The Progest-E & Raw Honey High

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"With a diet high in protein (e.g., at least 70-100 grams per day, including eggs) and vitamin A (not carotene), I have found that the dose of progesterone can be reduced each month. Using thyroid will usually reduce the amount of progesterone needed. Occasionally, a woman won't feel any effect even from 100 mg. of progesterone; I think this indicates that they need to use thyroid and diet, to normalize their estrogen, prolactin, and cortisol." -Ray Peat
 
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“The pharmaceutical industry has a long history of lying about natural progesterone (and many other natural substances), to promote sales of their competing products. The price ratio of retail estrogen tablets to bulk estrogen can be 1000 to 1, while the ratio for progesterone products is often less than 10 to 1. With the increased use of progesterone (its sales in the US have increased more than 100-fold), the estrogen industry has had to develop new kinds of attack. A small shift of the market away from estrogen costs the drug industry hundreds of millions of dollars. The loss of estrogen sales following the 2002 WHI study, that convincingly demonstrated its toxicity, was huge, with the decreased sales of Wyeth alone amounting to billions of dollars. Wyeth has petitioned the FDA to prevent compounding pharmacies from selling the natural hormones.

People who have made a career of research that, according to them, reveals the "benefits" of estrogen have, in recent years, expanded their work to argue that it is progesterone, rather than estrogen, that causes diabetes, heart disease, dementia, and cancer.“ -Ray Peat
 
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“People who have made a career of research that, according to them, reveals the "benefits" of estrogen have, in recent years, expanded their work to argue that it is progesterone, rather than estrogen, that causes diabetes, heart disease, dementia, and cancer.

The EPA currently has a document draft on the internet which, in relation to the evaluation of a carcinogenic herbicide, reviews the issue of the balance between estrogen and progesterone in the development of cancer in rats, and includes the observation that progesterone is not carcinogenic to rats, and that it instead is protective against cancer, because of its antiestrogenic effects.

Recently, stores in California have placed warnings near their progesterone-containing cosmetics, saying that the State of California "knows" progesterone to be a carcinogen.

Californians often talk about their state's having the world's sixth largest economy. The state accounts for 14% of the GDP of the U.S. If the state regulates a product made in Michigan, Texas, or France, the producer is very likely to change the product to suit California.

If an industry wants to control its competitors or potential competitors, an investment in California's regulatory system can pay huge rewards.

California has listed progesterone as a carcinogen under the Safe Drinking Water and Toxic Enforcement Act, called Proposition 65. The law doesn't prevent the sale of carcinogens, it simply requires a warning. Warnings are posted in grocery stores and restaurants, on sports equipment, in beauty parlors, on apartments and parking lots, but there is so little effort spent on realistic evaluation of risks that the effect of the law is to allow the major polluters to go unnoticed among the ubiquitous warnings. But California has other laws that encourage its lawyers to sue for "unfair business practices" when they believe Prop 65 has been violated. That has resulted in a culture of vigilantism with bounty-hunting lawyers, some of whom try to enforce Prop 65 even against companies that are clearly exempt.

California's regulatory board that lists progesterone as a carcinogen cites two bodies that have evaluated carcinogens, the US National Toxicology Program (NTP), and the UN's International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), as authoritative sources. One of those, the US National Toxicology Program (NTP) cites the other's, the IARC's, evaluation of progesterone as the basis for its own listing of progesterone, so the opinion of IARC has been very influential.

The IARC publications discussed the toxicity of several of the synthetic progestins, and concluded that some of them are possible human carcinogens. The (1987) entry for medroxyprogesterone acetate, for example, has three sections: "A. Evidence for carcinogenicity to humans (inadequate)," "B. Evidence for carcinogenicity to animals (sufficient)," and C., that it can damage chromosomes. Eight citations, besides two IARC monographs (1974 and 1979), are given as supporting evidence.

The entry for progesterone, oddly, has only two sections, "A. Evidence for carcinogenicity to animals (sufficient)," and B, that it doesn't damage chromosomes. There is no mention of human carcinogenicity at all. Besides the IARC monographs, only one study is mentioned, a test in beagles (I'll comment on the competency of that study below). At the end of the whole section, which included eleven synthetics and progesterone, it concludes: "Overall evaluation" "Progestins are possibly carcinogenic to humans (Group 2B)," oddly neglecting to distinguish progesterone from the synthetics.

