Paused at 0:00.
Well once again welcome and thank you for tuning in to this month's Ask Your Herb Doctor. My name is Andrew Murray. For those of you who perhaps have never listened to the show before, we have a very special guest speaker with us, Dr. Raymond Peat. There is the odd occasion where people have called in and they've never heard him before, but I know a lot of people that are listening to the show are listening purely to glimpse some of his insights because I know he's always got a different answer for things.
The number here if you're in the area is 707-986-923-3911 or there's an 800 number for people outside the area code which is 1-800-KMUD-RAD. From 7.30 until the end of the show at 8 o'clock you're invited to call in with any questions either related or unrelated to this month's topic of Cal Prop 65, California's Proposition 65. I started very briefly towards the end of July's show saying I wanted to bring out some inconsistencies or incongruencies with Prop 65 in the legislature in California and we'll be bringing Dr. Peat on here in probably 10 or 15 minutes.
I wanted to outline some specific testing that we've done personally for products as part of GMP protocol for ICP-MS testing of metals and specifically for the California Proposition 65 metals which are arsenic, cadmium, lead and mercury. So what I wanted to start with was the 1986 California voters approved initiative to address their growing concerns about exposure to toxic chemicals and that initiative became the Safe Drinking Water and Toxic Enforcement Act of 1986 better known by its original name of Prop 65.
Now Prop 65 requires the state to publish a list of chemicals known to cause cancer or birth defects or other reproductive harm. This list which must be updated at least once a year has grown to include approximately 800 chemicals since it was first published in 1987 and Prop 65 requires businesses to notify Californians about significant amounts of chemicals in the products they purchase in their homes or workplaces or that are released into the environment. By providing this information Prop 65 enables Californians to make informed decisions about
protecting themselves from exposure to these chemicals and Prop 65 also prohibits California businesses from knowingly discharging significant amounts of listed chemicals into sources of drinking water. Hooray you say. The Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment, the OEHHA, as only these acronyms can be so stupendously long, administers the Prop 65 program. OEHHA which is part of the California Environmental Protection Agency also evaluates all currently available scientific information on substances considered for placement on the Prop 65 list. Now two months ago and the month prior to that, it was June, May, June and July, we
did a program with Dr. Peat on progesterone explaining how the marginalization and demonization if you like actually of progesterone is completely wrong and how the scientific evidence to put it on the Prop 65 list was completely erroneous and there are very very innocuous products that are on the Prop 65 list that you probably have never never heard of or never imagined could be on there. But Prop 65 labels are just becoming increasingly apparent in stores especially in the supplement departments. We walk the aisles of the supplement departments and take a look at whatever products you're
looking at for alternative health care and you often find these small Prop 65 labels stuck on the bottles just purely saying that the products may contain chemicals known to the state of California to cause reproductive harm or cancer and as we'll find out it's a lot of litigation here. It's not really factual and I'm going to bring out some very striking incongruencies here. Now a chemical can either be listed if either of two independent committees or scientists and health professionals find that the chemical is being clearly shown to cause cancer or
birth defects or other reproductive harm and these two committees, the Carcinogen Identification Committee, the CIC and a Developmental and Reproductive Toxicant Identification, this is the DART, they're part of OHHAS's Science Advisory Board. The committee members are appointed by the governor and are designated as the state's qualified experts and these are experts for evaluating chemicals under Prop 65. When determining whether a chemical should be placed on the list the committees base their decision on the most current scientific information available and the OHHAS staff scientists compile all relevant scientific evidence on various chemicals for the committees
to review. The committees also consider comments from the public before making their decisions. So that's the first way. The second way for a chemical to be listed is if an organisation designated as an authoritative body by the CIC or DART, the Identification Committee, has identified it as causing cancer or birth defects or other reproductive harm. The following organisations have been designated as authoritative bodies, the US Environmental Protection Agency, the US Food and Drug Administration, National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, the National Toxicology Programme and the International Agency for Research on Cancer.
The third way for a chemical to be listed is if an agency of the state or federal government requires that it be labelled or identified as causing cancer or birth defects or other reproductive harm. Now most chemicals listed in this manner are prescription drugs that are required by the US FDA contain warnings relating to cancer or birth defects or other reproductive harm. We've seen plenty of drugs like that. Now the fourth way requires the listing of chemicals meeting certain scientific criteria and identified in the California Labour Code as causing cancer or birth defects or other
reproductive harm. And this method established the initial chemical list following voter approval of Prop 65 in 1986 and continues to be used as the basis for listing as appropriate. Now how about this? Businesses with less than 10 employees and government agencies are exempt from Proposition 65 warning requirements and prohibition on discharges into water drinking sources. OK, did you catch that? So if your business has less than 10 employees or you're a government agency, you're completely exempt from discharging waste into drinking water and the relevant Prop 65 warnings.
