Podcast Episode #64: Everything You Need to Know About Bio-Identical Hormone Replacement Therapy

In this podcast episode, bioidentical hormone replacement therapy, how older athletes should train, hamstring injuries and triathlon training camp details.

Welcome to the BenGreenfieldFitness.com podcast. We provide you with free exercise, nutrition, weight loss, triathlon and wellness advice from the top fitness experts in the nation. So whether you're an Ironman triathlete or you're just trying to shed a few pounds, get ready for non run of the mill cutting edge content from BenGreenfieldFitness.com.

Well folks, I'm finally back from covering the Ironman World Championships down in Kona and thanks to the people who commented on some of the videos and some of the content I was sending back from there, we're back to our normal high quality audio instead of that dinky little digital recorder I used in last week's podcast. And in today's podcast I have a pretty interesting guest. Her name is T.S. wiley and I had heard a few different interviews with her before, read some of her material, and was simply intrigued by some of the work that she's done in bioidentical hormone replacement therapy BE and so I decided to get her on the show and we had a fantastic discussion that I would encourage you to listen into. Not just if you're a post menopausal female or someone who is concerned about or preparing for menopause, but also if you're a guy with a daughter or wife or girlfriend or mother. These are issues that you should know about because there are ways that you can help the people that you love to live longer, have more energy, and avoid some of the dangerous mistakes that people make when it comes comes to hormone replacement. So listen in to today's podcast to the featured topic on today's podcast and it's going to be information that you aren't going to hear a lot of other places. So we do have some special announcements this week. I do have a little bit of listener Q and A. Not quite so many questions this week as we've gotten in previous weeks, so we'll have a little bit more time to devote to the interview. So we're going to go over a few special announcements, then we're going to move straight on into the listener Q and A and then our Featured interview with T.S. wiley.

Special Announcements.

Okay, so in today's special announcements, I've got a couple announcements for you triathletes out there. If you're not a triathlete, hit the fast forward button and move on to the listener Q and A. If you are a Triathlete, stick around. The first and probably the most important thing that I want to talk to you about, the opportunity for you to actually participate in the training camp in Austin. Now, right now we have five people signed up for the camp, have committed to the camp. Now, the deal is that this camp is taking place at what's called an endurance ranch, which is basically a house designed for endurance athletes to come and train. And, and it is brand new. I mean, this house is just launching in January. Now, the guy who purchased this house along with another pro triathlete, he called me up on the phone. And we know each other, we've raced against each other. We go back a couple of years. Because he knows that I'm a coach. He wanted to know if I would like to give my athletes and the people who listen to my podcasts and the triathletes that I know the first opportunity to go down there and throw down an all inclusive camp at this ranch down in Austin. And in exchange for that, he offered me much, much lower pricing than what the house is going to be going for. So I'm able to turn around and offer an all inclusive triathlon training camp that is basically a fraction of the cost of what you normally get. I surfed around on the Internet and what I found was there was an average of about 900 to $1,200 for most triathlon training camps that were about seven days long, which is what this one's going to be. But that did not include lodging, and it only included two meals during the day. So what I put together was a camp that includes everything. So all your training sessions, all your lodging, which, you know, normally with the type of rooms that you're going to get and big screen TVs and Internet connections and a lounge and a massive kitchen, you'd be paying 100 bucks a day easily. And so that's going to turn a triathlon training camp into a 2000 or up to a $2500 affair. I've put it all together and what we're doing is actually everything. All inclusive training camp down in Austin. And rather than that 2000 or that $2500 fee, what I'm doing is 13 for everything. Now, that 1300 is if you sign up by October 31st. At that point, starting in November, it bumps up to 1375. Not much more, but just a little bit more because I'm trying to get people on board so that we can plan for this camp. And then after that, after January 1st, it jumps up to 1450. So it kind of doubles. It goes up $150 after that anyways though. So you think about this $1300 full week of training, all the lodging, all the food every single day, swimming, biking, running, coaching, presentations, lectures. Myself and several other pro triathletes will be there training you. It's January 18th through the 25th and you're looking at Austin, Texas being one of the least expensive cities in the US to fly into. My tickets are going to be total taxes and everything, round trip, about 260. That's from Spokane, Washington. So essentially the entire camp, everything. You're looking at a $1,500 training vacation that includes everything just completely, completely done for you. You can even ship your bike and we'll put it together and have it all ready there for you. We pick you up from the airport, we provide you with all the food, you sit back, you do the training that we put together for you. Based off your unique level, we're going to split it into probably about two groups in terms of the people who maybe a little bit more of a beginner triathlete level. Not total beginner, but the people who have done an Olympic and plan on doing half Ironman next year or have done a half Ironman but want to jump up to an Ironman or even have done an Ironman but are more in that 15, 16 hour range and want to get faster. And then we're also going to have the group that is wanting to qualify for Hawaii and is a 12 hour Ironman wanting to bump down to a 10 hour Ironman. We will have training sessions that are put together for both levels anyways though I am putting a link on the show notes to this podcast so that you can go read exactly what the itinerary is for that camp. And we do have some nightlife stuff planned, you know, some social opportunities for you in the evening. So it's not just all going to be training and eating. It's going to be some, some fun as well. Click on the link in the show notes that I'll put up there. It's called the Pacific Elite Fitness 2010 Triathlon Training Camp down in Austin, January 18th through the 25th. If you start to put things together now, the way that I have it set up on the registration is you don't have to, you know, scrape together $1,300 and put it all down. I have it split up so that it's 439 bucks and it just, it gets withdrawn three times over the next three months. So it kind of spreads it out for you. So for this type of training, this type of camp, this type of fun, the food, the lodging, everything. 439amonth for the next three months. It's pretty dirt cheap compared to other triathlon camps that are going on across the country right now. Because I went and researched and I wanted to give you guys a good deal because they're giving me a good deal on getting this home for the week. So the triathlon training camp, that was number one. The second thing I wanted to tell you guys was that the Triathlon Dominator package came out last week and that is now live over@triathlon dominator.com I'll put a link to that in the show notes. But it's pretty much the only plan out there that's really allowing the everyday person who never thought they could do Ironman because too much time, take away from family, take away from career, take away from your hobbies, from your social activities. Ironman is a selfish sport. And this training plan is designed not with the ide that Ironman doesn't take work. I mean if it was easy, everybody would do it. But it's designed with the idea that too many people spend too much of their lives prepping for Ironman, with junk miles, with unintelligent training, with poor eating, and with all the things that add up to make it so that you're training a heck of a lot for results that aren't very good in Ironman. So rather than train 20 hours a week or 25 hours a week and do an Ironman in 13 hours or 14 hours, why not train intelligently for between? It's about 9 to 15 hours a week, 8 to 12 in some cases and be able to do a 10 hour or an 11 hour Ironman. This is the same plan that I use to do a 9:59 and a 9:46 and qualify and do Hawaii Ironman a couple of times. It's all put together for you. The trick is that you have to get all the components in place. You have to be eating intelligently and following the holistic meal plan that I provide. You follow the weekly plan that I provide that's put together to allow for you to rest and recover, but includes lots of things like interval training and rest and recovery periods that are strategically built into the program periodization. That means you're working in things in specific blocks for those 36 weeks leading up to Ironman. A very smart taper based off of research, based off of science, based off of how a taper is supposed to look, not just guesswork and kind of throwing together those last three weeks unintelligently and then a little bit of flexibility, being able to move around the weekend workouts and know what you're supposed to do, being able to do the weightlifting that I put in there and then finally all of the audio files that I provide that walk you through those last eight weeks, walk you through that last week, walk you through race day, walk you through everything from what you're supposed to put into the five different bags that you get that they hand you at Ironman, all the way down to what you eat the night before the race, what your heart rate needs to be on the bike. I arrange with lots of different people across the country to get huge discounts for you on some of the supplements that I recommend. And those are exclusive discounts that come with the program. So it's just tons of stuff that you get. I would definitely check it out. It's brand new and I'm getting a lot of positive feedback from people who have already gotten the program and looked through it. You can get it as books, DVDs and CDs that are mailed to your house. You can also get it electronically for under 100 bucks just download straight to your computer.

