RP Stress Interview - Eluv - Part 1
If you're really healthy then you can meet challenges without experiencing something that Hans Selye would have called stress, for example if you are not very healthy, just skipping a meal can put you in really serious stress, but a healthy person stores something like 7 or 8 ounces of glucose in the form of glycogen in the liver and the muscles and brain, and since at rest the muscles can burn primarily fatty acids, your brain is the main thing that consumes glucose.
If you're inactive and relaxed you can easily go 12-15 hours without eating or any stress at all, but if you're not able to store that much glycogen, for example low thyroid people or people with a history of a lot of sever stress aren't able to store much glycogen, and so when you run out of sugar, whether it's from going all day without eating or because your liver isn't very efficient, your body tries to increase the available glucose, normally being awake makes enough adrenaline to mobilise as much glucose from your stores as you need, but when you run out of that stored sugar, your brain still require sugar to function properly, instead of increasing adrenaline more and more, when it reaches a certain level and can't get the blood sugar up from storage, then you turn on the cortisol and that' the classes stress that can be harmful, because the cortisol dissolves first the tissues like the Thymus which is very fragile, that starts turning to sugar immediately when you run out of stored glycogen, and when the thymus is gone in just a few hours of intense stress, that happens to be one of the reasons they think adults don't have thymus glands, because by the time they're dead and are analysed, the thymus has been eaten up by stress - they may have had a perfectly normal thymus until death.
After the thymus is consumed and turned to sugar, the cortisol starts breaking down your muscles, then your skin. The brains, lungs and hearts are spared from the breakdown, partly because in a healthy person they are very saturated with androgens (testosterone and DHEA especially) which block the breakdown function of cortisol. if your brain, lungs and heart are short of those protective steroids then that's where the stress really starts causing severe, deadly damage. Post-trauatic stress disorder is produced when someone has had such terrible stress, such as torture or terrific catastrophes, they not only deplete their stored glycogen and breakdown the expendable tissues like thymus and liver, but then the cortisol starts damaging the brain and heart and so on.
They get very sever chronic symptoms. once the stress is completely resolved, then the brain can massively regenerate itself. For example they've seen MRIs of girls who have been in Anorexia for months, their brain shrinks from living on the cortisol breaking down their tissues, when they start eating the brain can rebuild itself in just a few weeks.
Q: How often does one have to eat to not have this stress reaction happen?
The famous argentine biologist, bernardo husset, he showed that if he fed his animals only once per day, they not only tended to get fat on the same amount of calories, but they had a high incidence of diabetes, but if he fed them 3 or more a day, then they were resistant to diabetes, and less fat .More or less nibbling all the time is the safest thing, but if you have a really good diet and weren't under emotional pressure,e then a person can get along on one or two meals a day.
Q: What is the optimal diet?
The Blood type has almost no effect, you can see in very different species of animal which have very different ways of living, you can see the same processes [lost] so there's a universal animal diet which is optimal, but the proportions vary with the type of activity and size, and metabolic rate and personal history. Your previous stresses will affect what you need.
Q: for someone who is stressed and not healthy, what is recommended?
RP: One of the reasons that the single meal eaters tend to get fat and diabetic, is that it triggers a great surge of insulin, and the insulin triggers cortisol. If you can eat foods that don't trigger insulin, that's the ideal thing, and fruit happens to be the best single type of food for not triggering the stress reaction because it combines very small amounts of protein, with large amounts of sugar and minerals - potassium handles sugar in place of insulin, and the fructose component of fruit doesn't require insulin, so eating a lot of fruit produces much smaller amount of insulin, cortisol, than eating for example just one big meal of meat and potatoes, stimulates insulin and cortisol, starches are more stimulating to insulin than sugars.
Q; So it's almost counterintuitive, when you're talking about taking in fructose
RP: for about 100 years, Fructose has been recognised as the ideal sugar for diabetics because they can metabolise it. It used to be sold in health food stores all across the country, you can still find it for diabetics.
