We have Part 2 of our two-part series on progesterone with Dr. Lindsey Berkson today.
Dr. Berkson is one of my favorite hormone experts. She has a talent for breaking complex ideas down to make them easily understandable for clinicians and the general public. She is a peer-reviewed, published researcher, bestselling author, educator, leader in thought, nutritional gastroenterology, and hormones, and a formulator and inventor.
We continue our discussion today by diving into the disruptive effects of oral contraceptives on the endocrine system, looking at the impact of progesterone on thyroid health, leaky gut, and immune function during perimenopause and menopause. We explore the role of testosterone in gut health and lab ranges for breast protection, and we also discuss progesterone resistance and reactivity, and oxytocin.
You will not want to miss this informative conversation with Dr. Lindsey Berkson. She will return to the show toward the end of this year for Part 3 of our discussion.
IN THIS EPISODE YOU WILL LEARN:
The intricate link between progesterone and thyroid function
How endocrine disruptors impact thyroid physiology
Why iodine is essential for thyroid health and cancer prevention
How progesterone relates to thyroid health
Why progesterone and estrogen are crucial for maintaining gut integrity and preventing leaky gut
How testosterone helps to prevent autoimmune diseases
What are the ideal progesterone levels for women in perimenopause and menopause?
The role oxytocin plays in women with progesterone resistance
How to overcome progesterone resistance or reactivity
The interplay between progesterone and oxytocin and their roles in bonding and pregnancy
Bio
Dr. Berkson has taught re-licensing CME seminars to MDs, pharmacists, NPs, NDs, chiropractors, acupuncturists, and nutritionists since the 1980s.
Dr. Berkson was a distinguished hormone scholar at an estrogen think-tank (Center for Bioenvironmental Research) at Tulane University for ten years working with the scientists who discovered the first estrogen receptors, ER Alpha and ER Beta (Elwood Jensen PhD and Jan-ake Gustafsson PhD. Dr. Berkson worked with Physicians for Social Responsibility and wrote with the WHO one of the first works on the etiology of the diabetes epidemic due to endocrine disruption (with Linda Birnbaum PhD and Lynn Goldman PhD). Dr. Berkson wrote one of the first breakthrough books on endocrine disruption (Hormone Deception, McGraw-Hill 2000, Awakened Medicine Press 2016). This book has been used by universities and environmental science programs at prestigious institutions like the University of Minn. She has published another 19 books.
Dr. Berkson has led grand rounds at the University of Minnesota, and the University of Southern Florida. Dr. Berkson's book Healthy Digestion the Natural Way (Wiley & Sons 2000) sold over a million copies and is one of the first gut, nutrition, and spiritual books.
Dr. Berkson co-invented a drug for dialysis patients with Jack Moncrief MD, the co-inventor of home dialysis and the inventor of telemedicine. Together they published original peer-reviewed research with the University of Texas and Nathan Bryan PhD on the role of nitric oxide and dialysis.
Dr. Berkson is a DES daughter who suffered multiple cancers and infertility and has spearheaded much DES Action research and education globally. Dr. Berkson has battled multiple cancers, blindness, and much more secondary to the model compound of endocrine disruption, DES in-utero exposure, and thus is passionate about passing critical information forward.
Dr. Berkson has been a peer reviewer for the journal Environmental Toxicology. She is also on the medical advisory board for the major pharmaceutical support company PCCA, based in Houston, TX. Berkson is credited with the in-depth knowledge of Estrogen Vindication and estrogen's science surrounding safety, efficacy, and outreach.
“A loss of hormones means the loss of the gut’s capability of opening and closing with appropriate timing, so you have more debris going into the bloodstream.”
-Dr. Lindsey Berkson
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Transcript:
Cynthia Thurlow: [00:00:02] Welcome to Everyday Wellness podcast. I'm your host, Nurse Practitioner Cynthia Thurlow. This podcast is designed to educate, empower, and inspire you to achieve your health and wellness goals. My goal and intent is to provide you with the best content and conversations from leaders in the health and wellness industry each week and impact over a million lives.
[00:00:29] Today is the second in a two-part series with Dr. Lindsey Berkson and to refamiliarize you with her work. She is a peer-reviewed published researcher, best-selling author, educator, a leader in nutritional gastroenterology as well as hormones, a thought leader, formulator and inventor. She is one of my favorite voices in the hormone space and loves to take complicated concepts and make them accessible to not only clinicians, but also the general public. Today, we continued our conversation talking about the impact of oral contraceptives and their endocrine disruptive nature, the influence of progesterone on thyroid health and physiology, the role of leaky gut during perimenopause and menopause as well as immune function, the role of testosterone and gut health, which may be surprising for many, lab ranges especially for breast protection, and lastly, discussions around progesterone resistance, reactivity, and oxytocin. Again, I know you will love this conversation as much as I did recording it. I will be bringing Dr. Berkson back later in the year for Part 3.
