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Wendy Myers: Hello. Welcome to the podcast. My name is Wendy Myers. Today, we have a really good friend, Dr. Lindsey Berkson on the show. She has been a practicing physician for over 40 years, and she’s been studying detox that entire time. She has such an incredible wealth of knowledge, and she’s going to be talking today about how toxins affect your hormones and the importance of balancing hormones in your body, and why it’s more dangerous to age without balancing hormones than not. That was a really compelling statement that she made today on the show, and I was actually really surprised by that, but she gives a lot of scientific evidence based on the latest research in her book, Sexy Brain, that we’re going to be talking about today on the show that support the argument for balancing your hormones, using hormone replacement therapy, and she really debunks the common knowledge, or in the alternative health community, that taking hormone replacement therapy is bad for you, it causes cancer. She’s the exact opposite. She’s going to talk about why today on the show.
Dr. Lindsey Berkson has been in practice in functional medicine, nutrition, hormones, intimacy for many years with an emphasis on digestion. She’s a best-selling author of 21 books on health, the environment, hormones, and intimacy. Her book, Healthy Digestion: The Natural Way, was a robust seller and she is soon launching a textbook for practitioners and smart patients called Nutritional Gastroenterology. She was a hormone scholar at an estrogen think tank at Tulane University. She teaches CEU courses for practitioners such as MDs, pharmacists, and nutritionists, and also for the public. Her newest book, Sexy Brain, shows how great sex begins in the gut and in turn helps protect gut health, a true win-win. You can learn more about Dr. Lindsey Berkson at drlindseyberkson.com.
Please go check out my book on Amazon. It’s called Limitless Energy: How to Detox Toxic Metals to End Exhaustion and Chronic Fatigue. I know so many of you out there are so tired, and I’ve definitely had periods in my life where I have been exhausted and just turned to stimulants and coffee and didn’t really know what was wrong with me, didn’t know how to address it other than craving carbohydrates or sugar or drinking coffee, etc, and so it really compelled me to do some research into things that impact our mitochondrial health. Our mitochondria make our body’s energy, and what I found in my research in toxic metals is there’s many metals out there that we are ingesting every day in the air, food, and water that interfere in our body’s ability to produce energy, and I outline that in my book Limitless Energy in a very simple protocol to detox these metals to unleash the power within your body so that you can create the energy and the life that you want. Please go check it out at amazon.com.
Lindsey, thank you so much for coming on the show.
Lindsey Berkson: I love having a show with you. Thank you for having him.
Wendy Myers: Why don’t you tell the listeners a little bit about yourself and how you got on the hormone, detox, Sexy Brain route?
Lindsey Berkson: I’ve been on this route for about 45 years. Really, it’s true. I had my first rotation in integrated medicine with Dr. Jonathan Wright in 1977 and he had not yet become the father of bioidentical hormones. Two years later, he wrote the very first script for bioidentical hormones, but he had a machine called the Heidelberg Gastric Analysis and he would analyze whether people made enough digestive … Really, stomach acid isn’t a true enzyme, but it’s a big player in digestion, so he said, “It’s very important to know if patients digest. It’s very important to understand hormones because they have an intimate role with every tissue in your body, not just reproduction and sexuality,” and then he was of course very much into nutrition.
That was my very first understanding of combining nutrition because I’d already had my master’s in nutrition and was a medical nutritionist before that. Then I started to realize the role of the gut, that you can take an herb, but if you don’t make enough stomach acid, you might not get the benefit from that herb, so very early on, I’ve been into this. I opened my own practice. I bought a Heidelberg Gastric Analysis and I’ve been testing hormones since I was in junior clinic in school, which was about 1976.
Wendy Myers: I love it. You’re so knowledgeable. I love talking to you because I learn so much and you have such a vast array of knowledge, but not only that, an excitement for it, such a great energy to want to educate other people.
Lindsey Berkson: I’ve always been so passionate about this. When I was about 17, I heard Scott Nearing, who really formed with Eliot Coleman the organic gardening movement. He and his wife, Helen, gave a talk for the theosophy society saying you are what you eat, and what you eat plays a big role in your perception of the world. I was 17 and I said, “That’s it. That makes sense to me. I want to have a great perception of the world, so I’m going to really eat organically,” and I’ve been raising my own food most of my life. I had goats while I went to school and did my own goat milk. I was not very good at making goat butter.