The corruption of the term "progestin" or "progestogen" by the industry and the drug regulators has been terribly consequential. The synthetic chemicals classified as progestins often have anti-progesterone actions, and shouldn't be called progestins at all, because they don't support gestation, contrary to what the term falsely implies. It is exactly their anti-progesterone/antigestational action that led to their use as contraceptives.

Since the 1987 review by IARC, it seems that their only other review of progesterone's carcinogenicity was of a single study in 1999, and that study clearly gave evidence that progesterone prevented cancer.

But California's board of "qualified experts" in the Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment (OEHHA) identify progesterone as known to cause cancer, and cites the group of studies listed by IARC in the medroxyprogesterone acetate report as their evidence. Rather than trying to clarify the confusions that exist in the IARC documents, this board has compounded the confusion.

In the transcript of the meeting, at which they decided to list progesterone as a carcinogen, they received testimony from only one outside expert, Richard Edgren, who answered the chairman's question, why don't you want progesterone listed, by saying, because it isn't a carcinogen. He said that the inclusion of a large number of non-carcinogenic materials "could vitiate the use of the list."

But the chairman had, early in Edgren's review of the shortcomings of animal studies of carcinogenesis, heard the word "metastasis," in connection with beagle dogs, and--although Edgren hadn't said that any metastatic cancer had been found in the progesterone test (it hadn't)--the committee's decision to list progesterone appears to have hinged on that word.

Edgren, referring to "various synthetic and semi-synthetic progestogens," said that administering them by injection "leads to the development of mammary nodules, some of which have the characteristics of malignant tumors, although these tumors rarely metastasize." A little later, Kilgore said "I mean, I heard you say that it was rare that it metastasized. I would say any kind of metastasizing is important." Edgren isn't quoted in the transcript as having attempted to explain that the malignant and metastatic cancers appeared only in beagles treated with synthetic progestins. At best, the behavior of the chairman and the committee, as reflected in that transcript, was erratic and confused, or more accurately, irrational.

The only biologist on the committee who spoke during the meeting, Dr. Spangler, expressed confusion and dissatisfaction with the evidence:

". . . in reviewing the information that was supplied to me regarding progesterone, I was confused and concerned by what appears to be a variety of discrepancies in the way the compound has been reviewed." "In one place, IARC says there is limited evidence; in another place, it says there is sufficient evidence. And NTP says there is sufficient evidence. And they cite as their sufficient evidence a variety of very convoluted experimental procedures, in which mouse mammary tumor virus positive mice were used in a study; and, in addition to that, some other carcinogen, some other potent carcinogen, was applied at the same time or after." "It was just very confusing. And I had a lot difficulty evaluating it."

The State's rules explicitly state that all the relevant evidence is to be presented to the committee for consideration, and that the evidence must show clearly, by accepted scientific methods, that a material causes cancer (i.e., malignant tumors) before it can be listed. What is clearly shown by the few papers provided to the committee is that their procedures were not followed at all. Providing publications that didn't even claim to have involved the development of cancer, and ignoring an immense amount of more relevant evidence, the committee, in a parody of legal process, didn't even get a randomly selected sampling of the relevant evidence.

In my correspondence with OEHHA, when I pressed for information regarding the criteria for selecting evidence, and the qualifications of the staff who had the responsibility of selecting "all relevant evidence," their response was that they lacked the resources to answer the question.

Edgren, who had argued that progesterone wasn't a carcinogen, didn't make a very good presentation of the case against the few studies that had been mentioned by NTP and IARC. Even if he had been able to do that, in the few minutes he had (six or seven different substances were on the agenda for consideration for listing during that meeting), it doesn't seem likely that the committee would have been interested.

