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Hi everyone, the following show with Dr. Raymond Peat was recorded on January 22, 2012. It's about progesterone. And a growing number of shows can be found at the Radio 4 All website, that's radionumeralforall.net, and then search for "Politics and Science." Welcome to "Politics and Science." I'm your host, John Barkhausen, and today, once again, I'm delighted to say that Ray Peat is here to join me, Dr. Raymond Peat. Dr. Peat has a PhD in biology and has done extensive research in the fields of physiology and endocrinology. Is that enough, Ray? Oh, that's enough.
That's enough, okay. That's enough for me. And I was just saying that we've never really touched on the subject in the pure form of progesterone. And I was looking back through your newsletters, for those who don't know, Ray Peat has a website, raypeat.com, where he's posted a lot of your newsletters. What percent of your letters are up there at this point, Ray? I've written 300 and some, and I think there are only about 75 on the website, so about a quarter.
There's so much knowledge in each one, and plenty of food for thought, even if you don't agree with what you're putting forward. I find I can read them many times, and they always seem new because there's so much information packed into them. So they're all there for people just to enjoy when you want to do it. Yeah, the search, the little search device on the website helps to find, for example, if you put in progesterone, you'll find lots and lots of newsletters that talk about it. That's right. And the newsletters, I started
off with one, but there were actually three almost in a row that you did in 2007, dealing with progesterone and the regulation of progesterone, which is starting to happen then. And I thought maybe we could start the show, unless you had a better idea, just talking about how you first got interested in progesterone. Yeah, I had been writing about it somewhat in the 70s, but this Proposition 65 thing in California, calling it a carcinogen, that was the occasion for me writing this new bunch of newsletters a few years ago. But I had
been studying, oh, linguistics was what I was studying right before I came to Oregon, and moving from Mexico to Montana and then Oregon, I noticed a great change in the way my health worked and realized that it was the absence of sunlight, dark cloudy weather. I saw the same thing happening to all the women I knew during the winter, especially students who came from sunny areas and then lived in dark student apartments during the winter. They would get PMS and I called it winter sickness, a whole range of things,
but especially PMS was outstanding. And at that time, I was aware of the old experiments and observations in which birds, for example, in Times Square, people have noticed that the sparrows mate all year round because of the bright lights. And what in other species, for example, there are animals that can mate during the winter, but they don't really get pregnant until about March 20th when days become longer than nights. And what happens in that situation is that the embryo is formed, but it doesn't implant in the uterus until
the progesterone reaches a certain level and light is the certain day length of light exposure that raises the progesterone and allows fertility to proceed. And I was interested in that because I noticed that during bright, sunny, long days, my vitamin A requirement increased tremendously. And I gradually came to understand that the sex hormones go up in the spring with long hours of light and vitamin A is massively used in producing pregnenolone and progesterone. And so right at the beginning of moving to Oregon before I actually began attending the
university, I was seeing that progesterone and daylight were very powerful on the emotions and body functions. The premenstrual mood changes were evident even in men. Typically, men coming from a sunny climate would be depressed all winter living in cloudy Oregon. How did you link sunlight to progesterone? Was it something that was already discovered or were you working on that? Yeah, it was one night I went to sleep reading a book with a bright light shining in my face and I woke up starting to get pimples and I realized that just the light shining on
my eyes activating my brain had done something to affect my metabolism and in trying to understand how the light affected my skin even though it was just mild incandescent light. That was what I started rereading and I ran across the winter fertility of sparrows from bright light and the springtime implantation of animals. So I realized that everyone from birds to men experience the driving of their hormones by daylight and the first steroid made is either pregnenolone or progesterone. And do you think, you said that people coming from southern climates experience depression
coming north and I've noticed that among friends of mine who have done that. Do you think there's an adjustment that's made whereby even with less light you can produce progesterone or all of us in the north are depressed for that reason? Yeah we just get used to being depressed. If you look at Scandinavian movies you see that depression seems to be the rule. The Bergman approach to life. So when did you become aware that progesterone was useful therapeutically for cancer and other things?
