Renegade Health Inner Circle Ageless Woman ’s Health ... · Ageless Woman’s Health Seminar with...

Ageless Woman’s Health Seminar with Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo D.C.

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Renegade Health Inner Circle Ageless Woman’s Health Telecourse - Call #2

Kevin: Welcome everyone. This is Kevin Gianni from RenegadeHealth.com. Today is our second night of the Ageless Woman’s Health Telecourse. Tonight what we’re going to be doing is we’re really diving into the nitty-gritty, the real heart of the information of the course today. What we’re going to be talking about is very specifically the foods and herbs that you can use to help heal yourself. We’re going to be talking about the thyroid and we’re going to be talking about the adrenals. We’re going to be talking about libido, all specifically today. We’re going to be answering some of your questions as well, some of the questions you asked last week, as well as this week. As we were just saying before, before I started the recording, we’re going to be answering your questions based on when we’re talking about the specific topic during the course. So if we didn’t answer your question last week chances are we’ll answer it either tonight and if not we’ll answer it on the last night, which is next Tuesday.

We hope that you are ready to go with a pen and a piece of paper available. If

you don’t, go grab one right now. I’ll tell everyone else where they can ask their questions. If you do have a question you can go www.renegadehealth.com/womanshealth/event2888.html . You can ask your questions and you can even ask for clarification there too. If you hear Dr. Rita Marie say something -- generally I’ll butt in if I hear something there needs to be a little bit more clarification about. But if you still don’t get it, go ahead and ask for clarification. If I see it come up I’ll make sure that we repeat it for you. So Dr. Rita Marie, welcome.

Rita Marie: Hey, I’m really glad to be here. Kevin: We’re glad that you’re here too. This is going to be really exciting. I’m really

excited about getting into the details today. I think that last week’s call was a really nice overview. Now everyone’s kind of chomping at the bit, ready to get into the real details of how to actually improve the function of some of these systems. So let’s get started. Let’s just jump right into it.

Rita Marie: I think last week I didn’t get a chance to explain a couple of hormones that are

not necessarily female hormones but I would love to have the opportunity to explain them because they tie in to a lot of the symptomatology that women tend to feel, in terms of weight gain and appetite and things along those lines, even PCOS, which is polycystic ovarian disease. So if you don’t mind me explaining a little bit about insulin and it’s friends, that would be great. That’ll make more sense later as we talk about some of the more specifics.

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Kevin: Great. Let’s do it. Rita Marie: All right. We talk about appetite. A lot of people will say, “I have uncontrolled

appetite, cravings and such.” A lot of that is hormonally driven, but it’s not necessarily the hormones that you think about. You think about estrogen, progesterone, thyroid, etc. There’s actually a set of hormones and one of them is insulin, which most of you have heard about and really relate more in terms of diabetes, it’s important in appetite regulation, and it’s sister/twin/cousin/opposite, is glucagon, which we’re not going to get into much detail on. Two that you probably haven’t heard of very much that play a key role in the whole appetite/fat burning mechanism are leptin and grelin. We’re just going to touch on those, just a little bit, just to make you aware of in terms of what you can do about them.

I’ll start with insulin. Basically the function of insulin is to get the sugar out of the

blood and into the cells. This is a very important function because when you eat foods and it gets broken down and you get an increase in your blood glucose, if that sugar doesn’t get to get into your cells, you don’t have any energy. So it’s really important that it be able to do that. The sugar can’t pass through the cell membranes on its own. It needs insulin to carry it in. Whatever excess sugar is left, after it stores as much as it can into the cells, gets stored as fat.

The point is, what happens over time is that the standard American diet is very

high in sugar and refined carbohydrates, which means that there’s big influxes of sugar getting into the blood, and insulin is called upon to do its job. You’re stimulating the pancreas to produce these high levels of insulin. The insulin levels get really high and then for a while there it quickly puts as much of the sugar into the blood but then there’s a time where the receptors that are on the cells get kind of tired of all that insulin. It’s kind of like a kid and a mom who’s nagging. “Pick up your toys, pick up your toys.” After a while the kid just shuts it out. It’s like the receptors turn off. Mom has to shout now in order to get the same response from the kid. Similar thing happens in the blood. The cells are sitting there and they’ve turned off because there’s been a lot of insulin over time so you need even more levels of insulin. But the insulin is not able to do its job and get the insulin into the blood. It says, “Well, I have all this sugar in the blood. If I leave it there, there’s all kinds of damage that can be done to the nerve cells and retinal cells, whatever.” So it says, “Okay, I’m going to do something else with this sugar and store it as fat.”

So two problems happen with that. One is, you get extra fat. Insulin really loves

to store that fat around the middle. Someone had asked the question, “I’ve got this extra belly fat and I exercise all the time. Why isn’t my belly fat going away?” Well, the belly fat is coming from insulin resistance. So exercise is not going to get rid of that. What’s going to get rid of that is going on a lower-glycemic diet,




reducing your need for the high levels of insulin and nourishing your cells so that they open up and allow the insulin in again. Does that make sense?

Kevin: Um-hmmm. Rita Marie: Okay. So the problem really stems from the diet and the fact that, number one,

the diet is really high in sugar and starches that get quickly turned into sugar, but number two, there’s a lot of nutrition that’s been taken out of that diet that’s high in sugar and refined carbohydrates. That’s the nutrients like the B vitamins that are needed to assist this process, minerals like chromium and niacin, another B vitamin that’s really important for this situation. They’re missing from the food. So you’re eating all this extra sugar, the sugars are going up in the blood and there’s nothing to help with crossing the barrier.

The fats are really important because the kind of fats that are in most processed

foods and heated foods, so heated fats, become oxidized and they damage those insulin receptors on the cells. What that does is create even more insulin resistance.

The solution to the problem is getting the junk out of the diet, getting all the

refined foods out of the diet and having a very high nutrient-dense diet with really good omega-3 fats and unheated raw fats in the diet. That will help to rebuild those membranes.

When insulin gets out of balance it can lead to hypoglycemia. When it’s

functioning properly, in that early state where you’re producing a lot of insulin and it’s doing its job and the receptors are still intact, well the insulin does such a good job that it leaves your blood sugar really low. Then the brain, which takes the sugar right out of the blood and uses it for fuel, gets like, “Ooo, there’s not enough sugar here. There’s not enough fuel here.” You get those low blood sugar symptoms - irritability, fogginess, inability to focus. That’s hypoglycemia. So anybody that’s ever had that, you know what that feels like. It doesn’t feel good. Over time hypoglycemia will turn into insulin resistance, which we just described in detail. If that’s not enough, if that gets to go further, that can often turn into type II diabetes. Type II diabetes is where your insulin receptors just won’t allow the sugar in at all and the blood sugar just stays high. The only way to get it down then is through medications, usually oral medications but some people with type II diabetes let it go so far that they need to be put on insulin.

So it’s not a pretty picture, this whole process. I bring this up in a women’s

health thing because number one, fat around the belly is a common problem. As we get closer and closer to menopause it becomes even more of a problem because of some of the other inherent hormone imbalances.




Number two, insulin resistance, sometimes called syndrome X or metabolic syndrome, is associated with polycystic ovarian syndrome, PCOS. That’s a situation, if you have it, you know. Basically your ovaries are producing lots of these little follicles, these little cysts, every month but it doesn’t usually release an egg. So one of the problems with PCOS is infertility. Also it’s associated with an imbalance between estrogen and progesterone and testosterone, with testosterone dominating, which means that not only are you not able to get pregnant but you can be developing facial hair, coarse skin and other male-type symptoms. So it’s a really serious situation. It’s very much linked with insulin resistance. We’ll talk a little bit more about that condition when we talk about some of the specific symptoms related to females.