[00:01:42] You know, one thing about progesterone that I think is so interesting, especially as it pertains to women in north of 40 that are very likely dealing with an underactive thyroid in the setting of lowered progesterone levels, as they're kind of navigating the beginning aspects of perimenopause. Can we speak a little bit to how intricately involved progesterone is to thyroid hormone physiology and why this is so important? Because more often than not, most of my female patients that are in their 40s, 50s, 60s and beyond are also on thyroid replacement. And unfortunately, I think the kind of prevailing philosophy is this is just the way things are and helping them understand that this is relative lack of circulating progesterone can contribute to poor T4 to T3 conversion.
Dr. Lindsey Berkson: [00:02:32] That is a great question. I just remembered the one other point to say, why are we seeing less progesterone? Just want to add this one thing, 300 million women around the world are on birth control pills, which as of July 2023 became available OTC. That's one of the worst things that has happened to young women ever to be able to walk in and buy endocrine disrupting forms of estrogen and progesterone over the counter. So, birth control pills turn off your hormones. They castrate you, they castrate you, you're not getting those emails. And we all know there's not one study that shows that women who take birth control pills don't have an increased incidence of breast cancer. And those duration studies is how long does that increased risk occur when you go off of them? We've only done them for women on oral contraceptives for five years.
[00:03:17] For another five years, they still have a heightened risk. But many women come into me. I specialize in breast cancer patients now since many of my women that are dealing with breast cancer have a history of being on long-term hormones, oral contraceptives and their hormones are turned off, so the protection of hormones is turned off. So, women don't get that pregnancy hormone is turned off when you're on birth control pills. Okay, so going into your question with progesterone, what was the question? I was so focused on making sure I said that I forgot what you asked. [laughs]
Cynthia Thurlow: [00:03:49] No, no. And it's such an important distinction. I know when I interviewed Dr, Felice Gersh, she talked about oral contraceptives being so disruptive. And for full admittance, I was on the pill because I had latent undiagnosed PCOS. I was one of those thin phenotype. And so, I tell everyone for full disclosure, I pass no judgment. But from late teens into right when I got married, so I was on oral contraceptives for a long period of time without realizing all of the potential long-term side effects. We were kind of speaking around the physiology of lower levels of progesterone and how that impacts thyroid function, how I’m seeing in-
Dr. Lindsey Berkson: [00:04:27] That's right, that's right.
Cynthia Thurlow: [00:04:28] -clinical practice, so many women that are developing not only latent hypothyroidism, but also Hashimoto’s and that interrelationship between autoimmunity as well with progesterone.
Dr. Lindsey Berkson: [00:04:40] Excellent question. Well, we just went through a short little physiology class where we said a hormone is made and it goes in the bloodstream seeking out a receptor on a target tissue. And progesterone helps thyroid find its target tissue. And progesterone helps the active form of thyroid, which is triiodothyronine or T3, the nickname T3, because there's three molecules of iodine. Progesterone is one of thyroid's best buddies and it nudges thyroid into its binding pocket domain so it can signal, so there is this intimate relationship. In fact, in birth, the first trimester, the fetus doesn't make thyroid, and it depends on the mom's own thyroid. And I think that we have progesterone to sustain the pregnancy, but we also have progesterone to help mom's T3 nestle on into the developing thyroid receptors in the fetus. So, this was its action in utero or in the first womb room, and then it continues to have this physiologic action later on.
[00:05:54] Now, I interviewed on my podcast Barbara Demeneix, who was a scientist from the Sorbonne in France in Paris, and she wrote a book called Toxic Cocktail and it's how endocrine disruptors, one of the biggest organs that they assault is the thyroid. And doctor David Brownstein was stating that he guesstimates that 60% to 80% to 90% of people are hypothyroid or thyroid dysfunctional, you might say today, because we have so many chemicals that affect the ability in multiple points in thyroid physiology, the production of it, the transport of it, and the ability of it to go into that binding pocket and signal. And also, endocrine disruptors, when they affect progesterone, they indirectly affect thyroid. All the hormones are a family. I just actually heard a lecture by a really intelligent physician and she was saying, “Oh, each hormone just has its own receptor, and no hormone can signal somebody else's receptor, and that's not accurate at all.” They're very slutty molecules. [chuckles]
[00:07:05] [Cynthia chuckles] And there's a lot of interplay between the nuclear receptor hormone, so cortisol can sit on any receptor. If you have a lot of stress in your life, you're going through a lawsuit, you're going through a divorce, somebody just served you divorce papers at your door and you weren't expecting it. God forbid you have a child that's in a horrific situation. You secrete lots of cortisol, and it's the most bully hormone we have, and it will sit on other receptors, and no other hormone can get into that binding pocket. Cortisol will completely take up those binding pockets. But thyroid can sit on other receptors and other receptors can sit on thyroid. A healthy practitioner will have a healthy understanding that all hormones need to be assessed to get patients hormones working optimally. And there's a tremendous interplay between progesterone and thyroid, and they're both very vulnerable to endocrine disruption.