I started, I was intending to study nerve biology and the very first few weeks at the university I realized what dogmatists the brain and nerve biology people were. So I just went looking around poking into all the labs at the university and saw that the reproductive physiology people were open-minded and actually studying things rather than trying to confirm their dogma. And so I immediately switched over from nerve biology to reproductive biology. Rick, can I interrupt? What was the giveaway? What gave it away that they were open-minded, non-dogmatic?
Well, talking to the nerve biology people, it was just their personalities were absolutely militaristic, rigid, closed-minded, single-minded. And the money went along with that, big research grants. And the reproductive physiology had grants but very low prestige in the department. And people were very relaxed and open and had basically a willingness to learn and consider things. Just the personality was very obviously different. And so you were saying... There was one group working on male reproduction and the other one female. Arnold Soderwal
was the person in charge of the female reproductive end. And there were only, I guess when I was there, there were three graduate students working in the lab. Well, that sounds very intimate. It sounds like a good atmosphere. And Soderwal was the link with previous students and what they had been doing. So his work made us feel that our stuff was continuing a tradition that had started in the '30s and '40s where Soderwal was a graduate student. And so the three of us were working on different
parts of the system. Bev Stockton was working on implantation, which involved an age-related delay in the production of progesterone. And Terry Parkinning was working on, I think, some enzymes at that time, but he later shifted over to see that the failure of progesterone was an essential... Excess estrogen and falling progesterone was an essential change of aging infertility. And I was working on the oxidative changes in the aging reproductive system. And as I worked with the chemicals, I noticed that handling progesterone, I had always had
the tendency to hang nails. And just being careless in the lab and getting some of the progesterone on my hands, I noticed that my hang nails disappeared and have never come back. So even though it's considered to be somewhat of a female hormone, I think, by you, it's also an important... has an important role in males as well. Yeah. As I got acquainted with how it felt on my hands, for example, and I noticed that if I stuck my hand in the powder, I could very quickly taste it on my tongue or sense
an awareness that it had got into my bloodstream. I looked at the changes that were known to occur in males and I saw that someone had two different groups just almost at the same time had observed that an intrauterine device for contraception often caused systemic health problems. And they found that the problems were related to a falling progesterone. And animal studies showed that if you put a slight wound into the uterus, signals travel up to the ovary and block the production of progesterone because the animal system recognizes that
it isn't wise to get pregnant when you have a wounded uterus. So that was recognized as the effect of the IUD or one of the effects. But at the same time, another group found that men who had had the vasectomy often suffered very serious effects, impotency and such. And they found that the men who suffered the health effects from a vasectomy had very low progesterone and that replacing their progesterone levels up to normal cured their symptoms. And very often just one dose was all that was needed to start the ovaries in the woman
or the gonads in the man to begin producing the normal amount. And of course you've mentioned before that progesterone is the hormone of fertility that promotes life. Yeah, it's the basic implantation stabilizer. Estrogen creates a release of histamine throughout the body but especially where it's concentrated in the uterus. And the histamine creates a site of inflammation that is actively growing. But the inflammation focus under the influence of estrogen prevents survival of the implanted embryo. And progesterone turns off the histamine and estrogen and makes it possible to deliver oxygen and sugar to the implanted embryo which
would be killed if the estrogen influence continued. So it's the shift towards oxygen and sugar delivery that makes progesterone the preserver of pregnancy. And interestingly people have removed animals' ovaries at the time of fertilization and then given them different hormones and they found that testosterone worked to preserve pregnancy by delivering oxygen and sugar to the implanted embryo. So you could say that testosterone is a progestin in the sense of supporting pregnancy. And the things that are called progestins or progestogens, the term implies that these are acting to preserve pregnancy
