. I think three or four or five books. On hormones, gestures, and women in nutrition and things like that. He's got a quarterly newsletter that I highly recommend you signing up for. Ray got his PhD in biology from the University of Oregon with a specialization in physiology. He's taught in many schools from the University of Oregon to Montana State University and the National College of Naturopathic Medicine and many others. He also does private nutritional counseling. He started his work with progesterone and related hormones in 1968.
Since then, he's done more research and published more articles, of course, which he shares on his website. I'm going to ask Ray if he wants to introduce himself and add to that. If you want to learn more about us, you can go to our website, EastWestHealing.com. I was talking about our website. On the top, you'll find the fifth link. It says Ray P. We have a list of a lot of the shows that we've done, past shows from other people, etc. There's a list that's being shared on the Internet.
They're actually on this page. You can listen to them all, download them all, and share them. We don't own them. Myself and my wife, we do nutritional counseling with clients all over the world, actually, through Skype. We have a cookbook, a Med Evolve Blueprint cookbook, that's on our website that's based on Ray's philosophy, as well as an online educational program that is PDFs, audios, and live calls bi-weekly. It's an online educational program called the Med Evolve Blueprint. You can take a look at that on our website as well.
Of course, you can follow us on Twitter, you can follow us on YouTube, you can follow us on Facebook, all that fun and annoying social media stuff that's out there. So, there they are. Let me get them actually on here, because I'm getting sick of hearing myself. Can you hear? Yes, hello. Oh, hey. Yes, we're both on. Okay. How's it going, Ray? Oh, very good. Good. Well, I did a small introduction for yourself, just the basics of who you are, what you've done, what you've taught.
Is there anything you might want to add about yourself in regards to, you know, I don't know, maybe what you're working on or just anything about your history that you want to let people know about? Right at the moment, I've been working on some of the similarities of the different organs. Recent newsletters were on the heart and the typical solid tumor as an organ, having some of the properties of other organs during stress. And currently, I'm working on both the lens of the eye and the brain
because they express some of those same properties of the failing heart and of tumor physiology. You see some of the same processes showing up in such different places and trying to generalize things so that various treatments and diets and programs and such don't seem arbitrary, so you can see what's in common. Right. Do you want to tell people how they can get your quarterly newsletter? Oh, yes. It's for, in the United States, a two-year subscription, bi-monthly, 12 issues, is $28. And outside of North America, it's $48. And they just email you through your website?
Yes, or post office box 5764 Eugene 97405. Great. And we highly recommend it, guys, for anyone wanting to learn and really pass through a lot of illusions that are out there when it comes to physiology. We've been studying Ray's work and getting these newsletters for a long time. It's really benefited us personally as well as professionally in working with ourselves and clients. So we highly recommend it. So let's move on to the show. Today we're going to be talking about NAK metabolism, kind of talk about a mishmash of topics.
And we'll take some callers if people have questions. Once again, the phone number is 760-454-1100. So I guess the first topic would be the body's alternative energy sources. A lot of people talk about macronutrients and you have all these diets out there. Everyone says high protein is good or high fat is good or high carb is good. And I think we all agree that all macronutrients are important. Of course, we all have different views on how much of one or the other we need.
But I guess we can kind of rewind it a little bit and maybe you can talk about, from your perspective, because you mentioned it on your site, in talking about the cells and talking about metabolism, and why it's so important when we talk about energy. Well, one of the things I've been interested in for a long time is the function of carbon dioxide in cells. And in some observations, people have seen that the most improbable organism is unable to live without carbon dioxide, even though they can live without oxygen.
And ordinarily, we think of oxygen turning into carbon dioxide as a waste product, but it really seems to be even more essential for life than oxygen. And carbohydrates are a very good source of carbon dioxide. They oxidize and produce a lot of carbon dioxide. And if carbon dioxide is that essential to life, then obviously the best food to produce it is going to be carbohydrates. In these recent newsletters, I've been pointing out some of the things that are becoming fairly common knowledge now.