[00:08:10] So we are seeing an increase in all hormonal issues. So, we're seeing hypothyroidism, one of the reasons we're seeing so much autoimmune disease of the thyroid. So autoimmune thyroiditis, I think is because of the endocrine disruptors that are in our foods. We have a lot of bromide, which the USDA just put out about a month ago that they were going to remove bromide out of flour because we used to put iodine to make flour more stable and so forth. But now we use, for the past so many years, bromide. And in water we put fluoride. And both bromide and fluoride will compete where iodine should sit. And every single binding domain of hormones is thirsty, thirsty, thirsty for adequate iodine to make that hormone be able to deliver that all important email. So, we are living in a scenario where we're just rinsing iodine out of our bodies from our unhealthy food that we have all these additives in. Then also the fluoride that we've now put in our water. It maybe had some-- I don't know there's a lot of-- I don't think in medicine it's always risk versus benefit. And I don't think the benefits of fluoride are better than the risks that we have now caused.
[00:09:32] In fact, JAMA, the Journal of the American Medical Association, came out with an article just two, three months ago where they measured the amount of bromide in pregnant woman's urine and the amount of iodine, and they were able to show that women who had a lot of bromide, which you get using wheat, that's not organic. And if you get certain sodas, I don't know exactly which sodas, but they add bromine to stabilize some of the citrus flavors. So a lot of sodas have bromide in them. They were able to show that the more bromide and the more that iodine couldn't be held in the body. At three years old, when they tested the children, those were the kids that had ADHD and Asperger's syndrome. Because your whole brain is under the influence of healthy hormones. hormones rule your brain, but especially the thyroid, has a lot to do with IQ and thinking. And if you're rinsing out iodine and so your thyroid hormone doesn't work well, it's made up of iodine molecules. And now you've learned that iodine is necessary in every single binding domain or otherwise, hormones don't work.
[00:10:46] Our children are showing up illnesses that have a lot to do with not being able to have enough iodine present. Recommended daily allowance of iodine is based on 50-year-old data that was based on prevention of iodine, just to not get a goiter, which you get extra growth of the thyroid gland if you have insufficient iodine. But there wasn't near as much bromide and fluoride and other chemicals in our environment 50 years ago as there is now. So, a lot of autoimmune thyroiditis as much as this goes against many people's fear of, we have a lot of iodophobics circulating because some people are inappropriately making patients frightened of iodine. Iodine is a detoxifier. It really helps you detoxify a lot of these chemicals.
[00:11:37] And the other thing is, we have ways that we combat cancer inside our body, and one of the biggest ways is the final metabolite of estrogen. So estrogen is made and then it's broken down and broken down and those broken down pieces are called metabolites. So you get the parent estrogen, which makes the kid estrogen and the grandkid estrogen. The grandkid estrogens, which are the methylated final metabolites of estrogen in both men and women, make something that looks exactly like a chemotherapeutic drug. We call it endogenous or our own homemade anti-cancer drug, but if you don't have iodine, it won't make it or if you can't methylate, it also won't make it. But you need iodine to protect yourself from cancer. And we have less and less iodine and more chemicals rinse iodine out of the body, and that's something that's not well appreciated.
[00:12:32] So, we often give autoimmune thyroid patients robust amounts of iodine, but we also always look at the gut. The epicenter often of autoimmune disease starts in the gut, and there's many things to do. You never can guarantee anyone anything, but many cases of MS, RA, mixed mucosal collagen disease, all kinds of autoimmune diseases, which all mean that the immune system is on overdrive. A lot of those things you can help with fixing the gut and also giving robust amounts of iodine. So please don't be one of the iodophobics that is missing out on what you actually really need to help maintain healthy hormones.
Cynthia Thurlow: [00:13:13] I'm glad that you touched on iodine, because I do feel like it tends to be a very controversial topic with even within the functional integrative medicine space. And sometimes we will get questions and I know Dr. Brownstein has a great resource, a book that's written specifically on iodine and just helping people understand that this is where I think diagnostic testing can beneficial to help determine what someone's intrinsic needs may be. And kind of pivoting and talking about gut health.
Dr. Lindsey Berkson: [00:13:42] Oh, just can I just make one last sentence on there, sorry.
Cynthia Thurlow: [00:13:46] No, it's fine.
Dr. Lindsey Berkson: [00:13:46] Everyone's worried about breast cancer, and iodine kills breast cancer cells, so just keep that in mind. [laughs]
Cynthia Thurlow: [00:13:54] No, it's certainly, it's incredibly important, and yet it has been vilified in many circumstances. One other thing that I want to at least touch on is the interrelationship between progesterone and gut health, and specifically these enterocytes. The reason why I think this is interesting, relevant, especially to my community, is the changes that are ongoing as we're hearkening the beginning stages of perimenopause, we have less circulating progesterone, the kind of the adrenals step in to help support the ovaries. But why, all of a sudden, not only is it autoimmunity, but people are so much more susceptible to dysbiosis, opportunistic infections, and why both progesterone and estrogen are so important for immunity, the ability to navigate fighting infection. And I think the gut in particular, and leaky gut is a huge issue that I'm seeing almost consistently in every single female patient.