the way progesterone is. But in fact the synthetic so-called progestins are used in birth control pills because exactly what they don't do is support pregnancy. So they've got the naming system very confused in which testosterone functions potentially as a progestin and the so-called progestins are really anti-progestational chemicals. Doctors have been very confused by that terminology. Yeah, well it's very confusing for all of us. It sounds like our filing system is a little bit screwed up. Yeah, the estrogen industry really contributed to that by creating a theory of how estrogen
is a potential contraceptive because it was known from the time Soderwall began his studies from the late 1930s through the 40s it was known that estrogen is an abortifacient. It kills the embryo either at the time of implantation or any time later when it becomes the dominant influence. And the estrogen industry didn't want their product known to be killing the embryos and so they claimed that it stopped ovulation. That was invented just in time for them to come on the market with birth control pills. But it was just a complete
fabrication that they made up so that it wouldn't be seen as causing abortions. It does seem bizarre that estrogen is almost universally, among the public anyway, considered to be the female hormone when that's actually the hormone of infertility and abortions. Yeah, and the reason for that was that progesterone turned out to be such a basic simple substance that works to preserve both male and female fertility and to stabilize nerve cells and blood sugar level and oxygen delivery and all of those things. Only that one molecule
as the first steroid made out of cholesterol, only that single molecule has those functions. And estrogen, they very early in the 1930s discovered that soot could be extracted to form almost an infinite number of estrogenic substances. And so it was possible for the industry to patent various synthetics. Diethylstilbestrol, D-E-S, became a popular product for the industry and they wanted the idea that it was a female hormone for sales purposes, even though it was known that it actually is essential for male traits to develop. So estrogen could
be also called the male hormone better than it could be called the female hormone. Because it causes hair growth and what else? Well, the early development of male characteristics is induced by the local production of estrogen. Testosterone has to turn into estrogen before it androgenizes the brain, before it brings out the male features. How long did you continue to work under Arnold Soderwal? Until 1972. I started, I moved over to his area, I guess, early 1969. And then with Nixon, Nixon canceled a lot of science grants and that closed the lab that Soderwal had been
running for many years. That's a shame. Is that where you got your PhD, Ray? Yeah. I had to write my dissertation quickly in the summer of '72 because Nixon had shut off the grant. The government approved the grants, but Nixon simply cut the funds off for even the approved grants. Well looking back at science history a bit, when was progesterone discovered and how has it been used? In the early '30s, the molecule was identified and very quickly, I think Armour was the company
that made the corpus luteum pork ovaries were separated from pregnant pigs and the corpus luteum was very richly supplied with progesterone. And so the corpus luteum powder was sold as early as, I think, 1935. And I think I was probably one of the early progesterone babies. My mother having been infertile and getting, I think it was the Armour corpus luteum product. So you do have a personal stake in this. What for myself and everybody else is the corpus luteum? Is that a place where progesterone is concentrated?
When the follicle ovulates, releases the egg to be fertilized along with a burst of estrogen, then this area turns into steroid producing cells and reduces the production of estrogen relative to the total steroids and progesterone is the main steroid produced from that time on. And in humans, that is the basic source of progesterone for the first nine weeks, nine or ten weeks of pregnancy and then the placenta takes over production and the corpus luteum fades out. But with each pregnancy, some of those cells remain in the ovary. So
a woman who has been pregnant eight times in her lifetime will have higher residual progesterone levels and will live much longer than on average a woman who hasn't had so many pregnancies. They saw the same thing in animals. The more litters the animals had, the younger their tissues were at a given age. Is that perhaps why some women who get fibroids, they've noticed that the fibroids go away if they get pregnant and likely don't return? Oh, I don't think I had heard of that. But yeah, progesterone was recommended for many
years for treating making fibroids redress. But partly that involves increased thyroid function. Progesterone is needed to be in balance for the thyroid to work and then the thyroid working causes the liver to lower the estrogen level systemically. So sometimes just one dose of progesterone is all it takes to free the thyroid to function, to stimulate new progesterone synthesis and to lower estrogen systemically. And you've often talked before about estrogen and progesterone basically opposing each other where you might get a surge of estrogen for a certain purpose, but if the progesterone
