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This free program is paid for by the listeners of Redwood Community Radio. If you're not already a member, please think of joining us. Thank you. This free program is paid for by the listeners of Redwood Community Radio. If you're not already a member, please think of joining us. Thank you. ...including chemtrails. Tune in and call in this Sunday at 1.30 p.m. to Edge of the Herd. Keep your heads up. And support for KMUD comes in part from Golden Dragon Medicinal Syrup, an anti-inflammatory, anti-fungal, antibacterial, antioxidant medicine made without heat or ice.
Golden Dragon Medicinal Syrup is organic, edible, topical, cosmetic, and water-soluble. Information is available at [email protected] and by phone at 707-223-1539. And as always, the views and opinions expressed throughout the broadcast air are those of the speakers and not necessarily those of the station, its staff, or underwriters. At this time, we'll be made available other viewpoints. Thank you for joining us. And, you know, for the record, that was not my view. They made me say that, and I think that is the one thing that the station does have as its own view,
is that the views are yours. Anyway, here comes your doctor. Welcome to this month's Ask Your Herb Doctor. My name's Andrew Murray. My name's Sarah Johannison Murray. For those of you who perhaps have never listened to our shows, which run every third Friday of the month from 7 till 8 p.m., we are both licensed medical herbalists who train in England and graduated there with a degree in herbal medicine. We run a clinic in Garboville where we consult with clients about a wide range of conditions, and we manufacture all our own certified organic herbal extracts,
which are either grown on our CCF certified herb farm or which are sourced from other USA certified organic suppliers. So you're listening to Ask Your Herb Doctor on KMUD-Garboville, 91.1 FM, and from 7.30 until the end of the show at 8 o'clock, you're invited to call in with any questions either related or unrelated to this month's mixed topic of hormone replacement therapy, estrogen, along with the inflammatory effects of estrogen, as well as some other popularly accepted hormones like serotonin, melatonin, and 5-HTP, so we can discuss the roles of those particular materials in our bodies
and why they're not actually that good for us. So once again, we're very pleased to be joined by Dr. Ray Peat, who will be sharing his research and knowledge surrounding these topics. The number here if you live in the area is 923 3911, or if you live outside the area, the toll-free number is 1800 KMUD RAD. That's 1-800-568-3723. We can also be reached toll-free on 1-888-WBM-ERB for further questions during normal business hours Monday through Friday. So science, whilst responsible for many excellent breakthroughs, is unfortunately subject to the same scandals that beset many excellent thoughts.
Whilst studying physiology myself, I, like many others, was subject to what I now understand as an indoctrination, if you will, into an erroneous state of pseudo-fact, and that one of those things was the receptor model used in physiology, with one particular hormone, namely estrogen, which will be the subject partly, at least of tonight's discussion with Dr. Peat, this being a perpetrator of much deceit on the behalf of a big pharma. Why was HRT so promoted and how did the truth behind estrogen effects get so covered up?
Well, this question and many other answers will be opened up in tonight's Ask Your Herb Doctor, including the facts surrounding the melatonin, serotonin, 5-HT craze. So thank you once again, Dr. Peat, for joining us on the show. OK. Again, as always, we always get comments from people after the show. I know a lot of people that listen to the show have either emailed us or contacted us regarding information that you've been sharing and how they can get hold of more information so they can be a little bit better informed.
Now, as usual, some people will have tuned into the show and maybe have never heard of you. Would you just open up with your background, your scientific background? OK. As a kid, I was interested in science. I would read old medical books and encyclopedias and such, and I very early got the impression that education was largely indoctrination. I found that literature as an undergraduate was a field where I could see the actual evidence, the material that we were studying without interpretation of the professors.
So it was years and years later that I finally decided to go to graduate school in science and I realized that I could get through it without having to fight with the professors. I could just be quiet and do what I wanted to do. So I enrolled at the University of Oregon in the biology department, starting as specializing in nerve biology. I was interested in how the brain could do things like handling language and images and such, and I saw that the whole direction of the brain biology was towards a very reductionist computer analogy.