So check that out.

That's@triathlon dominator.com okay, we're going to go ahead and move on now into the Listener Q and A for this week.

Listener Q and A.

So this week's first question comes from Listener. Who is this question from?

Paul.

Listener Paul says first off, love your podcast, always tons of useful information. Thanks Paul. My question is on triathlon training for older athletes. I'm 61 years old and have been running for 32 years. Holy cow. All the training regimens I read about seem to be geared for the younger athlete. What kind of adjustment should an older athlete make in relationship to training, mileage, intensity and recovery, especially for an Ironman triathlon distance? Any help would be appreciated. Intelligent question, Paul, because you obviously know that your body is going to change quite a bit as you age, especially in relation to endurance exercise. The nice part about being an older athlete is that you actually do typically have a higher population of slow twitch muscle fibers. And slow twitch muscle fibers have a longer time to fatigue, they're able to use fat a little bit more efficiently as a fuel, and they're very useful for endurance exercise. However, what happens when you age is a significant decline in power and in strength and that age related decrease in power and strength is much faster than the decrease that's going to occur in your endurance. And that holds true for both men and women. So your endurance performance in men will peak in about your 20s and it'll decline between the time you're 20 and the time you're 55 by about 4% and decline at a slower rate than the decline in power and the decline in strength even going forward into the age of 65, 75, 85 and so on. In women, endurance will peak in your 30s and same thing, it shows a very slow decline moving Forward into the 50s and the 60s. So what that means for you as an older athlete and what I do with the older athletes that I coach. I have a couple of masters athletes that I coach right now. One's trying to train for Kona, another is trying to train for the world championships in Olympic distance is I'm working a lot on developing, especially here in the off season, their strength, their power and their force. So we're doing a lot of paddle and pole buoy work in the pool. We're doing a lot of full body weightlifting three times a week to maintain and build that strength and power. Because once the race season rolls around, I'm not going to be able to give them quite as much of the weightlifting. And we're going to need to be focusing more on the racing and the biking and the running and the swimming. So weightlifting and force application type of workouts should take precedence in your training with the realization that you need fast twitch mus, not only due to the fact that you're going to lose strength and power as you age, but also due to the fact that that will help to keep your hormones active. There's a hormonal response to strength and power based training that simply does not occur with the long slow distance training. So as an aging athlete, one of your goals should be to maintain strength and to do so by using the weight room, by using resistance when you're swimming, by pedaling in more of a gear mashing style at least a couple of times a week against a higher force, and by doing like hill repeats when you're running or if you're indoors this time of season, using the stair climber at the gym or uphill climbs on the treadmill. So that's number one. Number two is your nutrition. First of all, you're going to have difficulty with your collagen formation. You're going to have difficulty with some of your joint cartilage breakdown. Two of the things that are going to help out quite A bit with that Glucosamine chondroitin, fantastic for increasing the amount of synovial fluid or the oil for your joints. The one that I recommend is called Capraflex Capra Flex. It's made by a company called Mount Capra. And Capraflex is not only glucosamine and chondroitin, but also a blend of a bunch of other herbs. The most or not the most expensive, the least expensive place I found it is a website called doctorschoicenaturally.com doctorschoicenaturally.com and you can also get a 5% discount on Capraflex if you use discount code BGS. Just like Ben Greenfield Fitness. So vitamin C and glucosamine, chondroitin, preferably from something called Caproflex and the vitamin C. You can get that from eating high density fruits and vegetables. You can also take a vitamin C supplement. Omega 3 fatty acids have a very strong anti inflammatory effect. So you're looking at wanting to get nuts siege wanting to eat fish. You can use wheat germ. That's also very high. Ground flaxseed is very high. Chia seeds are high. Flax seeds are very high. But going after the healthy omega 3 fatty acids will help to fight the inflammation, keep your joints stronger. The essential fatty acid that I use is called nrefa. There's many of them out there. That one in particular is two capsules of a flaxseed oil that I take in the morning and anything like that or Carlson's fish oil. Again, very good amino acids once again for your joint cartilage. You can get amino acids of course from the lean proteins that you eat. You can also get them. One supplement I recommend is called Recover Ease. It is amino acids. It's also combined with proteolytic enzymes which help you to digest, break down and utilize proteins a little bit better. And that also has something called glutamine in it, which is another fantastic supplement for recovery. Okay, so you're looking at something like recoveries, something like glucosamine, chondroitin, some vitamin C, omega 3 fatty acids, high intake of fruits and vegetables due to the bioflavonoids, which are going to have an anti inflammatory effect and also due to the antioxidant content. If you want to step up your antioxidant content even more, something like selenium can help quite a bit as can vitamin E. And that will help protect you against a lot of the damaging free radicals that are going to proliferate in your body a little bit more, especially as you age, and essentially just eating healthy, of course, but understanding that as you age, your body decreases its ability to absorb some of the vitamins and the nutrients and the minerals from the foods that you're eating. And so supplementation is something that you should take into consideration. So for you, Paul, for any aging athlete that's listening to this, if that was just like a laundry list of stuff, you can feel free to email me ben greenfieldfitness.com or go to thebeangrenefieldfitness.com and click on the part on the top of it that says nutrition. And there's a bunch of nutrition articles up there that also include some of my previous recommendations on supplements. So check those out and great question. Next question comes from listener Gord, who says, hi Ben, I really like your podcast and enjoyed your coverage of Kona. I need your opinion on a problem I'm having. This past season, I had problems with my hamstring. I began having art. For those of you who don't know what that is, that stands for active Release therapy at least two times a week beginning in June. This had no results. However, today during my visit, my art specialist suspected that I may have an SI joint misalignment and could be causing my hamstring issues. I remember you had a show on the SI joint, but the truth be told, I didn't pay much attention to it. Now you got my attention. Could an SI joint cause hamstring tightness and plane and pain? Could you please tell me the episode number again so I could relist? So, first of all, Greg, the two episodes where we had a chiropractic physician on talking about SI joint syndrome were episodes number 13 and number 49. I also wrote an article in the July issue of Triathlete Magazine that talked about the SI joint and the SI joint issues. Now I'm gonna put a link to your question in the show, notes Gord, because rather than surfing through the BenGreenfieldFitness.com website and searching for those podcasts and just clicking back and back to older and older posts that you can find those podcasts, there's actually a page that just lists all the podcasts that I've ever done and the exact topic of those podcasts and lets you download the podcast right from that page. I'll put a link to that right after your question. It's called the Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast Feed. And sometimes it's a little bit more convenient than trying to dig through the entire website looking for the Podcast. So, first of all, podcast number 13 and 49 would be the ones that you want