The failing heart, for example. Well, if you just look at what happens when you exercise, when you're sitting at rest, the quiet muscle burns almost pure sugar and oxygen, pure glucose and oxygen. But as soon as it starts exercising, it shifts over to fat oxidation. And at maximum exercise, it's burning mostly fat and very little oxygen, very little sugar. But it's producing quite a bit of lactic acid because it's wasting sugar. It's burning the fat pretty thoroughly, but it's wasting the sugar and turning it over into lactic acid.
The failing heart does the same thing. It's exerting its maximum, and in doing that, it's burning fatty acids primarily rather than sugar. This process in general of substituting fat burning for sugar burning was called by P.J. Randle a cycle. It isn't really a cycle, but now it's called the Randle cycle, which means that if you burn fatty acids, that stops your burning glucose, oxidizing glucose. Instead, you're turning it into lactic acid. And diabetes consists of living on fatty acids and not being able to oxidize glucose,
but still turning glucose into lactic acid so that lactic acidemia becomes a problem in diabetes. Now, obviously, to make lactic acid out of glucose, it has to get into the cells. So this whole thing of transporting glucose into the cell, being where the failure comes in heart failure or diabetes or whatever, just isn't the case because if you're making lactic acid, obviously the sugar is getting into the cell. But something goes wrong in the oxidation process, and the cell begins to favor the oxidation of fat rather than glucose,
and that doesn't produce as much carbon dioxide, and that seems to be a basic problem for the cell that leads it down the path of reduced function or so-called non-survival. And a very similar thing happens in cancer cells. They begin turning glucose, if not into lactic acid, then on into fat, and then they oxidize the fat. And in treating heart disease, over the last five years or so, there's been quite a movement towards thinking of ways to stop the oxidation of fatty acids,
allowing the heart to avoid the Randle cycle and get back to oxidizing glucose instead of turning it into lactic acid. So, just based on what you said, which is great information, I guess, for the listeners, when you talk about how the cells or the muscles are using primarily fat, and you talked about foods, how carbohydrates are the most important because they increase the production of energy, which is CO2, can you define when you say carbohydrates what you mean by that, and then clarify,
because some people are going to hear that and maybe think, "What are you talking about eating a high-fat diet because our bodies are using fat for energy?" Can you clarify on that a little bit? Well, we can turn protein into both sugar and fat equivalent. So, when you're talking about energy, you have to consider that some of it might come from protein. But in the case of oxidizing protein, that's very wasteful besides being expensive. It produces a lot of waste material, ammonia, for example, and it turns on machinery, which resembles the stress reaction.
When we're in stress, we break down protein and turn it into energy materials. But the mechanism of oxidizing fat somewhat gets into the process of creating stress, especially the polyunsaturated fatty acids activate the same stress metabolites, which are the expensive enzymes that burning too much protein will activate. By carbohydrate, people generally mean both starches and sugars. It's simply anything that's made up of that same proportion of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen. And starches are just long chains of sugars. But in the case of most of the food starches, they're composed of pure glucose molecules.
And so when you're getting energy from starch, you're really burning pure glucose. And sucrose, the standard table sugar, that's also the main sugar of sweet fruits. And it consists of only half glucose and half fructose. And fructose happens to be able to metabolize without relying on the use of insulin. And so it has been used for feeding diabetics and for avoiding some of the stresses produced by the ups and downs of the insulin reactions. So getting the right amount of carbohydrates in relation to protein and fat is one way to basically increase glucose oxidation.
And if you're relying on fat, then you're inhibiting glucose oxidation, is really what you're saying in a simplistic sense. Correct. And fructose and glucose, assuming you're eating a sugar such as fruits. Right. Right. Now going with CO2 and talking about oxygen and things like that, we talk about antioxidants and what antioxidants are and how they allow oxygen to be used productively rather than destructively. Actually, someone quoting you. So we can say CO2 is an antioxidant, right, and not so much all these supplements out there.
We could say the carbohydrates that you recommend like the tropical fruits and the root vegetables are antioxidants. Are there more specific examples you could give in regards to antioxidants to help with the production of CO2 for the listeners? Well, running the oxidative process through the mitochondria very fast happens to be an anti-oxidative process in terms of avoiding toxic free radicals. And so the faster you burn oxygen usefully, oxidizing sugars, the less you have to worry about taking care of the free radical toxic products
that really develop when you slow down the respiratory process of burning fats and especially polyunsaturated fats. Vitamin E and vitamin C and uric acid, which is produced in our body, is a major antioxidant. But the marketing of the idea of antioxidants has created a big confusion in the area. The antioxidants in our body have to fit together with uric acid, which is naturally there, and the enzymes which naturally break down free radicals. And if you put things in that don't fit, an apparent antioxidant in a test tube can become a pro-oxidant in the body.