And looking around the department, I saw that the other end of the organism, the reproductive physiology, was much more scientific, and so I shifted over to that specialization. My professor, if I would get unusual results, would say, "Well, if it's repeatable, just go ahead." And the nerve biology section, if the results or the interpretation were a little off, you had to throw away the evidence. Okay. Okay, well, that word "indoctrination" I think is a very good point to, a very good place rather to start tonight's expose.
I know the, gosh, the scandal surrounding HRT that was kind of revealed, as it were, mainstream not too long ago. It is a very good place to begin tonight's talk. In terms of indoctrination and the models that were so popular then, and probably still are now, when I was studying the whole receptor-ligand interaction was dogmatic, and a particular compound elicited a particular effect when it was bound to an enzyme or to a cell. Surrounding estrogen, the estrogen receptor, you actually have a very good understanding of the background enzymatically,
how it was before it was taken over by, and unfortunately, I know it sounds, it's another conspiracy, as it were, but it's the truth in terms of pre-1940s with the enzyme, the people studying enzyme interactions were then effectively taken over by Big Pharma and corporate manufacture for want of increase from their products. And the whole estrogen receptor is a bit of a non-entity, I understand. Yeah, it was 1970 when I was working on my dissertation, and I was studying the metabolism of the uterus in aging animals
and trying to understand why in middle age infertility came about. And the particular metabolic studies that I was doing corresponded to increased estrogenic stimulation with aging. And that led me, since all of the current textbooks in the 1960s were saying that menopause is when the ovaries wear out and stop producing estrogen. So I read way back to about 1900 and to the 1940s and '50s, and I saw there was a sudden change in 1942 all through the 1930s when my thesis advisor was a student into the 1940s. His thesis advisor was Richard Blandau,
who was later at the University of Washington Medical School. And Soderwald and Blandau were among the people who were studying the effects of excess estrogen on the uterus, and they showed that if you gave a greater dose, increasing amounts of estrogen caused miscarriage at earlier, and the smallest dose would cause miscarriage at a very early stage. And if you waited until very late in the pregnancy, it would take a bigger dose, but it was a very continuous-graded effect in which the estrogen flight excess would be sufficient to kill the developing embryo.
And this was going on all through the late 1930s into the 1940s, and the hormones of the ovary were identified in the mid-1930s as the very major substance produced in the ovary was progesterone, and estrogen was a minor substance. But it turned out that other people doing research on how estrogen worked at this time saw that soot, just put a spoon in a candle flame and then extract it in a solvent, you could get hundreds of different estrogenic substances out of just soot.
And this was wonderful for the drug industries because everyone could find an estrogen patent, but there was only one natural progesterone, and so that was not a viable drug because no one had a patent on it. So by 1942, the 13 major estrogen companies had their synthetic estrogens, and the situation scientifically was that estrogen caused infertility. It was associated with aging. But since they had product, they said, "Here we have the female hormone, and being female means being able to have babies, and so estrogen must be what causes women to have babies."
And they wanted to sell it for some popular use so they could sell it to millions of women, and they came up with the idea that it would prevent miscarriage, even though the science said the opposite. And they got a team, man and wife at Harvard, who promoted the idea of the diethylstilbestrol, D-E-S. D-E-S, which is awful. Yeah, that it would prevent miscarriages, and so they were prescribing it for years to women to prevent miscarriage and to make a healthier baby and so on.
