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Ep. 479 The Ultimate Progesterone Masterclass for Women featuring Dr. Lindsey Berkson and Dr. Scott Sherr

  • Team Cynthia
  • Jul 2
  • 45 min read

Updated: Jul 6


We have a mashup episode today with Dr. Lindsey Berkson and Dr. Scott Sherr sharing their insights on the powerful role progesterone plays in overall health and its critical connection to the brain and nervous system.


Dr. Berkson highlights how progesterone supports brain function, immunity, cardiovascular health, nerve repair, and gut integrity and explains how chronic stress and environmental toxins contribute to widespread progesterone deficiency, even in young people. She also challenges outdated hormone practices and stresses the importance of maintaining optimal levels throughout life.


Dr. Sherr clarifies how progesterone enhances the calming neurotransmitter GABA, explaining that as progesterone declines, GABA activity drops, leading to anxiety, sleep issues, and mood changes. He recommends natural ways to support GABA and highlights the benefits of using safe, plant-based modulators instead of alcohol or sedatives that deplete GABA and can cause dependency.


Join us for expert advice on balancing hormones, calming the nervous system, and supporting your body through hormonal transitions.


Hormones have long been misunderstood and vilified, yet they are signaling molecules essential for overall health. Dr. Berkson explains that although outdated medical thinking still limits the value of progesterone to simply protecting the uterus, it plays a crucial role in brain function, immune defense, cardiovascular health, and nerve repair.  

Modern-day stress and environmental toxins are huge contributors to widespread progesterone deficiency, even in young people. Dr. Berkson explains how chronic stress depletes progesterone, while widespread exposure to anti-progestin endocrine disruptors in food, air, and water further disrupts hormonal balance, leading to issues like infertility, anxiety, and early hormonal decline.


Progesterone enhances GABA activity, while estrogen tends to block it, which helps to explain why many women experience insomnia and heightened stress during hormone fluctuations. 

Dr. Scott Sherr explores how declining progesterone during perimenopause disrupts the GABA system in the brain, leading to anxiety, sleep issues, and mood instability. He explains that while GABA supplements are popular, GABA is too large to cross the blood-brain barrier. So, if a supplement does work, it may indicate a “leaky brain,” often linked to gut issues and systemic inflammation. Instead of using alcohol or benzodiazepines, which can rapidly deplete GABA and lead to dependence, he recommends safer, natural GABA modulators and cannabinoids, which bind to allosteric sites on the GABA receptor and enhance its effect without the same risks. 


Progesterone plays a vital role in gut health, immunity, and overall hormone balance, especially during perimenopause. As estrogen and progesterone levels decline, the gut’s ability to regulate permeability is impaired, contributing to leaky gut, autoimmunity, and systemic inflammation. 

Dr. Berkson explains how progesterone and estrogen can improve the gut lining and immune regulation, and that declining hormone levels, in both older adults and younger individuals, are linked to a range of widespread health issues. She highlights how hormonal resistance, particularly to progesterone, is common, and she challenges outdated hormone replacement practices and misconceptions, explaining that progesterone deficiency can compromise lung health, brain function, and immunity, and optimal levels are essential across all stages of life.

“One of the side effects of insufficient hormones is the propensity for leaky gut.”


– Dr. Lindsey Berkson.


Connect with Cynthia Thurlow  


Connect with Dr. Lindsey Berkson


Connect with Dr. Scott Sherr


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 first of two mashup podcasts on the topic of progesterone. This includes experts Dr. Lindsey Berkson and Dr. Scott Sherr. We dive into myths and misconceptions on hormones as well as vindication of hormones, how progesterone helps balance out estrogen and how these hormones are powerful signaling molecules. Progesterone helps to protect our lungs, our uterus, our nerve cells, and so much more. The actual physiology of this hormone and the impact of progesterone deficiencies and chronic stress.


[00:01:10] We move on to discuss ovarian senescence, the role of GABA and progesterone, the impact of stress, and ways to support a healthy GABA system, as well as the importance of vagal tone. And last but not least, the impact and the interrelationship between progesterone and gut health, as well as risk for leaky gut, progesterone resistance and so much more. Again, this is the first in a series of two podcast devoted to progesterone, a very important hormone. 


Dr: Lindsey Berkson: [00:01:45] First of all, hormones have been vilified, vilified and they've been used actually by the pharmaceutical company as profiteering and then they were vilified and now we're in the era of vindication. So, I love this opportunity to vindicate and explain and embrace hormones and to see how they might help each of us have a better life in a time when the planet is so dirty, it's very difficult and challenging to have a better life. 


[00:02:17] And a start with progesterone is fabulous because progesterone is about life and birth. It gets its name from pro to support and gest for gestation, life. So, progesterone is the main hormone that allows the evolution of humanity. So, it is enormously important. But it got absolutely relegated to the back of the room being a naughty hormone in the corner with a dunce cap on, like in the olden days when they really didn't understand why when they first started using hormones and they used only estrogen, there was an increase in endometrial cancer or the lining of the uterus or you could say uterine cancer. And it's because all the hormones need to be dealt with in balance. But if you give estrogen without progesterone that is the policer or the balancer of estrogen, you can have too much growth because progesterone helps control growth. 


[00:03:22] So, when they first saw this happening in the beginning, they knew estrogen made women look younger, longer. And there was a gynecologist named Wilson out of England who wrote a book called Feminine Forever. And it was all about the promise of giving women hormones to help them stay younger longer because we all feel better when we look better. 


