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Well, welcome to this month's Ask Your Herb Doctor. My name is Andrew Murray. My name is Sarah Johannison Murray. And for those of you who perhaps have never listened to our shows, which run every third Friday of the month from 7 till 8pm, we're both licensed medical herbalists who trained 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 CCUF certified herb farm,
or which are sourced from other certified organic suppliers. So you're listening to Ask Your Herb Doctor on KMU DeGarboville, 91.1 FM, and from about 7.30 until the end of the show at 8 o'clock, you're all invited to call in with any questions, either related or unrelated to this month's topic. 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 568 3723, that's KMUD Rad.
We can also be reached toll-free on 1888 WBM Herb for further questions during normal business hours Monday through Friday. So, this month we're again very pleased and fortunate to welcome Dr. Ray Peat back to this show, and we will be examining further some common misconceptions surrounding thyroid treatment, and the apparently normal thyroid test in clients with obvious manifestations of thyroid imbalance. We have ourselves seen remarkable progress made with clients with many and varied symptoms that improve dramatically, with diet and lifestyle changes that promote thyroid health, revealing a prior lowered thyroid function,
even in the absence of diagnostic tests that show no obvious problems. So, welcome again to this month's show, Dr. Peat. Hello, thank you. It's very kind of you to join us again. Okay. Oh, I think we should, Dr. Peat has over 40 years experience. I want to introduce Dr. Peat's experience for those of you who haven't heard Dr. Peat on our radio show last year. But he has over 40 years experience in lecturing, teaching, writing, editing, and nutritional counseling. So, we're very happy to have him join our show tonight.
And he also has a PhD in biochemistry, and he also teaches on physiology, and basically functions as an endocrinologist. Does that sound right, Dr. Peat? Yeah, my PhD is in biology, but my work was all in physiology and biochemistry. So, we wanted to talk about thyroid disease because it seems to be such a chronic epidemic. And we thought we'd just start by introducing what thyroid disease is, in case there are listeners that are not aware of what their thyroid is or where it's located.
So, Dr. Peat, what would you describe low thyroid disease to be or hypothyroidism? It's basically a slowing of the oxidative metabolism. And that means your biological efficiency falls drastically because we rely almost entirely on oxidative metabolism. In emergencies, we can use glycolytic non-oxidative metabolism, but then we have to make up for it by re-oxidizing the lactic acid that was produced in the oxygen deprivation or energy over-stressing. And so everything that is human or mammalian or even a complex organism depends on the thyroid because all cellular activity to be efficient requires oxidative metabolism.
So, thyroid in a sense is controlling the oxygen to all the cells in our system. Is that correct? And so one of the effects is that our carbon dioxide production is kept at a fairly high rate in relation to oxygen consumption. That keeps our tendency to produce lactic acid very low. So, if a person is low thyroid, even at rest, they can seem metabolically as if they're doing stressful activity. They can chronically have elevated lactic acid. And is this something that involves like chronic fatigue?
People's muscles are chronically fatigued even though they're not really even doing any exercises that might seem to be using their muscles besides just walking around? Yes, because when you don't use oxygen efficiently, you have to make lactic acid to keep the cells alive. And the lactic acid then has to be reoxidized in your liver to turn it eventually to carbon dioxide. And so just sitting passively for a hypothyroid person can be the same as running at high speed for a healthy person.
And about 60 years ago, it was very well known that a hypothyroid person has trouble relaxing their muscles and nerves. And so there were publications showing that you can just about invariably diagnose hypothyroidism with a simple thump of the ankle tendon to the gastrocnemius muscle. Which is the calf muscle. Yeah. And when you're kneeling and you thump that, you can see that the relaxation is delayed. That was very well established as a good diagnostic method in the 1930s and '40s. But the labs and pharmaceutical companies couldn't sell anything.