In your charts I had a very interesting picture, if you have those charts from last

week, about insulin. It talks about metabolic syndrome, central obesity. There’s this picture of this apple across this person’s middle. That’s basically the kind of fat pattern that it leads to. It also can lead to problems like blood pressure problems, triglycerides, low HDL. It’s related to cardiovascular system and all. So it’s not just a cosmetic thing. It’s not just, “I don’t like this fat around the middle.” It’s actually pretty serious and dangerous because it can affect your heart.

Kevin: I have a question about the hypoglycemia. If you’re experiencing that on a

regular basis, what do you need to do in order to not have it progress into something that is say a type II diabetes?

Rita Marie: Good question. First of all, cleaning up the diet, getting the sugars out. That’s not

often enough. If there’s been damage to the receptors and you don’t have enough nutrition, you’ve got to boost that nutrition. Eating lots of whole, fresh foods, lots of green foods, omega-3 fats such as hemp seeds and pumpkin seeds, chia seeds, flax seeds, algae, those sorts of things can help with improving the availability. But what you have to do is prevent your body from producing these insulin spikes.

What will typically happen with a person who has developed this situation is

even a small amount at this point, they’re so sensitive, sometimes even eating a banana, can shoot the insulin levels up. So for a while there it’s usually recommended that you eat more of the low-glycemic fruits - green apples and grapefruits and berries - to allow that situation to go down so you’re not producing so much sugar and adding all those extra nutrients. You can add things like chromium. A good B complex is a really good thing because usually this whole process is related to adrenal fatigue and that really zonks your B vitamins. So B vitamins, chromium, zinc, magnesium, are important. Supplements if you’re into taking supplements, and if you’re not, it’s just identifying what those foods are that have high levels of those things. I’ll repeat those - B vitamins,




magnesium, chromium and zinc are the most important. Vitamin C can be pretty important as well but that’s easier to get if you’re eating a whole foods diet.

Kevin: Great. In terms of B vitamins, whole food sources, do you do bee products, or

no? Rita Marie: You mean like bee pollen? Kevin: Yeah. I do. I’m not that strict about things. Bee pollen is a good source of B

vitamins, nutritional yeast. There are some companies make it that’s not so good but there are some companies that make a real good quality nutritional yeast. Then there’s some B vitamins. There’s a liquid B that’s a really good one that I’ve seen really good results. They call it a living source B vitamin. It’s taken from yeast. It’s not truly a living source but it’s much more whole and alive than a synthetic B vitamin, which I don’t necessarily recommend. Those are good things to do.

Kevin: Do you want to move into the thyroid foods and herbs or do you want to…? Rita Marie: Let me say one more thing about leptin and grelin. Leptin is a really important

thing for controlling your appetite. The thing about leptin is when you eat a high-fat diet or you store body fat and then release body fat, it creates these imbalances. Leptin is a hormone that’s produced in response to the level of fat in the bloodstream and it stimulates appetite. So if your levels of leptin go up, it stimulates satiation. If your levels of leptin drop, you get hungry. What happens, again, similar to insulin, is we develop a leptin resistance. So you think that people who are overweight, if that mechanism was working properly, they’d be fine. They wouldn’t get overweight because it wouldn’t allow them to get overweight. But it’s that junk food diet, the lack of nutrients, the excessive, that cause that whole system to go out of whack.

So it’s really important to be looking at not just what you eat but the timing of

what you eat. This is why I wanted to bring this up. If you’re eating your foods late in the day, it’s going to cause the foods to be stored as fat and it’s going to affect the whole leptin/insulin hormone balance. So it’s really important, if you’ve got that extra belly fat -- and this is contrary to what a lot of people are taught -- is that you need to eat very frequently. If you’re looking to lose some of that extra fat and that extra weight, it’s actually better to wait a good five or six hours between eating, four if you can’t wait that long. That allows the levels of everything to settle down in between and then have you go into fat-burning mode. If you’re eating constantly then you’re never really going into fat-burning mode, you’re always able to take it from the bloodstream.

Again, if you’ve got these blood sugar problems, if you’ve got hypoglycemia,




you’re going to have to work at getting there. You’re going to have to gradually increase the space between the meals. As you increase your nutrition you’re going to be able to go longer and longer without. Realistically, a person should be able to go 8, 10, 12 hours, a whole day, without eating and not fall on the floor and faint.

So you want to talk a little bit about thyroid? Kevin: Let’s do it. Rita Marie: All right. We talked about assessment last, didn’t we? We talked about some of

the blood and the saliva tests. Kevin: Um-hmmm. Rita Marie: Okay, good. There’s lots of foods that can imbalance the hormones. Thyroid in

particular is sensitive to gluten. If we talked about this last time, stop me and we’ll move on. Gluten is a protein that’s found in wheat and rye and kamut and spelt and a little bit in oats and barley. It affects the level of inflammation in the body. It’s very common to have antibodies produced for it. A lot of the foods that we eat were foods that have been bred, so to speak, or hybridized, to have high levels of gluten because it gives bread that kind of nice, light, doughy, fun sensation and texture. When we’ve done that we’ve created a problem. There’s actually genetically, I would guess about 30 percent of the population is sensitive to gluten. That can affect your hormone levels by affecting the level of inflammation and also creating autoimmune problems. So your body starts attacking other tissues, like it attacks the thyroid. It can attack the pancreas, it can attack the skin. There’s lots of places where your system can be attacked in an autoimmune condition.

I think we talked a little bit last time about thyroid and iodine deficiency. A

question came up in terms of sea vegetables. I mentioned some sources of sea vegetables. It’s really important that we include these sea vegetables in our diet. The other question that came up, which I’ll address now, is about the brassicas, the broccoli and cauliflower and kale and all those foods, getting a lot of popularity for having thyroid-inhibiting, they’re considered goitrogens.

I’ve done really extensive research in that area. The studies are kind of weak, not

to say that some people aren’t affected by it. There are definitely goitrogens in those vegetables. But the goitrogen is actually a molecule called isobiocyanade [?], which is actually the same molecule that protects us from cancer. So it’s like a double-edged sword. Do we avoid these foods because we think they’re going to cause a problem with our thyroid? But if we do they’re one of the most potent cancer-protective foods there are.




When I looked at the studies, the studies were done in rats and they isolated this

isobiocyanade and they fed it back to the rats. Well, the rats had problems with their thyroid as a result. But those same rats, when they fed them a good source of iodine, usually it was some sea vegetables like ground-up kelp, it reversed the goiter. So what that told them was that the effect that these goitrogens were having was on the iodine efficiency of the thyroid.

So what I’ve come up with is, if you’re going to eat the brassica family, and

you’re going to do it raw, like in a smoothie or chopped up in a salad, have some sea vegetables with it. What I’ll do is if I’m making a salad and I’ve got some kale or broccoli or whatever, I’ll sprinkle some kelp powder on it. If I’m making a smoothie, the same thing. If I put any of the brassicas in a smoothie or soup, I put some ground-up sea vegetables in there. It’s really important to make sure that you keep that balance. I think that in some cases there are people who may have to avoid the brassicas completely for their thyroid, but I think in most cases not. It’s such a great source of nutrition that I really hate to see people get rid of that.

We talked about B vitamins in relationship to the insulin resistance. The B

vitamins are also important for the thyroid. So it’s really important that you have your levels of B vitamins up there by eating whole foods that contain them intact, lots of greens. If you are doing grains, which I don’t recommend if you’ve got the insulin resistance-type figure, then make sure that they’re whole grains and they have everything in tact. Higher protein grains like quinoa, tend to be less problematic to people with polycystic ovary and insulin resistance than do the ones that have less. So brown rice might not be as good as quinoa, wheat is less good than that.

Kevin: What about legumes in that same case? Rita Marie: Soybeans also contain some of those anti-- they actually have them in higher

levels than the brassica vegetables. Soybeans are another one of these double-edged swords, legumes in general. Legumes tend to be harder to digest. A lot of people get gas and bloating from them because they’ve got a certain combination of carbohydrate and protein in them and they also have a specific carbohydrate that tends to not break down and that’s what causes the gas. But things like lentils, for example, are really good legumes because they’re much more alkaline-forming. We’ll talk a little bit about osteoporosis in a bit and we’ll talk about the distinction from an alkaline-forming diet and an acid-forming diet. Lentils tend to be the one legume that’s a little bit more alkaline than the others.