[00:03:43] I'm going to be 76 in a few months, and I just came back from California visiting a lot of my old and dearest friends who are in my time range, and I am aging completely differently than they are. And we'll go more into that. But I attribute it like, we just had a conversation to balanced hormones and healthy living, but it's not like I've had an easy path to get there. 


[00:04:11] But when Wilson came out with his book, everybody got excited that estrogen maybe could slow down the Mack truck of aging. So, they gave women estrogen, and estrogen rules collagen of the skin. Skin looks better on women with estrogen. It keeps your bones more healthier, so you stand up straighter. You have estrogen receptors, so when signals go to your lungs and your esophagus and your vocal cords, you could project better. So, women on hormones can continue to command in the negotiating boardroom better and longer, or lecture better and longer than women who are not on hormones. 


[00:04:46] But when estrogen is given without progesterone, you can have problems in the uterus. So, they then thought if a woman didn't have a uterus, she didn't have to worry about progesterone. Because the only action early on from the 1950s and 1960s onward, was that's all that this little hormone did. It either supported pregnancy in pregnant women or it protected the uterus from too much growth action of estrogen. They thought that's all it did. But hormones are very misunderstood and a big reason is that they are the most powerful signaling molecules in the body. And what I mean by that is the body has an Internet system. And we all know how important now email is. When you wake up in the morning and open up your computer and you get into your email, you're so excited because you're in touch with people for play and people for business. If your email freezes up, if your Wi-Fi freezes up, you get into a very frantic state because nothing is moving and communication is blocked. So, hormones deliver signals or you can refer to them as emails to genes to tell cells what to do to keep us healthy. 


[00:06:11] The most powerful compounds we have in the body speak to genes. Whatever can speak to genes rules. The only things that can really actively speak to genes are sex, steroid. hormones. And then a new, exciting, famous player that's emerging on the block, vitamin D. We've heard a lot about vitamin D and Covid, we're hearing more and more about it, but why is it so amazing? 1, it's a vitamin, which means you can't make it yourself, so you got to take it in on a regular basis. But 2, vitamin D can also speak to genes. So, we think of our hormones as signaling molecules that run the internet of the body, that deliver emails to your cells. And they do it via being able to talk to genes so that your brain keeps thinking, your vocal cords keep vibrating and you could speak. 


[00:07:00] As you just said, with Covid, they discovered that women on hormone replacement or younger women with more hormones would get Covid more, but they would die from it less. And when they did a deep dive, it's because estrogen and progesterone help protect the immune system. But in particular, progesterone has ways to signal the lungs, to keep the lungs safe and to repair the lungs from injury. So, they took men in the ICU and they gave them standardized care, or they gave half the men standardized care plus 100mg IM injection b.i.d., which is twice a day of progesterone and they tracked how long were they in the hospital? What were their complication rates? How did they do? Guys that got progesterone signals, that delivered emails to the cells in their lungs, got the messages to repair those lungs and not get that ground glass damage that Covid can and some patients do. And they got out of the hospital statistically in shorter periods of time with statistically less complications and the need for less medications.


[00:07:59] So, what we know is that most hormones are made in glands, and then they're squirted out into the water-soluble highways of your biological blood. And then they swim around through your body looking for target tissue. What in the heck is a target tissue? It's tissues with these little satellite dishes waiting for these emails, longing for these emails, hungry for these emails. So wherever there are these receptors, and each hormone has its own receptor. So, progesterone will seek out progesterone receptors and signal or deliver emails to those receptors so that the local tissues stay healthy. So, we have progesterone receptors in our brain. We don't have them just in our uterus. That's the old saying was, if you don't have a uterus, you don't need progesterone, thinking its only job description was protecting the uterus against too much or unopposed estrogen. 


[00:09:02] If a doctor tells you that, “Run, do not walk,” what is that old saying on Monopoly? Do not pass go or whatever that is, pay $200. I don't remember the old saying of Monopoly. A doctor that says “You don't need progesterone if you don't have a uterus,” is so old hat. And it's been old hat for a long time. And unfortunately, it's even being still taught in schools. I know that at national, where I went to naturopathic college for a few years, they were still teaching for 20 years, the same exact thing, if you don't have a uterus, you don't need progesterone. 


[00:09:37] So, let's look where these little cells, receptors, satellite dishes that want to take messages from hormones. And let's look at progesterone satellite dishes in particular. We have progesterone receptors in our brain. We've got progesterone receptors in the coronary artery of our heart that keeps our artery that can-- If it goes into spasm, can kill us, keeps our artery relaxed and keeps our heart healthy. We have, as I just said, progesterone receptors all throughout the lining of the lungs. We have progesterone receptors in the prostate. We use progesterone in men to treat benign prostatic hypertrophy when the prostate gets too large and they stay up all night urinating and feel really exhausted and cranky all the next day, wherever there are progesterone satellite dishes, the body wants those emails for the Internet system not to freeze up, but there’s more.


[00:10:32] So, when progesterone is made, for example, in the adrenal gland, or when you-- In the middle of your cycle, don't you ovulate, but you're not going to be fertilized. The burst corpus luteum makes progesterone. So, we make progesterone in the ovary and we make it in the adrenal gland and then it travels in the bloodstream looking where the heck to go for these satellite dishes, that's endocrinology. That means a hormone was made in a distant gland and it's going to seek out target tissue, satellite dishes or the other term in science is receptors. 


