Chantel Ray: Hey guys, welcome to this week's podcast and I'm so excited for today's guest. She's a bestselling author, one of the pioneers of functional medicine. She's a famous teacher, writer and researcher in the role of nutrition, healthcare, and so many things. I could not be more thrilled to have Dr. Lindsey Berkson with us today. Welcome.

Lindsey Berkson: Thank you so much for having me. I love shows like yours. You're doing such great work. Thank you.

Chantel Ray: Well, thank you. And I know that you are a gut and hormone expert, which is the two things I love to talk about, but can you tell us a little bit about your own journey and what led you into this area?

Lindsey Berkson: I have been in practice in one way or another in nutrition or functional medicine for 47 years.

Chantel Ray: Wow.

Lindsey Berkson: My very first mentor is considered the father of bioidentical hormones, Dr. Jonathan Wright.

Chantel Ray: Well, hold on. I got to stop you right there because I'm trying to figure out are you going to share how... I'm blown away right now. If you're listening to this podcast-

Lindsey Berkson: [I'm on Medicare 00:00:01:36] for quite some time already.

Chantel Ray: Oh my goodness. Well, if you guys are listening to this podcast, then you need to watch this podcast and look how young she is. Are you willing to share with the listeners how old you are?

Lindsey Berkson: No. I'll tell you one thing that's really funny. I lecture for A4M, which is an anti-aging certification program. If a medical doctor or nurse practitioner is tired of regular medicine, frustrated, and wants to go back to med school, there are these four to five-year certification programs, which is like going back to med school, where you learn how to do medicine differently. So I've been lecturing for them for a number of years. I'm a professor on two of those certification programs. And a few years ago, they started making us tell our age when we first got up there. So if we're speaking on fatty liver or in the gastroenterology module, we first have to say our age. So I was like, oh my God, I had been lying on match.com for so many years. I'm going to be just hit in the face with a lot of lycopene-rich tomatoes.

Lindsey Berkson: So when I do say my age in this small little safe sacred space, I get a standing ovation. And at the break all the young docs, which the average age is in their late twenties or thirties, they're surrounding me with their phones going, what do you eat? What hormones do you take? What do we do? Because we want to look like you when we're that old. And that is the whole deal. I mean, how do you really... It is exercise and nutrition are great, but they're not enough. So how... and the world is very toxic and dirty, which you can't live in the Seinfeld Bubble Boy episode permanently. So how do you really give yourself the best opportunity to, at the latter part of your life, have your money, some rupees in the bank, some knowledge under your belt, but have the same energy in life that you had when you were in your 20s and 30s but now you've got the time to really be more comfy in your body suit? So that's what I'm hoping we can share today.

Chantel Ray: Well, I would like for you to share with us, to walk us through the day in the life of Lindsay. What did you eat yesterday? When did you eat it? And are there any foods or food groups that you completely avoid or tell your patients to avoid?
Lindsey Berkson: First of all, a lot of diet does need to be individualized. For example, a really popular diet today is the ketogenic diet where people say you can eat a lot of fat if it's healthy fat and a lot of meats if they are healthy meats and less carbs then that's a good thing to do. Well, that almost killed me. And it turned out that there are what I call molecules of mass destruction. So there's certain molecules that the Cleveland Clinic and the Mayo Clinic have discovered actually drive aging and illness.

Lindsey Berkson: For example, one of them is called trimethylamine N-oxide and the acronym is TMAO, and one to 2% of the population have elevated TMAO. And if you have that meat, even healthy meat, even grass-fed meat is not your friend. So I started consuming a ketogenic diet because on my own podcast I had the belly doctor cardiologist, and a lot of people who are turning their health like the Titanic around toward a better health by having more meat, and I tried it and it was making me go down hill. When I ran that blood test, which you can get at Quest laboratories, I'm not sure whether clinical pathology labs has that, but it's called T... Tom, Mary, apple, orange, TMAO. If you're elevated in that test, the norm is under six, meat is not your friend.