So things have to fit together so that vitamin A and vitamin E lock together, and vitamin E and vitamin C lock together, uric acid and vitamin C lock together, and the glucose and other sugars have to be streaming through the systems of enzymes turning into carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide has to be flowing out of the cell properly. The whole antioxidant system is really one piece, and if you try to stuff in any super antioxidants like they're selling as health products, you're likely to create more oxidation than you had without it.
A recent publication saw that cataracts are twice as common in men over the age of 65 who took big supplements of vitamin E and vitamin C, almost doubled their rate of cataracts. So when you talk about, you know, I talk to clients a lot about this, when you talk about, you know, you talk about like progesterone, you talk about vitamin E, vitamin C, and you're talking about all the benefits of it, are you talking more from a food sense, a macronutrient sense, or are you talking more from a supplemental sense?
Well, the vitamin E in particular has a peculiar history that it started out in the 1930s being called a fertility drug, a fertility nutrient. And the Schutz family of doctors studied it in treating women with clotting problems and fertility problems both. And they saw that it prevented abnormal clotting, which is a feature of excess estrogen. Estrogen has many problem side effects when it's excessive and unopposed. And the Schutz and others in the 1930s saw that vitamin E restored fertility and prevented heart disease by functioning as an anti-estrogen.
And around that same time, the polyunsaturated fats were being seen to have estrogen-like effects and to cause clotting circulatory problems. And animals that were fed on a high polyunsaturated fat diet were sterile. And the various forces such as the estrogen industry didn't want estrogen associated with sterility and heart disease. And various pressures turned vitamin E into an antioxidant rather than an anti-estrogenic material. So by 1950, the whole history of vitamin E had been turned into an antioxidant.
So I don't see it as primarily an antioxidant. I see it as anti-inflammatory and anti-estrogenic with this potential side effect of protecting against free radicals if it's in the right concentration and balanced with other chemicals. So in a sense, because estrogen creates that hypoxic environment at the cell level, correct? Where vitamin E does the opposite. You're saying it's almost like an antioxidant. It allows oxygen to be used more efficiently at the cell level. So in a sense, because of that, it's anti-estrogen.
Yeah, both estrogen and anything that creates inflammation wastes oxygen and tends to lead to lactic acid production. And vitamin E by stopping the inflammation and estrogen effect is also making more oxygen available and reducing the lactic acid problem. Now going with estrogens and some of the next topics and questions that kind of correlated with that, and we're talking about ourselves, and we talked about pre-fatty acids. Can you talk a little bit about, you know, I know it's a huge topic and how it can cause a sluggish liver.
It can be recirculated to the body and inhibit T4 to T3 conversion, cause a hypoxic environment at the cell level, leads with DNA, etc. Can you talk a little bit about that in regards to pre-fatty acid production, cell metabolism, and the thyroid, you know, in regards to energy production a little bit more in depth? Yeah, thyroid is the hormone that activates our whole oxidative system and leads to the production of carbon dioxide when it's working properly. And estrogen, besides working at the cell level to waste oxygen, happens to block the enzymes that secrete thyroid hormone.
The fatty acids that are saturated happen to oxidize with fair safety. The polyunsaturated fatty acids are the ones that are more likely to break down and produce free radicals. Cells distinguish between these two types of fatty acids and prefer to oxidize the saturated fats. That means that any time you eat a little bit of excess unsaturated fat, it primarily goes into storage because the cells prefer not to oxidize it but to store it instead. But estrogen prefers those oxygen-wasting free radical-producing fats. It preferentially causes them to be liberated from storage.
So under the influence of estrogen, all of the free fatty acids increase. Women have on average higher level of free fatty acids circulating but preferentially estrogen brings the polyunsaturated fats out of storage, especially the very long chain polyunsaturated. And these are the ones that most interfere with other levels of thyroid function, not just the secretion which estrogen directly does but with the transport and metabolism of the thyroid hormone. So at many levels, estrogen and the polyunsaturated fats are working together to inhibit the function of the thyroid hormone and the oxidative system.