You can use just a table knife or a wooden hammer handle or anything to thump the tendon. And it just takes about two minutes to do it. And so it's a very uneconomical business for doctors in the pharmaceutical industry to be able to diagnose the condition so simply. So is this why the blood test came about that tests the TSH, thyroid stimulating hormone? Yeah. For the first 20 years or so, doctors were told not to use the Achilles relaxation test or the basal metabolic oxygen consumption test or any of the proven absolute confirmations of hypothyroidism.
Because they had what they called the scientific blood test to prove it. And that was called the protein bound iodine test. And that convinced doctors all over the country that where previously 40% of the population had shown some evidence of being hypothyroid. The new blood test showed that only 5% were hypothyroid. So for 20 years, this test was used convincing the whole medical world that very few people are seriously hypothyroid. And then in the 1960s, it turned out that protein bound iodine has essentially nothing to do with thyroid hormone functioning.
And what about the TSH that's used today? Do you think that's relevant? Yeah. When the protein bound iodine test was thrown out, they looked for other tests which conveniently proved to be even more expensive than the protein bound iodine. And that finally has settled in on the TSH test as the favored one. And they can measure it very precisely, but it just isn't clear what it means in many cases. Because other things can raise it or lower it other than the absence or excess of thyroid hormone.
So if someone is low thyroid or is not low thyroid, they can have varying levels of this TSH, which the doctors are saying is thyroid stimulating hormone, but which you're suggesting and other scientists are suggesting doesn't really relate specifically to thyroid. That's true. And it has some bad side effects. It promotes inflammation in itself. So low thyroid people not only lack the metabolic energy, but they tend very often to have very high TSH levels. And the TSH is causing some tissue damage chronically.
Wow. Okay. So what do you think is causing low thyroid function in a lot of people in the US today? I think, well, 70 years ago, it sometimes included an iodine deficiency, but with the iodination of table salt, other factors became far more important. I've only seen the iodine deficiency condition a few times in people from South America or the mountains of Mexico. And many times it's a protein deficiency or an excess of eating certain foods that inhibit the thyroid, such as raw cabbage or even an excess of any of the cabbage family foods.
So that would include kale, broccoli, cauliflower, brussels sprouts. And mustard and watercress. And even if they're cooked, if you eat a huge amount of them, that sometimes can be enough to make you hypothyroid. Is this anything to do with the sulfur groups? Yeah, it's a combination of a carbon that contains an oxygen or nitrogen and the sulfur group. Okay. And so there are known medical chemicals that are used to specifically inhibit the thyroid to treat hyperthyroidism. Okay. Right. I know in the previous interviews that we've done that you've very much brought out the polyunsaturated oils
as being definite antagonists to thyroid function and in fact downright thyroid destructive in some ways. Yeah, they antagonize the thyroid function at several levels. For example, they inhibit the proteolytic enzyme in the gland itself, which are needed to secrete, to form and secrete the hormone. And they bind to the protein in the bloodstream that transports thyroid, preventing the transport to the tissues. And they block several of the active sites in the cell, the points at which thyroid should bind to enliven the cell, the polyunsaturated fats.
So they're affecting thyroid health at the production location, the thyroid gland, the transportation through the bloodstream, as well as at the tissue level where the tissues and the cells can pick up the thyroid hormone. Yes. And they act on several other parts of the system, including indirectly on the TSH and every other part of the metabolic system. So these polyunsaturated fatty acids are found in very high levels, are mainly consisting of vegetable oils, corn oil, soy oil, sesame seed oil, safflower, canola, rapeseed, and canola are the same, and fish, hemp, and flaxseed oils.
So a lot of these oils that are purported to be good for our health are actually quite thyroid toxic and long-term use could lead to conditions that are common in low thyroid and is as detrimental as cancer. Yeah. And there's one which isn't really a fatty acid, but it's a highly unsaturated molecule, carotene, which is the precursor to vitamin A. It not only blocks the cellular sites that use vitamin A, but as a polyunsaturated molecule, it also blocks the thyroid function every place that the vegetable oils do.