And it turned out, well, probably they never would have had to stop selling it, even though it was causing cancer and deformity. About the same time it was getting recognized that D-E-S causes cancer and doesn't prevent miscarriage but actually increases the risk, they were getting interested in a new product to sell to even more women, the birth control pill. When they decided that the time was right in the 1940s, they didn't want their drug company known as the abortion producer. By 1959 or '60, abortion was becoming--
contraception was becoming acceptable, but still abortion was a taboo. So they invented a story saying that if you take estrogen, it will suppress your body's estrogen and prevent miscarriage by lowering your estrogen. And so they came out with the contraceptive so-called abortion pill just as it was recognized that D-E-S was causing miscarriages and cancer. So they lost one product but immediately came out with another falsified story to sell the birth control pill. In terms of the dogma behind receptor physiology, what is the truth behind whether or not estrogen binds to a specific receptor
and the lies surrounding the so-called science that was produced in order to support the estrogen industry? These people who were doing the real science were trying to explain why estrogen had these toxic effects and they found that natural estrogen was imitated by these polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons in soot, which were famous and recognized as carcinogens, and estrogen was known to be carcinogenic. And so they were studying the properties of soot and estrogens and finding that given estrogenic properties, the substance was also tended to produce inflammation and cancer,
a very close association electronically in the nature of the molecule. And these were activating enzyme systems in particular ways according to the exact nature of that inflammatory carcinogenic, estrogenic electronic configuration. And this was reaching a peak in the 1950s and the government moved some of their investments from chemical warfare to endocrine research. The opinion of many people is that the intention was to use it for population control. The Nazis had been using estrogen on people in slave camps and such, but the U.S. government got very interested in estrogen after the Second World War
and they gave a big grant to a group who-- it's an ongoing tradition of a group associated with the University of Chicago, Michigan, and Lawrence Livermore Radiation Lab and UC Berkeley. The project that was funded, or Elwood Jensen was the leader of it, he had been working in chemical warfare and wanted to create a new idea for how estrogen worked that would not involve all of this interesting chemistry which explained why estrogen was a very intense toxin, carcinogen. He wanted to say that all it does is activate the female genes
that women are characterized by having a uterus and breast, and the function of these is governed by their genes, their female genes, and these genes are activated in their particular organs by estrogen and somehow turning a switch that would only activate those female genes and not involve all of this nasty chemistry of cancer and inflammation. But they knew that soot caused cancer in the late 1800s from the chimney sweep. But that was exactly what Jensen wanted people to forget by saying just forget all of this enzymology and chemistry that people have been working on,
and in such elegant ways showed the similarities of the carcinogens and estrogens. But he wanted to say that it's like a lock and key. The female organs have a very specific lock, and the estrogen is a key that sticks only into that lock. Estrogen receptors are now known to be found all throughout the body, right? And in men. And in men. Yeah, there you go. But no one was--at that time, the real science was thinking of the whole cell and the whole organism as the responsive unit to things like estrogen.
But Elwood Jensen would--he was arguing that there was just one little switch molecule in the cell which would neatly turn on only the female genes, and so it wouldn't have the possibility of any of these other actions. The Defense Department funded--well, Atomic Energy Commission gave him permission to use a radioactive isotope and supplied the isotopes. And other labs, his competition didn't have either the grants or the isotope. They were very tightly controlled by the Atomic Energy Commission, and he labeled estrogen and found that it concentrated in organs like the uterus.
And since the enzymologists were saying that it affects the whole energy system of the organism and the cell, changing the oxidation reduction processes and participating in the chemistry of the cell, he labeled two different kinds of estrogen, what labels in two different places, and added them to the uterine tissue and said that there was no interchange between the two. There were no oxidative reactions in which estrogen participated, and he published that, I think it was 1962, and the enzymologists had been-- the whole thing was based on estrogen participating as a chemical reactant,
and he had the only means by which to demonstrate what he claimed, so his opponents didn't have the grants or the isotopes to challenge that. To disprove it, because the research up until that point had been showing that estrogen causes cancer, but the drug companies after 1942 wanted to sell the oral contraceptive pill, they wanted to sell DES, which is known to have caused cancer for generations later in the babies of the mothers who took it, and now HRT. So we're talking about three different majorly used drugs.
They knew caused cancer, and doctors are still prescribing them today. And some of the particular enzymes involved in cancer and estrogen function were well known to the enzymologists, but Elwood Jensen's group said, "No, they don't use the fancy isotope demonstration to say, no, they don't participate. They're not oxidized and reduced." Ten or 15 years later, after the receptor dogma had been imposed on the world of biology, other people started using isotopes and showing that, yes, the older enzymologists were exactly right. Estrogen does participate as a catalyst in enzyme reactions,
especially transhydrogenation reactions that connect energy production to gene turnover and cell growth and so on. So that's how it initiates cancer cells? Yeah. It allows the energy to be short-circuited over into the growth rather than the function mechanism. So the cell stops functioning and doing its normal cellular functioning, and just the estrogen turns on the cell growth processes. Yeah. It drains the energy right out of function into growth. Very scary. Okay, one sec. You're listening to Ask Your Herb Doctor on KMED Galbraithville 91.1 FM.