In a letter he wrote to the committee before it met, Edgren said "Careful evaluation of data from a properly conducted oral study is a prerequisite before the carcinogenicity of any chemical can be adequately evaluated." The reason for that statement is that it had become clear in the 1970s and 1980s that the invasive introduction of anything into the body's tissues creates inflammation and a complex series of systemic stress reactions that affect the immune system, and that can lead to the development or promotion of cancer, no matter how inert and innocuous seeming the injected material might be. The people on the committee didn't even discuss that issue. Worse, the studies mentioned by IARC included some that hadn't met basic scientific standards of experimental design, failing to use proper experimental controls, including vehicle controls, and failing to describe the actual composition of the vehicle or solvent used for administering progesterone.

Every good high school science teacher or science student knows that the experimental variables have to be clearly defined. The United Nations' IARC, the US's NTP, and California's Panel of Qualified Experts chose to draw conclusions on some studies that don't meet any standards for testing carcinogens, such as those published by the US government. And while disregarding basic standards of experimental design, their review of the literature had an even more serious flaw--it "cherry-picked" the published evidence that they apparently preferred, ignoring the studies which, over a period of more than 20 years, showed that progesterone prevents and/or cures tumors. And in an extremely unrepresentative selection of studies on the subject of progesterone's carcinogenicity, the selected studies presented some clear evidence of some of progesterone's anticarcinogenic effects, along with some results that can't be interpreted clearly.

One of the early papers listed as evidence of progesterone's carcinogenicity in animals actually concluded that their experiments completely failed "to produce any beneficial effect by the administration of progesterone on the mammary cancer in mice," and cautioned that their results showed "the need for care in attempting to generalize results even in different strains of the same species and emphasizes the difficulty of attempting to carry over results obtained in experimental animals to human pathology." (Burrows and Hoch- Ligeti, 1946).

The work (demonstrations of the anti-tumor effect of progesterone) that they were not able to confirm had included explicit observations that intermittent injections of progesterone were not effective in preventing tumors or causing them to regress, and emphasized the importance of continuous exposure. Knowing that, the Burrows and Hoch-Ligeti publication appears to have been designed propagandistically to oppose the work that was demonstrating the anti-tumor actions of progesterone, since they--without explanation--used the already discredited method of giving periodic injections of progesterone dissolved in peanut oil.

Without reading the article, people seeing it included on the agencies' list of studies supposedly providing evidence of progesterone's carcinogenicity would assume that it provided such evidence. It didn't. If the agencies cite this study, why didn't they mention any of the numerous studies showing that progesterone prevents tumors or causes them to regress? The reason this study was done was to argue against the studies that had demonstrated progesterone's protective effects, so anyone reading it had to know of those other studies' existence, as well as knowing that this study itself provided no evidence at all of carcinogenicity.“ -Ray Peat
 
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“The amount of estrogen in tissue is decreased when progesterone is abundant. In the absence of progesterone, tissues retain estrogen even when there is little estrogen circulating in the blood.” -Ray Peat
 
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“Women who have had their ovaries removed are usually told that they need to take estrogen, but animal experiments consistently show that removal of the gonads causes the tissue aromatases to increase. The loss of progesterone and ovarian androgens is probably responsible for this generalized increase in the formation of estrogen. In the brain, aromatase increases under the influence of estrogen treatment.” -Ray Peat
 
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“Ever since Lipshutz’ work in the 1940s, it has been established that the uninterrupted effect of a little estrogen is more harmful than larger but intermittent exposures. But after menopause, when progesterone stops its cyclic displacement of estrogen from the tissues, the tissues retain large amounts of estrogen continuously.” -Ray Peat
 
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“RP: The Pentagon was doing that in the 1940s following the atomic bomb, and 1950s with the hydrogen bomb, when they... the fallout from the hydrogen bomb drifted across the islands... they sent [Daniel] Carleton Gydacek [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Carleton_ Gajdusek], I think his name was. He was a pediatrician, but he was posing as a virologist. He was sent by the military to an area that had been exposed to hydrogen bomb fallout to study what supposedly was additional brain disease, Kuru, that he claimed had been passed on for generations by cannibalism. But actually it was never reported before the hydrogen bomb fallout. In a miraculously short time, he identified what he claimed was a new slow virus and got the Nobel Prize for discovering a virus that probably doesn't exist. The whole thing was a military cover up, basically. He was not virologist, and didn't know anything about it, didn't do the kind of research that could have identified it - and the same symptoms can be produced by radiation.