Dr. Lindsey Berkson: [00:14:52] You give great questions. [laughs] So, what the heck is a leaky gut? For some reason, God, he or she or whoever, maybe there's another gender to describe God, I don't know. Someone told me the other day there were nine genders and I said, “I'm confused.” Okay, the gut for whatever reason, made by our wonderful maker of life. And life is a gift. The gut is only one cell thick, for whatever reason. This little gut lining that separates the outside of the world from the inside of us is one cell thick. And that one cell is really important to maintain functionality. If you talk about functional medicine, all functional docs want to make sure your gut lining is functional. One of the ways it's functional is after you eat, if you have enough digestive players available, you take these large peptides of food, these large chains of proteins, and of different types of food. And with a meat cleaver, you cleave, cleave, cut, cut, cut, cut, cut to tiny pieces, and your gut wall opens up a little bit after a meal, and they cross into your bloodstream. Go to your liver and then the rest of your body, and then your gut wall closes.
[00:16:09] So, there's an opening and closing that's optimal, postprandially, which means right the heck after you swallow, you eat. So, we have little adhesive proteins. There's families of them, there are these polysyllabic names, like junctional adhesive molecule and occludens and things. There's 44 types of occludens. There's lots of little adhesive proteins, they're so important. They are the proteins that are sticky, and they help when the gut opens after a meal to let the well digested food through. They then stick back these enterocytes together so that you don't have leaky gut. And what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas. What happens in the gut lumen? The inside of the gut should stay in the gut lumen. You know, it's kind of a really cool term, but it's accurate. You don't want stuff in the gut that shouldn't be debris that’s going in the bloodstream. So, these adhesive proteins are critically important to gut health, biome health, etc. What we call the term upregulates or boosts the production and activity of these adhesive proteins are estrogen and progesterone. Who the heck knew that?
[00:17:27] And that means as you lose your estrogen and progesterone and as you get into perimenopause, we make a lot of our progesterone from ovulation. And now we're not ovulating regularly, but our enzymes that also intra-chronologically produced progesterone all over the place, they're waning because so much of our overall health is waning. We have so many chemicals in our body when we don't have enough hormone after a meal, when the gut opens without enough hormone, it can't close back together again. So, one of the side effects of insufficient hormones is the propensity for leaky gut, in anybody, if they're a young man, young men now, often in their 20s, have levels of testosterone that we only saw in old 70, I hate to say old 70-year-old, because I don't feel old in my 70s. And most people in their 70s don't have lucidity and speed of processing like my brain does, because your brain is run by hormones, and I'm on a fair amount of hormones. And it's very important to know that you can really create a healthier human being if you know how to go about it strategically.
[00:18:34] But a loss of hormones means the loss of the capability of opening and closing an appropriate timing, so that you have more debris going into the bloodstream. And when you have debris going into the bloodstream, your immune system says, “Holy moly, we're filled with gunk. We better go on overdrive and get this gunk out.” And wherever the overdrive tissue is the most focus of it, we name the autoimmune disease based on the tissue that overdrive action. But it's really interesting the way they treat autoimmune disease is immunosuppressive drugs, because we all know autoimmunity is caused by overdrive of the immune system. So, let’s shut it down, which, of course, these IV infusions and these old meds like methotrexate and so forth, people end up getting cancer 10 years down the road and all kinds of problems, because you don't want to turn your immune system totally off, that’s absolutely nuts. Not only is that Band-Aid medicine, it's bomb medicine, and it's not good bomb medicine, but we always like to get to root cause. So, one of the root causes is not enough hormone. Let's test the hormones and get them back to a better, earlier age level. So, we've got this open and closing, and then let's check the digestive system, which is a whole nother conversation. We could go on and on and on.
Dr. Lindsey Berkson: [00:19:54] I have a book out. My book, Healthy Digestion the Natural Way, which was one of the first books on digestion and nutrition and spirituality, was published by Wiley. It sold over a million copies. And I haven't finished my textbook that I've been working on for too many years. It's embarrassing, but I'm at page 814. It's a textbook on nutritional gastroenterology. And next year, I hope to put on a course, Everything Gut, like we did, Everything Hormones this year, because your gut, of course, is the epicenter of your health, but it's ruled by hormones. All along the whole lining of your gut are these satellite dishes for estrogen, progesterone, and we hear that gut immunity is the major place where our immune system works. And that's all run under the auspices of testosterone. So secretory IgA is a licking little protein that licks what comes in from the outside. They lick it. [Cynthia laughs] Is this friend or foe? Is this friend or foe? And it's run by testosterone. And that's why there's 159 known autoimmune diseases at the moment. And men get less of all of them, except for the renal one, because they make more testosterone.