doesn't come out to nullify that effect, you'll end up with bad health effects. Yeah, estrogen stimulates the uptake of water by, I think its first action is to block the use of oxygen. That causes the cell to take up water in the first few hours or minutes of exposure. And the overloading cells with water causes them to go into a growth inflammation state where they forget what they had been doing and simply start multiplying. And so for the first 12 hours that gives a burst of new cells in the uterus ready to receive
an implantation. In the breasts it creates a mass of new cells to enlarge the milk production capacity and in the pituitary it enlarges the cells that will take over production of prolactin at the time of lactation. But if you continue that exposure more than a day, that growth continues and then you increase the risk of breast tumors and pituitary tumors. When birth control pills were first on the market in the 1960s, they had big doses of estrogen and there was a terrific epidemic of pituitary tumors producing prolactin. There's
been very little written about it but it was like the yearly production in one hospital of pituitary tumors went from I think just a few like five per year up to 300 per year in one publication. Wow, that's significant. And you were talking about your mother having taken Armour corpus luteum and was it used for other things? Was that for getting pregnant? Is that why she was taking it? Yeah, it was recognized that estrogen wasn't the fertility factor as really as that and that progesterone was. But the estrogen industry not being able
to patent progesterone because there was only one substance and it was very expensive to make, they found that soot is as cheap as anything and so you can for no production cost you can make any kind of estrogenic substance you choose to. And so they created the whole mythology of what the female hormone is and at that time progesterone had to be very laboriously converted from cholesterol the way the ovary does it and it was later in the 40s when Russell
Marker devised a way to make it from the yam steroid and it became very cheap in the early 1950s. But the first synthetic forms of progesterone that could be patented that were later developed as contraceptives, these were modified molecules that they marketed as synthetic progesterone with the argument that real progesterone is destroyed in the stomach and so you have to take our product because we've modified it and made it biologically active when you take a pill otherwise you would have to inject it. There were doctors injecting progesterone
and curing all kinds of things through the 1940s from premenstrual syndrome, premature births, cancer and so on. Using natural progesterone. Natural progesterone, but the drug companies did their campaign to say that that's too expensive and very few women would want to be injected every month and so here's the synthetic pill which you can take orally and just out of thin air they said natural progesterone can't be taken orally even though a few companies were selling 10 milligram progesterone tablets that worked fine even though the dose was low and fairly expensive. But they convinced
doctors just with a few unsourced claims in the medical journals that natural progesterone didn't work so they had to use the synthetics and it turned out that the synthetics had estrogen like anti-conception effects. I see, so they weren't actually doing the full physiological effects of progesterone and they had side effects. Yeah, they were not progestational support agents. They had some slight overlap that allowed them to make the claim. You put some cells in vitro and you get certain changes that are similar to what happens in the pregnant uterus but you can't get the same beneficial
looking effects in the whole animal, only in the culture dish. Can you describe basically how it was used therapeutically? I think you've mentioned a few examples but I know, I think her name was Katerina Dalton who's a doctor in England and she wrote a book whose name escapes me, maybe you know the name of the book. But her primary method of giving it was injections. One of the problems was that it's extremely insoluble in everything. Hot olive oil will
dissolve a lot of it so it will work on your skin or orally in solution for the first three or four hours but it crystallizes out of solution so the only way you can market an injectable effective product in oil is to use something like benzoyl or benzoyl alcohol. In our lab we had some old containers of benzoyl, benzoate just touching the outside of a bottle that hadn't been opened for 10 or 15 years, my fingers began to crack from an allergic reaction
to it and that stuff was injected massively as a solvent with a lot of the early progesterone treatments but still the patient got better because of the powerfully anti-inflammatory effects of progesterone and the less allergenic benzoyl alcohol was the one that persisted in use the longest and it is a nerve toxin that will kill the nerves in the region where it's injected except that again progesterone's powerfully detoxifying effects over rode those poisonous effects of the benzoyl alcohol and so Catherine Adalton's results were just amazing. What was she using it for I was going to ask?