Q: difference between HFCS and Fructose?
RP: the funny thing about it is if you look at the fructose and glucose content, it seems to not be any difference between any sugar, but people thought to analysse what is in the stuff other than fructose and glucose, and the reason that people get fat is the calories that is neither fructose or glucose, it is the syrupy component basically a type of corn starch or syrup, but they don't count it.
It was a trick because of the boycott of cuban sugar starting in the 60s, the price of sugar went up, so the corn starch producers learnt how to produce something resembling sugar, it's like the old carob syrup which was not a very appetising way to sweeten things, but during the second world war, in the United States Corn syrip started being used in canned things. The sweeter more palatable form was developed in the 60s in response to the increased price of sugar.
Q: they've done a similar thing with oils in food?
RP: Yes the cotton seed industry was a major power behind that at the end of the 1800s
To make cotton more economical they had machines to get the seeds out of the cotton, and in proportion to the production of cotton they were accumulating seeds that were too toxic to feed their animals, and they found that they could squeeze oils out of the cotton seed, and by chemically hardening in they could sell it as artificial butter, and the butter industry finally they were required to sell it in a colourless state, so that it wouldn't ruin the butter industry, but the seed industry gradually got powerful enough that they could convince people that it is better than butter.
Same as rapeseed oil?
RP: the first Rape seed oil happened to cause severe heart disease, and they wanted to sell it for cooking etc, and there was a particular oil in that plant that they decided to blame the heart injury on, but Hans Selye did experiments on it, studying the type of lesion product in the heart from the rapeseed oil, and he found that it was the linoleum acid in it, which is still in it. They took out the peculiar unusual fatty acid, but left the heart toxic linolenic acid . Hans Selye showed that if you added coco butter, highly saturated stearic acid to the rapeseed oil, it no longer caused the death of the heart cells.It's the excess of the polyunsaturated fats that made the rapeseed, cotton or canola oil, all of those are actually toxic if you eat very much of it.
Q: What about soybean oil?
RP: it's still the Polyunsaturated element, which turns into prostaglandins, which promote all kinds of degenerative diseases. As early as 1964, a dutch research named Betcher, sliced open the lesions in artheroschlroitc at all stages and analysed the fats within them and he saw that he called it a primitive idea that cholesterol got infused out of the blood and damaged it. HE said that the situation was very different to that and he said that many fats change at the beginning before the change happened in the cholesterol. And in the most advanced lesions, he found that the content of Linoleic Acid was highest, and after that many people demonstrated that the oxidation products of these highly unstable fats are found in the atheroschlrosis
Q: All of these oils are being advertised as better for your health!
RP: Advertising from people claiming they shouldn't buy them because they
Claiming they are essential means you should eat more. It's very questionable whether they are essential as a nutrient at all - animals can live more or less indefinitely - grow cells in a dish without those, which proves they are mot essential
The more you increase in the diet, there is a direct increase in the incidence of cancer, but the industry keeps publicising them as health foods.
Q:
RP: beyond fruits, the ideal diet the ruminants are able to detoxify the polyunsaturated fats in grains or grasses, it happens to be vitamin E in the grass which allows them to convert linoleic into the trans fatty acids, there is one of the components as butter or beef fats, because it counteracts the toxic effects of the PUFAs, this is called the conjugated linoleic acid, you get some of that in beef, butter, cheese or milk. The high ratio of calcium to phosphate comes from the fact that if cow allowed to eat hay and grass, the leaves contain low amount of phosphate and calcium and other safe minerals. Too much phosphate from grain based or meat-based, the phosphate becomes toxic if not balanced by calcium and magnesium. Milk, fruit and cheese give you the main nutrients. Then there are some like selenium and iodine, then you are getting the basic things for anti-stress
Q: more difficult for vegetarians?