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 or mixed topics of estrogen, DHT, serotonin, and those hormones that are particularly bandied around by doctors and the mainstream as being helpful and beneficial, when in fact the science is there quite clearly to state the opposite. And we are very privileged to be joined by Dr. Raymond Peat, who has many years of research under his belt, to just tell us all about it.
So, Dr. Peat, again, I'm interested about the... because I know that I've mentioned this in the past, and I think you brought it up on one of the previous shows, about water. Water, H2O as we know it, is not just straightforward water. And I read some alchemical treaties about the way they would capture lightning water, or water that was subjected to fallout during storms, and how this water was energetically more active. And actually, modern science has shown that H2O exists in many different states,
and there is a very different mechanism by which water can act cellulally or intracellularly. And I'm interested, from a point of view of what we're talking about now, with estrogen involved in redox reactions, how that actually comes out in terms of its cancer-promoting. Well, the fastest change that you can see in a cell within a minute or two of exposing it to estrogen is that it just instantly starts taking up water. And as it takes up water, the water gets out of the cell's control. And that's part of this short-circuiting the energy process.
The microtubules that are an organizing force in the cell that lets it do the work it's supposed to, these are depolymerized in the presence of estrogen and disorganized. And that's part of the cancer problem, that the cell can't communicate from one part to the other because the microtubules are messed up. And the division process even can reach the point where it can't separate the chromosomes evenly, and then you get imbalance of chromosomes, making the cancer degenerate. The water is normally under control of adjoining surfaces, so that it's very unlike bulk water,
but in the presence of estrogen, it becomes bulk-like. So that one of my experiments at the university was to put an old uterus, a young uterus, and an estrogen-treated uterus in an MRI machine. And we could show that the old uterus and the estrogen-treated uterus had loose water, disorganized water, could be distinguished from the young, healthy uterus. Interesting. Okay. It's coming up close to 7.30, so I just want to let people know that from any time on, people are welcome to call in with questions related or unrelated to this month's show.
So far as other hormones are concerned, the whole hormone replacement therapy, just give me your opinion of the HRT's effects and why it was eventually taken out. Well, when the-- Well, it's still not taken out. People still-- In England, there's a lot of-- It's not as popular. Yeah, in England, there's a big backlash against it. The industry succeeded so greatly in turning science completely upside down in the case of estrogen. That took a lot of other hormones with it. Progesterone was suppressed and ignored because it would cure the things that estrogen was claimed to cure,
and actually caused. And it couldn't be patented, as you said. Yeah. And prolactin had many toxic effects that were well-recognized. But since estrogen increases prolactin, there was a great pressure not to think very much about what it means that prolactin causes bone loss and contributes to osteoporosis. It wasn't popular to think of the fact that estrogen increases prolactin. And serotonin is another thing that has been strongly influenced by this inverted interpretation of estrogen because estrogen increases exposure to serotonin. Serotonin is one of the means by which estrogen increases prolactin.
And serotonin does many of the harmful things that estrogen and prolactin do, including a direct cause of bone loss. People who take the fluoxetine type of antidepressants are seen to have a lot of premature bone loss because of the excess exposure to serotonin and the associated prolactin. And serotonin is, in a way, kind of a cofactor for estrogen. Estrogen increases serotonin systemically, and serotonin, in turn, increases the production of estrogen. So when one gets out of control, they both tend to become dominant. And serotonin is involved in the inflammations produced by estrogen.
Well, we're all told that serotonin is the feel-good hormone and-- They give you SSRIs, I mean-- Yeah, they give you antidepressant-selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors so you can feel better. So it's more present in the circulation. And so it's just the same brainwashing they're trying to do to us like they did with the estrogen, saying estrogen prevents bone loss when actually it causes bone loss. So serotonin helps your depression and, in fact, has all these negative side effects of increased bone loss, increased estrogen levels, increased risk of cancer.