Soybeans are touted for their phytoestrogens and they do have phytoestrogen

properties, but also they’re criticized for their estrogen properties as well. So it’s




really important that we don’t overdo something. “I’m going through menopause, I need to do these soybeans because it has these really good phytoestrogens.” They can throw you completely out of balance as well. Remember, hormones are all about balance. It’s not like the good guys and the bad guys and having a lot of one and not enough of the other, it’s all about balance.

Kevin: I’ve heard information about flax having some of the same estrogen properties.

Is that something to be concerned about as well? Rita Marie: Flax does. It doesn’t have quite as much as soybeans. Some people might be

sensitive to that but also some people get benefits, as a result of eating flax. The flax does have good omega-3 fatty acid. Anything in excess. So if you’re eating two or three tablespoons of flax seed every day, it’s probably great for you. It’s great for your digestion, for your skin, from all the omega-3s, good for your immune system. If you’re thinking flax is the be-all and the end-all and you’re putting it into everything and you’re eating packages and packages of flax crackers every day, then probably not. It’s all about balance.

So how can you protect your hormones? People ask me that all the time. I hate

to sound like a broken record but I’m going to sound like a broken record. It’s interesting that some of the most basic things that we go, “Oh, yeah, I forgot about that.” Stress. Stress is one of the biggies related to hormone imbalance. We talked about that last week in terms of how the adrenals respond to stress and how those levels of cortisol that get elevated as a result of that create havoc in the whole hormonal system. So those levels of elevated cortisol can affect the insulin and can affect insulin resistance. It can affect the thyroid. It can affect your estrogen and progesterone. So managing your stress is huge. Some people just go, “Give me something real to do. Give me an herb to take. Give me a supplement to take. Give me something to do.” But it’s so important.

One of my favorite methods of managing stress that completely transformed my

life and my approach, is from the Institute of Heartmath. You can go to heartmath.com or heartmath.org and read about their approach. They have a good little book, very easy to read, that I recommend anybody get. It’s called “Transforming Stress.” It’s filled with stuff that you can do, without having to get a massage every day, without having to spend an hour or two in meditation or yoga. Yes, those things are very beneficial but face it, we don’t always have the time. So it gives you little things you can do in short clips of time to manage your stress. So it’s critical.

Fresh air and sunshine is major in handling your hormones, your thyroid,

estrogen, progesterone, all of them. You’ve got vitamin D that gets produced in your skin as a result of the sunshine. The vitamin D effect is widespread, not only




on bone health but on the effect of the hormones. It’s also cancer preventative too.

Another thing that’s important is really exposing yourself only to pure water. A

lot of people will drink purified water or get spring water to drink, but they’re not really concerned about what they’re putting on their body when they take a shower. This is a mistake. The municipal water supplies are very heavily chlorinated to kill whatever junk is in there - bacteria and molds and all that kind of stuff. So they’re heavily chlorinated. If you ever just turn on your shower and walk in there, sometimes it smells like you’ve walked into an indoor swimming pool there’s so much chlorine in there. The thing that people don’t realize is that you’re getting more chlorine in your system by inhaling the fumes from the shower than you are from drinking that same amount of water. Why? Because it’s vapor and it goes right in through your lungs. It vaporizes off. We know that it vaporizes off because that’s how distilled water works. The water is boiled off and those volatile chemicals, those metals that we don’t want in there anymore, get boiled away, they get steamed off. So that’s an important thing. Getting shower filters or ozonating, just really being careful because as we talked about last week with the thyroid, the chlorine and the bromine and the iodine are all in the same family, the family of halogens. They disrupt. Levels of chlorine will disrupt the effectiveness of the iodine and have a negative effect on your thyroid.

Exercise is really important for all of these different things. It keeps things

circulating. It keeps levels of oxygen high in your bloodstream. Hydration. People go, “How much water should I drink?” There’s the eight glasses a day thing, but if you weigh 300 pounds and another person weighs 100 pounds, do you really think they both need the same amount of water? That’s kind of silly.

Kevin: I love that. Rita Marie: Holy cow. There’s miles more blood vessels and liquid needed in that body. So I

usually tell people about half your body weight in fluid ounces of water a day. When people are overweight and weigh 300 pounds they’re going, “Oh my God, how can I drink that much water?” I don’t care how you get it in you but you need to get it in you. When you’re dehydrated your body will hold on to toxins. When you hold on to toxins you hold on to fat to cushion those toxins. So you need to be dumping all those toxins and you need to be properly hydrated to do that. And of course it needs to be pure. We’re a sophisticated audience, don’t need to go into the whole negative effects of tap water.

We talked about sea vegetables, fresh fruits and vegetables, green leafy

vegetables, another thing that people don’t see the value in is the wild stuff that’s growing. A lot of people complain about how much it costs them to eat a




green diet, to go into the store and buy all these organic, green leafy vegetables. There’s a whole bunch of these things out in nature. You can spend about 10 or 20 bucks to get a good book and identify or you can go online and identify the stuff in your area. The main thing is that you identify all the poisonous plants in your area. There’s not all that many. If you can start to go out there, there’s dandelions growing wild. Those are not weeds. Those are good food. They’re amazing food. There’s clover out there. Persalane, lamb’s quarters, plantain. There’s all kinds of wonderful, edible stuff. The beauty of that is that they haven’t been cultivated so they’re basically heirloom stuff, the stuff that you pay a whole lot of money for in the store, the stuff that hasn’t been tampered with. And they have much higher levels of nutrition, including fatty acids. One of the few sources of fatty acids in the plant kingdom, of any significance, is in some of the wild edibles.

Hormone inhibitors are found all over the place. You really want to be careful

about the things like the plastics in bottles. There’s been lots of articles written, “Don’t microwave your food in plastic, put it into glass.” I don’t think you should microwave your food at all, because it disrupts the chemicals in there. But if you’re going to, make sure it’s in glass. When you heat it up and change the molecular structure, a lot of those chemicals, those plastics that are in there, are getting out into your food and they’re actually hormone inhibitors.

We actually have hormone inhibitors in dental fillings. So it’s all around us.

People say to me, “What’s a good material for your teeth?” It’s like, take care of your teeth so you don’t need a good material because there aren’t any. There’s problems with all of them.

The last thing I want to talk about is things that protect all of your hormones and

then we’ll get into the specifics. Omega-3 fats, we’re going to talk about that over and over, avoiding heating fats. People ask me all the time, “It’s really hard to keep up on a 100 percent raw diet. Do I have to do that to be healthy?” No, it doesn’t have to be 100 percent raw, but you know what? Don’t eat any heated fats. When you heat the fats you oxidize them, you create free radicals which damage your system and damage your mitochondria, which is your energy-production source in your cells. So avoid heated fats. Don’t ever heat fats.

You want to optimize omega-3s because they’re harder to find. We have so

many omega-6 type fats. Our sunflower seeds and walnuts and all the oils that are used in processing all have high levels of omega-6. When we get out of balance between omega-6 and omega-3 we get inflammation, we get hormone disruption, we get spasm, we get all kinds of things like prostaglandins are produced that harm our systems and create imbalance in hormones.

Would you like to talk a little bit about some of the conditions that I hear women




complain about that they’d like help with? Kevin: Yes, let’s do that. I do want to ask, under thyroid, the certain vitamin and mineral

deficiencies that you have in the outline here, did we talk specifically on those? I don’t think we did.