There’s a lot of bias against older people these days because so much of Hollywood and media are about younger, gorgeous people, but if you’ve been living and really embracing what we talk about, your older age is very different. You have more youth in your older age than a lot of people have in their younger age, and your morbidity, or when you might get older, closer to exiting to your next incarnation is compressed into a shorter period of time, so it’s so wonderful to have this viewpoint where you’ve been in a career for decades, and you’ve heard things come and go, you’ve heard theories, you’ve heard debates, and you have a beat, like a seasoned dancer, where you’ve got a bit of maturity about lead and follow, and it’s exciting to have been in on the beginning.
It used to be called holistic medicine. Then it became complementary medicine, and now it’s called functional medicine, and next year it may have a different varietal of a title, but nonetheless, it’s really taking a look at the body, mind, spirit complex and trying to get the reason why someone is ill and get them well once and for all and not have them be sustained on medications or the conveyor belt, and it’s exciting to see a lot of people in on it. By the way, that term, body, mind, spirit, we throw it around now. I was lucky to be one of the people on the very first book that introduced that three-word, now psychobabble, iconic statement, and there was a doctor when I was teaching health in Vermont in the high schools, there was a family practice doctor named Dr. Albright, and he had just come back from England where there was a big Renaissance Fair named Spirit, Body, Mind.
He was thinking on his vacation that healing must take place on all three levels, so he tweaked that statement around not to be a copy cat, and he called it body, mind, spirit, and he put together a book that was published by Stephen Green Press and he invited a number of us to each write on a different portion of health, trying to incorporate and think about health on all three levels, and that term took off like crazy, and that was published … Stephen Green Press isn’t even in existence anymore. I think it was published around 1979.
Wendy Myers: Nice. You wrote a new book with a publisher that’s still around. You wrote a book called Sexy Brain, and so tell us about that and why you wanted to write that book.
Lindsey Berkson: That’s my 21st book. I couldn’t have children because my mother was given a heavy drug when pregnant with me. Millions of women were given that drug for decades and many of the daughters born to those women couldn’t have kids, so my books are my kids and they mean a lot to me, so I never would’ve thought that I would have a kid that was about intimacy, and I call it the Sexy Brain because sex steroid hormones, estrogen, testosterone, progesterone, they run your brain. Hormones run your brain. Hormones are not just about sexy stuff and reproductive stuff, they run your brain, but we live in a world that’s a toxic soup with hormone-altering chemicals that attack our hormones, and thus they’re attacking our brain tissue.
Replicated studies are coming out of very scary studies out of Mexico sharing that the brain tissue of six, seven, and eight year-old kids in urban areas are showing early signs of Parkinsonian, Alzheimer-like changes. There’s a lot going on because chemicals rule us and toxic chemicals in our everyday world are altering our internet system, which our hormones deliver emails to all of our cells, thus they’re kind of our internet system, so I had wrote one of the very first books on the chemicals in the outer environment getting into our inner environment, and being able to sabotage us. It was called Hormone Deception and I’ve written a lot of books on hormones.
Four or five years ago, a group of docs wanted to open up a low-T center. It was really an erectile dysfunction concept of a 100 different clinics around the country, which now they’re pretty much close to their goal, and they were a urologist and a surgeon and a group of docs, and they called me up and said, “We see you write a lot of hormone books. Will you help us collaborate with a book for the waiting room for all of these different erectile dysfunction clinics?” I said sure, we agreed on the contract, and I started doing due diligence on hormones from a different viewpoint that I never had before, from intimacy, from connection, and I’ve been in the hormone field now as you’ve heard for decades, and I didn’t know anything about the research that was out there on intimacy and how intimacy protects our brain and how we are being less and less intimate as a society.
We are. Kids are being raised at two and three year-olds to bond with a screen. A screen, a phone, a game with a screen. They’re not being taught eye to eye contact. Texting, where you can edit and delete and multitask and not focus on the person in front of you is the new form of talking. Talking is the subsidiary form of talking, but through authentic connection, nature designed us to release hormones and chemicals that are brain protective, and nature never does anything without a reason ever, and in my research and due diligence, I discovered that authentic closeness, be it hugging or hanging out at Starbucks with your best girl friends, women release progesterone that protects your brain. When a man and a woman hug at night, the research from the Georgia State University on heterosexual couples would show that every night when you make love, you release more testosterone and testosterone protects the brain, and the nights you didn’t, you had lower levels of testosterone, but we now have a whole new world where things have changed.