So Proposition 65's warning requirement has provided, on the upside, an incentive for manufacturers to remove listed chemicals from their products. For example, trichloroethylene, which causes cancer, is no longer used in most correction fluids for wiping out type. Reformulated paint strippers do not contain the carcinogen methylene chloride and toluene, which causes birth defects or other reproductive harm, has been removed from many nail care products. In addition, the Prop 65 enforcement action prompted manufacturers to decrease the lead content in ceramic tableware and wineries to eliminate the use of lead-containing foil caps on wine bottles.
So whilst the Prop has some very positive benefits, it drastically needs reframing within a realistic criteria. How can a business with fewer than 10 employees be exempt from a legislation that would sue a larger company producing the same product? And how is it that commonly available foodstuffs are far over the maximum reliable daily limit currently in place and legislated for by Prop 65? It seems the only winners from Proposition 65 are the attorneys who bring the lawsuits, and there are some additional facts that are not so commonly known.
Now, chief amongst these are, since Californians have been warned of possible carcinogens for the past 27 years, one would expect to see a decline in cancer rates compared to those states that didn't adopt similar right-to-know laws. In fact, no such decline exists. There isn't a single medical study that demonstrates any public health benefits of Proposition 65, and there is no evidence that Prop 65 has lowered cancer incidence amongst Californians. Most startling. Proposition 65 has been a bonanza for the bounty hunter law firms that drive such lawsuits using paid plaintiffs.
Between 2000 and 2011, there were 2,381 settlements that cost targets nearly $180 million, exclusive of plaintiffs' legal costs and court costs. Sadly, the systematic legalized abuses surrounding Prop 65 have resulted in all too real economic effects on individuals as well as their employers. Our workers suffer lower income or job security in affected businesses, and the California government has had to spend taxpayer money for administrative and court costs relating to the law. So let's look at some real-world examples of actual values for some Prop 65 chemicals
that I've personal experience working with, and being GMP-compliant, we have to periodically test our products for the so-called California Big Four. So these are, as I said, arsenic, cadmium, lead, and mercury. How do we do this? The most common process now is called ICP-MS. It's inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry, and one of the most sophisticated technologies to date, to quantify components to detect levels down to three parts per billion. So typically a PPB, part per billion, quantification is what's used, and typically that detection
limit is about four parts per billion, as low as it can go. It may well change as time goes on and technology improves, but certainly much more sophisticated than the previous calibrations for it. Now Prop 65 components of natural medicinal herbs which are tested by ICP-MS include, as I said, arsenic, cadmium, lead, and mercury. Now for above-ground foliage, the analysis shows typical ranges in the low teens to 60s of parts per billion, not of mercury typically, but for cadmium, arsenic, and lead. Sub-analysis, typical ranges mid-twenties to hundreds, depending on the location grown and the species.
Now I'll just give you a quote here from some before and after extraction results that we've done personally. We'd purchase a product, we would spot check it for confirmation of a vendor certificate, send it off and get an ICP-MS analysis for it. Once the product's cleared QC and has been produced, that extract is also then sent off for ICP-MS analysis and then we can see what kind of product we've produced or what the extraction process has done for the metals that may have been present in the raw material.
So turmeric root, have a think about that will you? Lots of people eat turmeric for its health benefits. It's documented anti-inflammatory and anti-cancer activity are published and have been known for some time, especially in Ayurvedic medicine. Now the quantity, typical quantity in raw root was as follows. Arsenic 395 parts per billion, cadmium 41.9, lead 646 and fortunately mercury was undetected. So after extraction, the liquid extract was retested and came back with the following report. Arsenic 68.1, cadmium undetected, lead 6.6, mercury undetected. Another fairly common herb, Lobelia.
Arsenic was 43.9, cadmium 79.6, lead 357 and mercury 10.2. Now after extraction, the liquid extract was retested and came back with the following report where all the tested elements were actually below the detection limit. And then Echinacea root, people are very familiar with Echinacea. The arsenic there was 115 and the cadmium came back at 20.5 and the lead was 17.3 and mercury in that sample was undetected. And then after extraction, the liquid extract was retested and came back with the following report arsenic 5.9, cadmium, lead and mercury undetected.