Rita Marie: I thought we did last week, but we can go through those again. Kevin: Specifically the vitamin D3 in terms of source. I don’t know if we went through

that. Rita Marie: I don’t think we did go through that. We talked about iodine, selenium --

selenium we didn’t talk about, but that’s another one -- vitamin A. D3 is super important for the thyroid. If you don’t get out in the sunshine during the peak hours of the day, like between 10 and 3, you’re probably not making enough vitamin D3. It’s a really good idea to get your levels checked. Not only does it disrupt hormones but it’s been found to be a precursor to cancer, low levels of vitamin D.

So what are the sources? Well, the sunshine is obviously the best source. I was

just listening to David Wolfe talk about this and he said that these certain mushrooms that are out in the sun and they pick up the vitamin D, they contain them and you can eat them. That might be true. I don’t know. That could be another source. But really food sources of vitamin D don’t exist. Vitamin D is really not a vitamin. It’s really a hormone, or a pro-hormone. It’s really something that’s created. So the foods that people generally turn to for vitamin D that have natural vitamin D, the only one that I know about is cod liver oil. That has a high level of vitamin D naturally. Milk. It’s fortified. It’s just synthetic vitamin D that’s put in there. People don’t realize. They say, “I don’t want to take a supplement. I’m going to get it from the food so I’m going to drink vitamin D milk.” Well, where do you think the milk got it from? It’s a supplement.

D3 is generally naturally occurring in mammalian systems. So D3 is the one that

you want to take. Unfortunately it comes from animal products. So if you’re a really staunch vegan for ethical reasons, you don’t want to take vitamin D3 which comes from lanolin, which is the oil that is produced by usually sheep or lamb. It’s not a process that needs to kill the animal, but there can be some cruelty associated with shaving the animal to take off the lanolin. So you need to make a decision about that.

D2 is the synthetic form of vitamin D. I was doing some research back about a

month ago and there was this one researcher who was out to show that the D2 wasn’t that much different from the D3 in terms of effectiveness. He had some pretty convincing evidence, in terms of doing testing and having people take it




and checking levels. The D3 had a little bit of an edge over the D2, but not as much as I was expecting. This was one researcher. Not sure where that goes.

The best way to do it is to get your level tested and then supplement with the

vitamin D and get your levels tested again in three to six months. If it’s restored to normal, then whatever it is you’re taking is working.

Kevin: Great. Rita Marie: We get all hung up about this kind of stuff. It’s pretty simple. If you’re deficient

in vitamin D and you’re not getting enough sunshine, you take a vitamin D supplement. Don’t have some attitude that says supplements are inherently bad, because that’s not serving you.

Kevin: And more importantly, get tested to see so you don’t have to worry about it

anymore. Rita Marie: Then you know. “I’ve been guessing for three years.” Great. Somebody I know

did that and she came back with a level of 20. That’s reasonably low and you need to supplement now. Levels below 50, you’re much more subject to the female cancers. You’re much more subject to colon cancer if it’s below 40, but it really needs to get to be about 50 to protect you from breast cancer and uterine cancer. Women need higher levels of vitamin D than men do.

Kevin: Real quick, for clarification, Harmony asks, “How much sea vegetables do you

need to balance the brassicas?” Rita Marie: That’s great. In general what I recommend people do is take between an ounce

and two ounces a week. So it’s not a lot. If I’m making a smoothie and I’ve got a whole head of kale, which is typically what I would put in a smoothie, I’d put a teaspoon or two of powdered kelp in there. It’s not a tremendous amount. They’re so dense in iodine that it balances out pretty easily.

Kevin: Great. Let’s move on. Rita Marie: So some of the other things, B6 and B12 are important for thyroid and B6 is

important for neurotransmitters. So some of the mood things that happen when we get into menopause or PMS, can be related to neurotransmitter balances, it just reiterates the importance of those B vitamins. B12 is real important for thyroid function. So if you’ve been vegan for a long time and you don’t take a vitamin B12 supplement, the same thing. Either start taking one or get yourself tested. And not with the blood test. The blood test for vitamin B12 is very coarse. It’s very rough. You can have what’s considered a normal level of B12 in your blood, but it’s not enough. So the best way to get vitamin B12 tested is with




urinary methylmalonic acid or MMA. You can go to vitaminB12.com and read all about that. They have a simple kit that you can order and they’ll send it to you. You pee in a little flask and you send it off to them and they’ll tell you how much MMA is in your urine.

It’s important to measure this because when we don’t have enough vitamin B12

we get a build up of this MMA and MMA is a neurotoxin that affects the nervous system. A lot of the symptoms related to B12 deficiency and some of them that can be irreversible…if you get damage to your nervous system and get the peripheral hands and feet numbness tingling that doesn’t go away, you may have permanent damage. You don’t want to get to that point. So if your MMA is at all elevated you want to make sure that you’re taking a B12 supplement. B12 is easy to get your levels up, as long as you get methylcobalamine. Mainly because that’s already in the form your body uses and about 30 percent of the population has a genetic variation called a methylation defect, which means they cannot put the methyl group on, which is just a chemical group, they cannot put it on there, which means that your body can’t use it. Those kind of people have really poor detox. If you’re the kind of person that is super-chemically sensitive and everything bothers you, you’re probably a person who has this methylation defect, people that are poor detoxifiers, kids that have autism. If you test kids with autism, most of them have methylation defect. That’s why they are autistic, because they can’t detoxify their environment. They’re much more sensitive to the mercury in the vaccines and the chemicals in their air and water and food. So that’s just an aside.

Kevin: You said 30 percent? Rita Marie: Yeah. Maybe 35 percent. There’s another genetic defect, as long as we’re talking

about that, or variation, that affects, I was reading close to 50 percent of the population. It has to do with glutathione. So if you have both of those, you’re in trouble when it comes to detoxifying your environment, you’re one of those super-chemically sensitive people. We all know people like that.

The other thing that’s important for the thyroid as well as some of the others,

are zinc and iron. Again, those are really, really abundant in your greens, in your sea vegetables and your green leafies and your wild plants. Zinc is important for something like 90 different enzymes, it’s a co-factor for 90 different enzymes, including the immune system, the hormone system, the skin, the digestive function, digestive enzymes. Sometimes I do find it important for people to supplement with these things. Even though you go to a great diet that has huge amounts of this stuff, the length of time that it can take to repair and replenish, is putting you into more of a vicious cycle. Say for example you need zinc to be able to digest your food well, to create the digestive enzymes and the hydrochloric acid in your stomach. If you don’t have zinc then you don’t have




enough of those things and you can’t absorb your food and extract the zinc out of the food. So a zinc deficiency can cause an inability to absorb zinc from your diet. If you take a liquid zinc supplement for a month and take it on an empty stomach so it just goes right in and gets absorbed under the tongue and in your stomach, then you can jumpstart that whole mechanism and see some major changes.

We can have our theories about everything from nature is good and the

synthetic is bad, but there are times when you really need to do some stuff to jumpstart your system.

Kevin: What do you think is a good protocol for testing for stuff like this? Should we be

testing every six months, every year, every twos? Rita Marie: I think it varies depending on your situation and your health. If you’re coming off

of a really poor diet, which I know I was when I first started doing all this, then you’re much more likely to have a lot of imbalances and it’s a good idea to just keep checking to make sure. So every six months would probably be good, initially, to make sure that what you’re doing is actually correcting the problem. Then once you get to the point where things are correcting themselves and you’re supporting yourself with a good diet, with the sunshine, with the good water, with good thoughts, with low stress, all the ideal things that we ought to be doing, then it’s less important to be checking it on a regular basis. But it’s still not a bad idea to just get checked. Once you get maintained, every couple of years at least to check out and make sure that you haven’t gone off track.

Kevin: Great. Rita Marie: So, we talked about actions you can take to protect your hormones. Did we talk

about specific adrenal nutrients? I’m not sure we talked about that last time. The adrenals, vitamin C is super important for the adrenals. You don’t have to take a synthetic vitamin C to support your adrenals. A lot of the dense, super food type sources, certainly all fruits and vegetables are high in vitamin C. If you’re looking for a therapeutic effect you can do things like armwa [?], camu camu berries or acai berry. There’s one other berry, rose hips. Things like that. Those are natural sources that are very high in vitamin C. So that’s important for your adrenals.