We have 20 year-old men with the levels of testosterone that 68 and 90 year-old men have. We have teenage girls with an epidemic of polycystic ovarian syndrome, which is kind of like menopause in teenage girls, so our hormones are all askew, and the end point is that the human brain, which runs us and our race, is on the decline between obesity, which makes the brain volume shrink, and excess sugar in the diet, which blocks circulation to the brain, and hormone-altering chemicals, our kids’ brains aren’t what they used to be, and hormone-altering chemicals even affect the mothering and parenting centers of the brain, so we are less prone to be a parent that nature intended.
I decided I had to put this all together in a book because it was so important. I’d no idea that these guys hiring me to help them with their project would make me decide that I had to create a new project for myself, and that’s how Sexy Brain was birthed.
Wendy Myers: It’s frightening how chemicals in our environment and things we’re using, everyday beauty products and perfumes and laundry detergents and chemicals put on our clothes, how all of these things are so dramatically affecting our metabolism and our hormones and every aspect of our health, and it’s a bleak prognosis.
Lindsey Berkson: When I first wrote Hormone Deception, which was almost 20 some years ago, even my best friend didn’t want to read it because it was so doomsday, and based on that, the field was brand new of endocrine disruption then. It was just being formulated by multiple scientists from all kinds of fields, and based on that book, I was invited to be a scholar at the think tank of scientists at Tulane University that are putting together that field, and now it’s 20 years later and people are just starting to understand the impact. One of the reasons I had you on my show twice and I’ve been so impressed with you and your work, is that even in that last book, I said that detox has to move mainstream, and here you were a person embodying that, and I was very impressed with that.
I think at some point, it’ll have to become insurance-reimbursed. It’ll bring us back to nuclear families because you’ll want to pick your mate and you’ll want to detox before conception because the egg and the sperm are very high in fat, and most of these very nasty chemicals love fat, they’re lipophilic, and so you want to detox prior to having a kid because then you’ll have a much better chance of having a kid that has less of the attentional and behavioral and other issues that we’re seeing in our children. We have the first generation of kids who are going to live shorter lives and more ill lives than their parents. It’s a risk factor to be a kid today mostly because of these chemicals and the chemicals are affecting the brain so much.
In Sexy Brain, I explain what tests you should run. I put together a hormone detox that is based on the fireman detoxes that were published in the literature in the 1950s because they’re the most exposed of any human beings that we have, and that’s just a detox to be run a few times a year. I know you speak of gentle detoxes that you can do on a daily basis, but to be well, detox or some version of it has to become part of your life, or you can’t shop smart enough to avoid our toxic cocktail of an environment.
Wendy Myers: Exactly. You have a program, also, correct? You have a book but you also have a complementary program to go with it. Can you tell us about that?
Lindsey Berkson: Boy, it started out where I thought, “I’ll just do an online course. It’ll be my first course and I’m learning all these things like young people are and how do you put it all together and how do you buy all the different platforms and merge them,” and when I put the course out there, a lot of physicians responded, so it was said to be for practitioners and smart patients, so I ended up having gynecologists, family practice docs, nurse practitioners, a regular bunch of patients. I ended up having this big group of diverse people, so the course, which is called Sexy Brain because the book was Sexy Brain, really turned into redefining hormones, the new understanding of hormones in today’s toxic world, and this course has ended up becoming almost 30 hours of everything you would ever want to know about hormones but didn’t know who to ask, how hormones interact with nutrients, because the reason we eat so well is that hormones depend on nutrients where they deliver their signal into the binding domain.
Also I discuss in depth how the role of endocrine disruptors or hormone-altering chemicals are a whole new isthmus with hormones. No doctors have been trained in this in school. You go to an endocrinologist, a gynecologist, they have not been trained to look at hormones as having competitors, hormone-altering chemicals, so somebody’s got to put all that together, and I did that in this course, and I’ve been getting feedback from the doctors that’s incredible. One doctor said, “Why don’t they teach this to us in med school? This is amazing. It’s like a glass of fine red wine. I’m savoring each module and I’m looking at it over and over again.”
Later tonight is our last module. It ended up going over 10 weeks, and I’ve had everyone invite their mates, get a glass of wine, and tonight, we’re discussing the hormone language of love.
Wendy Myers: That sounds fun. I want to join that.
Lindsey Berkson: You can join that. I’ll send you a link if you want to join that.