Does that also have to do with estrogen-wasting glucose, estrogen stimulating the adrenal cortex, like putting yourself into that kind of sympathetic state, that hypoglycemic state, which as well causes the breakdown of proteins and increases free fatty acids? Does it have to do a lot with its function of wasting glucose? Estrogen directly stimulates the secretion of insulin and that tends to lower blood sugar and create fat storage if you've eaten more than enough.
But it also directly stimulates the adrenal cortex, increasing aldosterone and cortisol and that causes the whole system to go into the emergency reaction process. The cortisol tends to bring blood sugar up where the insulin tends to lower it. So the more estrogen is increased and unopposed by protective things such as progesterone, DHEA, pregnenolone and thyroid, then the more system stresses and tendency to failure there are. Right. Now kind of moving forward with estrogen since we're on that topic and we're talking about today endometriosis as well as body temperature.
In one of your articles you talk about the work of Desjardins, D-E-S-J-A-R-D-I-N-S. Oh yeah. And you talk about how estrogen's interactions with unsaturated fats causing damage to the brain cells, increasing free radicals. And this causes the pituitary to remain chronically active which basically produces a state of constant oestrus. Now in regards to endometriosis, is that a major factor? What are your thoughts on endometriosis? Is it the unsaturated fats? Is it not enough carbohydrates?
Desjardins and his group were interested in many of the side effects of estrogen on the brain, not just the effects on the pituitary but the endorphins, the effects of iron accumulation and the fatty acids and their interactions. And the liver is, because of the estrogen thyroid effects and the constant pushing up of the growth hormone in particular from the pituitary, the liver from an early age is feminized. And this shows up in studies of liver transplant plants from female donors to male donors and male donors to female donors and various combinations.
And they found that apparently because of this process of stress hormones and the growth hormone feminizing women's livers, they make poor candidates relative to the livers of men for transplant and the women have more trouble receiving liver transplant because of estrogen's interaction with the thyroid. The thyroid and liver causing stress for both of the organs. So you're saying basically endometriosis is more of the inability to detoxify this excess estrogen versus a low progesterone? Yeah, it involves the liver and the pituitary but estrogen is very central to the actual lesion or abnormal tissue of endometriosis.
Simply by reducing estrogen exposure you can alleviate the symptoms of endometriosis. So the endometriosis is actually what causes the endometrial tissue to be or express the enzyme aromatase which manufactured estrogen which they used to think existed only in the ovary then it turned out to exist in fat cells, breast cells, skin cells, bone and muscle, everywhere that's under stress will begin to produce estrogen molecules. And that happens in the endometrial tissue.
It should be exposed to estrogen for only about 12 hours each month and then progesterone should surge up to 50 or 100 times higher concentration and cause the cells to give up their production of estrogen and release what they had. But instead of that the aromatase keeps churning out estrogen and the estrogen excites the tissue turns on the cyclooxygenase enzyme which turns polyunsaturated fatty acids into prostaglandins creating inflammation that causes the pain contractions and all of the symptoms.
And the inflammation from the prostaglandin in turn creates more aromatase and so it gets a vicious cycle going. And the simplest most physiological way to stop it is to eat a diet with adequate protein and sugar and trace minerals and vitamins but to make sure your thyroid is functioning. I've seen people who had been constantly for months or years suffering painful endometriosis who in two or three days completely stopped the symptoms permanently just with quick acting thyroid and a good diet.
And aspirin or other blockers of prostaglandin production all by themselves can greatly reduce the formation of estrogen and break the cycle. Can you talk about how polyunsaturated fats actually activate aromatase enzymes? So you can see that unsaturated fats are estrogenic because they waste vitamin E as well. So for people with endometriosis of course eliminating unsaturated fats will help reduce estrogen production. Yes, they're central to endometriosis.