Lindsey Berkson: So for myself, I discovered that I was very elevated in that molecule. And usually that means you have dysbiosis, where you have more bad bugs than good bugs in your gut, but that wasn't the case for me. My mother was given as a prenatal vitamin when she was pregnant with me, and millions of women were from 1938 to 1971, a very special, what they thought was a hormone to make pregnancies even better. And it turned out that this was the first major endocrine disrupting chemical and the most cancer-causing substance ever invented and given to pregnant women in the first trimester when the fetus is developing. So those children born to those women were kind of screwed up, physiologically speaking, and one of the things that did was it up-regulated the enzyme that made TMAO. So I am what's called a DES daughter. The name of that drug was diethylstilbestrol. The acronym is DES, and DES offspring had elevated TMAO. So for me, meat is mostly not my friend.

Lindsey Berkson: So everyone's always looking for the perfect diet, but you want to find out what is the best diet for you. And even in different times of your life, that can vary. So for me, I basically eat a lot more vegetables. I eat a lot of nuts, I eat a lot of raw foods. I don't use gluten. I get cashew cassava tortillas and I just fill it with sunflower seeds, sprouts, and purple cabbage, and different colored peppers, like orange, red, yellow peppers. And I'll use nut butters. I'll cook with pistachio nuts, saute with them, and sometimes I'll have a little bit of organic turkey.

Lindsey Berkson: And that's pretty much my intake, massive amounts of vegetables, 10 to 15 different vegetables a day with lots of sprouts because sprouts are the most dynamically living food we can get. So I buy whatever sprouts whole foods has and I'm just learning how to make my own macro greens. And often if you come to my home, there'll be bottles of sprouts all over my kitchen counter because it's so hard to get pure food today, but you have more control over growing your own sprouts. So I'm really a health nut.

Chantel Ray: Wow, that's awesome. Well, you look amazing.

Lindsey Berkson: Thank you.

Chantel Ray: Well, let's jump right into the listener questions. This first one is from Deborah in North Platte or North Platte. I'm telling you, I wish I would have done better in geography because I don't know where any of these places are, but regardless, this is what Deborah says. I've always heard that taking hormone supplements during menopause was dangerous and could cause cancer. Is this true? I'm a 52-year-old woman in the middle of menopause and suffering from terrible mood swings and weight gain. Willing to try anything at this point. Debra, in North Platte.

Lindsey Berkson: Deborah, wherever you are, that is the number one question. Deborah, you asked the question that everybody's wondering about. People are saying and priding themselves I'm aging naturally. I'm going to go through menopause as a natural diva. Why do I need to do hormones? And maybe hormones will cause cancer so I'm going to avoid them. That is now being shown to be absolutely wrong.

Lindsey Berkson: Youth is due to hormone signals, giving cells youthful signals to keep yourself young and healthy. Aging is the loss of those hormone signals. Having more hot flashes, having poor sleep, having trouble losing weight in your abdomen, having overwhelming feelings, loss of motivation, thinning bones, higher risk of cancer. Almost all of these are driven by the loss of hormone signals. In two weeks, I'm giving the very first continuing education credit course that was okayed by the CME Board for medical doctors and nurse practitioners on how and why we should prescribe hormones to breast cancer patients. Even what we've learned about breast cancer, that breast cancer patients and high-risk patients should never have hormones, that's also not true.

Lindsey Berkson: It turns out that hormones are foundational more than diet, more than food. They are what keep you well and when they're out of balance, they are often a huge contributor of what's making you frustratingly not get the results you want. So more women who have balanced hormones or take hormone replacement will have less breast cancer and less cancers and less what we call all-cause mortality by being on hormones than trying to brace yourself and convince yourself that you should go through menopause naturally. It's old hat. It is old hat and it's not accurate. These headlines make the news. The scary headlines make the news. And for the scientists analyzing them in the clinical trenches, a lot of the news that says that estrogen is a bad player in causing breast cancer is junk science and not well-deserved for that headline. And the headlines that give us a lot of news where we find out that hormones protect us against breast cancer aren't making it.

Lindsey Berkson: There's a great book, I have a lot of books out, but there's a book that just came out from an oncologist that I interviewed for my book, Safe Hormones, Smart Women. It's called Estrogen Matters. He's the guy that was able to take surgeons and get them to stop making disabling breast cancer intervention surgeries and only do the lumpectomy and radiation. He was the guy who changed the standard of care in surgical intervention for breast cancer.
Lindsey Berkson: Now he's coming out and showing he has the only study of 14 years of breast cancer patients where he gave them estrogen and he tracked them to a comparable group of breast cancer patients not getting estrogen, and they had less risk of recurrence and they had less risk of death from breast cancer and less risk of all-cause death. And he goes through all of the science step-by-step showing you, how hormones, the higher and healthier they are in a normal range, keep you better longer. So you ought to take a look at that book by Avrum Bluming called Estrogen Matters. It just came out. I don't make anything from that. I'm just excited to hear another colleague get the message out.