[00:21:09] So, people debate, should we give testosterone to older women? Yes, it will help prevent autoimmune disease because it helps them lick, lick, lick that secretory IgA. And we can measure secretory IgA now and know the licking capacity of the you know, how robust is that immunity in functionality in the gut? And it's so great that we can do these deep dives, but patients are so much more complex today to get well because our food, air and water and also emotional stress, from politics to the pandemic. And is the pandemic real, or was it a scamdemic? And who do we believe? And should you listen to me or should you listen to some other doctor? Or is there an estrogen window? And it's only available for 10 years after the age of 50. And if you're 65 or 70 now, you've missed out. Bunk, bunk, bunk. we can give hormones in your 90s, even if you've never been on them. And I hope to be the most hormonally balanced corpse or ashes in the cemetery or on the mantle. You know, hormones can be taken all throughout life to help replenish the internet system and keep your emails going.
Cynthia Thurlow: [00:22:18] I love the thought process. I will never be able to think of SIgA again without thinking about the licking testosterone. Now, I would be remiss if we didn't touch a little bit on broad strokes labs before we talk about some of the problems that can occur with progesterone replacement, because this is where a lot of the questions came in. So, let's look at a cycling woman days 1 through 14 versus days 15 through 28 versus ideal ranges you like to see in your female patients that are perhaps perimenopause into menopause, that are taking hormone replacement therapy that confer the most benefits to their heart, brain and bodies.
Dr. Lindsey Berkson: [00:22:59] So you mean on all the hormones or a focus on progesterone? Let's start with progesterone. So I always go to the literature, not that all the literature can be depended on, because understand that a lot of literature always follow the money, and a lot of science comes from people who are benefiting by that science. And now schools are all given grants by pharmaceutical companies, all of them. The Southwest College of Naturopathic Medicine was just bought up by a lab, a Big Pharma lab. So now they're teaching drugs in naturopathic college, which I think naturopathy was actually the best genre of medicine that we've ever had, and I'm sorry to see that it's not sustaining itself because they want so much to be medical when the medical is not serving us. So, it's all crazy because everyone wants status and money and acceptance. So, who do you listen to with all of this? So, when I was writing, Safe Hormones, Smart Women, so I have 21 books out at the moment, and a number of them though are out of print because I've been writing books since I was a young woman, and now I'm no longer a young woman in years, but I'm hopefully still a young woman in energetic and an emailing capability.
[00:24:12] So I had breast cancer 33 years ago. I've been on hormones now for almost 30 years, and I wanted to know if it was safe for me to take hormones. And I had breast cancer because my mother was given the most powerful endocrine disruptor ever invented, diethylstilbesterol. And the majority of those daughters that got first trimester exposures had breast cancer all between the year 44 and 46, just a huge epidemic of breast cancer in the offspring of DES, they call them DES daughters. And so I wanted to know, is it safe for me to take hormones because I lost so many hormones and I went on to have other cancers, and I had to figure out how to stop my cancer madness and be well. And I already was organic and detoxing and doing everything right way before I was getting ill. So, it was nothing to do with changing your lifestyle. It was in utero exposure in my mom's womb. So, I dove into the literature, and at that time, so that book was published in 2010, and I started doing the research. It took me six years to write Hormone Deception, because nobody had ever heard of endocrine disruption then. And it took me three years to write, Safe Hormone, Smart Women.
[00:25:21] And in those three years-- it was published in 2010. So, from 2007 to 2010, in the literature, there were about 100 studies where they looked at preoperative levels of progesterone and women that were going in for breast cancer surgery compared to matched cohorts to women who had breast cancer surgery with lower levels of progesterone, high and low levels they looked at, and then they followed them. In many of these studies, it was extraordinary how many studies there were along this line to see who went on to get a recurrence and who went on to live through that recurrence or die from that recurrence. And there was a theme, and it was very established theme, the women who had the highest level of progesterone close to the luteal phase, which meant that it was between 5 and 6 ng/mL. Compared to women who had follicular levels, which were much lower than that, those women lived longer, had less recurrence and less death if they had recurrence. Sign me up, that's what I want. We all want to be safe. We all want to be healthy. We all want to be as good as we can be for as long as we can be, right? That's what we're looking at. So now, if you look for those studies, the majority of these studies are gone. They're buried. They were in PubMed. But Big Pharma has buried a lot of the old-time studies and it's very hard to find them but you can find some of them.
[00:26:48] And I had to go back in through old articles that cited some of these studies to find them. It was really shocking how much, when we google something online, you don't realize how much Big Pharma has bought the first 100 pages of that Google search. If you go to Mr. Google, Dr. Google, it's very hard to get an accurate answer. But there was lots of research on this. Carol and I were talking about this in Everything Hormones. She's the main pharmacist at Women's Health International, which is one of the major women's compounding pharmacies in Wisconsin. So, we know that the more progesterone you have in your bloodstream, the better breast protection you have and we want that. And we don't mean you should have excessive levels, but the level should be somewhere between 5 ng/mL. And then if you have a history of glandular disease, like chronic cystic mastitis, chronic lumpy, bumpy breasts, you had a biopsy and you had dysplastic cells, you had breast cancer, if you had endometriosis, if you had PCOS, if you had adenomyosis, you need a lot of progesterone because there's a condition called progesterone resistance, where you take in progesterone, but it can't signal.