RP: If you concentrate on well cooked greens, the protein and minerals balance in leafy greens is about the same as milk, just less concentrated because of the high cellulose diluting it. If you can cook away or wash away the anti-nutrients, for example too much spinance contains oxalic acid which tends to take the calcium out of your teeth, and some leafy vegetables have chemicals that block your stomach digestive enzymes, but a variety of cooked greens will provide the same type of protein as milk provides as well as the balance of calcium, magnesium like milk
The very juicy fruits are best raw, but if starchy like plantains or bananas, they should be cooked, because the starches can enter the blood stream and cause allergic reactions, called presoprtion, blocking capillaries and arteries until the particle can be broken down but it can stay in place long enough to kill cells in the heart and brain and lungs. Feeding mice on a raw starch diet, they were very prematurely aged, because of the death of cells in their organs blocked by starch grains. Potatoes are almost the perfect food if very well cooked, because you want to break down the starch and the non-starch ingredients of a potato have almost a perfect balance of nutrients, b vitamins, essential amino acids, carbs in the right proportion, and the only thing that is lacking in a pure potato diet is vitamin A and vitamin B12. THey are a very balanced food.
Q: Sweet potatoes, or white?
RP: White potatoes. Some white potatoes contain enough carotene that that could provide requirement of Vitamin A, sweet potatoes often contain so much Carotene that it interferes with digestion, too much carotene has anti-hormonal effects, it can slow down production of thyroid hormones, progesterone, adrenal hormones etc, If it accumulates to point of making your palms of calluses turn orange.
i constantly warn people about that there are good chemicals in the juice, good nutrition, but unless your thyroid is pretty active, it will accumulate the carotene. because you convert carotene to vitamin A if you have Voitamin B12 in proportion to how active your thyroid is.
If for some reason you are getting more carotene than your B12 and Thyroid can handle, it turns off the thyroid function. I experienced this myself 40 years ago, eating so many carrots I suppressed my thyroid. If your thyroid is good, then having a whole carrot every day has some very important anti-stress functions.
I heard from a woman yesterday who said that she had started a daily carrot salad and had had almost immediate relief from all of her premenstrual and digestive problems. We have measured blood hormones in a few people after they had started a daily whole carrot. It's the stimulating effect on the intestine.The fibre in the carrot isn't digestible, and so the excretion of the bile into the liver carries all types of detoxified toxins and chemicals, and if you have fiber in your intestine, these toxins that the liver has got rid of, will be carried out bound the carrot fibre. Without the carrot fibre they can be absorbed and recycled so your estrogen tends to go up as the fibre in your diet goes down and that in turn turns off your thyroid and progesterone, so it can cause all the symptoms of estrogen and cortisol excess, and in just 3 or 4 days we've seen the cortisol and estrogen level in the blood drop as the progesterone comes up, just from eating a daily carrot.
Q: it's interesting how the foods we eat influence everything about our body
RP: Yes [] of people, partly due to an industrliazed diet, lots of Americans are now going around in a chronically stressed condition, it's sort of like learned helplessness or Post traumatic stress syndrome, the diet keeps people in a high cortisol, high estrogen state, that's something that if you're going to have any stress, you should well before you have to do any important work, you should make sure that your diet isn't creating the stress day by day. For example checking your thyroid function just by measuring your temperature and pulse rate when you wake up and then in the middle of the day, they should rise so that your pulse is maybe 80 per minute at rest, and your temperature should be around 98.6 at rest. In the morning it's ok for them to be 10% lower pulse rate and maybe 97.8 degrees or so.
Q: This can also be influencing the fact that men are also having hormonal issues as well, correct?
RP: Sure. When a man is on a very bad diet, or is under stress or has an accident, the estrogen level rises, sharply. In old age, with any of the degenerative diseases, men tend to have a sharp increase in estrogen.
Q: So they can avoid this or monitor this by their diet?
RP: Yeah, and your temperature is your quickest way because oestrogen lowers your temperature, Thyroid and progesterone and DHEA help to maintain a good steady high metabolic rate even at rest.