Zinc is another one that’s really important for your adrenals. And the B vitamins

are super important for your adrenals. The fatty acids, across the board, if your fatty acids are out of balance your whole hormonal system is going to be out of balance. So we can repeat that for every single one.

The thing about this is, there’s some unique stuff like iodine for the thyroid, but

most of these are going to be supported by similar…like insulin, chromium is real




important, but mostly the zinc, the vitamin C, the B vitamins and the fatty acids, you’re going to see that across the board for just about all the hormones and balancing.

There are herbs and things that have high levels, like we mentioned all those

berries with vitamin C. Kevin: We didn’t talk about the herbs for the adrenals. Rita Marie: We didn’t. Okay. One very important one is licorice root. Licorice root is a

phenomenal adaptive and it helps to extend the half-life of cortisol. So it’s really good when you’re in the state of adrenal depletion, or adrenal fatigue. One caution I would make with licorice root is that you do need to be careful because if you take too much of it it can cause fluid retention, which can increase your blood pressure. The standard adrenal fatigued person has low blood pressure, really low blood pressure. In fact, so low that when you stand up quickly, or even sometimes just stand up at all, you get dizzy. That’s a sign of low adrenals. So anybody out there experiencing that as a symptom, it suggests that your adrenals are really exhausted. Licorice would be real good. If you’re doing licorice I would monitor your blood pressure. Just every once a month take your blood pressure or have somebody do it or go to the grocery store and stick your arm in the cuff.

Another one that’s super great is ashwagandha. I like ashwagandha because not

only does it support the adrenals but it also helps with thyroid. In fact, ashwagandha is contraindicated in people who have hyperthyroid. So if you have adrenal problems but your thyroid is on the high side, meaning your palms are sweaty and your heart races and you’re real thin and you’re hungry all the time, then I would stay away from ashwagandha. But most people that have low adrenals also have low thyroid. So that combination of licorice and ashwagandha are wonderful.

Ginseng is another one that’s real good. Ginseng is a little more stimulating so

some people just don’t do well with it. But again, it is an adaptogen and it can go either way. So you can play around with that one and see if that works for you.

Schizandra berry is another one that’s really good for adrenal support. What’s

another one? Rhodiola is another one that’s really good. Rhodiola tends to be real good for people who are adrenally fatigued but also they’ve got that mental component, that mental fog kind of thing, can’t concentrate, can’t focus. Rhodiola can tend to be good for that. There’s a whole bunch of others. I have a whole book called “Adaptogen - Herbs for Strength, Stamina and Stress Relief.” The book is 300 pages long. The thing about all these herbs, the ones I’ve mentioned are the ones that you usually can’t go wrong with, they’re very




neutral. But there’s all sorts of specific stimulating adaptogen and then adaptogen for people who have slow neurotransmitters. There’s all kinds of ways that you pick herbs and you pick them for balance. The ones I mentioned are good ones that you can just get in tincture or tea format and can be really helpful. Did I miss any?

Oh, holy basil, that’s the other one. Holy basil is a really good one. Kevin: Let me ask you this. Adaptogens are really interesting and some people’s bodies

react differently. For instance, if someone takes Rhodiola it might really make them kind of almost jittery and some people can take it and it can be the most calming, peaceful thing that they’ve done. What’s happening? Do you have any idea?

Rita Marie: That’s a great question. My herbal teacher was very much into not only the

science of the herbs but also the spirit of the herb. He said it’s basically the herb doing its job. It’s the herb going in your body and sensing what’s needed and then doing what’s needed. I cannot explain that from a scientific, chemical way. It’s never been explained to me in any way that makes sense. I don’t think anybody really tries to. It’s kind of like the energy of the plant acts upon the energy in your body and it does what’s needed.

I’ll give you one example. There was an herbalist who worked a lot with women

in childbirth. She had this woman who was in this really hard labor. It was going on and on. She was wanting to do something to help her and wasn’t sure, “Do I give her something to sedate her so she can rest and get back up and have the strength to finish this labor? Or do I give her something to wham, give her the strength to push through so she gets this baby out and then she can rest?” She decided to give her a type of ginseng with the idea that it was an adaptogen. It was going to figure out what she needed and do it much better than this woman and her intellect could figure out. She did and the woman fell asleep. She rested for two or three hours, woke up, delivered the baby in ten minutes. You hear stories like that all the time about the herbs.

Kevin: That’s a great story. Rita Marie: I love that story. One other one I didn’t mention was also astragalus. That’s

another one you really can’t go wrong with. It’s very mild and helps to support the immune system. It just helps to support everything that’s been really messed up by the levels of stress that people have had for a while.

From the thyroid standpoint, there are a couple of herbs that you would want to

watch out for, if you have hypothyroid, because they’re really good for treating. One of them is lemon balm. Lemon balm is a really good nervene, which means




it can calm you down. It’s great to take at bedtime. It is kind of adaptogen. If you’ve got low thyroid you just have to be careful you don’t take to much of that. High level doses are used to treat people with hyperthyroid.

Anything else before we move into some of the specific female conditions? How

are we doing on time? Kevin: We’re at 6:55 so we’re doing pretty good. Rita Marie: So I’m thinking maybe we can do all the stuff that’s not menopause and then

we’ll save menopause for next week and really just devote as much time as we need to with that. That way we don’t have to rush through menopause.

Kevin: Cool. Rita Marie: Okay. Maybe we’ll just touch on it a little bit. Kevin: [Laughs] Heaven forbid we rush through menopause. Rita Marie: No, no, no. We can’t rush through menopause. Actually, we want to rush

through menopause. Kevin: I know. Rita Marie: Menopause can last between three and ten years for some people. It’s a cruel

joke. Kevin: What should be the time that it lasts? Rita Marie: I can only go from personal experience. As far as the hormones going out of

balance, the first sign of menopause is you have periods that get irregular. Suddenly instead of being 28 days like clockwork, you’re 21 days and then you’re 30 days and then you’re 40 days and then you’re 21 days again. Then maybe you miss a cycle. Maybe the periods get lighter than usual or they get heavier. There’s some sort of change in there. That’s the fluctuation. That can go for anywhere from one to three years. I think beyond three years is like, come on, let’s get with the program. It’s just going on too long. But some people it will last for ten years, the symptoms of menopause.

In terms of other stuff though, some of these questions came up and I thought

we’d address them before we hit menopause. PMS. The reason it’s really important to discuss this before we discuss menopause is that women who tend to have really bad PMS are probably going to have pretty bad menopause. The hormone imbalance is already there and it’s manifesting on a monthly basis. So if




you’re in your 20s or 30s or early 40s and haven’t started menopause yet, now is the time to do these things we’re talking about, to balance your hormones. Now is the time. If you have bad PMS and your hormones are a mess now, you are setting yourself up for a miserable time with menopause.

I had a miserable time with my menstrual cycles in my teens and my early 20s. It

literally laid me on my back for three days and the headaches and the irritability and everything. After changing my diet and really looking at the whole picture, the whole mental/emotional/movement, etc. picture, the periods got better and better to the point where it just wasn’t an issue anymore. Menopause for me was very easy. It was a matter of periods going away and that was it. Getting irregular and then going away.

There’s several different types of PMS and you don’t necessarily have to know

what they all are. They name them by letters. A type is the one that has anxiety. Lots of anxiety and irritability and crankiness and all that, mood swings. That’s related to excess estrogen or a deficiency of progesterone or both. Here’s what I’d like to clarify. There’s a lot of estrogen in our environment. We talked before about the plastics. There are what’s called xenoestrogens, which means poisonous estrogens. They look enough like estrogen that they can bind to the estrogen receptors but they don’t act like estrogen. So they keep the real estrogen from binding to those receptors while they wreak havoc in your hormone system.