[00:11:11] But wait, there's more. We can actually make progesterone all over our body with progesterone-producing enzymes, that's called intracrinology. In other words, we make locally. So, for example, in the brain. Let's talk about progesterone in the brain. Progesterone has many progesterone-producing enzymes in the brain. There are six areas that are known so far. But hormone research is young and it's new and we're learning new things all the time. Six areas of the brain have enzymes that locally produce progesterone. They then signal the genes in local satellite receptors and then they're degraded. So, we make progesterone all over the place. We make it in our brain to help us sleep at night, to help us feel calm in the face of a crazy, chaotic world that nobody knows what tomorrow is going to bring. Of course, planet Earth has always been like this. We make progesterone in areas that are really rare. We make progesterone from Schwann cells that make the insulation around almost all nerves, the myelin sheath that protects nerves. Progesterone helps your nerves stay healthy. 


[00:12:34] So, MS patients that have demyelinating disease, we give them lots and lots of progesterone so that we can help them make more insulation and we can actually start shrinking some of those white brain lesions that are identifiable on MRIs. So, progesterone has many, many hats. The old thinking was it only protected the uterus, so if you didn't have a uterus, what the heck? You didn't need it. And actually, there's still a lot of arrogant docs, not all that still think that way today. Run, don't walk, this doctor is caught in old thinking, hasn't done any research on their own, and you really don't want to go to them for consultation about your health because they're not up on what they should be and it's human to be down on what you're not up on. So, you often get negative answers from people who aren't informed. So, it's very important to realize that because there's very few docs that have been trained at the moment in hormones. 


Cynthia Thurlow: [00:13:36] What is it about our modern-day lifestyles that is contributing to progesterone deficiencies? I think this is relevant and timely because there are lifestyle decisions that we sometimes make unknowingly that can drive down progesterone, that can contribute to our progesterone not being optimized. Before we even get to the point in our lives where we need to be utilizing hormone replacement therapy, I'm talking about younger men, younger women, modern day lifestyle, contributory factors that can contribute to this overwhelming deficiency. Not to mention some of the endocrine issues like PCOS that can also contribute. 


Dr: Lindsey Berkson: [00:14:14] That is a really great question. And by the way, you have a wonderful voice in talking with you. So, this is really a lovely experience on body, mind, spirit level. That's a great question. So, first of all, we used to think that hormone replacement was mainly for older people, women in perimenopause, but definitely in menopause and men in andropause. And it was mainly for older people. But this is no longer the case. And that is because our lifestyle and our dirty planet have created a condition where younger and younger people are more and more insufficient. And basic hormones and remember these hormones run the Internet system of your body so that when they stop working, what are we seeing in young people? We're seeing body dysphoria, gender bending, depression, mushy men, men that look like women, feminized men, masculinized women, and conditions that are emerging that we really haven't seen before like polycystic ovarian syndrome, which is really like menopause in a younger woman. It's the number one driving issue of infertility in younger women. And we're all kind of a mess because our hormones are a mess. 


[00:15:26] So, what's going on in our lifestyle that might be rinsing out our hormones at a younger stage when we should have more robust hormones? Well, the first thing is that we make our stress hormones out of progesterone. So, if we are very stressed and it is a stressful world, we've-- When I first--


[00:15:49] So, I've been in practice one way or another for 53 years, [laughs] oh my God. I feel younger and healthier than I've ever felt my whole life most of the time, not 100% of the time, but most of the time. And I really had a lot of illness when I was younger. But when I was first in practice, I don't remember four or five, six-year-old kids coming in and saying they were stressed out. And now everybody says that they were stressed out. And there's huge articles written about the increase, the rapid emergent existence of severe depression and anxiety and many other issues, even bone loss and bone integrity.


[00:16:30] And they've even done functional MRIs. So, areas of the brain that have to do with behavior control and verbality, which are run by hormones, they're shrinking, they're not as large as they used to be, although, all of this is fixable because of these conditions that I'm going to address in a few minutes and one of them is stress. But stress isn't just from feeling you're stuck in a situation and you have no control. Stress can be a hidden infection, a hidden allergy. Stress could come from many different consequences. But when the physiology is in stress, when you use up your own antistress hormone, cortisol, you use up your progesterone to make more cortisol. So, as we're under more stress and we don't fix it, take the stressor away or give-- We now give several hundred milligrams of progesterone to young kids with ADHD with Asperger's syndrome with lots of issues because progesterone helps and is needed in many of their young bodies because they're using it up so quickly to make antistress hormones.


[00:17:33] So, number one, the stressful world rinses progesterone out of the body because it's used as a building block to make antistress hormone like cortisol. The other major reason that's so underappreciated is the role of chemicals in our air, food and water. It's not just estrogen endocrine disruptors that are an issue, but there are anti-progestogenic endocrine disruptors. The air and water and food is ubiquitous with them. So, I wrote one of the very first books on understanding endocrine disruption. It came out in 2000. It was called Hormone Deception. And based on that book, I was invited to be a distinguished hormone scholar at an Estrogen Think Tank called the Center for Bioenvironmental Research at Tulane and Xavier Universities.