In fact, in all of the ICP-MS testing that we've done, which is extensive, extraction produces a 5 to 10 fold and above removal of any existing raw material components listed by Prop 65 and resulting in the maximum allowable daily limits, which are well within Prop 65's legislatively directed values. In many cases, the raw material would fall outside the allowable exposure. But what I really want to point out was the foodstuffs we had tested. So crab, we had crab tested and this is local crab here from Sheldacove on the Pacific coast here.
So crab, arsenic came back at 12,400. So previous herbs would be things like 395, 43 and 115. The crab was 12,400. Now when I spoke to the scientists at the lab that tested this, they did offer the consolation that this arsenic was not potentially a toxic product and that they could do specific speciation for this to find out whether or not the actual amount of toxic arsenic was as high as it looked like. So anyway, the cadmium was 10.4. The lead was 10.3 and mercury was 109, 109 parts per billion mercury.
Now this vastly exceeds the maximum allowable daily limits set by Prop 65, given you conceivably consume 8 to 10 ounces of crab in one serving compared with a half teaspoon dose of extract taken one to three times per day. Now how about this, cod. We tested cod and the cod came back with an arsenic count of 115. Actually the cadmium was less than 9.4. The lead came back at 30.3 and mercury was 473 parts per billion. So eating a 12 ounce portion of this would give you way higher exposure to methylmercury,
the most toxic and abundant oceanic form that we get exposed to. Okay, but it gets worse. Halibut, we tested some halibut. Arsenic was 602. Cadmium, it was down to 9.2. The lead was 23 and mercury was 794 parts per billion. Again with a serving amount typically of 8 to 10 ounces. So the last thing I did was for seafood was salmon. There was a young fish, it was about a nine pound fish, so it was quite a small one. And obviously we'll get into the whole predation thing and the food chain accumulation, et
cetera, which became pretty evident. So this nine pound fish came in slightly better with these values. Arsenic was 428, cadmium 10.1, lead was less than 10.1, mercury was 72. So still with a much higher MADL set by Prop 65, whichever way you cut it. So legislation for dietary supplement manufacturers imposes stringent maximum allowable daily limits set by Prop 65 values, which pale into insignificance when compared to seafood, for example. Now we also tested some elk meat, which had been hunted and it was not surprising that it was very clean.
Now the only detectable component was arsenic and it had a value of 64.7, but lead, mercury and cadmium were undetected. So I just wanted to say that terrestrial roots and foliage crops naturally sequester minerals found in a rock, which form the soil in which they grow. And pollution in industrial countries that's airborne finds its way back to the soil by being washed out in rains or as fallout from airborne particulates heavier than air, characterizing Asian or Indian farm products subjected to the conditions reminiscent of the era of industrialization in Europe.
The products I mentioned were all certified organic, by the way. Now terrestrial and oceanic life grazing on foliage or consuming other animals sequester these accumulated products. And the higher up the food chain, the higher the value in the animal as seen from our experiments. Now the whole point is the meaning of any initiative like Prop 65 to save us from harm has to be weighed both by the freedoms lost as a result of government being in charge to look after us, rather than we the people as a self-governing body with practical and
reasonable jurisprudence, not dictated by our control for higher bounty hunters, but by common sense, which seems to have gone the way of the dinosaurs. Now I know when I'd spoken to Dr. Peat preparing some of the material for two months ago, looking at progesterone, that progesterone was on the Prop 65 list. And we went through the science and the committee papers that were used as "evidence" for suspecting progesterone as a mitogen or as a cancer promoter, when actually Dr. Peat is very familiar with the whole progesterone tobacco and having studied hormones, especially progesterone
as one of his thesis past his PhD. So Dr. Peat, are you on here? OK, well, sorry to have blathered on here for 20 minutes with what I was first talking about. But in terms of Proposition 65 and its actual effects to the consumer, don't you think that some of this is a little bit out of control in terms of writing laws for it and giving amounts which they say, they clearly say, that they're using a 1,000 times safety factor?
So I know for progesterone that you're very aware of how maligned it was and there was absolutely no real evidence for it because the test that they did on the beagles, etc., was really pretty poor scientific process. But in terms of Prop 65, do you have any thoughts on it in terms of how it affects people or what you think the government are doing? Well, the way the committee is set up... Dr. Peat, could you speak up a bit? People in charge of choosing the evidence are appointed and they are basically able
to lobby for products that they're associated with. When I was in contact with the agency about 10 years ago, three of the members were from a single university. These three all had conflicts of interest. One woman was a representative of a company developing transdermal products, including hormones. Two of the people were connected with the development of a new approach to birth control which involves the suppression of progesterone. The articles that were chosen, supposedly all relevant evidence relating to the carcinogenicity of a substance are to be considered.