[00:28:00] And a lot of these diseases are actually caused by progesterone resistance. And the way you overcome it is by giving more progesterone. So, I like keeping women with those histories, so I like keeping my own personal level of progesterone around 20 ng/mL, because I had endometriosis-- All the DES daughters exposed in utero first trimester had adenomyosis, endometriosis breast cancer, and a variety of other issues. And now the granddaughters, several granddaughters have had ovarian cancer at eight years old. I mean, all these issues are transgenerational. They're passed on even if the exposures don't continue. But we now know the exposures are enhancing. So, I translated that science into levels I like to see. I hope this wasn't too long to get to the answer for you. I hope I'm not being too circuitous. I like to see women at least at 5 ng/mL. And if you're using topical, you should apply it like an hour before the test and then take the test within an hour that you get whichever-- And I use serum now, I've gone through every reiteration, I've done 24 hours urines, I've done spot-- I've done salivary. At the moment, what we taught in Everything Hormones was serum and serum interpretation.
[00:29:19] And I think you can do a real lot with blood. And even if you do use urine, like DUTCH test, you still have to follow follicle stimulating hormone and sex hormone binding globulin and things like that in the blood. So, you cannot get away from needing blood tests added to whatever way you're assessing your hormones, you've got to do some serum, which is blood testing. So that's a great way to understand how much protection the progesterone is giving to the body. Enough to the uterus, to the breast, but also you make it, remember the brain and all your insulation for your nerves, and also the repair of your lungs. Why do old people get more pneumonia? Because they have less progesterone. Progesterone protects the lungs from the first assault, and then it helps them repair from that assault. We saw that in the Mount Sinai COVID studies. So, we even use progesterone now in men. We don't deny men progesterone because they need it, just not in the same doses, but some men need similar doses to what the women get.
[00:30:20] And it used to be thought, according to the work of John Lee, who's kind of considered the father of progesterone, I had the honor of lecturing with him and David Zava that runs ZRT saliva labs. We lectured to 6000 people in a football stadium in Arizona. It was like a crazy day all day long. And he went on to help write one of the introductions for me to Hormone Deception. He was a lovely man and unfortunately died from an accident, was a big loss. But he said that a premenopausal woman only makes about 20 mg a day of progesterone. So, we thought you don't need very much progesterone to achieve protection. And that has since been found not to be true at all. He was the father of progesterone, but he didn't have his dosing right. Nobody's got everything right. And that was one of the things in his beautiful, incredible brain of so much gifts that he gave us. The dosing wasn't one of the gifts that he gave us, and it took us on the wrong path.
[00:31:19] And also, some people say that you only make progesterone the second half of the month, so you only need to replace it, especially if you're looking at hormone replacement as you age, the second half of the month, no, no. You've just learned that your adrenal glands make progesterone the first two weeks of the month. It's your corpus luteum that makes it the second two weeks. And you have enzymes all over the body that aren't going to be making it as you age, but you can still replace them in the body to the level they should have been, so the tissues all don't lose out. Your brain doesn't lose out, your vocal cords don't lose out, your lungs don't lose out. So, progesterone should be robust and much more robust. We used to think the average dosing of progesterone was 20 mg to 50 mg a day based on John Lee's work. And I hope I get to meet him up in heaven. And again, now we think the dose range is anywhere from 50 mg to 2500 mg. We now know that progesterone should be the largest amount of hormone in your body, of any other hormone in your body. We used to think it was testosterone in women, so if you look at the physiology, you often can understand what dosing and levels should be.
Cynthia Thurlow: [00:32:33] What should it be? And just lastly, because I want to be very mindful of your time, when we talk about progesterone resistance, and this is women that will tell me it doesn't matter whether they take 50 mg, 100 mg, “I'm very sleepy. I don't feel well even if they take it at night.” I know in some of your other work, you've talked about the role of oxytocin, which is a very important hormone when you're working with women that you've identified that they have some degree of progesterone resistance. When is oxytocin utilization something that you're considering prior to restarting progesterone?
Dr. Lindsey Berkson: [00:33:09] What a great question. My next book that I'm almost done with is Oxytocin and I've been threatening to publish it soon, but I was angsting over the name, but it's almost done. So, when the corpus luteum makes progesterone, it makes oxytocin at the same time. So, they're closely intertwined and progesterone is the hormone as we started this talk, pregnancy and oxytocin then squeezes the uterus to propel the baby out. It's a contractile hormone and it also squeezes the breast to let the milk down. So, but it does many, many, many other things, like your whole entire pancreas and all your islet cells are covered with oxytocin receptors. Your whole digestive tract is covered with oxytocin receptors. So, oxytocin has many, many hats that very few people understand. We just think of it as a pregnancy hormone or an orgasm hormone because it's a bonding hormone. And women make more oxytocin if they orgasm with someone they care about and love, not if friends with benefits or masturbation, but you make more of it when you're really with somebody you have emotionality with.