When we have a lot of these estrogens in our system from exogenous sources,

and also we’ve got the estrogens from meat - if you eat meat that’s been commercially-raised, not the organic free-range stuff, you’re going to get high levels of estrogen in your meat. If you eat meat at all, you’re going to get estrogen in there. You’re going to have hormones in there because it’s an animal and it has hormones and you’re eating it. So it’s not going to have the extra-high levels of the ones that have been fortified with extra estrogens. We end up with this large amount of estrogen which creates a perceived progesterone deficiency. So we may have perfectly normal levels of progesterone, but the ratio between estrogen and progesterone are completely off. If you remember we talked last time about the cycle, how during the mid-cycle the estrogen peaks and then as the estrogen starts to go down the progesterone comes back up. So if we have high levels of estrogen the difference between the progesterone and estrogen is not great enough to trigger some of the normal menses. So we end up with either excess flow, not enough flow, lots of cramping, irritability, etc.

Another type of PMS is the H type, which is hyper-hydration and that’s signified

by lots of bloating. That often times is related to the kidneys or the adrenals because you’re producing too much of the aldosterone or some of the other hormones.




Then there’s the carb-craving. That’s really imbalances in insulin that cause that,

the carb-craving kind of PMS. Like, “Oh my God, I can’t get enough sugar and bread.”

And then the most rare type of PMS is the one that’s the D type, which is

depression. The reason it’s rare is that it’s caused by excess progesterone and very few people have excess progesterone.

So understanding the balance and the hormones. It’s important to understand

that the symptoms generally happen right before your menses start, but it’s right about mid-cycle that you really need to look at intervening and being super, extra careful about what you’re eating and how much you’re exercising and what your stress levels are. The early part of the cycle the hormones are at their low and at mid-cycle when the estrogen peaks is a problem.

I’ve worked with people who have had just horrible depression and anxiety,

more anxiety than depression, during the second half of their cycles. Their doctors were threatening Prozac. What we found was that the imbalances between the estrogen and progesterone. We did testing, some hormone testing with saliva. That brings up, “How do you test this stuff? How do you know if you have high estrogen or low progesterone?” You can guess by the symptoms or you could have testing done.

If you don’t have any serious problems in this area, it’s fine to kind of guess and

play and work with your nutrition and herbs and stuff. If you see serious stuff going on in this area and you’re getting close to menopause, it’s a good idea to get it straightened out. Do some testing. There’s some salivary hormone testing that you can do where they check your saliva at various points during your cycle. You may take your first sample at day two and then you take another sample at day ten and then another one at day twelve. You take them a lot more close together during that mid-cycle so we see what’s going on. Then towards the end of the cycle it gets spread out again. Then we can see what’s the level of progesterone, what’s the level of estrogen, look at the higher-level hormones that are put out by the pituitary like lutenizing and FSH. Based on how those things are laying out, you can determine a plan of attack for helping to balance that stuff.

Some people will approach it with things like progesterone creams, if the

progesterone is low. That’s one option. People get great results with that sometimes. There’s a lot of ways to approach it. You can approach it from a nutritional standpoint, you can approach it from an herbal standpoint or you can approach it from the bioidentical hormone type of approach.




One of the key things though that’s going on when you have PMS is that there’s imbalances in your prostaglandins. Prostaglandins are these chemicals that get created from the fats that you eat. There’s different classes - z1, z2, z3, etc. You don’t need to know the details about that but just knowing that the prostaglandins get out of balance, which creates havoc in the hormones, goes back again to the importance of getting off of the bad fats, getting off of all the heated fats, the trans fats, and make sure you’ve got plenty of good omega-3 fatty acids.

This brings up another key point in testing. I tend to run this kind of a test quite a

bit with people. It’s a fatty-acid profile. You can get the long fatty-acid profile or you can get the short fatty-acid profile. You usually start with the short fatty-acid profile because it’s a much less expensive approach and usually we can get enough information. So if somebody has a lot of persistent problems and they’re not responding to some of the therapies, then we get more detail. The fatty-acid profile will tell you what your levels are of your omega-3 fats, those fats that are required to be in your diet that your body can’t make, the essential fats - the linoleic acid and alphalinolenic acid. It will also tell you what the levels of the fats that your body is supposed to be able to create from those essential fatty acids. In other words, you take in this omega-3 fatty acid that’s in your flax and chia and hemp and all the other foods, but your body doesn’t use it as is. It has this whole set of chemical reactions that it goes through to get it to the point where it’s a prostaglandin, an anti-inflammatory prostaglandin or an anti-spasmodic prostaglandin or where it goes into DHA, which helps with your brain function, but your body has to do chemical reaction to it.

We run into some problems with that in that to do those conversions, your body

needs to have the right nutrition. So if you’re low on - I’m going to be a broken record again - zinc, vitamin B3, vitamin B6, magnesium, vitamin C, if you’re low in those nutrients, you’re not going to be able to convert the food form of the fatty acid into the EPA, which is what’s in the fish oil. That’s why a lot of people will say, don’t mess with the vegetarian sources, just go with the fish oil. That might be true in some cases. The same people who are usually deficient are eating the processed foods or have long-term deficiencies because of processed foods or lots of stress that deplete those nutrients. So you might be either - not getting it in your food or getting it in your food but depleting it because your adrenals are working overtime. Does that make sense?

So this is a complicated process. If you have any questions or any questions

come up, I’d be happy to clarify that at this point. I think this is an important piece for people to understand how important all these basic building blocks are and how stress affects them. It’s how it causes all these nutrient depletions which then cause other nutrient depletions.




Kevin: Do you want to answer questions now? Rita Marie: If there’s any questions about his, because I really want people to get this piece. Kevin: We don’t have anything right now. Rita Marie: Great. So I’m going to move on. I find it’s important to do that test because a lot

of people will just, I use the expression, “throw fish oils at the problem.” Have you ever heard that? “You have this problem? Take fish oil.” I think it’s just kind of an irresponsible approach because number one, you don’t know if that’s what’s out of balance and number two, you can go into excess. So if you have excess of these fatty acids you can get into bleeding problems, because your blood gets too thin because they tend to be anti-coagulant.

The other piece, especially with women, is no the omega-6 side, which we don’t

talk about deficiencies a lot because the food is readily available. But it’s, again, the conversion from the food source into what our body needs. If you’ve ever heard of GLA, gamma-linolenic acid, it’s very important in the hormone realm. A lot of women will take evening primrose oil and find that it helps dramatically with these problems. Certainly it’s worth a try. I see people who have been taking fish oils and taking evening primrose oil and taking all these different oils, they come in and they’re still having problems. When we do the fatty-acid profile we see all the imbalances. We can tell a lot. I’ll say, “You’ve been eating this,” or “You’ve got a zinc deficiency.” They’re like, “How do you know that from this one piece of paper?” It’s very important to understand the biochemical flowcharts and how they work. I can figure out what’s deficient and what needs to be done.

When those things are corrected, it’s amazing the difference in how people feel.

The depression goes away. The eczema goes away. The mood swings go away. If they’re on hormones already they’re decreasing their levels. They’re decreasing their thyroid hormone. They’re decreasing their bioidenticals. Eventually a lot of people can get off of those things completely. That’s the long story about PMS and all that.

Kevin: We did have some questions come in, so let’s deal with those. “If budget is

limited, where do you begin with the tests?” Rita Marie: It depends on what symptoms are. For the most part I think that testing the fatty

acids is a good place to start. If you start by doing the expensive hormone panel that goes through the month, it is several hundred dollars, and you don’t address the fatty acids first, then you’re basically wasting your time. So I think the fatty acids would be a really good place to go, because they underlie so much of this.

Kevin: Does DirectLabs have that fatty-acid profile?