Fewer than 1% of the articles relating to progesterone and cancer were even listed. And of those, two of them were about a totally different substance, a carcinogenic synthetic progestin. And one of the articles that they cited as evidence of the carcinogenicity of the actual substance progesterone was actually someone's attempt to refute a famous publication showing that progesterone prevents and cures cancer. And this publication was used explicitly a method that the one they were trying to refute, a method that they said previously didn't work at all.
So they used a known false method to supposedly invalidate the evidence showing that progesterone cures cancer and that was listed by the committee as evidence that progesterone causes cancer. It was like the people were basically drunk when they were choosing the papers. I asked the chairman of the committee for the names of the people who made those crazy choices of evidence and she said they were too busy to give me that information. My impression was that it was not really a regulatory agency in public interest. It was a promoting product. On a pay-for-view basis. Yeah.
And the university that these people worked for, I looked at their research support. I forget the number, many, there were dozens of grants promoting arguments. Which gave the impression that estrogen was therapeutic for many different things. And I looked for how much they had on progesterone. They had two or three research grants which were aimed to show that progesterone was harmful. And this was 10 years ago, just three years after the Women's International Health Study showed that the combination of estrogen and synthetic progesterone caused cancer, stroke, dementia, heart disease, blood clots and with...
Would you be able to get a little closer to the microphone or the phone? I think the engineer is trying to tell me that you're coming in very quietly. Okay. The result of that study, Women's International Health Study, showed that those negative results resulted in an extreme rejection by women of the use of that combination of synthetic progesterone and estrogen. And there was an 80% decrease in the use of that particular prescription form of progesterone plus estrogen with the loss to... One company lost billions in sales.
Everyone invested in promoting estrogen, especially with the synthetic progesterone. Their main profit-making product being becoming very unpopular. And suddenly, at the same time when estrogen sales were falling, progesterone sales had increased 100-fold. And suddenly, money became available to research progesterone as a toxic substance. And since that time, since the early years right after the study came out, there has been just a flood of people researching progesterone as a brain toxin, a carcinogen and so on. When you examine each one of these, they're doing things known previously to produce the results look bad.
For example, progesterone is known to reverse a brain tumor. They were using about 100 times smaller dose and claiming that it caused the tumor and finding changes in breast tissue that they said was associated with breast cancer to distract attention from the studies that showed that it reversed and prevented breast cancer. Okay, you're listening to Ask Europe, Dr. Ron K. Medea, Garboville 91.1 FM from 7.30, that's now until the end of the show at 8 o'clock. You're invited to call in any questions related or unrelated to this month's discussion here
of CalProp 65 and its effects and also we'll be, like I said, opening up for questions that don't have to be surrounded. And I do have some questions that have been previously written that I want to ask Dr. Peat about his feedback. So Dr. Peat, I guess not to labor the CalProp 65 thing anymore other than to just explain that there certainly is a, isn't it the way always in government, no, there's certainly interested parties for and against certain things happening and obviously collusion between
companies especially when there's plenty of money involved to protect vested interests. But I think if people ever wanted to find out more about this, and I mentioned this on the last radio show that Dr. Carla Rottenberg's PhD dissertation was basically exposing all of the bad evidence, all the bad scientific, supposedly scientific reasons for which we're given that progesterone was to be deemed fit for the list. I was actually very inconsistent and she clearly outlines the mistakes that were made. But like anything else in big government, I think it's just extremely difficult to get
it to change, just like trying to change the direction of an oil tanker once it's moving in a certain direction. It takes a long time. It's taken how many years here to get people to stop, well hopefully stop consuming liquid oils and recognize the fact that the brainwashing surrounding saturated fats is actually very wrong and that people are actually much better off using saturated fats. It's probably taken 50 or 60 years. But anyway, we have a caller on the air. So let's take this first caller. Call away from and what's your question? Hi there.
My name's Ali. I'm from Calgary, Alberta. Okay, hi. My question is, well, basically a few years ago I developed symptoms of success, such as like hirsutism and my voice actually got a lot lower. And then about a year after the onset of these traits, I decided to supplement with progesterone after reading Ray Peat's writing. Well, this hormone, it did work wonders for many symptoms. However, my voice never went back to normal and a few other things never went back to normal. And it actually also caused extreme irritability.