Q: When people get cold when they're sitting there in front of their desk or at home, then that may indicate that the hormones have changed and the thyroid is dropping?
RP: Yeah, and one of the tricks of the body through increasing the adrenaline, can compensate for hypothyroidism, and so some people are hyper alert and anxious, and have a high heart rate even though their Thyroid is really low, and their temperature can be held up and look normal except that it's likely to be higher when you first wake up in the morning and then decrease when you east something.
Q: so it switches?
RP: yeah because the night time is when you aren't eating and your adrenaline and cortisol rise, those can tear down your tissues at such a rate that they keep your temperature up, so that when you eat something and lower the stress, you see that your metabolism is really not so high, and when the adrenaline is really high, even though your oral temperature might seem normal, your hands and feet will be cold, and maybe the tip of your nose even, because the body is directing your energy so that your brain lungs and heart aren't deprived or chilled, but your body can consider your hands and feet somewhat expendable, and can let them get very cold.
Q: So if we up the stress levels, and we've been speaking about general stress, and it someone has a surgery, there are more sever chemical changes , can include depression and sleep disorders [blah]
RP: and even dementia, they've been measuring mental function after major surgery and for months even years after major surgery, people's mental function is often slowed down, that is because of the chronic effect of cortisol, which slows nerve conduction, it protects some of your tissues from inflammation, but it progressively damages your immune system and your nervous system.
Q: What are some of the best things for recovery?
RP: the thing about surgery as opposed to a car accident or being tortured or something, is that you can prepare for it and even standard medical sources are saying that you should check Thyroid function before you schedule someone for surgery, because a hypothyroid person doesn't do well in surgery because their cortisol is already high. BEfore Hans Selye made stress famous, an American surgeon George Crile {?} in Cleveland, over 100 years ago was studying shock in surgery and what you had to do to minimise the shock, and shock as he understood it became to be part of shock and stress as Hans Selye interpreted it, for Selye an excess of estrogen was enough to create the whole shock syndrome.
And George Crile, in the hospital in cleveland he worked at in 1908 the mortality rate from all the surgeries was 4.4%, and after he devised a way to reduce stress, in 5 years of application it had cut the mortality to 1.8%. His basic procedure was to convince the brain that nothing had happened, he called it anoci-association, meaning getting the brain to not notice the noxious event, and he found that histamine was released by morphine, that histamine brought on all of these other stress hormone changes, and so he added an anti-histamine, an herbal drug called Scopolamine, basically an anti histamine, anti stress preparation to go with the anaesthesia, and then he used a local anaesthetic to stop, first he would anaesthetise the skin, then when the skin was cut each layer would get a local anaesthetic, so that he was not letting the brain receive any of those harmful signals, but a careless, quick surgery nowadays often is very rough, and the patient wakes up with changes in the brain from the powerful noxious stimulation of the surgery, so that if you can get the doctor to reduce the trauma of the surgery, that is a very important part of recovery, like the hypothyroid person doesn't recover very well because their metabolic rate is very low, their temperature is also very low, and since the surgery turning on the stress hormones turns off the Thyroid function, temperature tends to drop drastically during and following surgery, and in proportion to how the temperature falls, the person's recovery is impaired, so that everything that will keep your temperature up during and after surgery, preparing with at least 2 weeks of adjusting Thyroid so you are not hypo-thyroid, that makes the recovery a lot faster.
A study in Mississippi I think it was, found that if the intensive care people would check the patient's vitamin D levels as they came in, they found that out of 278 cases, only 3 people had normal Vitamin D. Partly that means that deficient people get sick more often or that sickness lowers your vitamin D but some of them had as low as 8 or 10 ng/ml where it should be 50 or 55, that's the normal range, and when he got the dietician to check their Vitamin D levels and supplement Vitamin D, the length of stay in intensive care was cut in half, survival increased and saved the hospital more than half of the expenses just by that one Vitamin.