Premenstrual syndrome which was related to the tendency to miscarry and the women who did have pregnancies usually delivered very prematurely and their babies were usually underweight and tended to have I think the average IQ was 90 and so she was giving them the injections to cure their premenstrual syndrome and they would become pregnant and she would continue giving the injections during the pregnancy sometimes several hundred milligrams sometimes up to I think 3000 milligrams per pregnancy depending on what they seemed to
need although other researchers found that in a lot of women who had the tendency to bleed every month and then to miscarry that very often just one dose of progesterone was all it took to stop that monthly bleeding and make them able to carry each term but anyway Catherine Adalton treated this large number of patients over the years and someone mentioned that it was interesting that her patients' babies all turned out to be so bright they were mostly working class women and she said yeah that's hard to believe because these
women the previous babies all had a 90 IQ and so she did a study and found that in fact her babies tended to average 130 IQ just as a result of the regular progesterone dosing a 40 point average increase and she saw that the intelligence of the babies corresponded to the amount of progesterone she gave the mothers during pregnancy the ones who got more than 1500 milligrams per pregnancy turned out the brightest and in England working class kids have very low probability of going to the university and her patients the ones born
after the progesterone treatment had a very high academic success outstanding at all levels of school and got scholarships to university and their personalities were very good she said the only problem was that they didn't do well in gym class because they didn't like to march in ranks didn't like to follow orders weren't placid enough to do the kind of arts and crafts things that were expected of them but in all the academic subjects they were outstanding , that's remarkable and maybe your mother's corpus luteum ingestion might have helped
you in similar ways possibly so what did you do after you left the lab Ray you got your PhD and did you keep working with progesterone after that? Not much it was several years until I was doing nutrition consulting and I think the first time I decided I was giving talks to medical groups and trying to convince them to use progesterone but I was just working out diet changes that could optimize the hormones increase thyroid and lower estrogen and I was hoping that doctors would come to understand
why they shouldn't give estrogen because there's really no such thing as an estrogen deficiency any tissue that's injured will become a source of estrogen production and the absence of estrogen in the blood stream it often means that there's an excess of estrogen inside cells because when progesterone is adequate it will destroy the proteins that bind estrogen inside cells causing the harmful estrogen effect. Progesterone causes the estrogen to be released from inside cells into the blood stream where it can be controlled and eliminated so you can't go by a blood test that seems to show
an estrogen deficiency and the more a tissue is injured or aged the more likely it is to have aromatase inside making estrogen so an injured breast tending to develop a tumor becomes a source of estrogen itself and injured uterus becomes a source of new estrogen. Fat a person isn't metabolizing their energy system very well so they lay down fat and fat becomes a source of estrogen. Well you were saying that aging can be equivalent to an injury and so does that mean as we get older we're all producing more estrogen? Yeah, more of our tissues.
The person tends to lose muscle and bone and replace it with fat and connective tissue and those tissues become sources of inflammatory materials and estrogen. And progesterone in its role is opposing that inflammatory process that would shut down that estrogen cycle? Yeah, it's one of the things that turns off aromatase but it also turns off the enzymes that inflammation causes estrogen to concentrate in the tissue besides being produced in the tissue so any estrogen that your liver is trying to get rid of through the kidneys if
it happens to pass by an inflamed cell enzymes will catch the estrogen by releasing gluturonic acid or sulfate from the estrogen molecule. Estrogen inactivates both of those enzymes that cause tissues to catch estrogen and it activates the opposite enzymes right in that tissue allowing the tissue to send estrogen back out by attaching sulfate or gluturonic acid to it and it shifts the balance of reduction oxidation enzymes so that it shifts away from the powerful estradiol to the weak estrone. I think there are nine different things that happen in a single inflamed cell under the
influence of progesterone to release estrogen from the cell and stop its production. And what got me started recommending it directly to people was a woman, a 52-year-old woman who had been epileptic from the age of 35. She was a school teacher and had had migraines and the neurologist told her that migraines were like epilepsy and gave her an anti-seizure drug and she said it did stop her migraines but it made her so stupid she couldn't go back to teaching school and so she stopped taking the drug and had an actual seizure.