to listen to. And short answer to your question is, yes, a stuck SI joint can cause hamstring pain. The reason for that is that SI stands for sacroilium. And if your sacroiliac joint is not allowed to move posteriorly, meaning towards the back of your body, or inferiorly, meaning down below, then that means that it's restricted in what's called posterior inferior motion. Okay? So what it's supposed to do, what that sacroiliac joint, or more specifically the ilium part of your pelvic bone, is supposed to do, is it's supposed to rock backwards when your hips flex forward. Okay? So when that ilium rocks backwards, what happens is the ischial tuberosity, which are those two bones kind of underneath your crotch that you can feel if you dig your fingers into your groin, that will move forward. So your pelvic bone rocks back, that moves forward. And what that does is it actually lengthens your hamstrings as your hip flexors contract. Or more specifically, it moves the bone that the hamstrings are attached to in a direction backwards. Specifically, that allows the hamstrings to not have to stretch, so to speak, quite as far or to strain when your hip flexors contract. Now, if the ilium, the upper part of your pelvic bone, does not rock backwards like it's supposed to, that means that those ischial tuberosities aren't going to move forward the way that they're supposed to. And the hamstrings that attach to the ischial tuberosity are not going to be allowed to lengthen as they normally would. And thus, they're going to have, like, this, almost like this shortening or tearing effect placed on them. And that can cause cramping, that can cause pain. It can cause you to feel as if your hamstrings are in a constant state of contraction, especially when you're running. The idea is that when one muscle contracts, for example, your quadriceps and your hip flexors, the opposing muscles should be relaxing. But if your SI joint is stuck, what happens is your hip flexors and your quads contract and the hamstring shortens at the same time. And so you get this hamstring cramping effect as you run, because you're running with that hamstring in a constantly shortening state. And, of course, the fix would be to get your SI joint adjusted and freed up so that your hamstring is able to mobilize while you're running. So to understand more about the SI joint, definitely listen to Those podcasts podcast number 13 and number 49 that I did with Dr. Brian Mather and then go find a chiro in your area who is intelligent and has some experience in SI joint adjustment and hook up with that them. So great question Gord. Now I also had a comment. I had a couple comments that made me feel really proud this week and I want to read them to you guys. Listener Jason says, I just want to give you some feedback on advice that you gave me recently. You might remember in September I did my first sprint triathlon and had severe stomach cramps on the run leg as I over fueled and over hydrated. Well I recently competed in the US Open Sprint Triathlon event which was a little longer than the other one but the run was the same distance. I took the advice that you gave me on the podcast and had a small breakfast two hours before the race, a couple goos during the race and only consumed about 3/4 of a water bottle as it wasn't hot. In fact it was in the 50s. After the 800 meter swim and 40k bike ride we had the 3.1 mile run which my previous time was 28 minutes with the cramps. With your advice, I smashed that time by five minutes, finishing it in 23 minutes and fishing fifth out of 45 in the 3034 age group and 31st overall. So congratulations Jason. And it goes to show people, if you don't listen to the advice that you get in this podcast, then lightning bolts will come out from heaven and strike you while you're out running. Or maybe you just want to as well as you wanted to. Listener Rex says, My wife is a nurse who has trained our children on nutrition and eating healthy. Just prior to you announcing your revised shape 21 lean body program a few months ago, I was planning to start on another fitness program. My son tried to talk me out of it because the suggested supplements did not meet his standards of being good for you. As a matter of fact, garbage, chemicals and poisons were the words he used. Just before beginning, I received an email containing recommendations for your services. I checked you out, liked what I read about your Shape 21 Lean Body program, waited for its release, bought it when it became available, and began the program. My son also reviewed the program when it arrived and gave it his thumbs up for being healthy and effective. I've been through the book twice at the beginner's level. Results have been gradual but measurable weight Blood pressure, belt size, etc. My son and I have been very pleased. I'm writing to say thank you for taking this holistic approach. I'm glad someone does. Well, thank you, Rex. And you know, the shape 21 lean body manual is something that I initially designed for some of the people I was training, like the brides who would come to me and be like, you know, panic, I've got a wedding in 42 days. I really need to get toned fast. And so I'd put together this program for them. And, you know, shape 21, you'd go through twice. So two 21 day protocols. But eventually I realized that people could use this program that I designed and literally start at the beginner level, go through that a couple times for 21 days, move on to the intermediate level, go through that a couple of times, and use this program throughout the entire year to achieve fantastic results. And it wasn't designed as, you know, like a triathlon training program like I talked about earlier. It was designed for rapidly shedding fat, building lean muscle, and doing so in a healthy way. If you think about something like P90X or something like CrossFit, bit very similar concept as those. But the difference between shape 21 and those is that shape 21 takes the specific exercises and workouts that you're doing on each day, and it matches up a food program for each day that corresponds directly to those workouts. So some days you're eating more protein, some days you're eating more carbs, some days you're eating fewer calories, some days you're eating more calories. But essentially it takes your actual workouts, pairs the nutrition plan for that day with them with the recipes and the meals and the grocery shopping list and everything, and allows you to literally just have zero guesswork. So it's not like you walk out of the gym, you wonder, okay, I did workout X, what do I eat after workout X? It tells you not exactly what to eat after workout X, what your breakfast, your lunch, your dinner is supposed to be that day, everything. The unique part about the redesign is that I also removed any potentially inflammatory foods out of it. So it is a completely holistic and healthy diet. The results that people see with it are pretty amazing. You can see some of them over@shape21.com and I'll put a link to that in the show notes. That program though, you know, if, you know, let's say you can't afford to hire me as your personal trainer, and I know that that's the case for a lot of people, I mean, that's why I wrote the freaking book is so that you don't have to, so you can just take what's up in my head that I put on paper and use that to achieve your goals. I mean, right now, going into the holidays, if you were to have that book and you were to use it through the holidays, you could arrive at January, literally, if you were to start it right now. I mean, using that book easily, easily 20 to 30 pounds between now and January 1st. And healthy pounds. So, anyways, that is all for this week's listener Q and A. And remember, if you have a question, just email me ben greenfieldfitness.com or you can call toll free. I like to get those audio messages. 877-209-9439 or you can just Skype me at PacificFit. And we're gonna go ahead and move on to this week's featured topic on bioidentical hormone replacement therapy with t.

Featured topic.

Hey, podcast listeners, this is Ben Greenfield back from BenGreenfieldFitness.com with a medical writer and researcher who happens to be at the forefront of natural hormone replacement. I have T.S. wiley on the other line and she has a protocol called called the Wiley Protocol that happens to be one of the most cutting edge protocols when it comes to natural hormone replacement therapy. You're going to find about, find out about that as well as everything that you need to know about hormone replacement in Today's show. So, Mrs. Wiley, T.S. what would you like to be called?