Right. Talking about aromatase enzyme, you talked about before, but correct me if I'm wrong, how aspirin therapy actually inhibits aromatase enzyme and actually can upregulate energy production. Can you elaborate a little bit more on aspirin therapy? Yes. In cancers, bowel or breast or whatever, the cells that are stressed begin to produce estrogen and the estrogen in the other tissues no matter what it is, as long as there's polyunsaturated fat available, the estrogen is going to activate the cyclooxygenase enzyme that makes prostaglandins
and keep the aromatase active producing more estrogen. So even if you aren't eating it currently, the polyunsaturated fat that was incorporated into your tissues is going to break down under stress, flow into the bloodstream and feed the production of estrogen, whatever tissue it's in, but especially in the irritated, inflamed cancerous tissue. Okay. Sugar is one of the things that can reduce the flow out of your tissues of the polyunsaturated fats into your bloodstream. Niacinamide is another thing that simply limits the release of these fatty acids from the tissues.
So both sugar and niacinamide back up the function of aspirin. So people suffering with endometriosis, it would be like getting the right amount of carbs, regulating your thyroid, using niacinamide and possibly asthma therapy? Yes. Now we'll go a little bit more with estrogen since we're on that topic and we're talking about body temperature and pulse, which we'll talk about a little bit more.
What is estrogen's role playing in this, you know, since we're on the topic of endometriosis as well? Because you talked about how estrogen increases heat loss, you know, and how it can stimulate nitric oxide, you know, and lead to vasodilation and all those things. How does that, you know, maybe you can correlate that a little bit with body temperature and pulse in endometriosis?
Yeah, even though estrogen is turning on the stress hormones and the stress hormones tend to protect the body temperature, at a certain point of estrogen dominance, even the adrenaline, which tends to tighten up blood vessels in the skin and make your hands and feet cold to keep the brain and heart temperature up for the function, and the cortisol, which should keep churning your tissues over producing heat, even those aren't enough to keep your body warm and so your temperature falls after a certain total exposure to unopposed estrogen.
And the reason progesterone and thyroid, progesterone all by itself without driving the oxidative process, can drastically and quickly increase your temperature while at the same time lowering the stress hormones that normally keep your temperature up in an emergency. The progesterone is blocking the estrogen's effect, simply letting you return to a more normal set point in your temperature. In doing that, it stops these mechanisms that cause flushing such as nitric oxide that causes vasodilation and turning red and feeling hot, which causes the falling temperature.
There's actually a caller. Do you mind taking a question from a caller? Okay. Go ahead, 417. You're on the air. Yes, this is David, and thank you for having this show. I hope this question makes sense here. I'm going to try to formulate this the best I can. I remember reading about the Lewis and Clark expedition, and Lewis and Clark were offered, and their team were offered salmon by the Northwestern Indians, and they just did not want to eat that.
They'd been eating elk and deer and different ruminants and obviously were almost repulsed by the taste of the salmon. My question is just about human physiology in general and about the polyunsaturated fats and about saturated fats. Number one, how are these tribes, and I know we don't know a whole lot about their health in general, but how is a tribe like these Northwestern Indian tribes surviving and possibly even thriving off of living off of salmon as maybe their main protein, even though that may not be exactly true?
And is it possible that they have learned how to balance certain plants and sugars in these polyunsaturated fats and maybe even, you know, because they're maybe not storing too many of these polyunsaturated fats and maybe because they're not living in too stressful of an environment like we are in this modern age, that somehow they're able to thrive off of those types of foods? Yeah, the Northwest Indians had a lot of varied foods. I don't know how much salmon they really ate year-round, but I imagine they dried quite a bit of it.
And various mixtures of bear fat and berries and fruits were very well able to survive travel and storage and such. And so those were, I think, usual staples among them. Is that called pomegranate? Something like that. I forget. I think I've heard it. And was that fish or was that more of a ruminant saturated fat? All of it I've seen was bear fat. Yeah, yeah, okay. So that wouldn't actually be even a ruminant fat, would it? Okay. Huh. But that would probably be a pretty saturated fat though, wouldn't it?
Because bears like to eat a lot of fruit and grass and they aren't primarily carnivores. When they've looked at their stomach contents, it looked like they were fruit eaters. Well, and you know, that's the other, that was actually in my list here, kind of, and I hope this is interesting to ask the question. I don't know. I think it ties things together, hopefully, in an interesting way.