[00:34:10] So, women have a harder time with friends with benefits because they make more oxytocin. And even though the guy says, “Look, we're just friends, I'm in an ethical, non-monogamous relationship. So just keep that straight woman and then the woman gets attached because she makes more oxytocin.” But progesterone is the most-- you can be allergic or reactive is the more accurate term to anything. You could be reactive to peanuts and dairy, and people know about that, but you can be reactive to hormones and progesterone is the most reactive hormone there is, and I don't know why that is, but if you go into PubMed, which is a free service put on by our NIH, the National Institute of Health, every person can go in there and search all the peer review abstracts and some of them give you the whole articles for free. So anytime you should do that more than Google, but know that a lot of peer review is still bought and sold by Big Pharma too. But if you put in progesterone, go to pubmed.gov, and put in progesterone and allergy and click search. And 65 articles on progesterone-induced autoimmune dermatitis pop up and there's no other hormone that has that allergic profile and published peer-reviewed data that progesterone has.
[00:35:36] Now, why that's the case, I don't know, and I'm hoping to figure that out before my expiration date. [laughs] It's a good question, but we do know that it is the most reactive. So just like we can desensitize your body to peanut or dairy, if you go to a great allergist, you get allergy shots and it's desensitizing you over time. So, for a number of years, I desensitized my patients through the collaboration of my mentor, Dr. Jonathan Wright. And he had a Desensitization long distance program and he just retired. He's not well. Another sadness is that many of my colleagues close to my age don't happen to be as well as I'm enjoying at the moment. So, my heart goes out to them. But that service is no longer available. And I've actually tried. I got in touch with an allergy company here in Austin and we tried to create some way that we could desensitize women to progesterone. And we couldn't do what Dr. Wright had made available.
[00:36:47] So I had a number of women who took progesterone and they didn't feel well or they got too drowsy, it made them feel worse. And then they get desensitized and then suddenly they can handle progesterone. So, we know it's a reactivity. Most women are able to get over it. And there is an acupressure treatment that some people can use called Nambudripad’s Allergy Treatment Elimination Program, NAET, I don't know exactly. It was started by Nambudripad is her name. That's why the first letter is N. And she started out as a smart chiropractor and then she became an MD and David Brownstein uses that treatment in his office to desensitize to other things, but also hormones. When I now send out people to acupuncturists that do this or chiropractors, they end up putting them on a year program. And that's not what you need. You only need a few treatments just to desensitize your hormones or sometimes we test the bases, because there's a wide variety of bases that you can choose to put the hormone connected to topically put it or put it in your vagina. Or whatever way you want to apply it. For example, there's a brand-new base for men that really helps testosterone go in called Atrevis.
[00:38:03] So I think if I was back in a brick-and-mortar practice, I would be using the Nambudripad technique at the moment until we come up with something different. But if you really want to take hormones. Before I go into that, Carol, who is the pharmacist that also taught in Everything Hormones, she said, “That if you really have reactions, you're just not taking enough and you should push through it.” I'm not a big fan of that. And I don't think many, -- I have patients that come in and say, “I felt so badly when I took progesterone, I'll never take it again.” And I don't really want to tell that patient, you should take more and push through it. [Cynthia chuckles] So if you take testosterone and oxytocin, you can balance out estrogen well. But I just don't know if you're still protecting the uterine lining in the same way. That's the big deal, is we knew from the 70s there was an explosion of endometrial cancer and they added progesterone. If you use testosterone and oxytocin as the balancer of estrogen, are you still getting that endometrial protection? It's not going into overdrive of growth. There's no studies on that that I'm aware of. So, you can't really give estrogen to a woman with a uterus.
[00:39:21] We just had an article published in peer review a few months ago that it isn't just uterine cancer that increases if you apply estrogen unopposed without progesterone, it's even ovarian cancer, because progesterone protects against multiple cancer cell lines. So much so that preoperative study that I just talked about, that women with robust amounts of progesterone before breast cancer surgery do better over the next two decades. They now realize that before almost any cancer surgery, progesterone protects against glioblastoma. Progesterone protects against ovarian cancer. Progesterone is so anticarcinogenic, it's kind of mind boggling. So, I would try and get that patient desensitized to see if we can, and then if we couldn't, then I think I would focus on estriol, which is one-eighth the potency of estradiol and testosterone and oxytocin and just hold off on estrogen because estrogen and progesterone give you a safer breast and safer uterus. But it is the bane of all hormone doctors that a bunch of women don't do well with progesterone.
[00:40:32] So we're working on it. In the interim, I would say work with Nambudripad. It's an acupressure system that helps desensitize you to things. And I've seen it work. Dr. Brownstein has seen it work in his practice. And if that doesn't work, you might need to go to other hormones because you do want to avoid estrogen by itself without progesterone to protect your ovaries and your uterus. And there's probably other things that we don't even know yet that the combo job of both protects.
Cynthia Thurlow: [00:41:052] Dr. Berkson, it has been such a pleasure. I hope I can entice you to come back on the podcast again. Please let listeners know how to connect with you outside of this podcast, how to purchase your books or work with you directly.