You can actually call me T.S. wiley or T.S.

How about T.S. thank you for coming on the show and you have a pretty comprehensive biography when it comes to hormone therapy. But before we even get started into this, because I know they're all about to hang up and press stop on their audio players, is there a reason that any men in the audience need to stay tuned to this interview?

Well, there's a Wiley protocol for men, testosterone and DHEA in a rhythmic dosing schedule that's based on sun cycles. And I've done extensive prostate cancer research and I'm at the moment working on a book for men called Fallacies with a Ph.

Okay. And nice, I like that title. And so the reason that men in the audience might want to stay tuned to this, the way I think about it, is they actually should not only understand what's going on with their wives or their mothers or their daughters, but also for men, andropause or loss of testosterone, especially going forward into the later years of life, is A crucial issue for both athletes and the general population. Right.

Well, everything that happens to women, whether it's night sweats as opposed to hot flashes or memory losses, you know, loss of libido is the obvious one for men, but aches and pains, high blood pressure, thyroid disruption, all of it happens when you lose your testosterone.

Okay, so guys, stay tuned. There's actually a lot of information here that's going to help you quite a bit. TS can you tell me about your background in the health field and hormone therapy and how you actually came to design what is now called the Wiley protocol for natural hormone replacement therapy?

Well, I worked in endocrinology, a woman named Schwarzein for a very long time. And I worked with molecular biologists at Formby. And it all started for me when I worked on a book called Lights Out, Sleep, Sugar and Survival. And it was a book about what happens when you don't go to bed, when the sun does, what happens to your hormones, and how that contributes to type 2 diabetes and mental illness and infertility and a few other things. So Ben and I were working on that book, and I think I had a hot flash. I was about 42, 43, and I didn't like it. And I had significant heel pain. I was living in New York for the summer, and of course I went to visit all the podiatrists, you know, all the foot doctors in New York, and they hand you orthotics and that's supposed to fix it, and it doesn't. And. And one symptom at a time. Eventually I went in for a mammogram back in the day, this is 15, 20 years ago. I had a lump attached to my chest wall that they wanted to watch in air quotes. I had a bronchoid tumor in the uterus the size of a grapefruit. I had an ovarian cyst. And of course they wanted to take a blood test called CA125, which is an ovarian cancer test. And my youngest daughter was about three or four. I mean, I have five children. As I said, she left for college this year, 15 years ago. And at 1, I got tired. Shortly, I got tired of being scared. I got tired of feeling like all the women out there feel, which is you wake up in this dark closet because the fear mongering, the potential cancer is on every television station, in every magazine, in every conversation among women of a certain age. And that age, by the way, is getting younger and younger. So I guess I decided I could probably figure it out. I think the first thought I had was that I wanted some hormones. Then I thought to myself, well, if I'm scared of cancer now, as I am deteriorating at midlife and hormones cause cancer, how am I going to solve this problem? How am I going to get the hormones I need to have quality of life, if in fact they are so wildly dangerous?

This was at the time the research had already emerged on the cancer problems with synthetic hormone replacement.

Well, the Women's Health Initiative was being conducted at that time. It certainly hadn't come up with any conclusion, but it was very clear in the literature that that tremorin alone caused endometrial cancer, that estrogen was proliferative for cell groups, so it probably would make breast cancer grow. That was just the current thought in the media and in culture. I was working with an endocrinologist who. I'm not sure she believed that, but she certainly was a mainstream endocrinologist. I now work with a mainstream oncologist. But I thought to myself, I remember the first thought I had. If estrogen causes cancer, all young women should be dead. They're full of it. And then I thought, well, if estrogen causes cancer, all pregnant women should be better because they have more than the young women. And I thought, so it can't be the estrogen. It has to be a much estrogen. It has to be when you have it. Because young women don't have heart disease, diabetes, cancer, Alzheimer's, osteoporosis, etc. Depression, knees that hurt. I mean, we could go on for days. They don't have menopausal symptoms or menopausal diseases that lead to death. They have more estrogen than I do. Clearly I need more estrogen. The question is, how would I take that estrogen? After a little research, it became very clear that swallowing hormones is pretty dangerous because when they go through first pass in your liver, they usually turn into something else.

Swallowing hormones, do you mean any hormones, synthetic or natural?

Yeah, any hormone swallowed, synthetic or natural, that is a sex steroid. That means estrogen, progesterone, testosterone will all go through the liver. And we know in weightlifters with anabolic steroids you get significant liver damage. We know that an oral estrogen, even if it's bioidentical from a big pharmaceutical company, gets significant liver damage. And progesterone, if you swallow that, it puts you to sleep. The metabolite of progesterone hits GABA in your brain and knocks you out to get sleepy, like pregnant women do in the beginning of pregnancy. I thought Well, I won't be eating it then. I looked into transdermal hormones. About that time I met John Lee, and John was promoting transdermal or topical or whatever you want to call it through the skin. Progesterone. It was over the counter, something called progest. It was very woody. I looked at that. Then I tried to find out if I could get some transdermal estrogen. The only transdermal estrogen out there was a big pharmaceutical company product called Vivel patches or chlomira patches. They're in a gel matrix and they got glue on them that make you itch and there isn't estrogen in there. I'm actually getting more estrogen over the phone from me in fumes than are in those patches. You know what I mean? That didn't seem to be the way to go. I contacted a lot of compounders and no one would make me estrogen because it was far too dangerous.

And for the people who are listening into the show, when you say you contacted a bunch of compounders, you're referring to compounding pharmacists, correct?

Yes, I'm talking about pharmacies. The little mom and pops that have a mortar and pistol in the back and they will mix up medicine on the spot, as opposed to just counting it out from a giant bottle they bought from a distributor and then putting it in a little bottle for you. So compounding a pharmacy used to be before the 60s, and the big pharmaceutical companies started making pills for everything, and then pharmacy became pill counting. But in the last, I don't know, 10 years maybe, that one semester of compounding, which used to be four years in pharmacy school, has been taken over in a commercial way by a different company that teaches little mom and pops to compound and buy machinery and learn how to do it. So I contacted pharmacies I knew that would do that kind of thing, that would make progesterone cream, for example, and none of them would make estrogen. It was far too dangerous. They talked about it like it was nitroglycerin and it would explode. And it was horrible knowing I didn't have choice at the moment. I got my hands on a lot of seizel patches and pasted them all over me, deciding that if I were going to take hormones, I would take them the way I had them when I was young, the way I produced, because logically that was safe. Because in any study you would think about, the cohort would be all young women. In other words, all young women are safe and they produce hormones like this. In their body. So I thought instead of taking the same amount every day, I would try to take the amount I might have produced when I was in my twenties.

By varying the number of patches that you used?

Well, at that point, yes, it was how many patches then I knew that there was a peak on day 12 and a peak on day 21 of hormonal activity. I thought if I did blood tests on those days, I could see if I could get within the reference range on the blood work for somebody 20. This was a thought experiment, as we say in physics. This was an idea based on a logical premise.