Wendy Myers: That would be great. Let’s talk a little bit about someone’s health history. How does your health history affect how you treat patients and deliver your message? It’s very, very important to take a complete health history before dealing with anyone. I know you can glean a lot of information about what potential toxins somebody might have simply by looking at their symptoms and some of the exposures they may have had. Can you talk a little about that?
Lindsey Berkson: An in depth health history is really the artistry of medicine, and you could look at somebody’s certifications on the wall or where they’ve gone to school, and that’s only part of the science of being a practitioner. The real art, because it’s the art and the science, is the intake and how well you look into every aspect of a possible perfect storm that came together to give this person the glitch and the suffering that they’re showing up in the office.
For example, as I just mentioned before, my mother was given a drug when pregnant with me. The nickname, the acronym, is DES, and it stands for diethylstilbestrol. Most of the doctors in practice today have never even heard of it, it’s such an older drug, even though it was given for 36 years to millions of women. Nobody has ever asked me, no gynecologist on any intake form, if I was a DES daughter, yet most of my issues were because of that and I had to figure and hack my own health from the mountainside once I discovered that I was a DES daughter because most of the moms given drugs while they were pregnant didn’t even know what they were being given in that era.
Wendy Myers: Was that for nausea?
Lindsey Berkson: No, that was a different one. I think that was benedictine. They gave it as a vitamin to make a healthy pregnancy even healthier, and they gave it if a woman is spotting because they thought that maybe it would abort a threatening miscarriage, but it turned out that the drug companies, it was sold under 365 different names by multiple drug companies and there were memos that were eventually found that showed that it caused mammary tumors. Just the last few years and I was somewhat instrumental in this, the DES daughters pretty much had a 90% chance of getting breast cancer from the ages of 45 to 50 years. That’s when I had breast cancer, was at 46 years-old, and the first little crop of DES daughters just got reimbursed for that even though I’m way too far after that.
If a doctor doesn’t know that I was exposed to this in the womb, how can they help me? You would want to know, what does that exposure do and how can you reboot and fix what it did? A great intake tries to lift up every rock and look under the rock and find out what might be hidden that’s part of the reason that person is suffering, and that takes time and that takes connecting the dots, and it takes an understanding that you have all these tools in a toolbag, and when you hear a clue, that means something cogently to your mind and you can start piecing together things for this patient to let them put their illness in their rearview mirror once and for all, rather than just schlepping from physician to physician and procedure to procedure or even nutrient to nutrient, try to get in the whole idea of health is that you don’t have to worry so much about your health, you can go off and live out loud and soar, and not have to worry about things all the time and so many of us aren’t at that point.
Wendy Myers: Yeah. That’s really my mission, is to educate people about the importance of detox, hoping there’s lots of physicians and functional practitioners listening to this, because I really want to get detoxification into conventional medicine and get it into the mainstream because so many of our health issues today and symptoms of fatigue and brain fog are due to chemicals and toxic metals, and if your physician is not testing for that or looking for that, and turning over that stone, they’re completely missing the boat.
Lindsey Berkson: How many people are looking for that? Very few. You’re exactly right.
Wendy Myers: It just needs to get out to more people, or if anything, you need to take as a patient, as someone trying to improve their health and meet your health goals, take responsibility for your own health because a doctor is very busy. They’ve got thousands of clients. You need to take responsibility today for your own health and get the testing that you need and do the detox protocols that work for you, so that’s what this podcast is about.
Lindsey Berkson: I love that. I think that today’s medicine makes patients embrace a sense of learned helplessness. You get diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis or type II diabetes or even dementia, and you’re told it’s a chronic illness and there’s really no cure for it, and either you’re sustained on meds or you get worse and worse, and we now know in the functional family and community that it isn’t true, and there are many cases, not all, that can be reversed, and detox is part of that major tool of doing that, whether it’s dementia or whether it’s rheumatoid arthritis, or whether it’s endometriosis, and you need a practitioner or a team of people who have these concepts within that team so that you can be offered the best care, but detox is so critical.
When I was first diagnosed with breast cancer 24 years ago, one of the very first things I did was, I don’t know if you know Dr. Allen [Gaby 00:24:03], he’s written nutritional medicine-
Wendy Myers: Yes.