If you're really healthy then you can meet challenges without experiencing something that Hans Selye would have called stress, for example if you are not very healthy, just skipping a meal can put you in really serious stress, but a healthy person stores something like 7 or 8 ounces of glucose in the form of glycogen in the liver and the muscles and brain, and since at rest the muscles can burn primarily fatty acids, your brain is the main thing that consumes glucose.
If you're inactive and relaxed you can easily go 12-15 hours without eating or any stress at all, but if you're not able to store that much glycogen, for example low thyroid people or people with a history of a lot of sever stress aren't able to store much glycogen, and so when you run out of sugar, whether it's from going all day without eating or because your liver isn't very efficient, your body tries to increase the available glucose, normally being awake makes enough adrenaline to mobilise as much glucose from your stores as you need, but when you run out of that stored sugar, your brain still require sugar to function properly, instead of increasing adrenaline more and more, when it reaches a certain level and can't get the blood sugar up from storage, then you turn on the cortisol and that' the classes stress that can be harmful, because the cortisol dissolves first the tissues like the Thymus which is very fragile, that starts turning to sugar immediately when you run out of stored glycogen, and when the thymus is gone in just a few hours of intense stress, that happens to be one of the reasons they think adults don't have thymus glands, because by the time they're dead and are analysed, the thymus has been eaten up by stress - they may have had a perfectly normal thymus until death.
After the thymus is consumed and turned to sugar, the cortisol starts breaking down your muscles, then your skin. The brains, lungs and hearts are spared from the breakdown, partly because in a healthy person they are very saturated with androgens (testosterone and DHEA especially) which block the breakdown function of cortisol. if your brain, lungs and heart are short of those protective steroids then that's where the stress really starts causing severe, deadly damage. Post-trauatic stress disorder is produced when someone has had such terrible stress, such as torture or terrific catastrophes, they not only deplete their stored glycogen and breakdown the expendable tissues like thymus and liver, but then the cortisol starts damaging the brain and heart and so on.
They get very sever chronic symptoms. once the stress is completely resolved, then the brain can massively regenerate itself. For example they've seen MRIs of girls who have been in Anorexia for months, their brain shrinks from living on the cortisol breaking down their tissues, when they start eating the brain can rebuild itself in just a few weeks.
Q: How often does one have to eat to not have this stress reaction happen?
The famous argentine biologist, bernardo husset, he showed that if he fed his animals only once per day, they not only tended to get fat on the same amount of calories, but they had a high incidence of diabetes, but if he fed them 3 or more a day, then they were resistant to diabetes, and less fat .More or less nibbling all the time is the safest thing, but if you have a really good diet and weren't under emotional pressure,e then a person can get along on one or two meals a day.
Q: What is the optimal diet?
The Blood type has almost no effect, you can see in very different species of animal which have very different ways of living, you can see the same processes [lost] so there's a universal animal diet which is optimal, but the proportions vary with the type of activity and size, and metabolic rate and personal history. Your previous stresses will affect what you need.
Q: for someone who is stressed and not healthy, what is recommended?
RP: One of the reasons that the single meal eaters tend to get fat and diabetic, is that it triggers a great surge of insulin, and the insulin triggers cortisol. If you can eat foods that don't trigger insulin, that's the ideal thing, and fruit happens to be the best single type of food for not triggering the stress reaction because it combines very small amounts of protein, with large amounts of sugar and minerals - potassium handles sugar in place of insulin, and the fructose component of fruit doesn't require insulin, so eating a lot of fruit produces much smaller amount of insulin, cortisol, than eating for example just one big meal of meat and potatoes, stimulates insulin and cortisol, starches are more stimulating to insulin than sugars.
Q; So it's almost counterintuitive, when you're talking about taking in fructose
RP: for about 100 years, Fructose has been recognised as the ideal sugar for diabetics because they can metabolise it. It used to be sold in health food stores all across the country, you can still find it for diabetics.