Now, a very quick question here. When you're talking about using these estrogen patches, I know that a lot of people are under the impression that estrogen is just one hormone, when in fact it's three separate hormones that women have in their bodies in men. But how are you differentiating between those three with these patches, or is that something you were doing yet?

Well, estrogen isn't really three hormones. Estrogen is estrogen. But the predominant form, there are three metabolites. The predominant form is something called E2. E2 is estradiol, and it's the most potent. E2 is made from E1, which is called estrone, which people predominantly make in their fat base. E1 becomes E2 becomes E3, which is estriol, and it is a spent metabolite. It's the third form, and it's very weak. It's not three different estrogens so much as it's three shades of gray. E2 can reverse itself and go back to being E1, which will make it go back to being E2. So there's a little spin there. If things are wrong, if things are right, E2 will go till body. So about the time I was trying all this, actually, a little later, a man named Jonathan Wright decided that since E2 estradiol, which by the way, is what's in the Vibel patch, only estradiol and chlomyra, for them, they're a big product. Jonathan decided that he would try to get some estrogen back to women. And I have to applaud him for the that because having no estrogen was debilitating.

And for those listeners who are out there, Jonathan Wright is one of. One of the top. Well, he's a naturopath. Is that correct? Naturopathic physician, yeah.

Jonathan is in port town, Washington, and he's a naturopath. And Jonathan decided that he believed based on some research by a woman named Helen Leonetti and a guy named Henry Lemon that. But a combination of the three factions of estrogen would be the idea. So he made something called Trieste first, which was all three in ratios. And the biggest ratio, of course, was the weakest one. Hedging his bet, the E3 estriol, that lasted, I don't know, five years maybe. When it became very clear in Zava's work, actually, a guy named David Zava, who used to work with John Lee, used frozen breast cancer slides that E1 or Estrone, the kind you make in your fat base, was the most ubiquitous estrogen found in frozen breast cancer slides. So it's almost like you go to the scene of the crime, and this is what we found. This was the episode. So Trieste became biest.

So you completely eliminated the estrogen form that was most likely to be associated with cancer.

That's what Jonathan did. Jonathan and the compounders, because that was no part of this. So Jonathan and the compounders went to Biest. Biaest is 12% estradiol and 80% estriol. And people dose that in a cream or a pill. Some people swallow it, and they give the same dose every day. Often. Some doctors now will give you that pill or cream every day and add in either progesterone cream or a pill called Prometrium, which is oral micronized natural progesterone in peanut oil. It's by a company called Solvay. They will add in that pill or progesterone cream for 14 days at the end of the month. And sometimes women will have a period when they do it that way. This is static dosing of an estrogen formulation and progesterone that.

We're actually not changing that based off a woman's natural. Right.

Same dose every day. Right, same dose every day. And that is called facial dosing, because they put the progesterone in. In the old days, they didn't even put the progesterone in. Or some people took only progesterone because John Lee, of course, my old friend, the late John Lee, told everyone that because he had seen a chart where it shows that cholesterol, pregnenolone. Pregnenolone becomes progesterone, becomes blah, blah, blah. Some people have seen this chart. It's a molecular chart of conversion. It's called shunt physiology. It's the way one hormone turns into the next, to the next, to the next. It's called shunting. John believed, because he had seen that chart, that progesterone being at the top would make everything else happen. And of Course, of course, that's not real science. The reason we have the potential to shunt a hormone one way or the other in our body is for adaptability. How your hormones shunt on any given day depends on how you woke up that morning, how you slept the night before, what you just ate, what kind of stress you're under, recombinations, or the combinatorial mathematics of how your hormones can dodge. And the outcome of such variability and flexibility is, in fact, all the stars in the sky. That's how we adapt and keep living from one room to the next, in one environment to the next. So that snapshot of a perfect inversion in some way was not actually how it works. So the idea that people could take progesterone and they'd end up with estrogen and testosterone is not necessarily true. Particularly because. Because progesterone from the O is not the same as progesterone from the adrenal, and O hydroxyprogesterone from your adrenal does the same kind of converting. So just taking progesterone alone didn't seem to work. So Jonathan Wright offered women estrogen in that way. The problem I saw with what Jonathan offered was not only a static dose, even with progesterone added in, but the fact that the ratio of 20% estriol to 80%, I'm sorry, 20% estradiol to 80% estriol, is not a normal ratio in a human woman. Now, Jonathan got this number, this idea, because in the trimester of pregnancy, that is a ratio ratio that can be found. His premise was pregnancy protects breast. Everyone, of course, is terrified of breast cancer, so that he would go with this. But in reality, in the third trimester of pregnancy, that ratio is made by the baby's renals. The baby is pumping out a lot of Estriol. It's not really a state in which any woman walks around for any length of time without the help of another human being being inside her. So I decided that since estradiol could convert to E1 or E3 as E2, that I would take the most potent estrogen, certainly the one the pharmaceutical companies take in Kivel and Chimera batches and other places. And I would somehow get someone to make me some cream, because obviously it worked transdermally or the big pharmaceutical companies wouldn't do it that way. So I picked cream instead of gel. Gel, because the matrix patches that were out on the market. Gel. I don't know how old you are, but if you're old enough to Remember back in the day in all those Marcus Welby hospital dramas, when someone was melting down from a fever, they would give them an alcohol bath. This, of course, would drop their fever and save their lives. That's because alcohol brings capillary action to the surface of the skin, so you could radiate out the heat. But for hormone delivery, it takes the hormones in too fast. So there's not a normal. It's a blast of hormone. Instead of a normal drip, drip, drip or pulsatile kind of thing. Your hormones have a beat, they have a rhythm, and it's just like a drum beat. It's bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, depending on whether you're scared or happy or whatever. At drum gets louder or faster. That's how hormones work. And I was attempting not only to replace those normal curves by escalating and descending doses, I thought I could do better on the delivery system being more normal, more pulsatile. So by finding somebody to make me a cream, that cream would rest in my fat base. I would rub it in and it would stick. And then every time my heart beat, the blood would run through and I would get a little bit. So now I'm running a beat that's my heart beating, which is not exactly the same, but it's still better than having it go in and out in a minute. So I had figured out how to get my blood ranges, reference ranges, the same as somebody 20 years old on day 12 and 21 with the patches.

So you're essentially trying to mimic the hormone levels of a younger woman.