Lindsey Berkson: He’s like a brother to me, and he and I were students with Dr. Jonathan Wright in that first rotation in integrative medicine, and he’s gone on to be a really big name in nutrition and he’s been like a brother most of my life, so after I was diagnosed, to support me, he and I went on a one month detox mission with Dr. Walter Crinnion, who’s really helped a lot with environmental medicine. He was the chair at the Southwest College of Naturepathic Medicine teaching environmental health, and we did blood testing of all of our different chemical panels before we started, then we did the whole entire detox program, some of that of which is in my book, Sexy Brain, and I’ve also discussed some of that in my book Hormone Deception, and then right after the detox, we measured our chemicals again, and a year and a half later, we measured them again, and they started out very high in different panels of chemicals, and a year and a half later, quite a number of them were down to zero.
I had been eating organically prior to getting breast cancer. I didn’t have the story where I was eating poorly and not living well and I got ill, because I heard Scott Nearing when I was 17, so I’d been detoxing, exercising, so my history had to be figured out that it was the DES, but no one in my whole medical life as a patient ever asked me that, and ultimately that was what saved me, was figuring that out.
Wendy Myers: Your book is about hormones, and so why is it more dangerous to age without balanced hormones than not? I know there’s a lot of conflict or arguments out there about avoiding traditional hormone balancing and taking hormones and whatnot. What are your thoughts on that?
Lindsey Berkson: That’s a very good question, but most of those arguments are really now very thin and anemic, hormones were given to women … Hormone replacement in the form of non-bioidentical molecules was given to women as the most sold pharmaceuticals ever for decades, until they tried to do a set of studies based by many prestigious institutions coming together called the Women’s Health Initiative, to prove what they thought that they knew very well, that hormones were close to an anti-aging elixir, but when they did this study, it turned out that hormones created some cases of breast cancer and some cases of stroke, and they stopped the studies prematurely, and everyone heard that news and it’s never been able to get out of the mind and the soul of the community.
I just interviewed one of the ex-presidents, Stephen Goldstein of the North American Menopause Society. He just stepped down, and he was with ACOG at a convention, and he said, “Oh my God. Women didn’t hear the reanalysis. It’s such a shame, that really estrogen doesn’t cause breast cancer. It’s the synthetic version of the progestins that did,” but there is a lot of debate for how long one should be on them, but the women have not heard a lot of the data that came after that study was reanalyzed and discovered to have lots of issues, and that hormones run your brain. They run your vocal chords. They run your kidneys. They run your gut, which is the mothership of your health, and there was a study that came out a few months, right after the Women’s Health Initiative made everybody throw hormones out the window, and it came out of Utah.
It was the Cash Study out of Utah and it was one of the most significant studies ever because it was almost 10,000 people who were all mentally healthy at the beginning of the study, and then they watched these people over time, so it was called a prospective study, to see who got dementia and who didn’t, and the women who didn’t get dementia, the majority of those women were women who had been on estrogen for at least 10 years. Being on estrogen for 10 years reduces your risk of dementia by 50%. In my new book, I show how even if you have the dementia gene, APOE 4 gene, your hormones can block that gene from expressing itself, so keeping your hormones up is a protective measure.
Hormone health is really something that’s important. It’ll protect your brain in the long run. The big debate is how long can you be on them safely? I don’t want anyone to ever take me off of hormones, so a big part of my career has been learning how to give hormones long-term safely so you can achieve being younger longer.
Wendy Myers: How often do you have to monitor them, because I know there’s a lot of doctors doing hormone replacement therapy, and a lot of them are not doing it correctly. What is a correct hormone replacement therapy program look like?
Lindsey Berkson: That’s a really great question and women don’t realize that doctors stopped giving hormone scripts here in the states, not in Europe, for about 10 years after the Women’s Health Initiative, and now there’s been a little bit of a renaissance, so a lot of the docs suddenly getting into hormones now had a two month or a year certification program, or they don’t know that much about them, so it’s very different if you have a uterus or if you don’t have a uterus. If you start hormones, you need to get a mammogram or you need to have some breast imaging, and you really need to get … When you’re on hormones, if you have a uterus, once a year you need to get a vaginal ultrasound. You just have to make sure that the lining of the uterus isn’t growing out of control, which we call proliferative … There’s something called the endometrial stripe that they test.