So anyway, my question is basically, do you think it's possible to get my singing voice back to where I can sing high notes easily again? How old are you first? Did you say? So I'm 23. 23, okay. So where is it possible to get your high notes back again? Because that's one of the main things that have been troubling you that hasn't returned is your, you say your voice has deepened. Yeah, but, and my singing teacher actually told me that too. Like my voice dropped like eight notes or something like that, even my singing voice
or my speaking voice, sorry. Okay. Well, her speaking voice doesn't sound as masculinized as many women that I've known who use androgens by prescription or just who had an ovarian problem with excess androgen production. They very often get voices almost as low as mine, a normal male pitch. But what happens under the influence of androgens, the way they change the hair follicle involves reorganization of the whole structure of the hair follicle. But since the hair follicle has a finite lifespan, if you interrupt that stimulation consistently,
like there was a study in France showing women who applied topical progesterone to sideburns and mustache and chest hair that had developed under androgen stimulation, they stayed with it through the expected life span of these hair follicles and refeminized their facial and chest hair. But in the case of vocal cords, if they actually develop a male pitch, that's because they have grown and enlarged and it isn't, the whole voice box enlarges. And generally you can't see a woman's Adam's apple, like a man's sticks out in proportion to how bass their voice is.
And if the whole cartilage voice box is enlarged, the vocal cords have to adapt and they simply don't have any way to get smaller without the framework that's holding them changing. How long did you say that you were under the influence of this androgenic excess that gave you the hair stitchism? It's actually kind of interesting, because it was only for a period of a few months, but I was living a very toxic lifestyle. My job had me working eight hours, basically walking to and from tables. I was a waitress and I never got a break.
I didn't get a chance. And so I was like exercising for eight, sometimes 12 hours a day for about three months, four days a week. And I don't know why it caused that in me, because clearly a lot of waitresses don't have that problem. But I was a girl who had very, very, very high notes before and I had almost, sorry if this is too much information, I had almost no body hair at all. And then after waitressing, both of those plus other changes happened, and I would call it virilization.
And then it also happened again a few years later when I was waitressing again. And those were the only times that that's ever happened to me. Since your voice doesn't really have a masculine quality, it's possible that some of the loss of the high notes is the result of swelling or edema. And often something that suppresses thyroid function will cause edema of the vocal cords. And just by correcting the thyroid, ideally, the water can quickly be extruded. And the cartilage can change shape a little bit by losing some of its excess water.
And so it would be a good idea to have your thyroid carefully checked. Check your waking temperature and pulse rate and your midday temperature and pulse rate. And if your TSH is not in the lower end of the normal range, then it's possible that just a thyroid supplement would raise your range a little bit. That's excellent. Thank you so much for your time. Yeah. By the way, did you ever get your estradiol to progesterone measured? Did you ever have that value looked at? Well, I actually didn't.
So I had my estrogen measured, and I have the whole thing that was measured a while ago. And I didn't really pay too much attention to it. The estrogen said it was like 60 or something lead test. But I know from reading Ray's writing, at least this is how I interpreted it, I was under the impression that you can't actually measure estrogen in the blood and it's not a good reflection. Correct me if I'm wrong. Yeah. Well, the blood test for estradiol is certainly very relative in terms of it's a subjective
amount and when your progesterone is measured, there's a very definite ratio between the two, which is very... And he did not measure progesterone. Okay. All right. All right. Well, thank you for your call. Thank you so, so much. Yeah, you're very welcome. Okay. So we actually have three callers on the line. So let's take this next caller on the air. Where are you from? What's your question? Yeah, my name's Jeff, and I actually have two questions. He's from New York. Okay, cool. So the first one is I've actually been doing the doctor diet.
I've listened to all the shows and what I'm finding is that I'm taking milligrams of natural desiccated thyroid twice a day, so it's about three grains a day. But the pulse in the AM is always right around 60, temperature is anywhere between 97.2. So then if you go to midday, it's cutting up a little bit to like 70, sorry, to 68, 69, but it never gets to 75 or 80 ever. The temperature never gets above 98.2, maybe rarely, maybe far. So I'm in good shape.
I follow the diet, 60, and I'm just wondering, I know the range is, you talk about sort of pulse and specifically, I know there was a show that gave you questions about what if the pulse goes up and temp goes down, all that, but this is pretty basic. It's like in the morning, what should it be? And at midday, what should it be relative to what I just gave you? And what would you do to change that? That's the first question. Okay.