So this would be just basically ingesting lots of cooked carrots, that would be the... Yeah. And cooked pumpkin, anything that had high levels of carotene. Okay, and that's that yellow pigment or the orange pigment. Yeah, some of the studies confused people because they knew that vitamin A was protective against cancer, but they saw that some types of cancer increased with supplementation of carotene. Okay. Right, so it's that the carotene blocks the receptor, so your body can't use the vitamin A that's in your diet.
And so it sits in the receptor, but it doesn't stimulate our receptor. It sits somewhere in the cell that doesn't stimulate the effects of vitamin A, the protective cancer-protecting effects of vitamin A. And vitamin A and thyroid work so closely together biologically that the protein that transports them is a single protein. It's called transthyretin for retinol and thyroid transport. And in the 1930s, one of the ways of confirming that a person had died from hypothyroidism was that the steroid-forming tissues turned red because of the accumulated carotene.
Because you can't use vitamin A if you don't have thyroid. And so the carotene accumulates in the steroid-forming tissue and makes them red. Would this be any reason now behind the basis of people with yellow calluses being very apparent on their soles or their palms? Yeah, that's one of the old ways to diagnose hypothyroidism. Okay. Well. I think you've told us that before, Dr. Peat. We're going to pause here for a moment. Okay. Well, you're listening to Ask Your Ob-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 related or unrelated to this month's topic of thyroid disorder. And we can hopefully cover iron and a few other subjects. But again, this month, we're very pleased and fortunate to welcome Dr. Raymond Peat back to the show. And we're going to be continuing to examine some common misconceptions surrounding thyroid treatment. Okay. So, Sarah, did you want to carry on with? Yeah. I printed out a long list of symptoms that are common in low thyroid disease.
So we've been talking about low thyroid disease, which is known as hypothyroidism. And we've talked about what it is, what causes it. But I want to mention some symptoms and signs that accompany the disease because so many people seem to be suffering from these symptoms. Okay. Well, the list is pretty exhaustive. It may seem a little extreme, but pretty much all of these will be apparent in some people. So things like the obvious ones are less stamina than others, given that the metabolic rate helps us produce energy and gives us life. Less energy than others.
A long recovery period after any activity. There's also the inability to fight infection, sort of low-grade chronic infections. Cold hands and feet are very kind of symptomatic of low thyroid. And then high, usually high or rising cholesterol in low thyroid patients does seem to be fairly common. And then things like dry hair, dry skin, hair loss, dry cracking skin. Also, though, the other thing that seems to be contrary to dry skin is that you can have acne on the face, the shoulders, the chest and the back.
So why would symptoms such as dry skin and dry hair and acne and oily skin both be symptoms of low thyroid? Partly it's the close connection between vitamin A and thyroid. The skin needs vitamin A to differentiate properly. And mucous membranes require vitamin A, too, so that in an extreme deficiency, the surface of the eye becomes scaly and like snake skin. But the lack of both thyroid and vitamin A can cause lots of skin problems, including plugging the pores and allowing infection to set in because the thyroid doesn't allow the immune cells to function properly.
And thinning of the skin just because it isn't growing fast enough. Estrogen is contrary to vitamin A's effect. Progesterone and vitamin A are closely connected so that when you have enough vitamin A and thyroid, even your skin can produce progesterone and other steroids. And when they're lacking, then estrogen takes effect, and it tends to prematurely harden or keratinize the skin cells. They're called keratinized because they become horny. The juicy cell collapses and becomes just a bit of leathery scale-like material like makes up horn or hair. Wow. That's accelerated by estrogen and retarded,
and the cells are allowed to stay vital and moist longer when there's enough thyroid, vitamin A and progesterone. All those good things. Sandra, do you want to carry on with-- Okay, well, I don't want to bore people with too many different-- I know, but there's quite a lot of things here that I think people-- Yeah, okay, so things like exhaustion, and we mentioned that in the very beginning. Physical, mental, and emotional exhaustion, inability to work full-time or work hard
or feel that other people just seem to have that more go than you do and not understanding that. Lack of motivation, lack of concentration, broken or peeling fingernails. We've mentioned dry skin. Tinnitus, ringing in the ears, another fairly common symptom. Things like joint pain. Fluid retention, almost to the point of congestive heart failure. Swollen legs that make it difficult to walk or painful. Blood pressure problems seem to be fairly frequent amongst low thyroid people, as do varicose veins. That's something that many doctors are completely confused about,
which is hypothyroidism typically increases the viscosity of the blood and raises the blood pressure so that a slightly hypothyroid person might have low blood pressure, but a very high percentage of the people with hypertension are simply hypothyroid, and correcting it with a supplement of thyroid, even the point of making them hyperthyroid, will lower the blood pressure. It just seems so counterintuitive to what most people would understand as being hyperthyroid. Well, it's contrary to what we were taught in medical school. We were taught high blood pressure is a sign of high thyroid function.