Q: Is there anything we can do to protect ourselves from this radiation - from Fukushima, from x-rays. Every time I go to the dentist, he insists that I must have an x-ray which he of course says is like sitting in the sun, and now they have these new panoramics - they have all this baloney, and it's very difficult to talk them out of doing these x-rays, but you point out that they are estrogenic. Is there anything we can do to off-set any damage from the x-rays?

RP: Two or three papers were published - I discussed them in my radiation newsletter, January, a year ago. They showed that estrogen was synergistic with radiation in causing cancer, and that the same way that progesterone blocks cancer produced by estrogen, it also blocks cancer produced by radiation.

Q: And so if someone knew that they had a history of a lot of diagnostic x-rays, one of the ways they could possibly prevent some of the long term effects is to start using progesterone on a regular basis?

RP: I think on the long term, that is protective. They know that when they do the so-called Gamma Knife brain treatment, that the symptoms of nerve cell degeneration aren't seen for usually more than 18 months, sometimes several years later - the cells stay in an inflamed condition. They've seen blood serum 20 years after Chernobyl, 50 years after the Japanese bomb exposures, they've seen a chronically inflamed condition that shows up even in the blood serum that came after exposure, so I think that's the sort of thing that can be reversed even at a late date so that the chronic inflammatory state doesn't persist.

Q: I hope that's true because I was a military kid who had a lot of diagnostic x-rays, which scares me when I think about them.

RP: Vitamin A works with progesterone as another protective thing, but it also happens sensitize you to the radiation that... the radiation breaks down the Vitamin A in your tissues, so if you replace it after the injury, that helps counteract the estrogen-like effects.

Q: What would be a good dose of Vitamin A on average for a 50 year old adult woman?

RP: That's hard to say because being an unsaturated oily material, it can interfere with thyroid function, so the amount you need corresponds exactly to the level of thyroid activity you have. A low thyroid person can get symptoms of Vitamin A poisoning from just a very small amount like 5000 units. When I was in my teens and twenty's, I found that I needed 50-100 thousand units to prevent having acne, or even Leukoplakia following dental x-rays. I would get these white spongy growths inside my cheeks that the dentist said were either cancerous or precancerous, and I found that these big doses of Vitamin A would clear it up completely in a week. And that's a precancerous estrogen-stimulated condition that also appears on the cervix of the uterus. And Vitamin A and progesterone similarly will reverse that.

Q: So, were you taking thyroid at the time?

RP: No, I just happened to be a hyperthyroid person during that period.“

 
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UPDATE:

There is a good collection of information in this thread on progesterone, but I wanted to add my own personal two cents worth. I use Ray Peat’s Progest-E and have had some differing experiences with it. Ray Peat has said you can use it anywhere, though I have read and posted other advice to apply it below the navel, and for me below the navel has been a better experience. I have used it on my forehead, on my lips and on my gums and i get more unpleasant reactions from it in my head area, but on my forehead on two consecutive nights gave me a terrible migraine headache. I also notice that the next day, I am more emotional using it on my head. This past few days I am trying it again, because I look better using it and I am out a lot in restaurants and I like knowing it is “covering” me with the PUFA,s and estrogens from those outings. I like the easy going feeling I get from it too. I have no problems so far, using it on a couple of recent injuries, I don’t want to scar on my calf and knee. I am not sure how it is serving me in the sleep department yet though.
 
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UPDATE:

I am not totally positive, but I am thinking that taking Progest-E when I don’t need it, at bedtime may be giving me a headache in the night. I do better with it, taking it in the day, on my legs and only when I really need it, when I am in a high estrogen state, such as eating in restaurants, drinking alcohol or upset and stressed. Mind you I am 59 and post menopausal, not overweight and have been pretty PUFA depleted for several years. On the upside I do feel that Progest-E makes my face look a little more lifted and youthful. I am gonna keep paying close attention and experiment with it more.
 