Chantel Ray: All right, perfect. This question just came in this morning. It's from Suzanne Jones in Austin, Texas. She says, I just got my thyroid tested and my TSH was at 10 and my doctor said that people feel great when their TSH is between one and two. He said, your thyroid is 10 times worse than the average person. I have been going from freezing cold to burning up hot even when the temperature is 71 degrees in the house. I'll go from sweating and burning up and to being freezing. I just started taking Nature-Throid. I'm a 39-year-old woman and my periods are all over the map, and I think I'm estrogen dominant but I'm not sure if I am. I just read an article on Google and now think I am.

Chantel Ray: What can I do about getting so hot and cold? Do you think it's my thyroid? Do you think it's estrogen-dominant? I read an article online that says the most common signs and symptoms of estrogen dominance include fatigue, mood changes, hot flashes, low libido, bloating, and difficulty concentrating. I have all of these symptoms. So how do you get rid of high estrogen and, do you do it by taking progesterone cream? Suzanne Jones in Austin, Texas.

Lindsey Berkson: Hey, Suzanne. Well, there was a lot to break down in that question. So first of all, let's talk about your thyroid. Your doctor was totally right. Thyroid, a TSH of 10, is a flashing red light on your physiologic dashboard that you have slow thyroid functioning. And you want to start... You started out with Nature-Throid. That sounds great. Some people respond well to that. Other people have to go to other interventions, but hormones are a symphony. They all function together. Thyroid, insulin, progesterone, oxytocin, prolactin, you can go on and on. All of your... even vitamin D is a pro hormone, so it's part of the hormone family. They all function together and dysfunction together. So, if your thyroid is off, a very in-the-know doc will also look at all your other hormones to make sure that they're not part of the reason your thyroid is low.

Lindsey Berkson: For example, progesterone helps thyroid get into the receptor to deliver its signal to your thyroid gene, and adrenal glands and thyroid are best friends, absolutely a duad. So you want to look at other hormones to make sure that you're not just treating one thing when there's several things. Because usually when something goes wrong in the body, there are several things that go wrong, and that's because nature designed us to have redundancy systems, backup systems. So one thing goes wrong, we have a backup system, then we have another backup system. Usually you have to have a number of backup systems go wrong for a health issue to show up, and a TSH of 10 is a health issue showing up, so you want to know why that is that way. Although you can still have low thyroid or thyroid issues with a normal TSH because it's not the only way we assess thyroid functioning.

Lindsey Berkson: But it sounds like you've got a really good doc, and getting your thermostat being all off is one of the flashing red lights of thyroid issues. I hate the term estrogen dominance. Bad term, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad term. The reason is it makes estrogen sound like a bad thing and if it's too much it's a bad thing. What it really is talking about is balance. Because there's the good estrogen dominance and estrogen that you want to be high, which is estriol, which signals estrogen receptor beta, the second estrogen ever discovered by [Yunaki Gustaffson 00:16:02] at the Karolinska Institute, Sweden's version of Harvard. So that's a good estrogen dominance.

Lindsey Berkson: So the idea of the estrogen dominance is very simplistic for the public, and it gets people extremely confused. You can have too much of the more aggressive-acting estrogen, which is called estrone, and that might be what people are more referring to with estrogen dominance. But to get estrogen to act more balanced, you, again, have to look at all of your hormones. It can be that progesterone, which is a buddy, a policeman, of estrogen is in insufficient action or it's not working right. Because there's the level of hormones isn't the whole story. It's the receptor functionality where a hormone delivers its signal.

Lindsey Berkson: It could be that you have too many pollutants in your body that are sitting on your receptor. So even though you have normal amounts of progesterone, it can't get in. It can't go into that portal. It could be that progesterone... It could be that it's not a progesterone problem with estrogen. It could be that you're very stressed out and cortisol was sitting on your estrogen receptor, your stress hormone, and even though you have progesterone or estrogen, it won't let it in. So once again, to truly get yourself healthy, a knowledgeable practitioner will look at all of your hormones and your lifestyle, maybe even your toxic load, because you have too much toxic load, your receptors won't function no matter how perfectly whatever tests they measure your hormones at comes out.