Yeah, one of the currently bad effects of serotonin excess that is getting some recognition, even though in the 1950s all of the bad features of serotonin were recognized in a disease involving tumors in the intestine that produced too much serotonin. But in just the last two or three years, the hypertension of the pulmonary artery is being seen to be caused by serotonin. And the drugs that increase serotonin increase this pulmonary hypertension and degeneration of the valves in the right side of the heart.
This was known in the 1950s as the main deadly complication of having that serotonin-producing tumor. But finally, 60 years later, it's being recognized as a way to treat pulmonary hypertension by using antiserotonin drugs. Okay, we do actually have a caller on the line, Dr. Peat. Yes, I sometimes have a tendency toward depression, and I like to do more natural things when I can and stay away from the hard drugs when I can. So I resisted trying to go after Prozac or any of that. But I was told by some nature doctors to try 5-HTP.
As a matter of fact, I was told by another couple of people that I inquired that had depression, and they said that this 5-HTP was something natural that would help you use your own serotonin better and be more like kind of a natural Prozac. Now, are you telling me that that is not good for you, that that's going to make you either make more-- does it help you make more serotonin or utilize what you have better? The Prozac-type drugs keep the platelets and nerve cells from binding and keeping serotonin out of the way,
and so they lead to overexposure to the serotonin. Are you familiar with 5-HTP? That's what you get at the health food store. That's supposed to be like an amino acid or-- Yes, plain tryptophan is bad enough, but the 5-hydroxy tryptophan is one step closer to being serotonin. So you think that it's not good for me to take it? Everything that I know suggests that, for example, there's increased risk of breast cancer and obesity and many bad effects. How can it increase obesity? By slowing metabolism and suppressing thyroid motion. 5-HTP does that? The antidepressants?
Well, no, I don't mean like Prozac. I'm just talking about 5-HTP, the amino acid, the tryptophan. It hasn't been studied as much as the antidepressants, but it works to raise your serotonin. It's basically providing you the precursor in your body makes more serotonin out of it. So the effects of serotonin in excess are going to be increasing estrogen, which slows your liver's metabolism. That can slow your thyroid down. That can lead to obesity. By increasing estrogen, it can promote cancer. I guess it says it elevates your mood.
Well, you have to weigh it up. It might elevate your mood, but you also risk these other things. I mean, they used to give x-rays to help with psoriasis and rheumatoid arthritis. Oh, whoops-a-daisy. Sorry you got cancer. My aunt had a lot of x-ray treatment for her acne on her back, and she had a terrible form of breast cancer, which turned into bone cancer, and she died at the age of 50. Well, I certainly don't want to slow my metabolism or my thyroid down or any of that.
I've done with the menopause thing, so I figure my estrogen has balanced itself out, and I've never taken the replacement. It seems like he's not talking about how it became so outrageously popular for women with menopause. The little pink pills, the HRT, the hormone replacement therapy that everybody was taking because they didn't like having hot flashes and other things that would move the swings and menopause symptoms. My approach was that it was a natural occurrence, and so it didn't really need to be medically changed.
I just didn't feel I had a symptom that was bad enough that I needed medical intervention. Maybe I was just lucky and I had mild symptoms, although I did have a lot of hot flashes. But it was only in the last maybe four or five years that it's been suggested that I take this 5-HTP as if it was like Congress. I don't need to increase my serotonin if it's going to slow down my thyroid and up my estrogen and be bad for my heart valve. That's right.
So that's all the things that she said it did, right? Yeah, and it's not, again, because Dr. Peat has spent his life researching things and doing research on even the articles, "Is this faulty science? Is this promoted by a drug company who did this research?" When he says that, it's not him saying that as though it's his own opinion. He's adopted that opinion from researching the evidence of what causes it. I just want to say again that I'm not talking about the Prozac or the Zoloft or the PaxMillips, the pharmaceutical serotonin drugs.