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“Estrogen has the opposite effect, inhibiting GABA's action. Since GABA opposes estrogen and inhibits the growth of breast cancer, it wouldn't be surprising if glycine, alanine, etc., did the same.

Recent research shows that progesterone and its metabolites also act on the “glycine receptor,” increasing inhibition, and that the “phytoestrogen,” genistein, antagonizes the inhibitory effect of glycine.”
-Ray Peat
 
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“The old characterization of estrogen and progesterone as “sex” and “pregnancy” hormones acting on a few tissues through specific receptors never had a good basis in evidence, but the accumulated evidence has now made those ideas impossible for an informed person to accept. (Progesterone increases the heart's pumping efficiency, and estrogen is antagonistic, and can produce cardiac arrhythmia.)” -Ray Peat
 

Happycat

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UPDATE:

I am not totally positive, but I am thinking that taking Progest-E when I don’t need it, at bedtime may be giving me a headache in the night. I do better with it, taking it in the day, on my legs and only when I really need it, when I am in a high estrogen state, such as eating in restaurants, drinking alcohol or upset and stressed. Mind you I am 59 and post menopausal, not overweight and have been pretty PUFA depleted for several years. On the upside I do feel that Progest-E makes my face look a little more lifted and youthful. I am gonna keep paying close attention and experiment with it more.
I wonder if I'll ever get to a point to only use Progest E when I need it.
Right now I am using a lot, taking a 5 day break every month, perimenopause is so up and down when it comes to hormones.
I only use it under the tongue, how do you apply it topically, its so sticky?
 
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I wonder if I'll ever get to a point to only use Progest E when I need it.
Right now I am using a lot, taking a 5 day break every month, perimenopause is so up and down when it comes to hormones.
I only use it under the tongue, how do you apply it topically, its so sticky?
I apply it on any wrinkle or scar on my legs. It is sticky at first, but after awhile there is no sticky!
 
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“Stress is an energy problem, that leads to the series of hormonal and metabolic reactions that I have often written about--lipolysis, glycolysis, increased serotonin, cortisol, estrogen, prolactin, leaky capillaries, protein catabolism, etc. The capillaries are among the first tissues to be damaged by stress.

Although Selye showed that estrogen treatment mimics shock and stress, and that progesterone prevents the stress reaction, the effects of these hormones on the circulatory system have never been treated systematically. Katherina Dalton observed that progesterone treatment prevented the spontaneous bruising of the premenstrual syndrome; Soderwall observed that estrogen caused enlargement of the adrenals, sometimes with hemorrhage and necrosis; old female animals often have bleeding in the adrenals (Dhom, et al., 1981). Strangely, estrogen's induction of uterine bleeding has been compartmentalized, as if the endometrial blood vessels didn't follow the same rules as vessels elsewhere in the body. Both estrogen and cortisol are known to cause clotting disorders and to increase capillary fragility, but these steroids have been elevated to the realm of billion dollar drug products, beyond the reach of ordinary physiological thinking. Other stress-released substances that are entangled in the drug market (tryptophan, serotonin, nitric oxide, and unsaturated fats, for example) are similarly exempt from consideration as factors in circulatory, neoplastic, and degenerative diseases.“ -Ray Peat
 

Bruna

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Thank you, that's quite a wide range from 4 to 22mg.
I take up to 20 drops Progest e per day, so I could be getting up to 660IU per day which is a big amount.
I emailed Kenogen to see if they can tell me anything more precise.

Did you have any response?
 
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“Another hormonal condition that probably contributes to lactase deficiency is progesterone deficiency, since a synthetic progestin has been found to increase the enzyme (Nagpaul, et al., 1990). The particular progestin they used lacks many of progesterone's effects, but it does protect against some kinds of stress, including high estrogen and cortisol. This suggests that stress, with its increased ratio of estrogen and cortisol to progesterone, might commonly cause the enzyme to decrease.” -Ray Peat​
 

Bruna

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No, they gave me the same info, 4 to 22mg. :(
this is a very large range :(
I'm using a large dose (+600mg a day), so I'm afraid of high doses of vitamin E. While progesterone has no limit in women, it's not true for vitamin E.
 

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