Right, But I was allergic to the glue and it was going in too fast and it wasn't right. And then I found a compounding pharmacist who would make me these hormones in a cream. And better yet, I asked him to put them in 3ml or 3cc plastic syringes with a cap on it, because I wanted to be able to measure out tiny doses to escalate and descend. So I actually knew what I was taking. The tub and a spoon, which was the standard delivery method at that point for hormones and creams, was not scientific. It was not something I could calibrate and titrate and make sense out of or ever study someday. So once I got estrogen into a syringe in a form that could be quantified, I had what is basically now the Wiley protocol. Eventually, I color coded the packaging to prefer green, because even I would grab the wrong syringe at night when they were all the same colors. Now, they have green plungers for the estrogen and purple for the progesterone. So you can't grab the wrong one at the wrong time of the month. And my idea, A few women here and there wanted to try it. I certainly wrote a book about it. Eventually, I worked at a compounding pharmacy for two years because I'd put their name in the back of the book to see how it was going. And that pharmacist refused to standardize. During the process of listening to women call in, it became obvious that they weren't all getting the same results. And it occurred to me that it must be in how they made the hormones, because they were getting the same amount of hormones, they were doing it right. But for some reason, it was all over the place. So I had to decide was that. I'm sorry, I had to decide, was that my idea or was that the pharmacy? I asked the compounding pharmacy to standardize the methods and the materials that we were making it out of, the raw hormones and the cream and how they did it. Of course, we'd already argued about pricing and packaging because compounders tend to charge anything they want, say anything they want, and make anything they want, which for the consumer is a nightmare. And for Big Pharma and the government, a field day. Because then no one ever has to study bioidenticals because there's no way to study it. It's too all over the place. So I moved to another pharmacy and another pharmacy until I got someone to help me standardize. So right now, the Wiley protocol is made at 55, and it is made exactly the same way at each one, in exactly the same packaging, from exactly the same raw materials, right down to calling the supplier of the raw materials and arguing about whether or not it all comes from the same lot number or the same bin.

Does this seem to improve the results that were occurring?

Oh, yeah. Yeah. Became very predictable. Once the results became predictable, then I sat with 50 to 80 women a month for three and a half years to figure out how to modify. It's called dose modification, how to wiggle these curves. Because I'm not woman to me, right? I'm. She's not the woman next to her, but. But we're all women. The Wiley Protocol is not one size fits all, but it's one size starts all. So everybody starts the protocol. And then within the first three months to six months, the curve can be raised. You can have a higher peak. You can spread out the dose in a day. You can. I mean, there are five. I found five fixes for 20 symptoms. So a woman sits in this room and she says to me, I had a headache this month. And I say when? And then they didn't know when. I say, before you period, after your period. They couldn't tell me when, which made it hard because hormones are time reporting time. They report the environment, light, food, stress, whatever. So when she had the head headache would change how you would fix that headache. Then I invented calendars that the women could keep so they could come to the meetings and say, I had a headache on day seven. Well, a headache on day seven means the receptors are fluctuating and you need to spread out the dose. Or if she came and said, I had a headache on day five, that would mean she wasn't taking enough. So two more lines, morning and night, would raise that whole curve and the headache would go away. If she said, I had a headache on day, day 21, that would mean too much progesterone was blocking too much. So the calendars, diagnostic calendars, are very important in offering the cycle uniquely to that human being, that woman and her life. And those calendars actually, over time will change because your life changes. And this is as close as I could get to recreating, not hormone replacement, but hormone restoration. How you have these hormones, this is biomimetic. It's biologically accurate. It's not just bioidentical, which means the molecule we made it out of, the raw material looks a lot like the one you've got. That's a very different thing. We've taken bioidentical hormones and made them biomimetic.

Now, something that I did want to ask you about in a little bit here was, is what someone actually receives to keep track of their calendar if they were working with a physician using the Wiley protocol. But before I ask you that, I'm kind of fascinated by how you describe where a woman's cycle or circadian rhythm actually comes from, how the fluctuation in those hormones actually occurs. Because you had referenced early in our interview about your book how, you know, the body's hormones tend to get off balance when we're not going to bed, when the son is going to bed. But can you go into that in just a little bit more detail the whole philosophy behind the fluctuation in hormones?

Well, human beings evolved with the planet. In fact, I teach 50 doctors five times a year at a planetarium in Glendale, California, and I chose to teach a two day seminar on environment, Endocrinola, the beach in a planetarium because I Had to do sort of a. You are. Here we are on a planet that's spinning a thousand miles an hour under our feet. You look out the door and everything looks like it's holding still. It's like when you were a kid and somebody says the earth is turning and you just can't believe it. Well, your body, your body feels that thousand mile an hour spin. And then that planet that's spinning a thousand miles an hour under your feet is falling, falling, tied to the sun, another 67,000 miles an hour. And that makes us a year. So evolving in an environment that's in and out of light and has tilt and a wobble for seasons means that every cell in us responds to that. And being human beings in the modern era, we're not in that environment anymore. We're more like lab rats. We're in artificial light. We wait for the kill to come down the tube, the food in the microwave. We are under stress and packed into cars on highways, which is a lot like a rat in a maze. All of that affects the consciousness interface that controls the hormones and aging, predominantly aging. Sleeping controls eating. How many hours of light you are exposed to is. A GPS system tells you what season is coming, which controls your appetite for either gaining weight or losing weight. Because if you're exposed to long hours of light and high carbohydrates, that's summer in your head. And that means winter is coming, so you should store lots of fat.

Is that because during the summer, the excessive amount of light actually creates a need for your body to. To consume or an urge for your body to consume more carbohydrates.

It controls a hormone called leptin. It controls a neurotransmitter called npy. Prolactin, which was named, where it was found in breast milk, is not about that. It's just about survival. Breast milk is about survival and static fluid. Prolactin is about the sperm living three days. Take a little lunchbox, get out, do the job, get back. Prolactin in human beings on a daily basis times your appetite for carbohydrates to keep you alive. That prolactin occurs at midnight. The hours of prolactin you secrete while you sleep are controlled by the hours of darkness you were exposed to before midnight. So how much melatonin you have controls how much prolactin you have. When you don't have enough melatonin, less than three and a half hours, you only have an hour and a half of prolactin. Instead of Six it comes back the next morning in rebound. When you're soaked in prolactin all day long you crave carbohydrates. Your immune system is on full tilt. That's part of the arthritis and the asthma and the wheezing and the allergies and stuff. That is a summertime scenario that is perfectly normal because it's mating. In mating season you would need your. Because there's lots of cuts and scratches and bites. In mating season you would need to eat all the carbohydrates that are there which have concentrated energy from the sunlight to store in your fat base because they're going to go away in the winter. This normal three to four month scenario would be fine, except we endless summer. The heat's on inside, the lights are on, the sugar never stops. Instead of one trip around the sun.

Being people aren't going to bed either when it's getting dark outside?

No, of course not. Of course not. So instead of one trip around the sun being measured, we take four. And what that means is we age four times as fast inside. So sleeping controls eating and sleeping and eating control aging or menopause and andropause. So there's, you know, that's just how the world works. Everything else we do besides sleeping and eating and mating, we just, you know, we're filling up time, we're killing time.

And so an industrialized lifestyle could be partially to blame for things like women going through their menopause at an earlier.

Age or well, and menarche. You have to understand that the age of menarche or the first period in a woman at the turn of the century was 17. Now women died routinely at the turn of the century at 47. That gave you a 30 year reproductive run. Right now the age of menarche is between 8 and 10. And that's because the environment has aged children so that when they're 8 years old, they're 17 years old inside.

When you say the environment and I would imagine you're not just referring to our endless summer lifestyle as you just described, but also I would imagine this has something to do with hormones that we're consuming in water. With the high number of birth control pills that are being consumed and ending up water supplies and those type of things.