[00:18:26] And I worked with the scientists who developed this emergent field that hormones are the only signaling molecules that can speak to genes. They run everything from our brain and thinking to our nerve repair and insulation and even the coronary artery health and our lung health and repair after Covid. But at the same time, they're all under attack by chemicals that are sprayed on our air, food, and water. And many of these chemicals are anti-progestins. They are contributing to infertility. Shanna Swan is a famous PhD scientist who worked with us at Tulane. She's still lecturing in the Netherlands and all over the world about this insidious increase in infertility that's occurring, and a lot of it is because progesterone, as we began this talk, progest, it supports gestation, but this hormone is under attack by progestin endocrine disruptors. So, eating organic is a huge deal. It can seem overwhelming and with inflationary costs it can seem a bit daunting and expensive. But only four or five days of eating organically starts to rinse a huge amount of these chemicals out of your body. When they do urine tests and blood tests in families that they get to really eat organically like this, we see nature is very generous and changes that you make often act fast. 


Cynthia Thurlow: [00:23:53] I guess so much about perimenopause, like the hearkening of perimenopause is this de-evolution, this ovarian senescence of less progesterone being produced in the ovary? 


Dr: Scott Sherr: [00:24:05] Yes. 


Cynthia Thurlow: [00:24:07] And so progesterone and GABA really do interact with one another. Let's speak to that because I find this so, so interesting and I think for many listeners that are experiencing an upregulation and anxiety and depressive symptoms and more insomnia or trouble falling or staying asleep at this stage of life, this complex interplay between these two hormones is very important. 


Dr. Scott Sherr: [00:24:29] Oh, it's huge. It's huge. And I'm glad you mentioned it because it's-- Progesterone is directly increasing GABA tone. So, when you have more progesterone around, you will sleep better. If you don't have as much progesterone around, you are not going to sleep as well, that's just how it goes. And you'll actually notice this if you're still having your regular periods, you'll notice at certain parts of the times of the month you'll sleep better than other times. And this is when you're more progesterone dominant versus when you're more estrogen dominant. So typically, earlier in your cycle when there's more sort of estrogen predominance, you're going to feel more awake, alert because estrogen actually has the opposite effect. 


[00:25:06] Estrogen is-- it blocks the GABA receptors so you feel less tired typically, you can go on less sleep overall and you feel pretty good, especially around ovulation. But when the progesterone starts being more on the balancing higher than the estrogen, that's when you're going to need more sleep. You're going to feel you need an extra 30 minutes in bed. You can't get out of the bed in the morning and things. But this is very important during the perimenopausal, menopausal time because this is one of the reasons why women will have a much harder time sleeping. So, it's so important to support the GABA system in this capacity. I mean, of course giving progesterone is an option and that depends on the situation and of course what your perspective is on HRT and things like that. 


[00:25:47] But in essence, at least for me personally, I think it's a good idea, but along with a battery of other things. But my overall perspective here is certainly HRT is something to think about. But how are we supporting the production of GABA? How are we making sure that you're not depleting it as well? I mean, one of the major things that's depleting it all the time, that all of us kind of know this intuitively, is stress right? So, if you're always stressed, if you're always-- Your cortisol, which is your stress hormone in your body, it's your steroid hormone. 


[00:26:17] Steroid hormone, cortisol depletes GABA in the system. And so, it also depletes some of the cofactors which are these other things like B6 and magnesium specifically that are responsible for the conversion of GABA from its precursor. The precursor to GABA in the brain is something called glutamate. Glutamate is our excitatory neurotransmitter. In fact, it is in combination with GABA. The total between the two of them is 80% of your brain's neurotransmission, okay? So, the rest of the other ones, norepinephrine, dopamine, serotonin, only 20% compared to glutamate and GABA. 


[00:26:49] But glutamate which is super interesting, is that the way we've evolved is that glutamate is our excitatory neurotransmitter and GABA is our inhibitory. And there's always going to be a balance between these two. And there has to be conversion of these two from glutamate to GABA, you need B6 and magnesium to do this. So, if you're B6 or magnesium deficient, you're going to have a hard time making that conversion. If you're actually not making enough glutamate in the first place, then you're going to obviously have a hard time making enough GABA. If you're depleting GABA so fast that you're having a hard time making that balance shift fast, then you're going to get a glutamate overabundance. And then what's that going to happen? It's going to be like this, you know it's like that downward perpetual cycle spiral where you're stressed and then you can't get unstressed and you feel worse because you don't have enough of that GABA there and you have too much glutamate around. 


[00:27:40] I mean, the most common example of this, that people kind of know of, that they've had the experience, is that you go to a Chinese restaurant and you have MSG in your food. MSG is monosodium glutamate. And this is a direct source of glutamate to your brain. So, this is why you get headaches, you feel irritable, you can't sleep, because all of a sudden you have this overabundance of glutamate in the brain. This is happening to all of us on a regular basis just because of anxiety, stress, nutrient depletion. Gut issues can do it too. If you have a leaky gut as well if your gut's not working very well. The main fuel for the small intestine is something called glutamine, which is an amino acid. And then glutamine is also the precursor to glutamate in the brain. So, as you can see, this is all connected, but the key here is to understand that if you're GABA deficient, we have to support that system. 


Cynthia Thurlow: [00:28:32] What are some of your favorite ways to support the GABA system from a lifestyle-related measurement?