Q: difference between HFCS and Fructose?
RP: the funny thing about it is if you look at the fructose and glucose content, it seems to not be any difference between any sugar, but people thought to analysse what is in the stuff other than fructose and glucose, and the reason that people get fat is the calories that is neither fructose or glucose, it is the syrupy component basically a type of corn starch or syrup, but they don't count it.
It was a trick because of the boycott of cuban sugar starting in the 60s, the price of sugar went up, so the corn starch producers learnt how to produce something resembling sugar, it's like the old carob syrup which was not a very appetising way to sweeten things, but during the second world war, in the United States Corn syrip started being used in canned things. The sweeter more palatable form was developed in the 60s in response to the increased price of sugar.
Q: they've done a similar thing with oils in food?
RP: Yes the cotton seed industry was a major power behind that at the end of the 1800s
To make cotton more economical they had machines to get the seeds out of the cotton, and in proportion to the production of cotton they were accumulating seeds that were too toxic to feed their animals, and they found that they could squeeze oils out of the cotton seed, and by chemically hardening in they could sell it as artificial butter, and the butter industry finally they were required to sell it in a colourless state, so that it wouldn't ruin the butter industry, but the seed industry gradually got powerful enough that they could convince people that it is better than butter.
Same as rapeseed oil?
RP: the first Rape seed oil happened to cause severe heart disease, and they wanted to sell it for cooking etc, and there was a particular oil in that plant that they decided to blame the heart injury on, but Hans Selye did experiments on it, studying the type of lesion product in the heart from the rapeseed oil, and he found that it was the linoleum acid in it, which is still in it. They took out the peculiar unusual fatty acid, but left the heart toxic linolenic acid . Hans Selye showed that if you added coco butter, highly saturated stearic acid to the rapeseed oil, it no longer caused the death of the heart cells.It's the excess of the polyunsaturated fats that made the rapeseed, cotton or canola oil, all of those are actually toxic if you eat very much of it.
Q: What about soybean oil?
RP: it's still the Polyunsaturated element, which turns into prostaglandins, which promote all kinds of degenerative diseases. As early as 1964, a dutch research named Betcher, sliced open the lesions in artheroschlroitc at all stages and analysed the fats within them and he saw that he called it a primitive idea that cholesterol got infused out of the blood and damaged it. HE said that the situation was very different to that and he said that many fats change at the beginning before the change happened in the cholesterol. And in the most advanced lesions, he found that the content of Linoleic Acid was highest, and after that many people demonstrated that the oxidation products of these highly unstable fats are found in the atheroschlrosis
Q: All of these oils are being advertised as better for your health!
RP: Advertising from people claiming they shouldn't buy them because they
Claiming they are essential means you should eat more. It's very questionable whether they are essential as a nutrient at all - animals can live more or less indefinitely - grow cells in a dish without those, which proves they are mot essential
The more you increase in the diet, there is a direct increase in the incidence of cancer, but the industry keeps publicising them as health foods.
Q:
RP: beyond fruits, the ideal diet the ruminants are able to detoxify the polyunsaturated fats in grains or grasses, it happens to be vitamin E in the grass which allows them to convert linoleic into the trans fatty acids, there is one of the components as butter or beef fats, because it counteracts the toxic effects of the PUFAs, this is called the conjugated linoleic acid, you get some of that in beef, butter, cheese or milk. The high ratio of calcium to phosphate comes from the fact that if cow allowed to eat hay and grass, the leaves contain low amount of phosphate and calcium and other safe minerals. Too much phosphate from grain based or meat-based, the phosphate becomes toxic if not balanced by calcium and magnesium. Milk, fruit and cheese give you the main nutrients. Then there are some like selenium and iodine, then you are getting the basic things for anti-stress
Q: more difficult for vegetarians?
