226. Unlocking Optimal Health: Addressing Inflammation and Metabolic Imbalance in Chronic Disease - Dr. Mark Richards

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This is happiness solved with America's happiness. Coach Sandee Sgarlata.

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Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining me today. I'm so happy you're here. I'm Sandee Sgarlata. I was born in Virginia and raised in the Baltimore Annapolis area and had very humble and tragic beginnings. And as a result, my life was a hot mess.

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Thankfully, 33 years ago, I got my act together and since that time, I have dedicated my life to serving others and raising awareness that no matter what you've been through, you can choose happiness and live the life of your dreams. Happiness Solved is dedicated to giving you content that is empowering, motivational, inspirational, and of course, a dose of happiness. It's my way to give back to the world and share other people's stories. This thing called life can be challenging, and my guests share their amazing stories, wisdom, and life lessons that demonstrate anyone can choose happiness. You see, happiness is a choice, and the choice is yours.

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Today's episode is amazing and I am so grateful for you. Thank you for listening and don't forget to leave a review and follow me on social media at coach. Sandee Sgarlata. Enjoy the show.

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Dr. Mark Richards, such a great pleasure to have you, my friend. How are you today? I'm great, Sandy. How are you?

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I'm doing great. I always feel funny because I met you in a personal occasion. We were at a wine spectator event. And was it Los Angeles? I think it was Los Angeles when I first met you.

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It may have been Los Angeles or New York, I can't remember. It was one of the two. It was one of the two. And I know for a few years you were talking to me about your hormone replacement therapy and I was a little resistant and then menopause started to strike me and I was miserable. And you got me into the office and I think it's been, what, eight years now?

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I think so. Life changing. And we're going to talk all about that just to give the audience a little bit of background. Dr. Mark Richards, you are a plastic surgeon, a very highly rated plastic surgeon in the DC.

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Metro area. You went to Yale. You have an interesting backstory, but I love that. And I don't even think I knew this about you, that for years you were a physician consultant to the White House. That's pretty cool.

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It was pretty because, you know, that's kind of like our American royalty. Oh, wow, you worked in the White House. How cool, right? Because I've lived in the DC. Metro area my entire life and I've never been inside the White House.

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Anyway, it was honor and it was really a cool ten years where I was a consultant to the White House and first family. I had to have you on my podcast to really learn more about you professionally, because we don't talk about that when we get together socially. You don't really talk business too much. So I was reading your book, and I don't even think I knew the backstory and how this book came about, but can you share your story with the audience? Because it's pretty fascinating how this all came full circle for you.

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Sure. So my board certification is in plastic surgery, and I had invented some procedures and different ways of looking at things in plastic surgery, and I was lecturing internationally and writing papers and so on. And about 2005, I was in Paris giving lectures and having board discussions with like 10,000 doctors were in attendance. And the director of the Paris conference decided that he wanted me, as the resident science geek, to go to a half day antiaging course before the conference started to determine if it was something he should add the following year. I was a little resistant.

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Know, who wants to waste a half day in Paris at an anti aging conference where most of the anti aging things are snake oil salesmen, basically, with very little science that's slowly changing, I'm happy to say. But at the time, it really was mostly just people having a product, wanting to sell it. So I went to the conference, and to make a very long story short, out of the whole half day, there were two people there that by accident changed my life. They started talking about symptoms people were having, whether it was before menopause after menopause, whether it was male before 40, after 50. And there was a common thread in all these symptoms.

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It was the same in both sexes. And they said they didn't really understand why and what was going on, but they found that if they took them off certain drugs, like their statin drugs, or put them on diet and exercise programs, that at the end of the day, they had to put them all on testosterone. And that just made no sense to me, because we spent a whole ten minutes in medical school on testosterone. So it really triggered something for two reasons. One, they're talking about a hormone that they call the most prevalent hormone in both men and women their entire life, the most abundant hormone.

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And I had only spent ten minutes on it in med school. And number two, I was having all the symptoms they were talking about. So when I thought, okay, I got to look into this more. So that's when I came back and spent literally thousands and thousands of hours looking into the science and found out that this therapy had been used in the US since 1938. It's the only way to get a sustained, steady state level of testosterone, and it's called Pellet therapy.

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I call it butt pills. Butt? Pellets. Butt pills. You're right.

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It doesn't go in the butt. It goes into right underneath the skin, into the fat of the butt. Right. Lasts about three months in women, and the Pellets are bigger in men, they go into the love handle area, and they last four months. Yeah, that was just a term of endearment that I started using with my husband.