Low blood pressure is a sign of low thyroid function. So to hear the opposite and to see that in our own clients is astounding. That when they take a thyroid supplement, their blood pressure comes down. And you would think before this came about, that you think that normally your imagination of thyroid is a stimulating hormone, when actually it really improves your sleep and calms you down and lowers your blood pressure and lowers your resting pulse, from a point of maybe 90 or more of an adrenaline high pulse, it brings it down.
I've seen two people who chronically had a pulse around 180 beats per minute. And one of them had it like that for about 20 years. And both of them, within a couple of weeks of taking thyroid, had it down to a normal 90 or 100 beats. Wow. I wonder what they thought. So that's another thing, is a racing pulse. What do you consider to be a healthy, normal thyroid pulse? And what do you consider to be a low thyroid pulse? What are those ranges?
Because of course in medical school we were taught 70 to 80 beats per minute is normal. If you're higher than 80 beats per minute, you could have a disease. So what is your opinion on this, Dr. Peat? There have been several studies of people of different ages, for example, high school kids. And the ones who were healthy and got the best grades and had the best attention had a resting pulse of averaging 85 beats per minute. And when old people on heart pacemakers were given mental exams with the pacemaker set at the usual 70 beats,
they had the usual old person's memory and reasoning ability. When they cranked the pacemaker up to 85 per minute, every mental function improved. So there you go. Cool. So that's pretty interesting because that's, again, we're taught that high thyroid, excess thyroid, hyperthyroid is diagnosed by a racing pulse. There is an old doctrine that around the beginning of the 20th century, they called it the rate of living theory, that the faster your heart beat, the sooner you would die. And the experiment that defined that and proved it for so many people
was to put some cantaloupe seeds in a dish in a saucer of water and watch them sprout. The ones that sprouted the soonest and grew the fastest died soonest, but they didn't put any soil. So they used up all their food. And that's what they were using to support that rate of living theory? Yeah. It's just an embarrassment for science. It's like if you gave a person all the thyroid they needed but no food, they would die quickly. They'd get skinny.
I think Dr. Peat, there's a couple of callers on the line, so let's take the first caller. Okay, you're on the air. Hello. Hello, is it me? Yes, you're on the air. There was no sound. Hi, thank you all. I have a couple of related questions. Okay, go ahead. If a person was quite low in thyroid and it wasn't known for a long time, like more than 20 years, I wonder what kind of damages that could cause. About 12 minutes in, Dr. Peat talked about tissue damage,
and maybe you could tell me what he meant more by that. And then once taking supplementation, when could you expect to be much better? I have been getting supplements for 20 years after not having any, and I'm still quite incapacitated. Oh, usually doctors prescribe thyroxine because that isn't the thyroid hormone. It has to be turned into the active thyroid hormone, which is called triiodothyronine or T3 in the liver to be active, and the thyroid gland secretes a little. But when a doctor prescribes thyroxine, there's no chance that you'll be overdosed
because as you increase it, one of the first patients I heard about who had a myxedema coma became totally unresponsive from hypothyroidism. She had been mildly hypothyroid for years, and they prescribed 100 micrograms of Synthroid, and she became more hypothyroid, and they doubled it. And when they reached 500 micrograms, she went into a coma. What about--oh, sorry. That was supplementing more and more thyroxine. But when in the hospital they gave her an injection of the active hormone T3, she came out of the coma in just a few hours and was completely well after that.