Rita Marie: Yes, it does. You can go through DirectLabs and get it. There’s a company under

DirectLabs called MetaMetrix. The one I use is the blood spot fatty acid. Kevin: Okay. Then one question is, “Could you give the name of the 300-page book on

herbs?” Rita Marie: Okay. It’s not on herbs, it’s on specifically this type of herb. It’s on adaptogen. It’s

called “Adaptogen - Herbs for Strength, Stamina and Stress Relief” by David Winston and Steve Maimes. David Winston is my herbal teacher.

Kevin: A 300-page book on adaptogens, wow. Rita Marie: Yes, not just on herbs. I’ve got 600 and 800-page books on the major herbs. But

this is just the adaptogens. It’s a cool book, if you like that sort of stuff. One thing I didn’t mention is that for PMS symptoms and hormone imbalance

symptoms and menstrual cramps, there are acupressure points that work wonders. I found a couple of sites. I’ll put it in an email and I’ll send it to you, Kevin, if you want to send it out to people. There’s some really good points that you can just hold on yourself. There’s a system of acupressure called Jin Shin Do [?]. You lay on your back and you hold different points. It’s amazing stuff for menstrual cramps. When I first got introduced to this I was having menstrual cramps, in my early 20s, and I started doing this protocol. It would clear them up. I sometimes had to do it twice if it was bad but it would clear it up and then I started doing it before the cramps even started. Then I didn’t have to do it anymore, after several months. I’ve had that repeatedly with patients that try this. It’s a really weird link so I don’t want to read it out. We’ll have too many questions on it. But I’ll send it to you and you can send it out to people. It has lots of different protocols for that.

If you just type in ‘menstrual cramps’ or ‘PMS’ and ‘jin shin do’ -- I’ll send that

too to make sure we get the spelling right. But you can Google it and find lots of websites that have that. It’s really important.

There’s also some points around your lumbar area, bladder meridian points, that

can help with PMS and discomforts in menopause as well. There’s a point on your shin called spleen 6, there’s large intestine 4, 10 and 11. There’s all really good points for helping with hormone balance. You can work on them yourself.

The other thing is acupuncture works phenomenally for balancing hormonal

stuff, in addition to herbs. You can go to an acupuncturist and get an actual prescription for herbs unique to you and also some of the points. I’ve worked with women who have had severe cramping or heavy, heavy bleeding and we’ll




work on them the week before their period is due, and do some of these acupuncture points and they have tremendous results with that. Energetic imbalances contribute to this stuff as well.

I wanted to take a few more minutes to talk about PCOS, polycystic ovarian

syndrome, because a couple of people brought that up in the questions. “What tips do you have for thin women with PCOS?” It’s probably the same I would have for not-thin women with PCOS. You still need to go on the low-glycemic diet. If you’re thin you may be upping the fat a little bit to make up for the lower calories. You still need to do no grains, absolutely, no sugar at all and very low-glycemic fruits. You probably have progesterone and estrogen imbalances so getting those tested can be a good idea. The fat-balance is super, super important, with all the omega-3s. And getting acupuncture can help a lot with that balance.

With PCOS there’s often times an excess of testosterone. So some women get

relief with progesterone cream, like an over-the-counter progesterone cream. Of course, vitamins and minerals, all the ones we’ve been talking about. There’s none specific for that that are unique for that, but the general, the zinc and the B’s and the vitamin C are all real important for that.

Let’s talk about menstrual cramps, if we can, because that’s a big problem. I hear

this all the time, “What do you do about menstrual cramps?” What I find with menstrual cramps, a lot of times there’s a magnesium deficiency. I do a saliva test for magnesium and other minerals. I do it right in where we do this testing thing and get which minerals are out of balance. Inevitably I’ll have somebody who they come in and I test them and they tell me about their menstrual cramps and their magnesium’s fine and I’m a little bit confused. Then I decided, “We’re going to test you right before your period is due.” I give them a little vial so they can test themselves. Yep, they’re magnesium gets deficient that week right before their period is due.

So it’s really important to make sure that you’re eating high-magnesium food.

Your greens are one of your best sources because the chlorophyll in the green is actually a ring that contains four magnesiums in it, in a similar fashion to the way hemoglobin is a ring with the four irons around it. So really good is lots and lots of greens, taking a magnesium supplement can be very helpful, putting castor oil packs over your belly. So if you just google ‘castor oil packs.’ It’s basically a very simple process of saturating three layers of castor oil, three layers of flannel with castor oil and then lay it over your belly with a hot pack. That can take care of cramps really easily.

Then there’s three herbs that I want you to know about if you have menstrual

cramps. One of them is called Black Haw. It’s not a real common one but you can




order it online and you can probably find it at your local health food store. It works for cramps in about 90 percent of people. The beauty of it is, unlike some herbs where you have to use it for a long period of time before you figure it out, if you try Black Haw and it doesn’t work, you might want to try it one more time. If it doesn’t work, it’s not going to, you’re in that unfortunate 10 percent that it doesn’t work for. I’ve seen amazing results with people doing Black Haw.

The other two that work well for cramping is Jamaica Dogwood and Crampbark.

Sometimes you just have to experiment with it. If you believe in muscle testing and you have somebody that can muscle test you. Somebody that knows what they’re doing can muscle test to see if those work for you. That could be a good thing too.

Kevin: Becky had a question from last week. “Do hormones play a part in losing and

gaining muscle?” Rita Marie: Yeah, actually. Progesterone, estrogen, testosterone, really important balance

between them. Women typically have lower amounts of testosterone obviously, because it’s a male hormone, but they need to have testosterone. If you’ve got problems with being able to put on muscle and you also have a low sex drive that tells me you probably have a testosterone imbalance. I have a list of things that you can do to help boost up your testosterone. So yes, definitely.

Kevin: One other thing about the magnesium. Can you put magnesium oil on your skin?

Is that as effective as taking it internally? Rita Marie: I know magnesium oil on the skin is used a lot for muscle problems, cramping,

pain. I haven’t looked at any studies to see what the percent absorption is and how it affects blood levels. You’re in experiment grounds. I would say try it and see.

Kevin: For that list of things to boost testosterone, we’ll talk about that later? Rita Marie: We can talk about that right now if you want to. Kevin: Cool. Rita Marie: So let me lead into that with the sex drive, what kind of things can kill your sex

drive and how you can get it back. Testosterone is one of those. So what do you think is top on the list of what kills sex drive?

Kevin: Unattractive mate. Rita Marie: [Laughs] That can do it. So barring relationship problems and all that.




Kevin: It’s either going to be stress or fatty acids. Rita Marie: Yeah, stress is really at the top of the list. That whole cascade that we talked

about last week with the adrenals, remember that really complicated picture that I put up? I don’t expect you to remember anything but that when you’re stressed you take away from your sex hormones to make stress hormones, to make cortisol. So it’s the whole process of steal. They call it the pregnenalone steal. Pregnenalone is the precursor and you steal it away to go make stress hormones and you don’t have enough to make your testosterone, estrogen, progesterone, etc. So that’s at the top of the list. As a result of that you have low estrogen, you have low testosterone, you have low DHEA, you have low thyroid. We talked about the stress connection with all of those.

The other thing though, you can also have estrogen dominance. If you have a lot

of those xenoestrogens we talked about, that causes a dominance so that there’s so much more estrogen then there is testosterone that your sex drive goes goodbye.

If you’ve got poor hydration in your system, you’re going to naturally have poor

lubrication and sex drive goes away when you associate sex and pain. That’s a common complaint of women as they get in towards menopause. Some of that is hydration. A lot of that can be taken care of with hydration. We’ll talk in a little bit about some herbs that you can use to help with that, to help create the balance there.

If you’re on birth control pills, it creates an effect in your system where you don’t

have as much sex drive. And actually, alcohol, toxins and various medications, especially anti-depressants, can zap your sex drive. If you’re obese, because of the way that the whole fat metabolism and the estrogen balance and all happens, you can have low sex drive. You can also have low sex drive if you’re anorexic. And if you’re depressed obviously you’re not interested in anything, let alone sex. So there’s all sorts of things that can affect your sex drive.