I'm specifically talking about 5-HTP, which you get at the health food store, where it seems like it's this benign thing that can't hurt you. No, it's not benign. It's all part of the same system. Yes, Prozac might increase your serotonin to a much higher degree than taking 5-HTP, but it's all working on that same system. If a little bit is that the body naturally produces in the bowel because your bowel will naturally produce the serotonin, if a little bit is stimulating inflammation and degeneration, then you wouldn't want to increase that even through natural means.
Yes, so I should probably do without it and see if my food is okay anyway and just have a stiff upper lip, right? Yes, it sounds like a good idea. All right, thank you. Thank you. I think unfortunately what comes out time and time again is that the short term is certainly not worth the price of the long term sequelae of disease processes. And I think most people, I think us all included, we only really see the short term unless we delve into the facts. It's just like with fish oils in people's inflammation.
It can relieve inflammation to some degree, but you also run the risk of suppressing your immune system and damaging your liver in the meantime. So it's a risk to ratio. I think what gets brought out more and more is that the long term risks are certainly very evident, very prevalent, and that people, what we're doing here with this show and other previous shows is just highlighting the long term risks.
And so unfortunately, most people don't understand the long term risks and only the short term gain is, I think, what fuels most people's desires to be on certain drugs. But there is a lot of long term risk associated with it. And I think Dr. Peat's doing an excellent job of bringing these facts out because it's already there in terms of science articles. Okay, there's two more callers on the line. Hello. Hi, you're on the air. Hi, Dr. Peat. This is wonderful. I've talked to you before and I've gotten completely off of my serotonin reuptake inhibitors.
And I wanted to say that I read a bunch of articles on your site. And I have to tell you that one effect of stopping taking these Prozac and these serotonin things is that I've now been able to stop taking, using steroids in an inhaler. My asthma has gone away completely. All right, well done. And I just wanted to make sure that I read your website right because I think you said there that it does relate, serotonin does relate to asthma. And nobody ever told me that, but I'm completely off my inhaler.
And it's only been a month. So I just wanted to tell you that and ask a question about that. Yeah, it does several things related to asthma. Estrogen is related to asthma too. And the effect of the serotonin is to cause localized contraction of the tubes in your lungs as well as causing them to take up water and promote some inflammation. But the contraction is the thing that's best studied in connection with asthma. Well, thank you so much. That's really interesting because it went away within like four weeks.
I was off of the -- I wasn't having the breathing problems. I just -- the first few -- the first week or so, I coughed up a lot of liquid. But then after that, it just quit. So anyway, thank you very much, and I'm going to keep reading your website for articles. Thank you. Great. You coughed out the asthma. I don't know what I coughed out, but I just -- I coughed up a lot of fluid for like a week.
But after that, it just cleared up, and I stopped using the inhaler, and I'm not using it anymore. And I'm just really grateful. Yeah, fantastic news. Getting off the serotonin was painful, but after I'm -- you know, I'm off of it now for almost two months. So I have to be -- I'm very grateful. So thank you for the information. Thank you for your call. Good. Well, there we go. That's another glaring example of what we hear frequently.
So, yeah, if you want to listen to Dr. Peat, truth is out there if you open your ears. Okay, there's another caller. Hey, hello. I came in a little bit late to the discussion, but I haven't really heard mention of the three different types of estrogen in our bodies. They have a hugely disparate impact on our bodies, and I think that that's really germane to this conversation. So please inform us of that. Sure. There are probably a dozen important types of estrogen, but almost all of them, the three main types, estriol, estrone, and estradiol,
those are the best known and have been used as drugs. Those all have pretty much the same effects but just at different potencies so that if you can turn your most potent estradiol into the others, you're protected against some of the most toxic effects of estrogen. During pregnancy, enzymes are detoxifying estrogen by many different routes. The index of a healthy pregnancy is when the estriol is high because that means you're destroying your estradiol very quickly.