You can have a complete, just amazing recovery from many things in just a matter of minutes in some cases. For example, a doctor who had been having agonizing breast pain, especially premenstrually for increasing over the recent years, I visited, and she said that that was her main problem. I gave her a 10-microgram tablet of Thymel. She went in to--said she would see me in an hour when she finished with the patient. In 10 minutes, she came out saying, "I can't believe that. It stopped."
And that's a very typical thing in less than an hour with just T3. Pain such as menstrual or breast pain will stop totally. I have taken both of those, and also now I have the, like, armor. It's not synthetic. So you're saying that no matter how much damage over, like, a couple of decades, all of that could be repaired. Yes, some types of damage such as osteoporosis. When your thyroid is very low, your--one compensation is that your pituitary tends to swell up and overproduce prolactin, and that's one of the factors in causing breast pain
and disturbed salt regulation and so on. But prolactin is a major factor in causing loss of bone. And as at menopause, very often prolactin goes up because thyroid has gone down, and the prolactin coincides with extreme loss of bone. And so it takes sometimes a long time of correcting your diet along with thyroid before you restore your bones. But I have seen a couple of people--one had her X-ray bone exam showing tremendous-- I think it was 20% increase in less than a year when she was taking thyroid.
Okay, I'm going to go so other people can speak to you, but I don't have a thyroid, so I don't know if that makes a--you know, if that makes much more of a difference. I'm wondering if the question you're wanting to ask is what would happen to someone's body? How much damage is there? That's what I was asking because for 20 years--the doctor removed my thyroid, but they never did anything about checking back, so I went for more than 20 years. Without taking any supplementation at all after a thyroid is removed.
So what would you--I mean, do you think there's damage that's been done in this client, Dr. Reed, that's irreparable? It just increases your stress and slows your recovery from stress, and so it tends to age you faster than usual, just like working too hard would. But those changes--for example, bone growth. I grew an inch and a half in my 40s when I started taking thyroid. Wow. So it happened over just a period of a few months, and so even lifelong things can be corrected pretty quickly. Thanks again. Bye. Very good.
Okay, well, let's see if we have any other callers on the line. I think there's one or two at least. Okay, you're on the air? Yes, I am. Okay, go ahead. Hi. I wanted to ask two questions, and I'll take my answer on the air. Okay. What is--first of all, let me say, I've had--I was thyroid toxic--in storm. Thyrotoxicosis? Yeah, thyrotoxicosis. Okay. Went into storm for four months, was treated with I-131, and for the last 30 years, I've been taking Synthroid. Okay? Okay. Now, here's my question.
Could the doctor please explain the connection between the adrenals, the--in the brain, the pituitary, and the thyroid gland? It seems to be a miracle round that goes around and around and back and forth. Okay, can you possibly turn your radio down if you haven't already, because we seem to be getting some feedback interference, and we can barely hear your question. My radio's not on. Okay. It's on, okay. All right. It's breaking up. Okay, I think I heard your question. You said basically you had thyroid toxicosis, you were treated with Iodine-131,
and then you were given a thyroid replacement? Right. Okay, and your main question was? What is the connection between the adrenals and the stress factor, the pituitary and the thyroid? How do they communicate with each other, and just how bad is the stress? Okay, there you go. Dr. Peat, did you hear that question? I think most of it. When your thyroid is low, because you don't have the efficiency with oxidative metabolism, you turn a lot of your sugar into lactic acid, and then your liver spends more energy converting the lactic acid back into sugar.
So low blood sugar is constantly a problem in hypothyroidism. And the compensation for that is that first your adrenal medulla secretes a lot of adrenaline to force your liver to give up any sugar it has stored. And when that doesn't meet your needs for sugar, then the adrenal cortex begins over-secreting cortisol to break down protein or muscle tissue to make sugar out of it to keep your energy up. And the falling blood sugar itself and the rising adrenaline, both of those are signals to your brain to increase the stress hormones.