There’s a bunch of testing if you have a uterus and you’re on hormones, and you need to do that, otherwise if you don’t want to do that, you probably shouldn’t be on hormones because you need to just make sure that everything is working well, and just the blood test or urine or saliva, whichever way you test it, aren’t enough, but once a year, you should look at the levels, whichever way you look at your levels, and a lot of doctors inappropriately think that if you don’t have a uterus, you don’t need progesterone, and that’s not true because progesterone does a lot of other protective actions with estrogen to balance it out in many other tissues, not just the lining of the uterus, so you should have all your hormones tested by a wise practitioner, at least in the beginning, and then you should have the majority of the hormones that you’re on tested once a year, and if you have a uterus, you need to have a look-see in there, and the reason is, if you already have a breast cancer cell, being on hormones can make it grow.
So you want to have a baseline breast image to make sure as well as you can, they’re not 100%, they miss about 30% of women, but you need to know and rule out that you had a breast cancer so the doctor can work well with you and not make you worse, and the whole dictum of being a doc is to do no harm, so you want to make sure you have no breast cancer cell in there to do you no harm, but on the whole there isn’t anything in this world that’ll keep you healthier longer than your hormones being balanced and your gut being healthy.
The old family practice clinic I used to work at, I have this famous little water fountain story with Dr. Richard Wiseman who is in his mid 70s and is still running iron man marathons, and he said to me something I’ll never forget, and he’s now in Costa Rica. Hi Dr. Richard. Thanks for saying this story to me. He said, “If you take 100 people and they all got the memo about food and exercise, so they’re all doing the best they can, but half of them are on hormone replacement or working to have balanced hormones, and sometimes you can do without hormones, you could do it with herbs and food, but it’s not as powerful as hormones.” He said, “You could cherry pick them out. You could totally tell who, because the people who are on hormones stand taller, have more beautiful looking skin.” I’ve been-
Wendy Myers: Girl, you have it going on. You are looking good.
Lindsey Berkson: Thank you.
Wendy Myers: For those not watching the video, I mean, I know you’re in your near 70s correct?
Lindsey Berkson: I’m in my 60s.
Wendy Myers: Sorry.
Lindsey Berkson: That’s okay.
Wendy Myers: I thought you were nearing 70.
Lindsey Berkson: I’m getting closer to that decade.
Wendy Myers: Yes. You look fantastic. I definitely hope I look like you when I’m in my last 60s for sure.
Lindsey Berkson: Thank you, but between exercise and detox and being passionate about what you do, there’s so many different variables that make for a life well-lived, but I would not be … Until I figured out what was wrong with me, until I figured out I was a DES daughter, I had endured 15 major surgeries and lost seven and a half organs, couldn’t get out of bed. I was very ill and well-intentioned doctors, the specialist here in town, Dr. Blevins, the endocrinologist, put his hand on my shoulder and said, “If life is a book, the first few chapters of your book are done and you’ve lost all these organs, and now you’re in the last few chapters of your book, and you’re going to have to age gracefully,” and that was about 18 years ago when I was very ill and I didn’t know yet that I really understand how to reboot the damage done by the exposure to that drug in the womb.
Right about that time, I think it was longer than that, it was about 20 years ago, because I was writing Hormone Deception and that’s how I figured out that I was a DES daughter, because writing what lab animals went through from being exposed to endocrine disruptors, I had everything that those lab animals had, so I wrote away for my mother’s microfiche birth records and got them and discovered that I was a victim of the very phenomena I was writing a book on. It was stunning. Once I knew I had been exposed to DES in the womb, which now you’re talking about let’s detox this out of us, but that was in the womb, which is your most vulnerable period, I then searched the literature as to what might reconstitute my tumor suppressor genes that DES damaged, and I discovered a metabolite, and it had never been written as a regular script, and I asked one of my mentors to write that script for me, and that script, I have not grown any tumors again.
I was just growing tumors, growing cancers, and now once I knew the root cause, I could switch it around, and now in my older age, I have the youth that I never could enjoy in my younger age, even though I’d been doing everything right, I didn’t understand my own root cause, which is why I’m so passionate for my patients to get to root cause because once you know that, then you’ve got a chance.
Wendy Myers: Are you still seeing patients?
Lindsey Berkson: I do. I have my 22nd book coming out soon, which is a textbook on the gut, and that’s about an 800-page mammoth book, and so I’m working on that and I lecture quite a bit, and I have a radio show too, so I see a few patients a week that I get into a deep relationship with for a few months to help them figure out their mystery, and I consult with people all over the world if they want to bring their practitioner or doctor on the line, I love that, no extra cost so I can pass it forward, and I also have initiated a new medical program for medical doctors, nurse practitioners, or chiropractors, whoever wants it, where I do one on one training with everything that I’ve learned over the last 40 plus years and writing all those books etc to just share it and pass it forward.