And the second question, and part of the other thing is I found through this process, a lot of things have gotten better, mental clarity, all physical symptoms, temp time, actually there has been an increase in male pattern baldness on the very top of the head, ironically. So I'm just wondering if that... And this is the only thing you're taking is these three grains of natural glandular? That's right. I don't want to mess with the other because given all I've heard, I just feel like the body decides what it needs.
And I think Dr. Peat said that on other radio programs, the body will decide it's a much safer way to do it. It may not be directly immediately as effective, but I prefer doing that for the reason I mentioned. Okay. So what question, Claire? Yeah. Have you ever had a blood test for TSH? Yeah, I have. It was about 1.8. I haven't had it in a while. At that same time, I had a cholesterol, total cholesterol of 330.
The guy wanted to put me on statin drugs and I brought his attention to the piece you mentioned. I have a copy of that shows there's no correlation between cholesterol. And to me, that was an indication of heart attacks. But this is an indication that clearly my thyroid was underactive, which has kind of got me. Were you taking this glandular when you got your TSH of 1.8? I started taking that, right. So you got a TSH of 1.8 and then you decided to start using a natural glandular? Yeah, 1.8 is high. Yeah, I can tell.
And my T3 level on the low end of the scale, that's their scale, which may or may not be useful. And the T4 was sort of on the average end. And they didn't take burst T3, so I don't know that. Have they measured the cholesterol since you've been taking thyroid? No, I'm due for another blood test. But my guess is it'll go down. But my real question related to the temperature, I think I can answer those questions after the next blood test.
My guess is it'll go down dramatically because I am in very good physical shape. I know you guys say don't jog, but I do do under two miles three times a week, mostly with sprints. So I feel that no activity is not useful. But obviously, as you pointed out, jogging is repeatedly running marathons, et cetera, is long-term detrimental. But I don't think you go to the other end and literally do nothing but ride a bike. You've got to do more than that, at least in my case.
And I think you said that sprinting is okay in some of your write-ups. In other words, doing like five, six sprints for 20 yards, et cetera, after sort of warming up. Have your muscles enlarged noticeably since taking the thyroid? Not at all. I have the same weight. My weight goes from 172 to 178, sort of centered around 175. It's been my weight for a long time. I do find it drops, though, from sleep to the next morning, but usually in that range. Mental clarity is so much better.
But that's really the key, and that's why I'm to this. And you're definitely right about the PUFA. No doubt about it. In the animal experiments, it takes about four years for a complete exchange when you stop eating PUFA. It's just a random exchange of what's in your present diet and what's in your body, and that takes four years to be complete. So it takes about two years to get a good 50% reduction in it where you'll start feeling your thyroid more consistently. Because for taking three grains, your pulses and temperature do seem pretty low.
The human is overweight. It takes four years, but on the lean side, more muscular and more active, perhaps that accelerates the process. But by the way, there's no chance that you can eliminate PUFA. I mean, the notion of getting five milligrams per day is like fantasy. You just can't do that. It's like impossible for anybody, even you, Dr. Peat. There's no way you can limit it to five milligrams, right? Because if you add up the milk you drink and the eggs, et cetera, it's... No, five grams, I think, was...
Sorry, five grams, not milligrams, five grams. You mentioned was the limit. Yeah, it's possible to get it down to a couple of grams a day, which is the inflection point where you see cancer correlating very closely to the amount of PUFA in your diet is around four grams per day. And so you're pretty safe if you keep it under four grams per day, which you can do just by low-fat milk or skimmed milk, fruit, and low-fat cheese and eggs and such. I do all that. The only thing I do take is cooked vegetables.
I've been doing that like twice a day. Ironically, I was thinking to myself, sometimes I can't sleep at night, I'm thinking, "If you cook food, you're killing the enzymes. And if your body, if your stomach's not generating those enzymes, you're going to have trouble breaking down that food, even if there's less PUFA in it." I'm wondering whether digestive enzyme, you know, Lita Lee talks about that. I know you know her. Is that something that ultimately is useful, recognizing you have to worry about additives?
No, I think if you're going to eat vegetables, they should be thoroughly cooked. Otherwise, partly the problem is that you can't extract all the nutrients if they aren't thoroughly cooked. And some of the carbohydrate complexes are going to feed bacteria if they aren't thoroughly cooked. I think measuring your cholesterol again and having your vitamin D level checked, sometimes a deficiency of vitamin D interferes with the way your body is handling the thyroid. It probably leads to more reverse T3 production.