There's certainly big pharma pollution in the water supply because everyone one is urinating vitamins and supplements and birth control pills and Prozac. Prozac by the way, is the most ubiquitous drug in the water supply. And it's like so many now, but you have to understand that all of those hormones as endocrine disruptors that will cause that frog to grow a third leg should not hurt women at midlife if they put back normal bioidentical hormones. Because the ligand, a name for the tiny hormone molecule and the receptor, the receptor that is made in the body for estrogen, for example, has more affinity for the original ligand. So if you have some actual genuine bioidentical estrogen floating around in there, there being presented at the receptor in a normal way, it will occupy the receptor so that the xenoestrogen and endocrine mimicking drugs can't get in.

Interesting. I'm going to give you a scenario here. Let's say that I am a woman who is actually experiencing the symptoms associated with with perimenopause or menopause or post menopause. And I've listened to this interview and heard you describe not only some of the dangers of the synthetic hormone replacement therapy, but also the essential nature of the timing in the natural hormone replacement therapy.

Where do I go?

I obviously couldn't just walk into a compounding pharmacy and say, well, I heard this radio interview. Can you make me something like that? Is there a place that some can go to actually do something like you've been doing for the women that you're helping?

Well, Suzanne Somers tries to tell everybody in every book since we found each other how to go to the website www.wileyprotocol.com. be sure you put the in it. There is a place on there where about 300 doctors are listed who will prescribe and 50 pharmacies that are in contract with me. I made them sign a contract saying that they will make these hormones in a specific way that can be studied, that they will donate a percentage of their volume to a national study that's coming to use my name in order to call it the Wiley Protocol, in order to put it in purple and green packages, in order to have a sign in the window that says we are a Wiley protocol provider, they have to sign this contract. If you really want what I've studied and what's being studied right now at the University of Texas and being studied on 100 cancer patients here in Santa Barbara, you would go to the website. And if you can't find a doctor near you or a pharmacy and they all mail so you could get the pharmacy to mail you the stuff, you would call a contact number. You can get a woman at contact Us named Karen with a C and she will, as we say, hook you up. We'll find you a doctor and we'll find you a pharmacy. Because it's very important to me that women do not take something they think is the Wiley Protocol, because it's my name that isn't. Because I don't know what that other stuff does. And I can't even get anyone to study because it is strandedly made. You might be able to walk into a pharmacy and say, I want the Wiley Protocol. And they can look at you and say, okay, we can make it back. And then you'll get something in generic syringes in a generic bag. And I don't know how they made it. I don't really know what to do. Think. And find a highly registered pharmacy. There's 50. And that you find a doctor in one of the 300, or we find you one, one that's going to prescribe to a pharmacy, at least for you, so that you can be part of what we're studying. Because women deserve to know what's safe and effective. And nobody cares in biologicals. It's like the Old West. There's no law out there. Big Pharma polices your Prozac and polices your Valium and your Celebrex and your Lipitor. And although that will kill you, all those things will kill you. Somebody is to be held responsible. You can go back and sue that drug company or have that doctor explain why he chose that, or have the fda, for example, come under scrutiny of the Congress. We have a system in this country that's supposed to protect people, but when it comes to bioidentical hormones, they fall into some gap netherworld between health food and supplement. And no one's watching. But I'm watching. I decided I would watch and I would publish results. And that might just force the rest of the people out there making up stuff to have to watch what they're doing.

And so when women actually hook up with someone to administer this Wiley protocol, it's not like they're just given some cream and told, put this on every day. It actually is a specific dosing protocol without guesswork, where they get a calendar and they actually receive specific dosage requirements based off of their fluctuating hormones.

Yes. That's another clue that you're not at a registered pharmacy. If you have your doctor call in the Wiley protocol, you will need purple and green packages, and you will receive a package insert telling you how to put it on what drugs are contraindicated, what supplements are contraindicated, warnings, and then a calendar, a personal or lunar calendar. If you know the first day of your last menstrual cycle, you can start the protocol on day. If you haven't had a period for years, or worse, someone's robbed you of your uterus because they didn't know how to fix it, you will go on a lunar calendar. Because all women for all time cycles with the light of the moon. So the women who have nowhere to anchor their cycle cycle with the light of the moon. So there's a lunar, they're telling you it's lunar day one and here's your dose. Or there's a personal calendar where you keep track of your own day one. And I've done the same for men and we're going to start to study it pretty soon.

Can you, can you briefly go into for men exactly what it is that they would be doing or why they would need to be doing something like natural hormone replacement therapy?

Well, men and women at midlife exchange places. That's how you stay alive. In nature. You cannot be non reproductive. There's no point to your existence, honestly. So in nature, when you cease to be reproductive, it women's testosterone goes up, their estrogen falls and men's testosterone drops and their estrogen goes up. So you literally trade places. Women get square and their hair thins and they grow chin whiskers and they're a little pushy, not quite so soft and feminine. Men on the other hand, tend to dress kind of get weepy, lose their ambition and their muscle mass and drink a lot of beer because beer is one of the most, most estrogenic things on the planet. And that gives them a little boost for their Women drink wine at night because wine becomes depregnetalone, which gives the progesterone effect because they can't sleep. And then they go to bed half crocked, but it wears off in the middle of the night, so they wake up. So it's not really a solution, but at any rate, exchange places at midlife. And when you are no longer reproductive, you are targeted by nature for elimination because you're now competing with the food supply for the offspring of people who are reproductive. So you start to fall apart. It's entropy. You know, you can't use the raw materials, light and food and temperature in the same way that you used to be able to. Old men are always cold and wearing sweaters and old ladies have hot fluff and, you know, everything falls apart. It was my notion the same way we would put women back to a template of normalcy. People say you invented this dosing schedule, but really I didn't. I have it on a higher authority. It is what existed in nature. Just kind of figured out how we would administer it. It's not my dosing schedule. The reality is, for men, the dosing schedule runs on a sun cycle the same way women run on a lunar cycle. So men right now take shots. Men right now take anabolic steroids. Men right now, some of them are being given hcg, which is a hormone out of a placenta, which you never have, to force your testicles to make more testosterone. There are all kinds of. Kinds of crazy, sort of frank and mad science going on for men out there. And I thought men have a normal dosing schedule of transdermal testosterone. But I had to figure out what your schedule is. And it turns out men run on sun cycles and magnetism the same way women run on lunar cycles. But you are driven by female pheromones, so you're not adjustable to the woman you're with, with, or the man you're with, in whichever case. So I had to invent a dosing schedule that changes every four days, goes up, up, up, and the high point is day 16, which would overlay a woman's ovulatory period for pregnancy. And you would take this same time frame as the person you're with. If you're with another man, you would both, you know, probably a lunar cycle to get your 28 days and then take it together the same way. Oh, I'm so sorry. Hold on. I hope you can edit that out. Anyway, you. You would. If you are with a very young woman, go on her first day of her last menstrual cycle, start yours. What we're seeing so far, the Wiley protocol, is a heavy dose of testosterone at night, a little more in the morning, and a little DHEA in the morning. And of course, the dose changes every four days and stepwise goes up and then back down. What we're seeing so far in the men that we're watching in structured data, that means blood work, is that instead of all this testosterone converting to estrogen. Estrogen, which it can and does when you take shots or you take pills. So now they've invented something called Chrysan. And there's Arimidex aromatase inhibitors. That's the enzyme that stops testosterone from converting to estrogen. They routinely prescribe that along with hormone replacement for men. Because of this problem, what we're seeing in the Wiley protocol, we have no estrogen conversion. It's not abnormal. Everything stays testosterone or converts to DHT dehydrotestosterone, which is the more potent form and what we're looking for because studies have shown routinely that high DHT means no prostate cancer, that men with prostate cancer have low DHT because of course then you had precursor. They have low testosterone too. But, but this high DHT is also like progesterone in women. Going to build bone, it's osteoblastic, going to immunosuppressed. So you don't have arthritis. I mean it is the way it's supposed to be for men. So I think I got pretty close. I think we're doing very well with the men's protocol right now.