Lindsey Berkson: So it's always the bigger, bigger, bigger, bigger picture. Hormones are the bigger picture for them to be your foundation. And I keep trying to teach to everybody when I lecture, and I mainly lecture for continuing medical education courses to doctors and pharmacists and nurse practitioners, not to any naturopaths. I don't know why they don't invite me, but I'd like to lecture to more of those. But that there's this bigger picture of hormones besides being free of pollutants for a hormone to freely deliver its signal, this is where all your food choices go. The food we were just talking about, what's the best food? Well, if you digest whatever food you take in adequately, your magnesium, your zinc, your B6, your iodine, your vitamin A, they all sit inside the receptor and they go like the Little Shop of Horrors. Come to me, come to me, I'm hungry, I'm hungry. And they want to get that hormone signal in and deliver it to the gene and then the hormones done its successful job description.

Lindsey Berkson: But you can be taking hormones. You can measure your hormones. You could do it till the cows come home, but if you're nutrient deficient or toxin poor or hormone family dysfunctional, then you don't have the hormones work. So it's this bigger picture, and you need to have someone evaluate yourself to get the answer for you.

Chantel Ray: Is there any foods that you've found for yourself, personally, that when you eat these foods, it disrupts your hormones for you personally?

Lindsey Berkson: If I eat sugar, it'll disrupt my hormones. If I eat fried foods, it will disrupt my hormones definitively. On the whole, soy is a very healthful food for estrogen, very helpful. Soy signals the positive estrogen that you would like to be dominant, the estriol estrogen that sits on the ER beta or the second estrogen receptor. Iodine-rich foods are good, colorful foods like purple. I buy one whole red cabbage every week and eat it in some way, whether I saute it or take little pieces and put it on top of my cashew cassava tortilla or just put a piece of... I love [Voila 00:19:52] cheese. It's a coconut cheese that you can get at Whole Foods, especially their cheddar flavor. And I put that on top of a slice of coconut, maybe with some [chipotle 00:20:03] mustard. I just try to eat a whole entire red cabbage a week because I find that keeps my hormones healthy.

Lindsey Berkson: And the same with sunflower sprouts, and Whole Foods sells them for just $3 a container, and I try and go through about four sunflower sprouts of containers a week because they're very estrogen care-taking.

Chantel Ray: Anything else that you could share with us that you personally eat that you say this is a staple? So I'm assuming you don't eat gluten and you don't eat dairy?

Lindsey Berkson: Well, I have a little bit of dairy here and there. There's a great Austin restaurant named Chuy's that has one of the best salad dressings ever. So I allow myself a little bit here and there, I just don't eat it as a staple. I'm not an ill person. I was younger in my life when I had to figure out how to be well. So I think if you're basically a well person, you can cheat a tiny bit here and there. So sometimes perfection, or the striving toward perfection, keeps you unhealthy.

Chantel Ray: I agree. I actually just finished my second edition of my book and I absolutely said that. I said... And here's the thing, you've got two lanes, right? Here's a lane of somebody who's very healthy. If you're healthy, you're going to have a different choices of foods that you're going to eat. If you're over here and you have some major illnesses going on, you've got rheumatoid arthritis, you've got psoriasis, you've got autoimmune issues, whatever you've got over here, you have to make some different choices than this guy over here who's perfectly healthy. And so you've got to know yourself and know, hey, what can I have and what can I not?

Lindsey Berkson: Well, it's like with gluten. So I had Dr. Perlmutter on my show and he was talking about this article that was published in nutrients where they took little slices of the intestinal tract of people who had different interactions with gluten. There were celiac disease patients who have an autoimmune reaction when they eat gluten. There were people who had gluten sensitivities, which are people who have kind of allergies to gluten, but they don't have an autoimmune reaction to gluten. And then there were the people who say I've got a stomach like a brick house. I can eat anything. I can eat all the gluten and bread and pasta that I want and I don't have an issue.