Her first seizure was when she stopped taking the seizure medicine that she hadn't really needed and so she went to the doctor and he said, "See I told you, migraines were like epilepsy." It's like she'd been vaccinated with the flu vaccine and then got the flu. Yeah, and so right from the age of 35 she was having so many seizures that she couldn't teach school anymore and after 17 years she said every year the neurologist would give her a mental test and declare that her mind had deteriorated farther and she was so demanded
that she couldn't find her way home if she went outside the house. So the first time she visited her son brought her so he could take her home. She said she was spending all but a couple of hours every day in bed having seizures and taking her anti-seizure drugs and she had some arthritic fingers all puffed up and red and I told her that since I had been talking to some of the doctors telling them that since they were convinced that progesterone can't be taken orally I dissolved it in oil and
convinced them that they could use it transdermally as a way to get around their prejudice, the mistaken belief that it isn't active orally. So I had some of the progesterone in oil and told her about it, how it was anti-inflammatory and anti-seizure and suggested she try it and she held up her fat fingers and said well these are inflamed so I'll start and she dipped her fingers in the beaker full of progesterone oil and her son took her home.
I gave her a sheet of paper and told her to mark each day how she felt starting at the left and moving day by day across the sheet and she said well that's easy, every day I feel the worst possible and so she drew some circles in the lower left hand corner and I think it was four or five days later I saw her coming down the walk without her son waving the paper in one hand and wiggling her fingers on the other hand and she had drawn a curved
line with the fourth or fifth circle up in the upper right hand corner of the paper and her fingers were not arthritic anymore and she said she felt fine and was working all day around the house and could find her way home. That was in the summer and she enrolled back in the university for a master's degree in gerontology and got straight A's and got her degree nine months later and she had been told for years that she was hopelessly demented. And what about her seizures, Ray? No more.
Just that one week of doses got everything back to normal. And that was just transdermal, topical applications? Yeah. And her blood tests showed that she had quite a bit more estrogen in her blood than progesterone and you should have about a hundred times more progesterone than estrogen. So that's remarkable. And so at that point you started to recommend it regularly to people? Yeah. And at that time I was teaching endocrinology at the Naturopathic College and somehow, I guess someone that the epileptic person knew heard I was interested in progesterone and
she had read Katharina Dalton's book and had talked a doctor into giving her progesterone shots and she had had multiple sclerosis or optic neuritis, had been paralyzed, bedridden and I think she was mostly blind for weeks at a time because of the optic neuritis and she was getting these periodic semi-toxic injections of progesterone every time she could talk a doctor into it. Toxic because of the vehicle, was it the benzo alcohol or something? Yeah. And she volunteered to lecture to my endocrine class in Portland which was in an old building
upstairs and she drove herself there, walked up to the, whatever it was, second or third floor and lectured through the two-hour class about what she had learned about progesterone from her own experience and Katharina Dalton's work. And so my naturopathic students were pretty well convinced by her lecture. What year was this Ray? '78. '78 and at that point... '77 or '78. Okay. And at that point, I mean obviously it sounds like progesterone is one of the obvious ways it's doing its work is as an anti-inflammatory because all those problems sound like inflammation problems don't they?
Yeah. After that first experience with the fat fingers I started telling people about the topical use and I think it was about 30 people who had essentially immediate or overnight recovery from various types of arthritis, not just rheumatoid but so-called osteoarthritis. A woman from Sweden who had some metal joints installed and was planning several more installations and was basically crippled. She was visiting in Eugene and a psychologist friend who started using progesterone herself gave her some and she spread it all over her body and spent her time in Eugene walking
around town enjoying the sights and having no arthritis. Because the inflammation had gone down so there's no pain. Yeah. Now you've cautioned man against using too much progesterone because it opposes testosterone too or what's... If you take a very big dose it has a cold shower effect. It simply displaces testosterone temporarily and so if a man isn't understanding the physiology of it he might be frightened by the sudden effect but it passes in two or three days. So I know from what you're saying it sounds so amazing and I know a lot of people with
arthritis so if they're listening to this they might obviously want to try some and if men are doing it are there any other cautionary tales about using progesterone? Well, yeah. Once a friend accidentally put a spoonful of it in a margarita thinking it was pregnenolone and I guess I had about 500 or 1000 milligrams and I couldn't feel where my hands and feet were for about half an hour. Because it's an anesthetic. Yeah, and it will anesthetize you totally if you take very large doses.