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And I'm like he's like, Where are you going? I'm like, I'm going to get my butt pills in today. Okay, you're not the only one that calls them that, let me tell you. But it's life changing. But here's the thing that's really interesting and what I really want to talk about, because health is such a huge problem in this country, and it really became a huge problem when the pandemic hit, because most of the Americans that were affected were not only the elderly, but those that had a lot of these diseases that you talk about.

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So you say that. What is it?

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Looking at your statistics here, it's like, what? Like half of the country is severely ill with some sort of chronic disease? It is. And you're right, Sandy. So when I came back and started doing this research, three things struck me, which led to this book, nobody Wants You Healthy she Can Talk about in a bit.

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But the three things were one, there's an epidemic of chronic disease. Well over 60% of Americans have chronic disease. It's massive and probably even higher than that.

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And the question was why? What was going on, and what's the basis of chronic disease? So the basis of these chronic diseases are really two things. One is inflammation, and the second one is metabolic imbalance. So how come we're all inflamed and have these metabolic imbalances that lead to diabetes and obesity?

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Inflammation leads to heart disease and strokes, breast cancer, prostate cancer, dementia, mood disorders, anxiety disorders, depression. These are all inflammatory diseases. And in reading about it, the cause of this is mostly environmental. Certainly a lot of it's in the chemicals that are in our food and the way things are being processed now. But the thing that's affecting the whole population of the globe are plastics.

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You see, in 1965, remember the movie The Graduate where Benjamin is in the pool at his graduation from Harvard, and he steps out because the scuba tank ran out of air, and his father's friend puts his hand on his shoulder, said, son, I got to tell you one word plastics. That's where you need to go to make your fortune, is plastics. Well, the problem with plastics is to make a plastic functional so that you could have, like, plastic syringes, plastic IV bags, plastic tubing instead of glass syringes, glass bottles of IV fluid and rubber tubing is a chemical called phthalates. And phthalates, we didn't know it at the time, but phthalates are the most powerful hormone disrupting chemicals we've ever manufactured in bulk. We manufacture so much phthalates now that we manufacture over 200 times the toxic dose for every man, woman, child on the planet annually.

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That's astounding. It's astounding. So what do the plastics do? Well, the phthalates end up suppressing your most abundant hormone. Well, what's the most abundant hormone in men and women their entire life?

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And this will come a shock to 98% of the doctors that happen to watch this show. The most abundant hormone in men and women every day of your life is testosterone. And I think that's a misnomer, because a lot of people think testosterone is for men and progesterone estrogen is for women. Exactly. And because of that, they're treating women grossly improperly and increasing their diseases.

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And yet women are the ones making health care decisions. Women's are the consumers of medical care. So, of course, when you're trying to sell estrogen preparations or things for chronic disease, you don't really want to prevent it. We'll get into that in a little bit. But when you reduce testosterone, not only are you increasing inflammation so that you get plaques again, heart attack, strokes, you're getting brain inflammation.

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So you get those brain diseases and dementia, but you're also not making another hormone called IGF One that testosterone is responsible for. And IGF One is the hormone that makes you sensitive to insulin. So when you can't make IGF One, you become diabetic. So diabetes is a fantastic disease if you're trying to make money, because each diabetic spends another $7,000 a year more than a nondiabetic on medications and pharmaceutical drugs. So that was the first thing that I noticed, was that, okay, this environmental chemical is causing our testosterone levels of men and women today to be more than 65%, 60, 65% lower than they were in 1970.

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When people look at the labs and the poor doctors are looking at the labs that they get if they ever even order testosterone levels, and they say, oh, you're in the range. But the range that the lab has is the average of the population that they're testing that year, and then two standard deviations. So if we're already 60% lower than we were in 1970, and then you're going two standard deviations, the ranges in the labs are well below the level of severe deficiency in every international study made.

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It just doesn't make sense, right. So why is this all going on? Well, it goes on because 90% of the $1.4 trillion that the pharmaceutical industry makes globally every year comes from treating but never preventing or curing chronic disease. Right. So who controls medical education?

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Why did I only spend ten minutes on testosterone in med school? Well, it's the people that fund the journals. It's the people that fund the drug studies. It's the people that fund the science research. And who are those people?

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Those people are the same people that are trying to sell you drugs. It's a pharmaceutical industry because it's a business. Because it's a business. Right. And you got to follow the money, people.

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You have to follow the money because their legal responsibility is not to the doctors, and it's not to the patients, and it's not to the government. Agencies that supposedly regulate them, their responsibility, their fiduciary responsibility, is to their shareholders. So promoting something that would decrease their sales and decrease their revenues directly contradicts what their legal responsibility is.

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We saw humanity at its worst and at its finest. I think you kind of had both of it during the pandemic, and yet most of the issues that people were having complete riots over, and I don't talk politics on the show at all. However, when it comes to people's health, why aren't people outraged over these types of things? Because are they putting too much trust and faith in their doctors? I mean, we've heard before, you have to take control of your own health, and that means being an advocate for yourself when you're talking to your doctors.