You know, grizzly bear is another animal that, you know, gorges themselves on salmon for a short period of time, and that's probably not very long, but maybe a few months. And then that may even be closer to the fall. I don't know how that spawning works. But I know they go into hibernation and I know I've heard, in fact, I think I've heard that on this show way back, about talking about how they actually increase their serotonin to go into hibernation.
And that was also tying into the fact that you've got, like, you know, deer here, like where I live in Missouri, and they're ruminants and they're eating acorns, you know, all through the fall. And I don't know, you know, they're probably eating grasses and different things. And of course, they can convert those things to saturated fat, I know. But then you've got squirrels and other rodent-type creatures that are eating all these different nuts and things.
And I just wonder how much that's been studied as far as how that affects their lives and their metabolism and everything. The squirrels have been studied pretty well. And they found that when they kept them from eating the acorn-type, highly unsaturated things in the fall, they didn't hibernate. Wow. Yeah, the PUFA increased the serotonin and put them to sleep. And they get even good sleep, typically. They'll wake up a few times during the winter to sleep normally. But the serotonin, it's a type of trooper that they like to wake up from and have a sleep.
So, you know, and this may be getting way too deep here, but I keep thinking about all these different things like that, and I'm sure reading your books about, you know, it appears that all these different life forms, obviously including humans, we've all, you know, we've been placed around the globe in different types of environments and ecosystems. And we appear to try to make the best of whatever situation we're in with what we have. Is it possible animals that are hibernating kind of stumble into this polyunsaturated fat thing
and realize they kind of get into the state that they go, "Well, shoot, I'm just going to go to sleep here for the next few months." It's a lot easier than trying to struggle through it. You know what I mean? Yeah, I think that's a gradual adaptation to seasonal stress. That people get depressed in the winter, but they aren't able to spend four or five months sleeping off. Yeah, and so that's the other thing. Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, I'm sorry about that. I have to cut you off because I've got some other questions from colleagues.
Okay, I'm sorry. I've been talking about this way too long, but anyway. Okay, thank you. We all could. Okay, bye. Bye. Well, I've got a question from a caller. They actually just emailed me since we're talking about, you know, the cells and estrogen and all that. I'm just wondering your thoughts on, you know, some people say, "Well, I have hot flashes." You know, from your standpoint, we know the mechanism behind them. We kind of just talked about it and what estrogen does.
You know, how come some women will get estrogen therapy and it actually eliminates their hot flashes? I have a little bit about that in my last newsletter on the hot flashes. It's on my website. I think it just creates a stress that keeps them from experiencing the ups and downs. So it's almost like maybe then with increased heat loss, they're, you know, have such a key validation and taking that excess estrogen kind of just pushes them over the edge and almost like shuts things down?
Yeah, I think it slows the metabolism enough that they aren't going in and out of the state. Okay. Okay. Another question, kind of maybe on topic, off topic, I guess we could say, kind of located. But it's talking about, here it is. I think we've talked about it before on the show, but I'll bring it up again. If you have mothers out there and their children have their babies, will have colic or eczema or something like that. So of course the doctor will say, you know, you have food intolerances as a mother.
You know, you can't have beer, you can't have eggs, you can't have berries or melons or whatever it may be because of a lab. You know, and that actually benefits the child. You know, what are your thoughts on that? How can someone, what's going on there and how can someone work out of that to get to the point where they can eat these beneficial foods? In animal experiments, some people saw that the mildest allergen would produce a deadly allergic reaction if they lowered the blood sugar.
And the mother's system can pass allergens through the milk so that even the baby can experience the interaction of ups and downs of blood sugars and allergens. But with these animal studies, they found that if they increased the blood sugar artificially, just putting a tube in with some glucose, the deadliest allergens that had killed normal animals would just cause a little sniffling when they were getting extra glucose pumped into the bloodstream.
But lowering the blood sugar from whatever cause would cause a mild allergen to kill the animal in shock from an allergic reaction releasing histamine and serotonin. And that I've seen many times in people who used to rush to the hospital for a shot or glucose or something or who carried an adrenaline pen with them for an allergic exposure or a bee bite or something. Instead, they would keep a big bottle of Coke in the fridge and drink the Coke quickly as soon as they had the exposure and stop going to the hospital.