But the vitamin D level in the blood should be around the middle of the range, 15 nanograms per milliliter, and the healthiest population for having no thyroid disease, essentially, they were in the below 0.4 on the TSH scale. And cholesterol is a pretty good indication of how you're responding to thyroid. It should be around 200 or a little less. And in the 1930s, cholesterol was recognized as a good diagnostic indicator of thyroid function. Someone published a study showing that when you removed someone's thyroid gland, immediately as the metabolic rate went down, the cholesterol went up.
And when you supplemented thyroid, the cholesterol came down as an exact mirror image of the metabolic rate. So I think that's exactly what's going to happen here because before I started your program for years, my total cholesterol was 200 and I had very good levels according to modern medicine. When I started your diet, I started eating a lot of ice cream. I didn't used to eat that and a lot of milk. And I ended up, that's when it skyrocketed to 330.
But I think when you make a change like this, it's a shock to your body. And to your point, I think I need to go through another blood test and see whether or not the impact on the thyroid supplement and the vitamin D level, by the way, which was in the 40s, but I tried to get that up a little bit. It's below 50, but it's not dangerously low. It's on the low end, somewhere between 40 and 50. But the real question was the temperature and pulse.
If your symptoms are not there, is it reasonable to have a pulse that sort of ranges between 60 and 70 throughout the day if you're athletic and at a temperature that really never gets above 98.2? I wouldn't worry about it. Some people have a big heart that pumps efficiently and does fine at 65 beats per minute. Yeah, you're right. In fact, I was told I had someone, when I was a younger kid, they said I had a larger heart. I think that exactly might be true. You've been very kind with your time.
There's one last question. This is a real quick one. There's another guy named Lawrence Wilson. I don't know if you've ever heard of him. He's a very prolific writer. He deviates from you on a couple of points, no fruit. He says take omega-3s, but it's very good. But the one thing he does say, and I know you're big on coffee, he's big on coffee too, but not orally. He's big on coffee enemas. I know in the past you came up once and you mentioned that that can be stressful.
A bigger problem for people over 50, one of the biggest problems, as you've mentioned, is iron toxicity is a real problem. If you do a coffee enemas on a regular basis, is that a way, other than bloodletting, to ultimately reduce the toxicity of iron in your body? Well, just drinking coffee every time you eat an iron-containing food. I always have coffee with oysters or eggs or meat because it drastically limits your absorption of iron. But my question is, maybe you don't have a position to answer that.
You may not know, I just know a lot, but maybe you don't have experience in this area, or do you have a view on coffee enema in terms of whether it's stressful or not? Because it's like running. If you run the first time, you're going to be stressed. But if you do the same running 10 weeks in a row, it's not going to be as stressful because your body got used to it. Yeah, I know there's a lot of benefit some people have from the coffee enema, but I think
you can get the same benefit, probably more, by having it with food so that you don't give yourself a sudden jolt of stimulation. That's where the stress is. It can make you burn fuel so fast that you get hypoglycemia. Okay, well, I appreciate the calls, caller. I don't want to cut you too short, but we do have two more callers who are waiting to get some questions in. So let's take this next caller. Caller, where are you from and what's your question? We lost this one.
It had to do with endometriosis and IUDs, their relation and the health of that. Dr. Peat, do you think IUDs could be responsible for endometriosis from an irritation point of view? Yeah, it's been well established that endometriosis is from the prolonged excessive exposure to estrogen without interruption from progesterone. And the mechanism of the plain plastic or copper IUD is to send a signal to the ovary that the uterus isn't ready for pregnancy because there's a foreign object in it. The uterus perceives this injury and the signal travels up the fallopian tube and tells the
ovary not to make progesterone. So it's a very specific interruption of your hormone ratio the same way that the birth control pill is. Right, so just constant stimulation, estrogen excess with no relief from a progestogenic part of the cycle. Okay, very good. Next caller, you're on the air. Where are you from and what's your question? Hi, this is Alex. I'm from Southern Humboldt. Okay, Alex, what's your question? Yeah, hey, my question is just I went through testicular cancer treatment last year. I ended up having my left testicle removed and then went through chemotherapy and then
after that had a surgery called an RPLND where they removed a section of lymph nodes. And I'm just interested in generic advice you'd have for somebody who's gone through that and gone through a few months of chemotherapy. I haven't had anything crop back up but I'm just interested in general health advice for somebody who's been through a treatment like that. How old were you at the time? I'm 34 years old. I was 32, just about to be 33 at the time of the diagnosis.