Dr. Scott Sherr: [00:28:41] Lots of different ways that we all can use. The most important ones are find ways to relax. That sounds like a tall tale for a lot of people. But the easiest thing, and I teach my kids this, and it's just learning how to breathe. We all think we know how to breathe because we do it reflexively. But if you learn how to spend two to five minutes, just prolonging your exhales. 


[00:29:07] And so, I teach my kids either like a box breathing technique or what's even easier for them is the 3:5, techniques of breathing in for 6 seconds, breathing out for 5 seconds for 2 to 5 minutes. Because once you can increase your exhales, your exhales are going to help you reset your nervous system so that you come out of that fight or flight, you decrease that sympathetic tone. 


[00:29:31] I'm a huge fan of meditation in general, and I don't think that everybody is going to want to meditate, I totally understand that. But even just doing breath practices can be really great. If you're not into just doing that, I have-- Even some light stretching or if you're into yoga, even some like just holding some yoga poses for a couple minutes can-- Even isometric kinds of exercise can be really helpful. So, if you're doing, very easy kinds of yoga poses, breathwork--


[00:29:59] Interestingly, on the other side of it, exercise can be very helpful here too. As long as you take time after exercising to let yourself recover and you don't go immediately into the day and all of the crap that you have to do. That's a big thing over the last four or five years has been like the Wim Hof breathing, for example. That's not relaxation breathing, okay? That is sympathetic breathing. Now can you use that as your exercise and then relax afterwards? Absolutely. But you still have to work on your breath practices or do some meditation or some other ways. And so, I find that--


[00:30:35] For me, the breath practices are pretty easy for my clients and patients to work on. There're other ways that I try to help with resetting the nervous system. There's some vagal nerve stimulators I work with people, so you can work on your vagal nerve which is in your-- A lot of places to get it, but your neck is easy. One thing you can do actually, this is kind of fun, is just do some humming or singing if you like to sing, that's also a great way to reset your nervous system. So, I have my guitar over there. Sometimes I'll just like-- If I'm really like just a bit going, going, going, if I can take five minutes and do some humming or something like that or even blowing into a straw, we'll do it too. If you have a straw and some water, like when you're a kid and you're blowing bubbles in the water, that's actually prolonging your exhale, so that's how you can do that. If you have kids, you can pretend you're a kid for 5 or 10 minutes, your kids will love it and you just get into play mode, that's really helpful too. So those are some of the ones that I use.


[00:31:30] I have others, I mean obviously your diet, your nutrition is really, really big here. Your relationships. If you're sleeping with a partner that's snoring all night, they've done studies that every time your partner snores, your cortisol level goes up just a little bit each time, even if you don't remember waking up, so address that. Sleep divorce, it sounds nasty, but if you're sleeping in a separate bed and you're both sleeping better, all the power to you. So, there's a lot of other things, but these are some of the highlights. 


Cynthia Thurlow: [00:31:58] Well, I love that you touched on the vagal tone piece because the vagus nerve is the longest nerve in the body. And in cardiology we used to have a lot of people that would inappropriately stimulate their vagus nerve and then pass out or have other things that occurred. But being able to hum, being able to sing, gargle, all these things can stimulate that nerve. The concept of sleep divorce, I have a husband who will occasionally snore and he of course remembers nothing about it. He now mouth tapes. But I can appreciate why and how if an individual is sleeping next to a partner who's snoring, your cortisol goes up because I know how irritating it can be. As much as I love my husband, I always tell him you need to be on your side, otherwise the statistical likelihood you're going to snore more is going to be problematic.


Dr. Scott Sherr: [00:32:41] Indeed. 


Cynthia Thurlow: [00:32:43] With that being said, when were initially talking before we started recording, you mentioned that GABA is such a large molecule it does not cross the blood brain barrier. So, when you are working with your patients, whether they're male or female, and you are first working on lifestyle, then consideration given to supplementation that can support this system, what are your go-to’s or what are your kind of high-level things that you're considering utilizing? 


Dr. Scott Sherr: [00:33:11] So yeah, GABA supplements are too big. GABA, the molecule is too big by itself to get across the blood brain barrier. So, this is a barrier that's evolved to keep things out as much as possible to protect our brain. If we have systemic infections or inflammation, the brain tries to protect itself. The problem with modern world as it is that many of us have leaky brains because we have leaky guts. If our gut is not doing what it's supposed to do, keeping things out, there's a significant amount of inflammation that happens in the system. The immune system starts getting revved up in ways it's not supposed to get revved up. This can lead to things like autoimmunity in some cases. We saw a rash of this and we're still seeing it a lot now, sort of post pandemic as well. 


[00:33:53] And so, if you take a GABA supplement and it works for you, it's likely because that barrier is not doing what it's supposed to do. So, it could be diagnostic in this capacity. So, I don't recommend doing this, but it is a way to say you know what I need to get some more help with some additional testing and work with a practitioner or do my own research as to why this may be the case. 


[00:34:14] And so, what's interesting about the GABA receptor, though, is that-- Typically, so the GABA-A receptor specifically, which is a more common one, it has five subunits, and on those subunits are all these binding sites where other things can bind. They can bind and increase the affinity for GABA to bind to where it binds on the receptor or it can have the opposite effect where it can decrease the amount of GABA that binds to the site of where GABA would bind on the receptor. So, these are called allosteric modulators of the GABA receptor. 