So, if I hear you correctly, what you're saying is that postpartum is more of a hypoglycemic reaction. It's the inability to regulate your blood glucose which is creating these allergens which are passing along. So, if you're able to regulate your blood sugar, and you talk about in that article, how flashes enter DNA genes, how in an experiment, how flashes were found to be increased by lowering blood sugar and decreased by moderately increasing blood sugar. Progesterone has a huge part in this in stabilizing blood sugar.
Do you think that it has a role postpartum, having that low progesterone and being hypoglycemic and being estrogen dominant? And if someone was able to regulate their blood sugar and increase thyroid production, it wouldn't so much have to do with the foods? That doing that alone would help them and the baby?
Yeah, the hormones. Even when a woman has had a very happy pregnancy, sometimes because the pregnancy itself is driving her hormones and keeping things in balance, as soon as she has the baby, there's a letdown in which she discovers her own hypothyroid progesterone deficient state, which becomes very excessively estrogen dominated. And that causes the postpartum depression syndrome along with a whole range of other possible consequences such as rheumatoid arthritis and MS and allergies, seizures and so on. Okay. I hope that answers the listener's question. Do you mind taking another question from a caller? Sure, fine.
Caller from 913, you're on the air, if you have a question. 913 or 931? Sorry, 931. Okay, just wanted to make sure. Hi, this is Carmen Hunter and I've been in communication with Ray by email and he's been more than helpful. Just real briefly, I've been on the Ray P plan with orange juice and food for about 23 days or so.
And within three days of starting the food plan, I was able to actually stop taking my thyroid medicine and my temperatures actually went up and have stayed up and my pulse is actually going up as well. My question here is, does it take the pulse a little bit longer to follow with temperatures? And if so, what does that mean? The temperatures have been 98.1 to 99.2 consistently without a break and rising after food. So I'm wondering, is the pulse going to follow or what might be going on there? How fast is the pulse?
The pulse goes anywhere in the morning when I wake up it's about 65 and then through the day it goes up to 85. It's probably okay. I think 85 is a very good daytime pulse rate. Okay, is that consistent? Because it's not every day, it varies. Yeah, you just should stay alert to possible fluctuations in your stress hormones and thyroid and such, but those numbers sound very good.
Wonderful. Okay, the other question I had briefly is, I went to the doctor yesterday and had all of my labs pulled, the lactic acid and all of the thyroid labs, everything all over again. I'm wondering after being off of medication what I can expect with my labs or does it really even matter what they say as long as I feel good and my temperatures and pulse stay the same? Well, you want to keep your eye on TSH if you have the opportunity.
You don't want it to go too high because it will start creating the symptoms of hypothyroidism. It creates inflammation and changes your blood viscosity and heart rhythm and so on. So it's safest to keep your TSH down and you can do that usually just by eating a good balanced diet, lots of fruit. Okay, how high is too high to keep an eye on? The highest my TSH ever was was 3.0 and the joint pain and everything else settled in then.
And by the way, since eating the way that you recommend or what your sites recommend, my joint pain has completely disappeared. Yeah, I would say that 3 is always too high. 3 is too high, okay. Yeah, and below 1 is where I feel more comfortable with it and in a big population, the freedom from thyroid cancer is best when the TSH is below 0.4. 0.4, okay, great. One last thing and I promise that's it.
How do you actually get rid of the stored PUFAs? Do we want to limit the release or detox or how do we get rid of them? The easiest way to do that besides avoiding them. That really is a problem. It's worse than storing DDT I think because we do have the ability. The liver can treat them like a poison and excrete them so they pass out through the urine without having to be oxidized. If the liver isn't just very well supported, the polyunsaturated fats can block those enzymes in the liver the way estrogen does.
So you have to make sure that your liver isn't under stress. Don't go too long without eating or getting rest and so on. Okay, great. Thank you so much for your time and everything has literally changed my life. I've been to 17 doctors over 13 years and have never felt better than I feel today in the last two and a half weeks. So I appreciate you very much and thank you for your time on email and for your interviews. Very good. Thank you so much. Thanks for calling in Carmen. Alright, bye-bye.