RP: If you concentrate on well cooked greens, the protein and minerals balance in leafy greens is about the same as milk, just less concentrated because of the high cellulose diluting it. If you can cook away or wash away the anti-nutrients, for example too much spinance contains oxalic acid which tends to take the calcium out of your teeth, and some leafy vegetables have chemicals that block your stomach digestive enzymes, but a variety of cooked greens will provide the same type of protein as milk provides as well as the balance of calcium, magnesium like milk
The very juicy fruits are best raw, but if starchy like plantains or bananas, they should be cooked, because the starches can enter the blood stream and cause allergic reactions, called presoprtion, blocking capillaries and arteries until the particle can be broken down but it can stay in place long enough to kill cells in the heart and brain and lungs. Feeding mice on a raw starch diet, they were very prematurely aged, because of the death of cells in their organs blocked by starch grains. Potatoes are almost the perfect food if very well cooked, because you want to break down the starch and the non-starch ingredients of a potato have almost a perfect balance of nutrients, b vitamins, essential amino acids, carbs in the right proportion, and the only thing that is lacking in a pure potato diet is vitamin A and vitamin B12. THey are a very balanced food.
Q: Sweet potatoes, or white?
RP: White potatoes. Some white potatoes contain enough carotene that that could provide requirement of Vitamin A, sweet potatoes often contain so much Carotene that it interferes with digestion, too much carotene has anti-hormonal effects, it can slow down production of thyroid hormones, progesterone, adrenal hormones etc, If it accumulates to point of making your palms of calluses turn orange.
i constantly warn people about that there are good chemicals in the juice, good nutrition, but unless your thyroid is pretty active, it will accumulate the carotene. because you convert carotene to vitamin A if you have Voitamin B12 in proportion to how active your thyroid is.
If for some reason you are getting more carotene than your B12 and Thyroid can handle, it turns off the thyroid function. I experienced this myself 40 years ago, eating so many carrots I suppressed my thyroid. If your thyroid is good, then having a whole carrot every day has some very important anti-stress functions.
I heard from a woman yesterday who said that she had started a daily carrot salad and had had almost immediate relief from all of her premenstrual and digestive problems. We have measured blood hormones in a few people after they had started a daily whole carrot. It's the stimulating effect on the intestine.The fibre in the carrot isn't digestible, and so the excretion of the bile into the liver carries all types of detoxified toxins and chemicals, and if you have fiber in your intestine, these toxins that the liver has got rid of, will be carried out bound the carrot fibre. Without the carrot fibre they can be absorbed and recycled so your estrogen tends to go up as the fibre in your diet goes down and that in turn turns off your thyroid and progesterone, so it can cause all the symptoms of estrogen and cortisol excess, and in just 3 or 4 days we've seen the cortisol and estrogen level in the blood drop as the progesterone comes up, just from eating a daily carrot.
Q: it's interesting how the foods we eat influence everything about our body
RP: Yes [] of people, partly due to an industrliazed diet, lots of Americans are now going around in a chronically stressed condition, it's sort of like learned helplessness or Post traumatic stress syndrome, the diet keeps people in a high cortisol, high estrogen state, that's something that if you're going to have any stress, you should well before you have to do any important work, you should make sure that your diet isn't creating the stress day by day. For example checking your thyroid function just by measuring your temperature and pulse rate when you wake up and then in the middle of the day, they should rise so that your pulse is maybe 80 per minute at rest, and your temperature should be around 98.6 at rest. In the morning it's ok for them to be 10% lower pulse rate and maybe 97.8 degrees or so.
Q: This can also be influencing the fact that men are also having hormonal issues as well, correct?
RP: Sure. When a man is on a very bad diet, or is under stress or has an accident, the estrogen level rises, sharply. In old age, with any of the degenerative diseases, men tend to have a sharp increase in estrogen.
Q: So they can avoid this or monitor this by their diet?
RP: Yeah, and your temperature is your quickest way because oestrogen lowers your temperature, Thyroid and progesterone and DHEA help to maintain a good steady high metabolic rate even at rest.