[00:34:41] And we already alluded to one earlier when we talked about alcohol. Alcohol, benzodiazepines, these are very commonly used to modulate the GABA receptor on these allosteric sites, increasing the affinity for GABA to bind. But what's the problem with these particular compounds. What happens with alcohol? Alcohol binds very tightly to where it binds on the receptor, increases the affinity for GABA to bind so much that you actually start seeing a depletion of the GABA very quickly. And what also happens is that it unbinds very quickly after it's bound so tightly.


[00:35:16] This is the common scenario that I'm sure many of your listeners have had where you drink some alcohol to go to bed, or you before you go to bed you fall asleep very easily, but you're up like two hours later, and you can't go back to bed, so, what just happened? You bound to the receptor very tightly. You depleted a whole bunch of GABA very quickly. You unbound the receptor. Now you have this glutamate overload compared to GABA and that's why you feel irritable, you get headaches. 


[00:35:42] I used to get the worst hangovers when I drank alcohol. And it was like two or three hours after I went to bed, I'd wake up with this pounding headache. And everybody knows what I'm talking about. Unless you have very significant Irish blood or something like that or -- There are those few people out there that don't get hangovers. But in essence, that's what's happening with alcohol. 


[00:36:02] And what's happening with benzodiazepines like Ativan, Xanax, Valium, these bind so tightly to the receptor as well that they cause the same issue over time. And what that issue is what we call tolerance, withdrawal, and significant dependence. Because what the GABA receptor will do over time is it will try to protect itself. And it does this by decreasing the number of those receptors and trying to have less capacity for you to bind GABA there so that because you're flooding the system with this need for more GABA, and so you're depleting GABA over time, so the system's trying to compensate for itself. 


[00:36:38] So, what you really want to do is work with compounds that don't do this, obviously. And then if you're working with compounds that don't do this, you want to be thinking about this in two different ways. The first way is that there's all these other compounds, and we'll talk about some of them that can bind to the GABA receptor and increase the affinity for GABA to bind, cool, but they don't bind as strongly. They're much more safe. They've been around for thousands of years. And I'll give you a couple of these in a minute. 


[00:37:04] But the other thing you want to think about even so, is that if you're giving something that's going to increase the affinity for GABA to bind, you want to make sure you're not depleting GABA in the process, even if these are more natural compounds, because it can still happen. So, what are some of these compounds? One of the most common ones that-- Many people have heard of and I think recently as well, is something called kava. Kava is something that's been around for thousands of years. It's been used in the Pacific Islands. It is something that modulates the GABA receptor by binding to one of these allosteric sites, and then it increases the affinity for GABA to bind. So, kava is one of them. 


[00:37:37] Another one that I like a lot is something called magnolia bark or Honokiol which is another one that binds to one of these sites on the other like on the GABA receptor, but not where GABA would bind. So allosteric, it's called a positive allosteric modulator. 


[00:37:53] There's actually the endocannabinoids-- Sorry, the cannabinoids themselves, not endocannabinoids, those are the ones that are internal. They're the ones that we take themselves, like CBD, CBG, CBN, these all bind to allosteric sites and the GABA molecule, or GABA receptor and increase the affinity. 


[00:38:10] Now, interestingly, THC is different. THC actually is a negative allosteric binder. So, it binds to the GABA receptor and it prevents GABA from binding. This is why people that use THC, typically, especially in the beginning or will get anxiety. You get that anxiety when you take THC. 


[00:38:30] Interestingly, opioids, things like morphine, heroin, and all the derivatives of those, they actually decrease the sensitivity of that GABA receptor to bind GABA itself. So, they actually cause-- The issue with the GABA system being more deficient and more issues with the GABA system because of the opioids as well. So, there's other things that deplete GABA over time. Even caffeine will do it. Even other stimulants will do it as well. But anyway, so these are all things that are binding, and we can talk about more of those because there's a lot, if you're interested, but they're all binding to these allosteric sites. 


[00:39:08] And then there's a couple cool things that can bind to where GABA binds on the receptor. The first one that I love to talk about is something called agarin. Agarin is one of the ingredients or one of the compounds that's found in the amanita muscaria mushroom. This is a psychedelic mushroom. It's well known across the world, especially for Christmas mythology. So, if you're in Europe right now or especially in northern-- in Scandinavia, you will find tons of pictures of this mushroom, the mushroom is the red capped mushroom with white dots. Alice in Wonderland, Mario Brothers, there's a lot of Christmas mythology that's around this mushroom because if you take this mushroom, you get psychedelic experiences. Especially if you take the mushroom that's been detoxified in some way because it's actually a pretty toxic mushroom. 


[00:40:01] So, what they used to do is actually drink reindeer urine. Reindeer love this mushroom and they would-- And then the shaman would actually collect the urine of the reindeer, drink it and then have shamanistic experiences in northern-- in the Siberian area actually. Anyway, that's a little bit of a sidenote. But the idea with the mushroom is it has two ingredients-- two main compounds, one is called agarin, the other one's called Ibotenic acid. Ibotenic acid is the neurotoxic ingredient that causes the psychedelic experiences and also the some of the GI disturbances that can happen with this particular mushroom. Agarin is a long-acting GABA agonist, which means it works on the GABA receptor at the GABA site, binding to where GABA would bind, so that's my favorite one because it's got a great story and it's also long acting. So, in some of the products that I use, we use it for sleep because it stays on the receptor for about six and a half hours, seven hours, so it's a great for its half-life. 