The ACTH is produced by the pituitary gland, but also other brain and pituitary hormones including prolactin increase along with it. And the ACTH is what drives your cortisol up, and the cortisol is what causes the most acute tissue damage, loss of muscle mass and quick loss of bone structure and so on. It's also weight gain, isn't it? This is low muscle mass in relation to weight and fat? Yeah, as your ability to burn fat decreases with your falling thyroid, the cortisol eats up your skeletal muscles that burn fat,
and so the unburned fat gets laid down in your trunk and neck and face area. It's probably some kind of a defensive reaction to pad your organs when you're under chronic stress. Right, because muscles burn a lot of energy, and so therefore muscular people can eat a fairly high calorie diet because that energy is being consumed by the muscle, whereas people that have an excess of fat and a lack of muscle tone can very easily get fat on a very small amount of calories. Is that right? Yes. Yeah, okay.
Well, I don't know if that answered the... I'm pretty sure it helped to answer the lady's question, if not answered it completely. A lot of people who have measured deficiency of adrenal function, that seems to be a medically popular diagnosis is adrenal fatigue or insufficiency, but to get any adrenal function you need the vitamins, vitamin A especially, and thyroid. So many people have been diagnosed as having Addison's disease simply because their thyroid was so low that they couldn't produce steroids. The other factor for producing steroids is cholesterol,
and so if you have both low cholesterol and low thyroid, then your adrenals aren't going to be able to make the steroids such as progesterone and pregnenolone and cortisol. So really what some doctors would say, "Oh, you have adrenal fatigue and that would be maybe diagnosed by a saliva test." Really what they need to be looking at is the thyroid function and making sure those people are getting enough vitamin A and that their cholesterol is high enough or they're getting enough in their diet. Yeah. Do we have any other corners? We don't.
Okay, so let's carry on with... I wanted to say another thing that I believe this is what you think, Dr. Peat, is the temperature and pulse can be a measurement of one sign of a low thyroid function. So how would you say a temperature is affected with someone who has a low thyroid? What would their waking morning temperature typically be in the range of? Usually around 98 degrees oral temperature. And then after they eat, what would their temperature be? It should pretty quickly pop right up to 98.6, 98.8,
and then as they get some muscle activity going during the day, it can even rise above that 99 degrees is good in the afternoon. Okay, so this is a normal function. First thing in the morning, your temperature should be around 98. Okay, now I just want to say of all the clients that I've had take their temperatures and pulses, about two out of 50 have had--since I've been doing this temperature and pulse thing all of last year-- about 50 of them have had much lower temperatures than that
and only two have had what you just described, Dr. Peat. So can you say most of them, if they had low thyroid symptoms, in conjunction with those low temperatures would be a diagnosis of low thyroid? Yeah, if you look at the whole picture, the Achilles reflex and their symptoms and how many calories they can burn without getting fat and how well they sleep and the activity efficiency to be able to relax instantly after the exertion and to be able to go to sleep quickly, all of those go with the good temperature curve.
So it's something that can be used in conjunction with symptoms. Right. I think we have a caller on the air. Yeah, we do. Go ahead, caller. Hi, this is Kevin. Hey, Kevin. Hi, Kevin. Andrew and Sarah, hi. So I had a question about Hashimoto's disease. I was diagnosed with that and understand that it interferes with the absorption of thyroid and I'm wondering if Dr. Peat can speak about Hashimoto's and what, if anything, can be done to alleviate it, cure it. The disease was originally defined as infiltration of white blood cells
into the inflamed thyroid gland and since they didn't necessarily like to cut out a piece of gland to confirm that that's what was wrong, they started looking at antibodies in your blood and assuming that you would have the infiltration and inflammation of the gland if you find the antibodies circulating in the blood. But in fact, the antithyroid antibodies overlap with many other problems including arthritis and so the antibodies aren't strictly clearly diagnostic, but they do indicate that something is inflamed and since the thyroid is the basic anti-inflammatory hormone and organ,
it's very often the thyroid that is the main problem when you have these antibodies and there have been several studies in which simply supplementing even with thyroxine for six months or a year, the antibodies will decrease and the whole problem is solved. One thing I've heard of also is taking low-dose naltrexone as a way of helping with the condition. Have you heard of that? When you're hypothyroid and produce lactic acid too easily, you tend to accumulate endorphins. Endorphins are produced in response to the signal of increased lactic acid
to compensate for the stress by acting like morphine equivalents and the endorphins themselves limit your physiological functions in a protective way, sort of like a localized kind of hibernation. So the naloxone or naltrexone will clear those out. Sometimes in two or three days, you can see a person come out of depression or a lethargic state or there was a study in California of demented people who were given very big doses of naloxone for several days or several weeks and their dementia improved just by blocking the endorphins.