So the estradiol is the most dangerous form, and that's usually what I recommend women have tested to make sure their most dangerous form is not too high. And these different forms are exactly the issue that Elwood Jensen denied happened. He said estradiol can't turn into estrone and estriol, but in fact, that's a major way of either activating or inactivating estrogen according to the cells energy system. So the only reason you'd want high estriol is because that would tell us that the estradiol is being detoxified,
not that high estriol in itself is protective in any way, shape, or form. Yeah, it's about 10 times weaker than estrogen. So every little bit of estradiol that you turn to estriol, it's a down stepping of your estrogen effect. So I'm not sure that's the answer that lady was looking for. Okay, well there's two more callers on the line. So, you're on the air. Hi, thank you so much for having me on the show. It's really interesting.
I had a question about modern birth control methods and your opinion of them in terms of how safe they are, things such as pill or the Nubar ring, and just in terms of I know that those still have levels of estrogen, and do you recommend those as safe contraceptives, or do you think that those are still dangerous to your health? And I can take my question off the air. Thank you. They tremendously decrease the amount of estrogen in the contraceptives, but if it's strong enough to kill the embryo,
it's strong enough to do some damage to the woman. And about 30 years ago, there was quite a bit of agitation among women's groups for FDA approval of the traditional cervical cap, which the ideal thing was made by a metal worker or a dentist with a metal casting outfit. They would use a dental mold making material to get an exact impression of the cervix, and then they would cast silver or gold or some inactive metal in the shape of the cervix,
and it would form a vacuum seal, and it could be used -- could be left in place weeks at a time. And under the pressure from the women's groups, the FDA gave its approval to a rubber so-called cervical cap, which was actually shaped more like a baby bottle's nipple with a huge projection chamber on the end, which was supposed to be filled with spermicidal goo, and that immense structural projection caused it to almost instantly be displaced, and so they were terribly unsuccessful. It was just like a way of inserting a spermicidal cream or jelly.
But the FDA approved that but wouldn't approve the one that actually worked because -- I think it was because they were simply working for the contraceptive pill industry. And then as far as the IUD, they now have IUDs that have hormones that secrete a small amount of hormone inside the uterine cavity, so that would be the similar situation. Yes, the signal from inside the uterus travels through nerves and other conduction up the fallopian tube to prevent the ovary from producing the amount of progesterone that it should.
So any kind of IUD, with or without hormones, will create a hormonal imbalance, which is what is the main thing accounting for the prevention of pregnancy. And then thereby increasing your estrogen and increasing risk of cancer. Yes. So the one possible safe method of contraception would be the silver or the gold. But they don't make those. They don't make them. Is there anything else other than natural birth control? Rhythm or method? Yes. Fertility awareness method? Not too much else. Yes, I think the rhythm cycle method is the best. Yes, good. Okay, another caller.
I think there's two more. Hello, you're on the air. Caller, are you there? I think you have something playing in the background. Well, I guess we don't have another caller here. So the lines are open. So give us a call at 923-3911 and we'll continue on with Dr. Peat. Okay, that last call I guess is not there. So Dr. Peat, going on to the other hormones that are... We want to talk about melatonin. We want to ask you... Melatonin. What do you think of melatonin? Well, it has its own endocrine problems.
It can disturb your progesterone and thyroid production if you take a lot of it. Its function seems to be as a way of detoxifying serotonin, the trigger that turns the conversion in the pineal gland of serotonin into melatonin. It's the adrenergic stress-related nerve. During the night, your stress increases from the lack of light, and the adrenergic system causes the pineal to convert serotonin to melatonin. In general, in various places, melatonin is functioning as an antidote to serotonin. So biologically, it's evidence that you're responding to stress with a detoxifying process.
And the similar enzymes exist in the pineal that are activated by the stress can also be found in inflamed joint tissue and in breast cancer, for example. And serotonin is involved in the pathology of both of those situations. And so if our enzymes could turn it more quickly into melatonin, then there would be less of a serotonin problem. But when people actually take melatonin-- Sometimes it's probably protecting against the circulating serotonin, but in itself, in an otherwise healthy person, for example, in the animal studies, was capable of lowering both progesterone and thyroid while increasing estrogen.