Yeah, was there an undescended testicle or anything like that or was it a lady tumor? No, yeah, none of the kind of the class things that would have really elevated my risk. I didn't have an undescended testicle or anything like that. They were both like normal testicles as far as I had known up until that point. Okay, all right, Dr. Peat, did you hear the question to begin with? Yeah, when experimenters have removed, for example, one adrenal gland or one ovary, I
don't remember any experiments with removing one testicle but the removal of some of the steroid-forming tissue in those other situations causes the pituitary to drive the remaining gland twice as hard basically to keep up the systemic level of the steroid production. And so I think it's important to watch your LH and FSH levels and there are ways you can without necessarily supplementing an androgen but you can reduce the stress, keeping your thyroid hormone level up, vitamin D level up, regulating your protein and sugar intake
carefully and possibly supplementing pregnenolone which will feed into the system suppressing the exaggerated stress reactions that are more likely if your androgen is low. Testosterone works closely with progesterone and pregnenolone to make it less necessary to produce the stress hormones such as cortisol. Yeah, my testosterone levels are actually up because the one testicle that's left working double time so I'm at like the upper range. I've been going to UCSF and going to the Oshkosh. Do you know what your value is? Is it 6-700? I think it's up 700, like 750. Okay, good.
I think it's good to concentrate on the whole anti-stress process because the androgen is probably compensating for the need for all of the stabilizing quieting hormones. DHEA and pregnenolone and progesterone have a stabilizing effect. Pregnenolone is the most neutral of those and will hold down the need to produce cortisol and help to restrain LH and FSH production by the pituitary. Okay, is there anything dietary? They've got me on vitamin D definitely. They want me to have elevated vitamin levels. They have me taking like mushroom capsules from fungi perfecta and then it's like fish
oil, vitamin D, fungi perfecta, mushroom capsules. You want to stop the fish oil? I think that's about it. Yeah, fish oil. You want to cut the fish oil out? Cut it out? Oh, definitely. Yeah. That's been the mainstay of Dr. Peat's research in the last 40 years is the toxic effects of polyunsaturates and fish oil is probably the worst of them all. Oh, yeah. I mean, I'm well-versed. I've been on his program a million times and I know the polyunsaturates are a problem.
I guess I was oblivious to the fact that fish oil was included in that category. Yeah, very much so. Okay. So, avoid the fish oil is definitely not essential. I mean, the science, I'll go back and listen to the actual chemicals or reactions that you're speaking about but is there anything dietarily or whatever that you'd recommend just generically to be kind of a soft approach to try to achieve the aims you're speaking or talking about? Having the anti-stress effect of vitamin D, a high ratio of calcium to phosphorus is very helpful.
So, cut down your meat intake compared to your dairy intake or have a good ratio of dairy to meat and just eat small amounts. Okay. Yeah. Not a lot of muscle meat. If you're going to eat meat, you're better off consuming the bone broths, the knuckle broths and the shanks. And a little liver. Yeah. Maybe once or twice a month. Yeah, definitely. I like all the nap bits. I've been good about eating all that and I've been on that kind of a thing like Sally Fallon type diet for a while. All right. Well, thank you.
Thank you for your call. We're going to have to close it out here because it's three minutes to eight o'clock and I just want to let people know about Dr. Peat's details. So, thanks so much, Dr. Peat, for joining us. There's a whole bunch of questions we didn't get to but great. I'm glad people were listening and coming from all over the globe here. Thanks so much, Dr. Peat. Okay. Good luck. Okay. So, for those people that have listened to the show, they want to find out more about
Dr. Peat and his work and the publications that he's produced, his books or his newsletters or his research articles, it's www.raypeat.com. Lots of articles fully referenced. Our website is westernbotanicalmedicine.com. Under the resources tab, we've just uploaded all of the shows including the 2016 and 2017 shows. And yeah, big fans of Dr. Peat. He's taught us a lot and it's how we live. So, for those people that called in, I'm glad you joined. I hope you got good answers. For those people who want to listen to the archive, they can also be listened to on kmud.org
under audio archives under Friday Night Talk and it's 7 till 8 p.m. on the third Friday of every month. Gosh, I'll be driving home in the dark here, folks. It was just like yesterday. We were at the solstice and now we're already winding forward to the autumn of fall. Here it comes. So, thanks for listening. Our number here is 1-888-WBM-ERB. We can be reached Monday through Friday, business hours.