How long that somebody should be on naltrexone with conditions like Hashimoto's? Is there any problem with long-term use? No, but I usually see good results in just two or three days. So I think the basic treatment is a good diet and thyroid supplement as needed and then the naloxone or naltrexone is a good thing to try once in a while and if it makes you feel better, then it probably was breaking up a pattern. Okay, thank you very much. Okay, thank you. Thank you for your call, Kevin. We have two other callers on the line.
Go ahead. You're on the air? Yes, thank you for taking my call. My name is Mike and I have a question for the doctor. Earlier I heard the show the doctor was listening a number of vegetables and some polyunsaturated oils that had something to do with making something higher and I'm assuming that had to do with the thyroid. My question is, would cod liver oil be placed in with those other oils? And I'll take my question off the air. Thank you. The fish oils are long molecules compared to the seed oils
and they are also more unstable to oxidative breakdown and the fact that they are long means that they don't inhibit our enzymes for metabolizing fats as seriously as the seed oils such as canola or corn oil do. But their instability means that by the time they get in the blood, they're pretty well oxidized and several studies have shown that the fish oils do have an anti-inflammatory effect but only their oxidative breakdown products which include some serious toxins, only those are really active anti-inflammatory substances and what they're doing is poisoning the immune system, suppressing immunity.
So temporarily, it's effective for alleviating symptoms but in the long run, it's not good because the breakdown products include things like acrolein and several of the free radical oxidative damage fractions of the broken down fats. And those are both very dangerous toxic substances. So not only does it suppress your immune system, it also through this immune system suppression, it's also releasing toxic substances. And there are really quite a few articles that people don't get to hear about showing that the fish oils contribute to atherosclerosis and increase the risk of metastatic cancer
and are toxic to the brain and so on. The commercial promotion of the fish oils, they happen to never mention those. Yeah. Well, I think we've got two other callers on the line, Dr. Peat. So let's take the next caller. You're on the air? Hello? Hello, you're on the air. Hi, my name is Jenny. Thank you for speaking, Dr. Peat. I've been on armor thyroid for some years now and they want to change over, change me and put me on one of the synthetic thyroid. And I'm wondering if there are any disadvantages to doing that.
And also I'm wondering about if the synthetic thyroid, I've heard they are made with milk products, which I can't tolerate cow's milk. So I'm wondering about those two things. The company that makes armor also makes a synthetic called thyrolar, which was based on the original armor thyroid product. And the FDA has been requiring a lot of formula changes in the natural thyroid. So it seems to vary in quality according to the interference by the FDA. And the thyrolar as a synthetic, I think it has been pretty steady over the last 40 or 50 years,
since it is just a synthetic chemical. And it's very equivalent to the traditional armor. But you can find out on the armor company's website, Forest Pharmaceuticals, whether there's milk in it. Several other products contain the same synthetic chemicals. I get them from Mexico. One is called Novo Tyrol and the other one is Cynoplus. And they're very similar to Armour thyroid. So when you see your doctor, if you want to ask them to, if you want to request that you have a prescription for thyrolar, that's spelled T-H-Y-R-O-L-A-R, thyrolar. Thank you. You're very welcome.