Wendy Myers: That’s fantastic. That’s great.
Lindsey Berkson: One nurse practitioner signed up for her third time already.
Wendy Myers: I’m sure it’s new every time. Yeah. Let’s talk about why are hormones and intimacy the missing part of diet and exercise pillars of health?
Lindsey Berkson: Because we don’t realize that diet is all about sustaining our hormones. It really is. When the hormones snuggles on into a receptor for it to deliver its magical email that’s going to make you think a thought or remember a memory or to feel alive with a real upward lilt in your step, it was a hormone delivering the signal, and the signal is in a domain that must be like a bowl full of nutrients, so how you eat lets your hormones deliver their emails. It’s crazy. No one is taught this in school even though it’s in the literature. Really hormones depend on nutrients. They’re the missing fact, and true authentic human connection, if you and I were to go over to Starbucks, we get along so well and we have such overlapping passion, that if we were to go and chitchat with each other at Starbucks, we would just be making so much progesterone, for the next few days, we’d be sleeping like a baby, we’d be feeling amazing, because authentic human connection, nature intended to make your brain better.
The coming together of intimacy, nature intended these release of hormones to make your brain better. Why would nature do that? She never does anything without a purpose.
Wendy Myers: Survival mechanism.
Lindsey Berkson: To protect the next generation. Supposedly, a smarter parent will have a more stable home and then a healthier kid. It’s all about the human race being well and protected. Sweden is a country that we all think of with these gorgeous tall blonds who can make love whenever they want and stuff like that, but the Swedish government was really concerned because one out of every four Swedish families was breaking up before one of the kids was four or five years-old, and the nuclear family is part of the fabric and stability of a country, so they hired Gothenburg University to look into the matter and say, “Why is there so much separation, divorce, and kids are the ones suffering?”
Gothenburg University did a study that they published last year in Nordic Psychologica. It was incredible. They followed almost 60 couples over seven, eight years, to see who stayed together, who didn’t, and why, and the couples that stayed together, which remember, benefits the kids. If you’re really happy, not grit your teeth to powder, and stick together and be miserable-
Wendy Myers: I’ve done that, and then smartened up.
Lindsey Berkson: We all have. But the couples that had intimacy, really healthy intimacy, it was a huge component of having a healthy home, yet we’re never taught intimacy in school. We’re taught math and science. We’re not taught about authentic connection and what it releases in the human body. We’re not taught about kind diversity, so if you have an argument, you have a way to come together without it being painful and suffering. We’re not taught these basic mindful skills early on that actually release protective chemicals that keep a couple together and a family more stable, and when I saw that connect the dots, no one else has ever put that all together in that way, it blew my mind. I was like, “Oh my God, that’s why we make love long after we have babies.” Nature has this urge in us still to keep our brain going, yet today’s toxic environment is hurting authentic connection, hurting our brain tissues.
So I realized as much as I never thought I would want to write a book on intimacy, I had to do it, so I did.
Wendy Myers: Some of those hormones for intimacy are oxytocin, so why are you so excited about oxytocin and the love hormones?
Lindsey Berkson: I’m so excited about oxytocin. Oh my God. There is so much mesmerizing literature on oxytocin in the gastroenterology literature. I actually put together an entire show. I went over to Austin Regional Gastroenterology, and because I’ve been using oxytocin a lot in my inflammatory bowel disease patients, and once I figured this out, this connect the dots that I’ll tell you soon, and I brought in three cases with pre and post colonoscopies, and I said, “Two of these patients were told that they needed to get their colons removed in a week or two, and I used oxytocin, and now here’s their post colonoscopy, and they’re doing really well,” and one woman had no evidence of disease, and she’d already had her colon removed. It had been being scoped for 18 years, and her doctor said, “I can’t even believe it. You had no evidence that you even had disease.”
They were very nice to me, but they don’t really believe that hormones or food have anything to do with the gut, but they do, and what I’ve discovered in my research, which nobody else has put these dots together, but when you have 40 years, you’re used to seeing things from a higher vantage point, like a mountainside viewpoint of things, so when a woman goes through pregnancy, oxytocin is released to contract the uterus to help start the birth and to contract the ducts in the breast to release and let down the milk, but all that oxytocin still gets into the baby’s gut, and when the baby’s first born, it’s in shock to be out in the world, and the gut is very vulnerable, and the oxytocin from the mother goes in, and this has been proven now in rodent studies and in laboratory studies that the oxytocin goes into the baby from the mom where it’s doing those cool pregnancy things in the mom, and it’s protecting the gut lining from industry from first being born.