So in layman's terms, no man boobs.

No man boobs. No, no, no. No man boobs. And no beer drinking to excess. And no wee and hopefully, you know, good morning. We call it morning wood. Get up and salute the time which is the first thing men. Well, the first thing men lose is the ability to see the object of desire and have an erection. The next thing men lose is the morning erection and the last thing they lose is being touched will not even provoke an erection. So it's a stepwise, you know, falling of part sexually.

Interesting. Now a couple other populations who I wanted to quickly ask you about who may benefit from this, but I wanted to check with you for athletes who perhaps may have tested and having low testosterone or who want to enhance performance. Is this something that an athlete or someone would do for sports performance or is this simply for something like andropause?

Well, it's very interesting. One of the local physicians here who was working with a famous, not to be mentioned cyclist, came to me and said, tell me how we can replace doping, in other words, using erythropin, which is a red blood cell enhancer that was invented for the anemia that follows chemoxy. Tell me how we can do that with hormones. And I said no, we're not going to do that episodically for some race. But the reality is that polycythemia, which means lots of red self like red blooded men, you know, there's always something anecdotal in the language that tells you what's happening. In terms of endocrinology, red blooded men have very high testosterone. So in terms of athletic performance and oxygenation and carry oxygen in the blood, having testosterone in a normal way and in a highway will make you as good as a younger man. However, it won't artificially give you any prowess.

Right. And it's healthier so you wouldn't necessarily, though, be illegally enhancing performance if. If you tested low for testosterone and used something like a natural testosterone replacement?

Oh, absolutely not. Absolutely not.

It would be like the huge levels of free testosterone that doping cyclists are ending up with.

Well, you would end up with high levels of testosterone, but they won't be free. They will bound and converting in a normal way and therefore. Or your edge would be undetectable. Of course. You didn't hear me say that.

Yeah, it was just something that I wanted to ask you about because I know that a lot of people, we do have a lot of athletes listening into this show who ask me questions like that. And I thought I'd see what you thought.

And then the other thing I was.

Going to ask you about, would this be something for a couple who is trying to conceive? Because I know that hormones, hormones tend to be one of the primary culprits in infertility. Would this be something that a couple trying to conceive should look into or would it be advisable?

Well, I would say hormones are the only culprit in infertility. There is the immunological issue. You have something called a major histocompatibility factor. And in sex lives. In menopause, I used something called the dirty teeth test that they ran. I believe it was the University of Chicago. I can't remember where they had healthy young men go out and work in hot sun, do heat lifting. They took their dirty T shirts and they ziplocked them so they would ferment. So now they're full of pheromones and sweat. They gave them to two groups of women. One on birth control pills, one not on birth control pills. The ones on birth control pills have them appalling and rang. And one that was less offensive than another, but on the whole found it an unpleasant experience. The women not on birth control pills didn't have quite that problem. Picked the one they thought was most interesting. And then they did pheromonal studies. And in order to be infertile, you must, for the most part, mismatch. I'm sorry, matching immune system. So should you pick someone with the same HLA haplotypes and major histocompatibility factors that you have, you will likely not conceive because the yin and yang of life means that you should have the opposite to broaden your horizons, to make your DNA have more to work with. So the women who were not on birth control pills picked a T shirt with the opposite immune system. Everybody time the Women on birth control pills almost uniquely pick the same one. A lot of the infertility is, in fact screwing with your hormones in general. Now you can do that by taking birth control pills, which makes you unable to pick. That's why everybody woke up in the 70s and said, what am I doing with you? When they stopped the pill from the 60s. Having your hormones deranged by environmental cues therefore can give you an inability to pick. So should couples aiming for fertility check their immune systems and find that they're okay, that they have opposite immune systems, then adding hormones to straighten out just personal environmental derangement, whether it's the man or the woman or both, can succeed in pregnancy. Fertility doctors, in fact, use a rhythm much like the one I devised to season a womb when they're doing in vitro transplantation, because it works better. Testosterone is routinely given to infertile men to up their sperm count, however careful, because in hormones, too much is like none. So too much testosterone will turn it off in the same way having none would turn it off. So it's a balance of the right amounts. And when I'm looking for the right amounts, I just look to nature and what would have been the right amount in nature? Because I would rather take that. For all intents and purposes, depending on your belief system, maybe God invented than what Jonathan Wright invented.

Absolutely.

That's just answers my experience.

Okay, well, you, you have a wealth of information on your website and I know that we only scratched the surface today and I have actually, since discovering your protocol, found a physician in my local area to send some of the, primarily some of the postmenopausal women that I've been working with who are struggling with weight issues and energy level issues to distribute, discuss with him looking into the Wiley protocol, and I would encourage listeners to go to the website. Very simple. I did it in about two minutes. I found a physician in my area who was utilizing the Wiley protocol. It just so happened that he was someone that I knew of who is such a good physician that he has a wait list going all the way out into January. But it's very easy to find access to this protocol. And this would be be one of your best and your most customized alternatives to something like a synthetic hormone replacement therapy or even a natural hormone replacement therapy that, as Dr. Wiley described, is static or that doesn't fluctuate in accordance with your personal rhythms. So a lot of information. I'm going to put a link in the show notes to thewileyprotocol.com and I want to thank you, Dr. Wily or Tsunami for coming on the show today and discussing these issues with us and sharing in more detail exactly how you came to design this Wiley protocol and.

What it's all about.

You're welcome. I just want to say in closing that women who do decide if they would like to try the protocol, keep in touch. And if there's a significant other in your life of a certain age, try to get them to do it with you because they're symptomatic is remarkable for personal relations. People are a lot smoother with each other when they're on the same time frame.

Yeah, it seemed to make sense when.

You were going over that.

So thank you for coming on the show and have a wonderful week.

You're welcome.

Folks. That is all for this week. Now next week. And I have an interesting interview coming up on Kinesiology taping with a gentleman from Rock Tape named Greg. Very interesting way to reduce your injury by putting strategically located strips of tape on your body. So that's going to be interesting. And if you have topics that you'd like to see on this podcast, email me ben greenfieldfitness.com for you Triathletes out there, just email email me again. If you want to get signed up for the Austin Triathlon Training Camp. Check out the brand new Triathlon dominator package@triathlondominator.com that was just released. And finally, leave our show a ranking in itunes and even comment on what you think about it. You can increase our visibility and our ranking in itunes by doing that and get the word out about the BenGreenfieldFitness.com podcast. So until next time, have a great and healthy week. And this is Ben Greenfield signing out.

Sam, it.