Okay, I think we might just have time for one more caller before we need to wrap up here. So you're on the air? Yes, I'm on the air. Okay. This is not related to thyroid. I actually wanted to ask you about something that has to do with tuberculosis and staph infections. Okay. I've had somebody at Red River Rural and also at Garberville Clinic, I've been diagnosed with staph. Okay. How do I treat this? Okay, I mean, when you say you've been diagnosed with staph, do you have multiple lesions resembling small boils?
All over my body. Okay. Welts. Right. And it started a cat scratch, went up my nose, and then it went into my eyes, and it went all over my body. And then my husband caught it too. And they had to put a wick into his chest because he had staph. Wow. I don't mean to be personal, but is there any kind of drug abuse or any kind of very low immune status amongst either of you? Immune status...
Do you normally get coughs and colds more frequently than other people or any kind of infections more easily than other people? Do you have any kind of history of having a weak immune system? I'd say that I get a cold every once in a while because my stepson comes back from CR and he always gets a cold. Okay. All right. I think without going too far into it because we really don't have the time, I would certainly come up with a few suggestions of things to try and then we'll throw it over to Dr. Peat
and see what Dr. Peat would be thinking about. I know there's one product and it's actually manufactured in England. I don't know if you can get it in America, but basically it's an allicin-rich garlic extract. Now, Dr. Peat may not like this much, I don't know, because it does contain a lot of sulfur and there's sulfhydryl groups that we were talking about to begin with that you find in the brassica family, the thyroid suppressive. So the allicin was used very successfully for staph, for internal staph. So that's basically one solution.
Other immune stimulating herbs from an herbal perspective would certainly be useful to improve your tissues resistance to the byproducts of the staph infection that cause that boil and that breakdown of that tissue. But Dr. Peat, I'm very interested to hear if you have any comments to make on staph infection, systemic staph infection. Well, I'll talk to you directly then. Go ahead and Dr. Peat will talk on the air now. I've seen a few cases of chronic infection, some that had gone on for decades, that cleared up with just thyroid or thyroid and nutrition.
And it's good to cover the bases. Even some antibiotics, tetracycline, for example, happens to have a structure that's parallel to vitamin K and to the active ingredient of aloe and cascara. And so those three or four molecules have a very beneficial effect on your immune system as well as being slightly suppressive to a variety of bacteria. Doctor, have you ever known somebody who has gone into the VA? My husband is in the VA clinic and he's gone and we were worried about that.
I had a friend whose doctors insisted that they first were going to amputate his feet and then they decided they would amputate his legs because they said the infection in the bones made it incurable. And since I had read Broda Barnes' book and had seen a couple of cases of chronic infections, clearing up myelitis and such, I made my old friend take thyroid for a while. And the ulcers, he had gangrene into the bones of his feet. Within two weeks, the sores had closed and he was putting on his dress shoes and going to lodge.
And we went through cycles. I think there were three cycles where his doctor made him stop the thyroid. The bone infection came back after two or three months and I would see his feet rotting, make him take his thyroid and his feet each time cleared up totally. But the doctor finally said, "Well, there's still infection in there so we have to cut them off." Okay, I'm going to have to call it a night there. Thank you very much for all of your calls.
And Dr. Peat, thank you very much for joining us again on the show. Thank you all. I want to mention that Dr. Peat's website is very extensive, has lots of articles on it, very much researched scientific information. So some of it may seem counter-controversial or counter to what we're told, but it's scientific information that you can all check out. His website is www.rayPeat.org. And that's spelled R-A-Y-P-E-A-T. No, it's dot com now. Sorry, dot com, rayPeat.com. Okay, folks, so that's the website. Go check it out. Thank you very much, Dr. Peat, for joining us.
And I just want to say thank you, Dr. Peat, and for all those listeners who are interested in trying to eat right for their thyroid health, we can be contacted Monday through Friday, normal business hours, toll-free 888-926-4372. Which is WBMHerb. Okay, so thank you very much for joining us. Thank you for all the callers. Thank you for being out there and asking questions. And also Dr. Peat is available for nutritional counseling from his website directly, which is www.rayPeat.com. Thank you, Dr. Peat. Thank you, and good night. Good night.