Q: When people get cold when they're sitting there in front of their desk or at home, then that may indicate that the hormones have changed and the thyroid is dropping?
RP: Yeah, and one of the tricks of the body through increasing the adrenaline, can compensate for hypothyroidism, and so some people are hyper alert and anxious, and have a high heart rate even though their Thyroid is really low, and their temperature can be held up and look normal except that it's likely to be higher when you first wake up in the morning and then decrease when you east something.
Q: so it switches?
RP: yeah because the night time is when you aren't eating and your adrenaline and cortisol rise, those can tear down your tissues at such a rate that they keep your temperature up, so that when you eat something and lower the stress, you see that your metabolism is really not so high, and when the adrenaline is really high, even though your oral temperature might seem normal, your hands and feet will be cold, and maybe the tip of your nose even, because the body is directing your energy so that your brain lungs and heart aren't deprived or chilled, but your body can consider your hands and feet somewhat expendable, and can let them get very cold.
Q: So if we up the stress levels, and we've been speaking about general stress, and it someone has a surgery, there are more sever chemical changes , can include depression and sleep disorders [blah]
RP: and even dementia, they've been measuring mental function after major surgery and for months even years after major surgery, people's mental function is often slowed down, that is because of the chronic effect of cortisol, which slows nerve conduction, it protects some of your tissues from inflammation, but it progressively damages your immune system and your nervous system.
Q: What are some of the best things for recovery?
RP: the thing about surgery as opposed to a car accident or being tortured or something, is that you can prepare for it and even standard medical sources are saying that you should check Thyroid function before you schedule someone for surgery, because a hypothyroid person doesn't do well in surgery because their cortisol is already high. BEfore Hans Selye made stress famous, an American surgeon George Crile {?} in Cleveland, over 100 years ago was studying shock in surgery and what you had to do to minimise the shock, and shock as he understood it became to be part of shock and stress as Hans Selye interpreted it, for Selye an excess of estrogen was enough to create the whole shock syndrome.
And George Crile, in the hospital in cleveland he worked at in 1908 the mortality rate from all the surgeries was 4.4%, and after he devised a way to reduce stress, in 5 years of application it had cut the mortality to 1.8%. His basic procedure was to convince the brain that nothing had happened, he called it anoci-association, meaning getting the brain to not notice the noxious event, and he found that histamine was released by morphine, that histamine brought on all of these other stress hormone changes, and so he added an anti-histamine, an herbal drug called Scopolamine, basically an anti histamine, anti stress preparation to go with the anaesthesia, and then he used a local anaesthetic to stop, first he would anaesthetise the skin, then when the skin was cut each layer would get a local anaesthetic, so that he was not letting the brain receive any of those harmful signals, but a careless, quick surgery nowadays often is very rough, and the patient wakes up with changes in the brain from the powerful noxious stimulation of the surgery, so that if you can get the doctor to reduce the trauma of the surgery, that is a very important part of recovery, like the hypothyroid person doesn't recover very well because their metabolic rate is very low, their temperature is also very low, and since the surgery turning on the stress hormones turns off the Thyroid function, temperature tends to drop drastically during and following surgery, and in proportion to how the temperature falls, the person's recovery is impaired, so that everything that will keep your temperature up during and after surgery, preparing with at least 2 weeks of adjusting Thyroid so you are not hypo-thyroid, that makes the recovery a lot faster.
A study in Mississippi I think it was, found that if the intensive care people would check the patient's vitamin D levels as they came in, they found that out of 278 cases, only 3 people had normal Vitamin D. Partly that means that deficient people get sick more often or that sickness lowers your vitamin D but some of them had as low as 8 or 10 ng/ml where it should be 50 or 55, that's the normal range, and when he got the dietician to check their Vitamin D levels and supplement Vitamin D, the length of stay in intensive care was cut in half, survival increased and saved the hospital more than half of the expenses just by that one Vitamin.