Lindsey Berkson: So they took nonreactive healthy people, allergic reactive people. But not autoimmune, and autoimmune. And they put the strips of their intestinal tract, their small intestine and large intestine, in a petri dish with gluten, which basically gluten is an umbrella term for 200 storage proteins. It's not one thing. It's proteins that plants make in the wild to make an animal or a bug sick if they eat it. So it's very resistant to being broken down and very pro-inflammatory, which is what the scientists found. That every time they added gluten, which is a number of storage proteins, in with strips of human intestinal tract, the intestinal tracks would become inflamed. But the healthy people could bring the antiinflammatory molecules to the rescue.

Lindsey Berkson: So they would make interleukin 10, which is an anti inflammatory cytokine, and they would clean up the inflammation really quick. Like I'm inflamed, here's interleukin 10, no more inflammation. I'm fine. But the allergic people took much longer to bring in the anti-inflammatory cytokines to the rescue driving in on the horses, and the people with autoimmune disease could never even do that. So we all get inflammatory reactions from gluten. But some of us can clean it up quicker. So maybe that person could have gluten a few times a week as long as they don't have it three, four times a day and get away with it.

Chantel Ray: Awesome. All right. This next question is from Linda in Muncie or Muncie, M-U-N-C-I-E. I just got diagnosed with Hashimoto's thyroiditis and my doctor wants me to be put on levothyroxine, but I'd prefer not having to take any medicine at all. Are there any natural options I could use to treat it?

Lindsey Berkson: You actually can try that first, although many people do do better on some kind of thyroid replacement. But you can try first testing your iron levels. I like to run serum iodine, take a look and see what they are. I don't like to give iodine without knowing where the person is. Remember that your thyroid hormones triiodothyronine and thyroxin, all those terms are because there's iodine molecules in there. So unless you have adequate iodine in your body, you won't make thyroid. So the first thing you want to check is your iodine. And if you have an autoimmune reaction, you want to check your gut because we now know that a leaky gut is linked to autoimmune reactions. So sometimes cleaning up the leaky gut, taking iodine, and sometimes using glandulars.

Lindsey Berkson: I certainly love glandulars, especially fetal glandulars. And a lot of the old-time doctors that have been in the functional medicine field for decades use fetal glandulars, and there's science behind it to show that they can mend glands. Sometimes we even give it as injectables, but you can buy them as nutraceuticals only from doctors' brands because you want really high quality animals that they come from. So you usually give yourself six months to see if you can figure out these root cause issues and address them, and track your thyroid panel and your symptoms and see if you improve.

Lindsey Berkson: If you don't, then you're probably going to need intervention. And the first interventions we give are natural thyroid complexes, but some people will do better with either levothyroxine or synthroid. And you can ask your pharmacist for brands that are free of talc and colorings and things like that because there are better versus not better brands of those. So is that helpful?

Chantel Ray: Yes. And I will tell you, I have started to take some iodine myself and it has made a night and day difference in some other people that I've talked to. I will put the link of the iodine that I prefer, and it's made-

Lindsey Berkson: Which one do you use?

Chantel Ray: It is called... I'll have to grab it for you. Hang on one second. Let me grab it.

Lindsey Berkson: No worries. I'll give my ice some time to melt so I can get a sip of water.

Chantel Ray: I use... This is the brand I use. This is not the dosage I use. I use 50. I had accidentally ordered the wrong one but this isn't... I'll take like three of these only because I want to try to get 50 milligrams.

Lindsey Berkson: Well, that's pretty high, 50 milligrams.

Chantel Ray: Yeah, I take 50.

Lindsey Berkson: Yeah, I'm more conservative than a lot of doctors are with dosages like vitamin D and iodine, but that is exactly the brand I love.

Chantel Ray: Yes.

Lindsey Berkson: [inaudible 00:27:23] also has a brand that's very similar to that. A lot of the doctors' brands are the best way to go because every month they have to do a quality assurance citation. And you can call them up and say, can I see your quality assurance printout on this brand? And you get it. So they're held to accountability. That's why doctors brands are better and that's a really high quality brand.

Chantel Ray: Have you heard of this at all? It's called sulphur boiron. Have you seen this before? Have you seen anyone that had success with it? I just started trying it.

Lindsey Berkson: So what are you trying it for?

Chantel Ray: I still have a little bit of psoriasis right here on my forehead and on my scalp that has not completely gone away. And so a-

Lindsey Berkson: Have you tested your blood cell zinc levels?