So what are we going to do about it? Well, one of the things we can do is to do

some things to help increase your testosterone. Believe it or not regular exercise can help boost your testosterone levels, especially if you get out there and start to do some weight-lifting. The thing is, to have the strength to do heavy-duty weight-lifting, you’re required to have decent levels of testosterone. I’m not saying go out there and try to be a he-person and lift way beyond your means. But if you start with weights just a little bit so you get tired by the end of 10 reps or 12 reps, then you’re going to start to build some muscle. That’s going to help you to boost your testosterone levels.




Omega-3s, make sure you have adequate omega-3s. You have to make sure you give your body adequate rest. When you’re not sleeping enough, not resting enough, it throws the hormone balance out of whack.

One of the things that can create low testosterone is long-term consistent caloric

restriction. I don’t mean some of the stuff that’s related to the longevity studies that say, “If you just undereat by a little bit.” I mean people who are on these severe weight-loss diets for long periods of time, anorexics, bulimics. That can really mess with the testosterone levels.

Another thing, we said exercise regularly but if you over-train you can zap your

testosterone levels. If you push yourself too far you can actually cause a decrease in your testosterone levels.

Super, super important is zinc, the mineral zinc in the diet. It’s really important

for testosterone levels. So there are other ways that we can boost sex drive. Do you want to hear them? Kevin: Sure. Rita Marie: I think everybody would like to hear them. Learn to manage stress, ha-ha. That

was a surprise, right? I love heartmath and I really think if you go out there and start learning that you’re going to not only be able to manage stress yourself, but you really get to transform it into positive emotions. When you have a positive emotion flowing through your system you’re much more likely to have a sex drive.

Caffeine and alcohol. Kevin: Let me ask you about the heartmath. Is that the little machine too, the m-wave? Rita Marie: That’s part of it. You don’t have to have that. That’s a biofeedback tool that

allows you to be aware when you’re going into the entrainment that they teach you. But you don’t need to do that. I have it and I hardly ever use it. I’ve gotten in the habit of going into the heartmath mode as frequently as I can. I lot of people really do well with it. The m-wave you can hook up to your ear and you can just have it beeping while you’re working or while you’re doing stuff. You learn to manage your heartbeat while you’re doing things that are typically stressful. They also have one that’s computerized. It’s on your screen and you get to see your screen and see how well you’re doing and kind of do little exercises. Really, if you get the “Transforming Stress” book from Heartmath, and read through it, it’s a really helpful book. It teaches you how to do it. You can always sign-up for a program. Heartmath has a program they call -- I can’t




remember what they call it but it’s basically a program where if somebody is trained in it, I’ve been trained and certified by them, can take you through a four-week process of learning the techniques and learning how to associate your specific stresses and how to manage your goals and you’re state. I did that training program. It was phenomenal, night and day what it did to me, in terms of my way of managing stress. So I highly recommend it.

Green, leafy vegetables can correct anemia and anemia can cause poor sex drive.

It can improve your neurotransmitter function and provide nutrients that your adrenals need. There are certain neurotransmitters that are the feel-good neurotransmitters, the ones that put you in the mood when you’re in the groove. When you’re under stress those neurotransmitters are not around. They’re kind of hiding. So it’s getting yourself in the mood by improving transmitter function, not only by decreasing the stress but by eating foods that help to support that. Again, we can go back to the thyroid and eating sea vegetables, because that’s going to play an important role in having your thyroid in balance. That’ll affect your sex drive.

When you eat processed foods, caffeine and alcohol, they stress your system

and they contribute to hormone imbalance. We talked before about using, if you drink coffee or black tea, like I used to do all day long, sometimes switching to something like licorice and ginseng and maybe a little bit of green tea, which has a lot of antioxidants, will be really helpful in making that transition away and will support your glands.

It’s really important that you take time every day for self-care and for self-

nurturing. I know as women we get into the caretaker role. We take care of our kids, we take care of our husbands, we take care of our mothers, we take care of our friends. But who takes care of us? If you don’t do it you can’t count on anybody else to. You’ve got to take care of you. You’re the only one that’s going to be there until your dying day, that you can count on. Take good care of yourself. What that means is even just setting aside five minutes a day or ten minutes a day to have some sort of self-care ritual that you do. It may be soaking your feet in hot water. It may be taking a bath. It could be doing some self massage. Reading a book, listening to your favorite music, anything at all that you consider nurturing for yourself. I’m not kidding. This is not just, “Oh, yeah, yeah. That’s the soft stuff. We want the hard stuff.” This is the critical piece. This is so important. When you take time to do these things and you put your whole heart and soul in it, you don’t just go, “I’m doing this because I have to,” you really get into it and do it from a standpoint of enjoyment and appreciation, it’s going to change everything. You will start to do it more often, first of all because it gets to be addictive. The feelings you get from taking care of yourself and doing this, even five minutes a day, then you can increase it to ten, then you can increase it to fifteen, are going to make a world of difference. Trust me on this




one, it really will. Kevin: What about the people out there who are saying, “Yeah, but I have this, this and

this to take care of. Is it really going to work? Why would I even bother?” What can you say to them? I know they’re out there because I say it too sometimes.

Rita Marie: I know. And I say it too sometimes. But when I do it, I go, “Why didn’t I do this

yesterday?” Try it for just five minutes. I know that no matter how busy you are five minutes is nothing. Can you find five minutes there, Kevin, in your busy day?

Kevin: No, not at all. [Laughs] Rita Marie: Even if you took five minutes off of your run or five minutes off of your sleep or

five minutes off of something, complaining about your computer not working. [Laughter] Whatever we have, we can find five minutes. We can create five minutes. I think just do it.

Here’s what I would do. Go and make a list. Take out a piece of paper and just

make a list, brainstorm all the things you think are fun that nurture you, that you feel really good doing. Some of the things on there may be “going on an Alaska cruise.” So some of them are things that you’re not going to do on a daily basis and some of them are things that you are.

Also, I’m going to tell you something about going back to the heartmath. You can

go on an Alaskan cruise every day. I go to the beach, everyday, and I live in the middle of Austin. There’s no oceans near me. But I go there everyday. My body doesn’t know the difference between whether I’m really there or whether I’m just picturing and imagining and really just getting all my senses to go there. When you learn to do these heartmath techniques, you’ll learn to completely shift your chemistry so that your whole body believes that you’re floating on the ocean right now and the chemistry shifts. What happens is your hormones get in balance, your neurotransmitters get in balance, your sex drive goes up, you start to heal, that insulin resistance starts to heal, you start to drop weight. It’s pretty darn amazing. I know, “Yeah, yeah, yeah. But will it work for me?” The only way you’re going to know is if you try it.

Kevin: That’s great. What do you say we wrap it up for tonight. Rita Marie: Let’s do that. We’ll talk about the herbs, when we talk about menopause the

next time and we’ll talk about the herbs related to your sex drive. We’ll talk about menopause and we’ll talk about various things related to menopause like skin, hair and nails and all that kind of stuff.

Kevin: Sounds good. Thank you so much for your time.




Rita Marie: You’re so welcome. It’s been my pleasure. If you guys have questions about the

stuff we’ve covered tonight, if I’ve left any of your questions from last time unanswered, which I think we hit most of them, we will go back. I’m going to keep these sheets with me and we’ll have a question and answer period at the end of next time, to go through it.

Kevin: We have about six more from today that didn’t exactly fit today, so we’ll bump

them over until next Tuesday. Rita Marie: Wonderful. Kevin: Thanks, Dr. Rita Marie. And to everyone else out there, we really appreciate your

time and investment. We know that this is a valuable program that will give you a return on your investment for many years to come. We’re really glad for you to have a part in this with us. Take care everyone and we’ll see you next Tuesday.

Rita Marie: All right. Goodnight everyone. Kevin: Bye.


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