[00:40:56] And the other one that I use is something called nicotinyl-GABA, vitamin B3 attached to the GABA molecule, and that's vitamin B3 has a receptor that gets across the blood brain barrier. So, you can have B3 and kind of lead the charge through the blood brain barrier taking GABA with it. And as a result, you get B3 and GABA in the brain. B3 is mildly activating, which is nice especially if you want to take some relaxation thing during the day but not feel too tired. So, you have this vitamin B3 attached to the GABA and GABA binds to where the GABA would bind. 


[00:41:27] So, in summing up all of this, I know I spoke for a long time, is that-- Like when I'm thinking about GABA supplementation, I'm thinking about these allosteric sites, these sites on the GABA receptor that can enhance GABA binding, kava, CBD, CBN, CBG, Honokiol or magnolia bark, along with something that's binding to the site where GABA would bind on the GABA receptor, and that's something agarin or nicotinyl-GABA, vitamin B3 GABA. 


Cynthia Thurlow: [00:41:54] This is fascinating. So, kind of a big picture to recap some of the things you talked about. If you are taking GABA, assuming that it's working effectively, it probably is a reflection of leaky gut equating with leaky brain, so that explains a lot. As someone who has a couple autoimmune conditions and very likely still has persistent leaky gut, because I was like GABA works really well for me, well, that's a tell. Number 2, we just did a podcast last month talking about benzodiazepines. And I think about 25 years of being in clinical medicine, and there's a time and a place to utilize them, but I had many patients that were on them long term, like years and years. A lot of my little old ladies had been on them since the 1970s as an adjunct to help them sleep.


Dr. Scott Sherr: [00:42:43] There's little helpers, right? 


Cynthia Thurlow: [00:42:46] Exactly, exactly. But alcohol and how it offsets these receptors, these GABA receptors. Can we speak to this a little bit? Because I'm thinking about individuals that utilize alcohol either to help with sleep or kind of generalized anxiety disorder or social awkwardness. I'm speaking about a family member specifically. I think this is where they started utilizing this and how they utilize the alcohol to be more comfortable socially, but yet ultimately, it is unwinding the role of GABA. It's making it harder for GABA to do its job. Is there a threshold with which the utilization of alcohol can become problematic? I know that there's really become a movement as of they're calling it sober curious, where it's becoming-- People are becoming more curious about not drinking alcohol. But in your clinical experience, when we're speaking specifically to alcohol and its effect on this GABA system, where is the fine line? Where is-- One glass of alcohol may not be problematic, but where is that fine line for you when people are trying to address sleep or trying to support this other side of their autonomic nervous system more proactively? 


Dr. Scott Sherr: Yeah. I have a colleague and friend that always says that when somebody asks him if he drinks alcohol, he says, “There's much better, there's many better drugs than alcohol. [Cynthia laughs] So why would you still be drinking alcohol?” And it really comes down to me when I talk to patients, it's like “Well, why are you drinking the alcohol?” and trying to understand what's the reason? Is it for sleep? That's just a bad idea. Is it to wind down after dinner? Let's talk about it. Let's talk about some other ways that you can use. I mean, do I think a glass of wine for most people a night is going to cause a problem? The answer is probably not, as long as it's not affecting your sleep.


[00:44:31] I do also know that-- There's been a number of studies that have come out recently that really is no safe amount of alcohol to drink. There's been associations with brain shrinkage, which we don't want shrinkage anywhere. Nobody likes the word shrinkage in general or moist. Nobody likes that word either, I don't know, but those are [Cythia laughs] bad words. My brother always hated that word and that’s the one that I never like to say except when we're trying to be funny. But when it comes down to it, also is that we don't know from an individual perspective what the safe threshold is for you versus for me. 


[00:45:04] In general, women are more sensitive to alcohol and the effects on the GABA system than men. So, for the same amount of alcohol that a woman's drinking versus a man, it's going to be a very different scenario. Now what your heritage is. If you're a Native American that's grown up and you are on a reservation, your capacity to tolerate alcohol is going to be much different than somebody that grew up in Ireland where the water wasn't safe to drink, so they drank beer instead. 


[00:45:35] And so back, 200 years ago, the beer was safer than the water. And so, you have to think about heritage. And I had a college roommate that could drink like a fish. The night before, he could pass out in an elevator, vomiting on himself, and then the next day he could run a marathon, like it was completely impressive. He had Scottish heritage.  


[00:45:57] And so, that's why I like to say that. I don't really think there's a safe level of alcohol per se. Do I think that having a nice glass of wine one night and like every evening is going to be bad for you? The answer is probably like if you could do it less than that that would be great. But I think that always the question for me is why? Why is alcohol needed? And it comes back to the beginning of our conversation, because when most people are going to say just, “I just need to relax.” It's very difficult for people to change their behaviors, to change their lifestyle. And it can seem impossible. If you have four kids and a job and things are just going 100 miles an hour, it's like what am I going to do? 


[00:46:38] And so, I see the role for supplements in this case like in helping to modulate that GABA receptor like we talked about, a little bit of kava, a little bit of CBD or a little bit of CBG at night. These are much more supportive to the GABA system and can have a very similar effect. You talked about social lubrication too. You talked about a lot of people use alcohol, as many of us did when were younger as well, as a social lubricant, I get it. There are safer options now. You can go--


[00:47:07] If you live in Los Angeles, if you live in the bigger cities, there's all these places you can go now where you can get the mocktail kinds of things, or you can get these functional beverages. I have a friend of mine that started a facility in LA that was kind of-- He was one of the first people that talked about, like I forget the name of it, but it was like a social wellness kind of thing. So, you bring people together and alcohol is not the focus. And that's a big shift for a lot of people. 