Chantel Ray: I need to. I have not. I think I'll do that next.

Lindsey Berkson: You ought to do that. Make sure that there... When I test a red blood cell mineral level, I look that they're in the highest quartile, the highest fourth quartile, so that... and you want to make sure that... There's a lot of articles in the literature that resistant psoriatic patients can improve with some zinc, but the sulphur homeopathic is also very helpful because so many of your hormones are held in a piggy bank in your body for use when they should be used when they're combined with sulphur. Sulphur is a very, very healing vibration in the body.

Chantel Ray: So if someone is zinc deficient, is there any specific zinc supplement that you highly recommend?

Lindsey Berkson: I think a lot of the zincs are good. Zinc chelate, zinc picolinate, zinc a citrate, a lot of them are good. The main thing is you just have to be careful that you give a backup small amount of copper because zinc can down-regulate copper receptors. But I had one woman who was a hormone coach and she was helping everybody else with their hormones and just couldn't get herself well. Ran her zinc red blood cell level and it was in the toilet. Zinc, your hormones, remember the receptors are filled with nutrients.

Lindsey Berkson: One of the most important is zinc. Right in the binding domain, like the parking lot where the hormone parks in the slot in the parking lot, there are two atoms of zinc in science called the zinc finger. The hormone links onto the zinc finger, which pulls it into the gene to deliver its signal so everything else can be perfect. If you don't have enough zinc, you won't get that hormone pulled into its parking lot space. So that's why I always say the bigger picture, the bigger picture, the bigger picture.

Chantel Ray: That's awesome. Is there any other supplement that you say this is a game changer for someone? For me, I have a few. But what are for you that you go these kind are just a game changer?

Lindsey Berkson: There's a lot of them. I am presently designing a line for Biotics. I gave a talk in Virginia. It was to medical docs and to chiropractors and nutritionists, so it went down both tracks. A few months ago, they had the largest turnout they've ever had in the history of the company, and so they've invited me to design a female line. So I'm going to be designing a product that will help stabilize hormones. I designed Metagenics' first female line in 1982 and it was called the Fem line. And so I learned a lot by putting those products together.

Lindsey Berkson: For example, one of the things I learned that I use a lot that's going to be in this product is PABA, because PABA slows down the breakdown at your liver level of your hormone. So it helps keep your hormones more zen throughout the day. So that's really important. But in terms of looking at a... So stay tuned for my products. If you go to my website, DrLindseyBerkson.com, and sign up for my email list, I'll let you know when these products are coming out, but...

Chantel Ray: Awesome.

Lindsey Berkson: One of my... I'll just tell you one favorite product.

Chantel Ray: Yeah.

Lindsey Berkson: So I was ill a lot when I was young until I found out why, that my mother was given that carcinogenic prenatal vitamin. And when I understood why, then I could turn it around. But until then, I kept getting cancers and I kept being ill and I kept having tumors. So I had my one... I'm missing almost eight organs, and I don't have a kidney. And with the removal of the kidney, even though they promised me at the presurgical meeting at the Mayo that they would leave my adrenal gland in, they didn't. So I'm minus an adrenal gland and a kidney, and I went into adrenal failure after that surgery and I had to be put on hydrocortisone.

Lindsey Berkson: So over the years I've really discovered what supports your adrenal or not so I wouldn't have to go on medication. And the product that has saved my patooties is called Cytozyme-AD by Biotics. It's a fetal adrenal product that has taken some of my patients in adrenal failure out of it without having to use hydrocortisone, which is a very common functional medicine intervention. And then in higher doses, an allopathic intervention. So that product, I don't go anywhere without a bottle of that.

Chantel Ray: Can you send us that link?

Lindsey Berkson: Sure.

Chantel Ray: Can you send me that link?

Lindsey Berkson: I don't go anywhere without a bottle of that in my suitcase.

Chantel Ray: Wow. I love it. Well, Dr. Berkson's new book, Sexy Brain: Win the battle between our toxic environment, your sex life, and brain, her slogan is be the best, smartest lover ever. I love it. Go to her website. Dr. Lindsey Berkson, thanks so much for joining us today. We really appreciate it. And if you have a question that you want answered, go to questions@chantelrayway.com. We'll see you next time. Bye bye.