I have one more big question Ray and then we'll let you go because I promise I'll only take up an hour of your time. Talking about body temperature and pulse, just for the listeners because these people were talking about it. And this correlates with the question someone sent in for you. What does body temperature and pulse tell us about energy metabolism? Do you find that to be more accurate than a thyroid panel?
And how long do you recommend taking temper pulse? I know people hyper focus on this because I think Broderbarnes recommended 10 minutes on your armpit. Do you recommend axillaries? Do you recommend orally, etc.? As long as you do it in the same way in the same place, it doesn't matter very much. The mouth is quicker than the armpit usually and I found that some people had fat armpits and it would take about two hours to get the temperature up through that thick layer of fat.
And then in hot, humid weather, one summer we had 90 degree weather and all of the hypothyroid people had normal temperatures so I checked their pulse. These people coming in with 98.6 temperatures, a lot of them had 45 per minute pulse rates. And I realized you have to look at more than one indicator when you have an environment that would keep a rock up at a normal temperature. And so there are other indicators. The pulse rate and temperature are the quickest and easiest.
Eardrum temperature is very quick to take if you have a good instrument. A lot of them aren't consistent. The Achilles reflex relaxation test is a very quick and a very definite indicator of thyroid function as it affects the nerves and muscles. Some people on the internet have demonstrated something that's useless for the thyroid. You want the toe to hang freely and relaxed when you kneel in a chair so that if you thump it and get a twitch so your toes go away from your body,
the foot should relax with complete instantaneous relaxation so that it looks just like a piece of jelly flopping there. After the outward twitch, the relaxation should be utterly relaxed and floppy if your thyroid is good. Right. And what we're looking at with temperature and pulse is how our cells are using glucose, oxygen and thyroid. So we're really getting a big picture of our thyroid. And would you agree though that, I don't know, I just find that people think that temperature and pulse are going to change overnight when they do this.
Would you agree that it just shows you that you're going in the right direction and it just takes much more consistency of what you're doing to get that consistent regulation? Yeah. If you add to the good diet a supplement of pregnenolone and thyroid, for example, you can get there pretty quickly. But to get there just with diet, it depends on how much PUFA you have stored in your tissues, for example. A big fat person has a lot of work to get rid of some of the toxic stuff.
A very skinny person can sometimes, apparently like this woman mentioned, it just took a little while for the diet to bring her metabolism up. I've seen people in as little as a week pop out of a chronic state of stress and start metabolizing. Right. Great. Well, I have kind of run through all my questions for the hour that I promised you we'd talk. We had some callers, which I appreciate and definitely appreciate you taking the time to answer those questions.
Definitely appreciate the time for you to come out today and spend the time here and educate us all. Is there anything you want to add in regards to what we talked about for the listeners before we go? Nope. All right. Well, once again, Ray, we really appreciate it. I'm sure I'm speaking for everyone. We really learned a ton from your research and information. I'm sure you know this, but it's helping a lot of people. So I think we all thank you. Okay. You're welcome.
Well, have a great week and a great weekend and we'll talk to you later. Okay. Thank you. Thanks, Ray. So for all the listeners, of course, this show is recorded on Blog Talk Radio. It's recorded on our Blog Talk Radio show page. You can listen to it after. You can download it later if you want to. It's actually uploaded to iTunes as well as an MP3. I think if you're on iTunes, you know, on the podcast and you search Josh Rubin or Jeanne Rubin or Holistic Living, our podcast will come up.
If you want to find our Blog Talk Radio show page, just go to eastwestradio.com. In the upper right-hand corner, you'll see the little microphone for the Blog Talk Radio show. And you can find this show as well as past shows. We appreciate everyone taking time out tonight to listen to the show as well as for people to listen to the show later on. Hopefully, I will be able to get Ray back on the show sooner or later.
If I do, you guys will know, pay attention to our Facebook page, EastWest Healing and Performance, or the Metabolic Blueprint, which is a closed group, as well as our Twitter page. Wish you all a great evening and a great weekend. Need one more reason why your Safeway store is just better? How about free Cuisinart Classic Cutlery or Elite Flatware? That's right! For every $10 you spend, earn a free stamp saver you can redeem for Cuisinart items.
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