So in a short-term emergency situation, it could be okay, but again, long-term, it's going to have negative side effects. Yeah, that depends probably on the person, but it's much safer than serotonin. Okay. All right, well, we do have two more callers, so we'll try to get through them if we can and see how we go. - You're on the air? - Yes. - Hi, you're on the air. - Hi. Yeah, I take a-- it's called Vagifem suppository, and it's for dryness, but I just looked on the package, and it says it's estradiol.
So should I really worry about that? Because I did have a problem with pretty dry-- Okay. Dr. Peat, what would you-- People have been studying who were using vaginal creams, for example, and their blood level of estrogen was even higher than some of the oral pills were causing. So it's definitely a systemic hormonal influence, wherever you put it. So obviously, if there's any familial-- even if there isn't a familial history, but especially if there is a familial history of any estrogen cancers.
So, Dr. Peat, what would you recommend to this lady to use in place of her suppository? I've known several women who had pharmacists make them up suppositories with a fairly high dose of vitamin A and a little vitamin E in cocoa butter or other way of introducing it. And the vitamin A helps to strengthen the membranes and normalize mucus production. - Okay. - Okay, good. Well, that's a pretty-- And in the meantime, if you can't find a pharmacist to make it-- Yeah, you can do that yourself.
--vitamin A, palmitate, and vitamin E, you can buy those capsules and try that. Okay. All right. Well, thank you very much. Yeah, you're welcome. It certainly sounds a lot safer than-- - Yeah. - Yeah, what you were using. Okay, good. There's another caller on the line. - Hello? - Hi, you're near. Hi. What do you think of the bioidentical hormones in low dose? - Very suspicious, Dr. Peat. - That come from wild yams and-- Well, it depends which ones. Are they estrogen or are they progesterone?
Well, there are the three estrogens, but the estradiol is the lowest. You know, they're compounded by Women's International Pharmacy, but they're from soy and yam, wild yam. And there's no progesterone in there? And progesterone also from vegetable sources, as opposed to the synthetic or the animal estrogens that pharmaceutical companies use. So, Dr. Peat, what would you recommend to this lady? Well, whether it's his opinion of the bioidentical hormones. Well, all of the hormones that are bioidentical can have-- they have to fit into the system in a balanced way.
And it's okay to have a physiological amount of any of these serotonin, estrogen, melatonin, and so on. But when you supplement estrogen or serotonin, you're most likely increasing something that's already excessive. The doctrine of replacement with the natural hormones is building on the history of the estrogen replacement with synthetic hormones. And what they neglect is that as a woman ages from age 19 to 39, for example, there's a steady average increase in the amount of estrogen in her bloodstream, as well as a fairly continuous amount of progesterone, which every cycle,
the estrogen is forced out of the cells all through the body by the rising large amount of progesterone. And in the 40s, progesterone production is no longer able to fully keep up with this steadily increasing estrogen production with aging. And as soon as estrogen-- as soon as progesterone decreases and can no longer force estrogen out of the cells, the blood estrogen level will drop, but the estrogen inside the cells will increase. Publications by some-- I think they're Norwegians, Batra and others, and by Richard Blandau in University of Washington,
showed that the tissues of old organisms retain estrogen than the tissues of young animals. And the fact that you don't find it in the blood is simply because estrogen sticks inside the cells in proportion to the deficiency of progesterone. So that was probably the reason why they recommended it is because of low blood levels, and so Dr. Peat's advice would be to not use it. Okay. I'm being made aware that it is two minutes to eight o'clock, and the show does wrap up at eight o'clock.
So thank you for all of those people that have called in. For anyone else who's listening who wants to find out more about Dr. Raymond Peat, who's our special guest this month, his website is very informative. It's www.raypeat.com. R-A-Y-P-E-A-T.com. Thank you so much, Dr. Peat, for joining us this evening. Okay. Thank you. Okay. Thank you. And for those listening, we can be reached during normal business hours, Monday through Friday. We have a number, 1-888-WBM-ERB, which is 1-888- 926-4372. Okay. So until the same time next month, seven to eight o'clock, thank you so much for listening.
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