[00:47:31] I mean, for myself personally, I remember even being in medical school and you go out with your friends, you go to the bar and you have beer and whatever, that's just what you do. At some point I decided I didn't want to keep drinking. And that was-- It's not like if I had alcohol, it wouldn't be a deal, but I don't see the reason, but I really understand how it's difficult to get out of those patterns. But there are so many other ways to be able to-- We engage now in community without alcohol and I think that's so important for people to think about too. 


Dr: Lindsey Berkson: [00:48:55] Everyone's worried about breast cancer and iodine kills breast cancer cells, so just keep that in mind. 


Cynthia Thurlow: [00:49:03] 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 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: [00:50:02] You give great questions.


[laughter]


[00:50:04] 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, so 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, just one-- 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. 


[00:50:43] If you talk about functional medicine, all functional docs want to make sure your gut lining is functional. And 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 to tiny, 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. So, there's an opening and closing that's optimal right postprandially, which means right the heck after you swallow, you eat.


[00:51:29] So, we have little adhesive proteins, there's families of them. They're these polysyllabic names like junctional adhesive molecule and occludins and things. There's 44 types of occludins. 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 stays in Vegas-- What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas. What happens in the gut lumen, the inside of the gut should stay in the gut lumen. It's a really cool term, but it's accurate. You don't want stuff in the gut that shouldn't be debris that goes in the bloodstream-- going in the bloodstream. So, these adhesive proteins are critically important to gut health, biome health, etc. 


[00:52:23] And 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? 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 intracrinologically 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. 


[00:52:58] 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. And 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. But a loss of hormones means the loss of the capability of opening and closing in 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. 


[00:54:15] 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 another conversation we could go on and on and on.


[00:55:03] I have a book out I 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. 


[00:55:40] 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. So, people debate, should we give testosterone to older women? Yes, it will help prevent autoimmune disease because it helps them lick, lick, that secretory IgA. 


[00:56:28] We can measure secretory IgA now and know the licking capacity of the-- 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, 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? 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. Hormones can be taken all throughout life to help replenish the Internet system and keep your emails going. 


Cynthia Thurlow: [00:57:27] 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’d 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: [00:58:08] 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? 


[00:59:01] So, when I was writing Safe Hormones, Smart Women. So, I have 21 books out at the moment, and I number of them, though, we 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 and energetic and an emailing capability. 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, diethylstilbestrol. And the majority of those daughters that got first trimester exposures had breast cancer all between four the year 44 and 46. Just a huge epidemic of breast cancer and 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. 


[01:00:15] 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 Hormones, Smart Women. 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 match 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. 


[01:01:05] 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, those women 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, that's what we're looking at.


[01:01:42] 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. 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, so it's very-- 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. 


[01:02:19] 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 breast, 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. And a lot of these diseases are actually caused by progesterone resistance. And the way you overcome it is by giving more progesterone. 


[01:03:15] 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.


[01:03:34] And now the granddaughters, One-- several granddaughters have had ovarian cancer at 8-years-old. I mean it's it 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 liked 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’d like to see women at least at 5 ng/mL. And you should be-- 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-hour urines, I've done spot this, I've done salivary. At the moment, what we taught in Everything Hormones was serum and serum interpretation. 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 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. 


[01:05:07] 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. 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 6,000 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. 


[01:05:59] 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. 


[01:06:29] 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, 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. 


[01:07:03] So, progesterone should be robust and much more robust. We used to think the average dosing of progesterone was 20 to 50mg 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 2,500 mg. It's a much-- 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: [01:07:41] 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 I 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: [01:08:19] What a great question. So, my next book that I'm almost done with is Oxytocin--


Cynthia Thurlow: [01:08:22] Oh wow. 


Dr: Lindsey Berkson: [01:08:22]- I've been threatening to publish it soon, but I was [unintelligible 01:08:22] 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 [Clears throat] in 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, 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 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 friends with benefits or masturbation, but you make more of it when you're really with somebody you have emotionality with. 


[01:09:20] 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 man, woman. And then the woman gets attached because she makes more oxytocin. 


[01:09:38] 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 and every person can go in there and search all the peer review abstracts and some of them give you the whole articles for free. 


[01:10:10] 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, P-U-B-M-E-D.gov and put in progesterone and allergy and click search and 65 articles on progesterone-induced autoimmune dermatitis popup because progesterone-- And there's no other hormone that has that allergic profile and published peer-reviewed data that progesterone has. 


Cynthia Thurlow: [01:10:49] If you love this podcast episode, please leave a rating and review. Subscribe and tell a friend.


[01:11:03] Everyday Wellness Podcast is for informational purposes only and represents the opinions of me, Cynthia Thurlow, Board Certified Nurse Practitioner and my guest to the show. Nothing in this podcast should be construed as medical advice. By listening to this podcast there is no implied nurse practitioner-patient relationship or provider-patient relationship has been formed because each person is incredibly unique and each one of us are bio individuals. Please consult your licensed healthcare professional for any medical questions. 



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