Oxytocin has a lot to do with protecting the crips at the bottom of the [inaudible 00:42:32] where brand new gut cells are formed every three to five days, and there’s studies out of Sweden where they have shown that there’s oxytocin receptors built to receive signals from oxytocin throughout most of the digestive tract, all except the gallbladder, and because of that, so this is about 10 years ago I started doing research in oxytocin, I’ve now used oxytocin replacement in about 800 patients, and many inflammatory bowel disease patients.
I just gave a talk at A4M with a group of gastroenterologists to doctors that are part of that two-year certification program for MDs, and they were just mesmerized by learning this new understanding of the intimate role of hormones, one of them being oxytocin. There’s an intimate role with estrogen, testosterone, progesterone, cortisol hormones. We’ve already known about thyroid hormone for a long time, but hormones line the gut, and if you’re on hormone replacement longer as you age, you tend to keep your gut healthier also.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, and so I had a question I like to ask all of my guests. What do you think is the most pressing health issue in the world today?
Lindsey Berkson: That is a great question. I’m going to defer to Harvard and the Huffington Post. They started a series of public forums, the first one was January 31st this year, and they opened up by saying the two biggest threats to humanity for a long time now have been nuclear war and global warming, but they were adding a third, and that third was hormone-altering chemicals, and a lot of the people on the panel, it was a forum put together by the Huffington Post and Harvard, the two Hs, and they were giving different talks every month on different aspects of how chemicals are damaging us and affecting the human race. It’s huge.
It really supports your and my career vision and our passion to try and help people, so I think that the toxic planet has made our bodies and our babies’ brains toxic, and detox must move mainstream, and I thank you so much for all your work. I’m so excited that there are other passionate people like you doing so many good things.
Wendy Myers: I applaud your work as well. You’re such a wealth of knowledge, and I love that you’re doing courses now so that people can not only read your books, but jump in and engage with you and actively learn and interact with you, because it is such important work to teach people about the importance of detoxification because you have to add it to your health regime if you want to feel good and if you want to be young and if you want to meet your health goals, period.
Lindsey Berkson: Period, but I am … The next course … I’m going to put a short course up on oxytocin. I’m going to do that soon. Thinkific is a platform and my goal is by 2019, to have maybe 15, 20 courses on there, looking at all these things in every which way, just to share all this information, because a lot of my colleagues are retiring or dying, and you never know how much time you have in your precious lifetime, so I just want to get as much … I feel great. I’m not saying I’m in any kind of problematic situation, but I feel the urgency to get a lot of this information out to pass it forward.
Wendy Myers: Yes. Why don’t you tell our listeners where they can find you and learn about your courses?
Lindsey Berkson: You can get me at my website, drlindseyberkson.com. There’s a consult section there. I’m going to be putting a better button. There’s a button right on the first page of my drlindseyberkson.com to go to my mentoring, to go to the Sexy Brain: Redefining Hormones course. I’m going to change those buttons, but they’re still there. You can get right to it, and on the sales page, once you click on that, there is a little webinar of me giving an introduction into that course if you want to watch that webinar. Also I have a blog. I have about 2,000 blog posts on my blog, so Berkson Blog is really active. I just did one yesterday on studies from McMaster University showing that both forms of tricyclic and SSRI antidepressants reduce life. They cause premature mortality from all causes except for heart disease patients, so I’m always looking at the literature and sharing things and connecting the dots, and if you want to reach me as a patient, you can go to my consult section on Dr. Lindsey.
I don’t have the phone number that I usually give out available, but you can call 512-507-3279, and I think that’s about … And then my radio show. I forgot that. Dr. Berkson’s Best Health Radio, which you have been on twice. You were so great, I had to have you back again really rapidly because I just loved having you on the show, so it’s great to have a show because you learn so much from your guests, and there’s so many amazing people looking at life in such unique ways. It’s so great to expand your own vision because knowledge truly is power.
Wendy Myers: Absolutely, and we’re here to give you that power. So keep listening. Thank you so much for tuning into the show, and thank you so much, Dr. Berkson.
Lindsey Berkson: Bye.