Dr. Lindsey Berkson: [00:41:16] Well, first of all, it's been lovely being in this conversation with you. You're so intelligent and you're a Buddha calmness to you and this lovely voice, and you're so beautiful externally as well as internally, that it's been really pleasureful for me to have this conversation with you. And it's always wonderful to share this information because there's so much misinformation. If you like my stuff, you can go to my website, drlindseyberkson.com and you can become a patient, you can go down to the consult-- I do not see very many people. The first visit where I go over your lab, spend time and write up these huge notes for you is about 3 hours’ worth. So, it's got a big price point on it. And you can also scroll all the way down on that first page if you want to look and see what we taught at Everything Hormones. You can click on Everything Hormones.
[00:42:15] There's David Brownstein's picture and myself, and we take you through everything that's offered and even the materials, the bonus materials. There's a number of free videos. I have lots and lots of podcasts and blogs, but also, I have a membership, and the membership is called Smart+Heart. And I have several levels of that. And one level is Substack, where I write in Substack six days a week, and I keep you up on what's happening in hormone land, nutrition land. I just started it about 10 months ago, and I have 2000 subscribers on that. My old podcast I had 50,000 people, but I was banned so much during the pandemic that I got exasperated. It's a lot of work to put on a podcast, as you know, and to get so many bans were daunting. But I'm going to be rebooting a podcast, so stay tuned for that. But if you want to get my Substack, and I write nutritional and medical information, but I do it all with heart and love and spirit. I try and make it simple but heartfelt. So maybe you can go look at some free samples. There's free ones and see if you like them, but. And I always put out some free every week. So, if you want, you can just subscribe as a free subscriber.
[00:43:30] And then I also have a live level where we meet once a month, and except for personal healthcare questions, you can ask anything you want. And we talk and we get together and we have a great time once a month for an hour. And then I have a pro level, which is mostly providers and pharmacists and OB-GYNs and some nurse practitioners and MDs, etc., and a few chiropractors. And we go deep dive, today we just had our pro before I spoke with you, and we went through case histories. If you want to do your own case history, your own case report, we will go over all in depth. And we're now soon coming up with a platform for all of you to meet throughout the month on Zoom, to talk to each other and ask each other questions and really process how you really help patients today. And then I lecture quite a bit. I've lectured for Continuing Medical Education credits for all providers for many, many, many years. And I've also formulated nutraceutical products. I formulated the first-- Susan Lark created the first female multi-line ever. She was around the corner from me when I practiced in a brick and mortar in Palo Alto many years ago. And Linus Pauling’s lab was around the corner. We used to go have lunch with him, Brown Bag Lunch with Linus in the olden days when nobody knew any of this stuff.
[00:44:54] I then came out with the next first line of female products for Metagenics. I designed their Fem line in the early 80s. I designed the first product for menopause, for lumpy, bumpy painful breasts, for heavy periods, etc. That was called the Fem line. And now biotics scientific research has allowed me to take the work that I did at Tulane, which was, we know that these satellite dishes should be available. We know they need all these nutrients and we want to make sure if we're on hormones, we don't get cancer. So, your cancer stem cells stay senescent. I've created receptor detox and hormone balance and protect based on-- I worked with the two scientists who discovered the first and the second estrogen receptors, Elwood Jensen and Jan-Åke Gustafsson. So, I have those new products and we put all women on hormone replacement on those products because it keeps, in this dirty world, your receptors clean. And we have a real easy way to do detox weekends once a month with the product. So that's an exciting thing. And I have a little video on my website for that and I lecture a lot. So, if you'd like me to lecture somewhere or somehow, we're having a big free online menopause day in October that Esther Blum is launching, and lots of good things to come down the path as hormones are more and more vindicated, but still less and less providers know what to do.
[00:46:20] So, when you ask questions of your well-intentioned provider, you're often apt to get the wrong answers. So, we'd like to expose you to what we feel are the right answers, even though they might not be mainstream or standard of care yet. But it's a big deal that I had breast cancer 33 years ago and have been on hormone replacement for almost 30 years. So, there's a lot of elbow grease in all of that. And I like to make all this available. Since I don't have kids, my books and my works are my family and I invite you to meet my family. My books are on Amazon. A lot of them are out of print, but you can still like Healthy Digestion the Natural Way you can get used online, but there's more coming out.
[00:47:06] So you can look on my website or look on Amazon. And if you in any way can think of some way that we can synergize or help, get the message out to women so women don't miss out by ignorance. That's what our hope is to keep younger longer, safer longer, energetic, and cognitively bright for as long as possible.
Cynthia Thurlow: [00:47:30] Thank you for the gift that you are. It's been such a pleasure to connect with you, and as I stated before, I hope that I can entice you to come back. And for listeners, I don't give out my email address easily and I have been subscribed to your email list and it's just such a wealth of information. You're so gracious and so humble and so generous to share as much as you do. So, thank you for the work that you do.
Dr. Lindsey Berkson: [00:47:53] Thank you. That means a lot to me. Really does. It's been very wonderful meeting you more in depth for this hour. So, thanks a lot.
Cynthia Thurlow: [00:48:04] If you love this podcast episode, please leave a rating and review, subscribe and tell a friend.
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