So at first when I found that vitamin E was a good solvent I made very concentrated solutions but I realized that a person getting too enthusiastic might kill themselves by anesthetizing themselves. There's nothing in the literature about using it as an anesthetic in humans but I've had the experience so I don't think it should be more than a 10% solution. Now I know we're actually almost out of time here so I think I wanted to talk about sort of the broad science implications of progesterone and how it's been approached by science in
the medical world in general but I don't even think we're going to get to that. So if you wouldn't mind Ray making maybe this two shows we can take on the other issues next time. But I wanted to ask you something which just flew out of my mind like a bird. What we were just talking about before I interrupted you again. Arthritis? Yeah, surprisingly the effect even when your knees have been examined and the cartilage is crumbling to pieces or your knee looks like a football.
The second person I gave progesterone to we just bought a flask of the injectable stuff in the toxic alcohol and my friend had a knee that he said it was agonizingly painful and it was swelling up every day for weeks and weeks. Had it been injured? No just from working at his bench every day and we spread this whole flask from his thigh around his knee down to the upper part of his calf and within two or three hours this football sized knee had deflated.
That was in 1978 or 9 and for all the years up until two or three years ago he had never had arthritis again. 30 years roughly. Wow, I know what I wanted to say. We were talking about the possible negative sides of progesterone and you were saying you know the worst thing that could happen is maybe overdosing and going to sleep and that reminded me of the Wall Street Journal article about brain damaged people, people who have been in accidents or had strokes.
It was known in the 50s as a brain preserving hormone both prenatally and in animal studies. It's a growth factor for nerves and an anti-stress, anti-inflammatory agent. So it's anti-edema. Edema is one of the factors that kills the rest of the brain cells after some of them have been injured. So it's an obvious way to stop the progression of the damage after brain trauma but it's also a growth factor that optimizes the repair. It promotes the remyelinization of the fibers.
For example in multiple sclerosis that seems to be or in optic neuritis that seems to be the way it's therapeutic. One of the most impressive things about that long article in the Wall Street Journal was that he did a very extensive study on all these brain injured people and stroke victims and many of them made miraculous recoveries and there were no side effects from the use of the progesterone. So there's not many treatments that you can say that about. Yeah, in the 70s I advocated that everyone should carry a bottle with them in case they
were in an accident as first aid for whatever happened to you because for example a friend spilled a pan of boiling water on her thigh and we happened to have a beaker of progesterone there and we poured that on and an hour or so later there was no pain or redness or blister. Wow. Well Ray, we are out of time and sped by as usual and we've been talking to Dr. Raymond Peat, endocrinologist, physiologist with a PhD in biology from Eugene, Oregon and you can find out more about Ray at his website, Raypeat.com.
Ray thanks so much for being on and I hope to continue this in a part two discussion in the days to come. Okay, very good. Thanks a lot Ray. Bye. Bye bye. And you've been listening to Politics and Science, an interview with Dr. Raymond Peat recorded on the 22nd of January 2012, hopefully a part two discussion will follow shortly and you can find a number of politics and science shows at the Radio for All website. I'm getting them up there slowly but hopefully surely. Go to radionumeralforall.net, radioforall.net and then search for politics and science and
you will find the webpage where there are now maybe I think 15 shows up there and there will be more to come. So thanks for listening and stay tuned again next week for another edition of Politics and Science. [BLANK_AUDIO]