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And it means educating yourself, educating yourself. And that's difficult. That requires discipline. That requires not turning on your phone and looking at Instagram videos. It requires not turning on the TV and watching the latest series.

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It requires doing some reading.

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Right. Before I get into that, let me say that the pandemic was very beneficial for me, because when they do the shutdown and I was still giving testosterone Pellets during the shutdown because testosterone controls inflammation and COVID killed you by inflammation. Right. So there was an Italian German study that showed that men with low testosterone had a nine times higher rate of death and ICU admissions compared to men with high testosterone. So there was no way I wasn't going to continue my testosterone patients on testosterone Pellets during the pandemic because it was probably one thing that was going to really keep them out of the ICU in the hospital.

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So I felt a moral obligation and ethical obligation to continue doing that. Of course, everything else was shut down. So I wasn't doing facelifts. I wasn't doing tummy tucks. I wasn't doing breasts.

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I wasn't doing eyelids and noses. I wasn't doing any of that stuff or filler or Botox or my typical aesthetic plastic surgery practice. So it gave me four, five, six extra hours a day. And voila. People have been asking me, how come my doctor doesn't tell me about testosterone Pellets?

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And the title of the book is, Nobody Wants You Healthy achieving Better Health by Avoiding the Corruptions in Modern Medical Science. And that gets back to why it's corrupt. Now, to your question of why people were not outraged. A lot of people were outraged. I would say probably 30% of my patients at the time believed what the government was saying.

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Probably 80% took the vaccination, 90%, even though a majority of those understood that it was not going to stop them from getting the disease. It wasn't going to stop them from spreading the disease. And it carried significant risks, maybe a 1% risk, but it carried significant risk of illness, injury, even potentially death. But they did it because they couldn't work. They couldn't pay their mortgage, they couldn't buy food.

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They couldn't do anything if they didn't take the vaccine. And that made a lot of people very angry, and people are still very angry today. And then at first, I was sort of believing that the people in charge, the people we elect, don't have any science background. A lot of them don't have any economics background, as we can tell, but they certainly don't have any science background either. And so they had to depend on their administrative appointees.

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Sadly, a lot of the administrative appointees had very poor understanding of science, so that they were easily manipulated by people who could make money off of a pandemic and disease. So even some of my friends high up in different health agencies were being fed things that weren't true. I knew they weren't true because I'm an avid reader and I look at data from countries all over the world, particularly countries where they can't manipulate the data as easily as they can. In a powerful country like the united States, and there were some big red flags. But you have 30% of the people, and many of those are that 30% are the people that are really running the country, running different cities, counties that buy wholeheartedly into whatever power says.

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That's the correct answer. And it's a hard battle. I mean, I think that's a very big reason why the country is so divided now, because you have the people that are willing to follow the political leadership to the ends of the earth and do things that may be horrible to other people. And then you have the population that doesn't trust the political leadership and doesn't trust the appointed health leaders in the country and wants to look at things for themselves, and they're furious that they're being forced to do things that they consider unhealthy and dangerous. And there needs to be a discussion, there needs to be a big airing of this because it's a division that extends into many other aspects of our lives.

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And we need to heal the country.

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Not to get into politics, but we need to heal because people don't understand. And so the whole impetus of this book was to tell people, look, this is what happened to me. I was highly educated. I was highly regarded. I wrote papers.

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I was invited to give keynote speeches around the world. And yet I had no idea about the most fundamental hormone, about how it prevents chronic disease, about how if you let it get low, you're going to get ill and disabled and no longer productive, you're going to get divorced, you're going to have poor relationships, you're going to have brain fog at work. You're just going to fail in every aspect of your life, with your family, with your work, and with your health. And I thought it was important that, look, this is an environmental toxin. This is why we're so infertile.

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A woman came out with a book about a year before called, I think, Countdown, and it was about the decreasing fertility rates and decreasing sperm counts due to phthalates. So she got one big part of the phthalate poisoning, but unfortunately, she never touched on the drop in testosterone. So phthalates can go across the placenta. So when you're looking at animals that are raised in high phthalate environments, the offspring act weird. There's much higher rates of, like, add a male or female offspring of animal in a high phthalate environment will have a much higher percentage that don't express the sexual orientation of that offspring.

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Of course, that has serious yeah, right. So the male will not act like a male and the female won't act like a female and possums, for example. And that affects social order as well as fertility. And I'm not I think you can expand it to some, not all of the hysteria about transgenderism going on today, but there is something different in children today. When you were talking about that with animals, that popped into my head as a curiosity.

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Is that why today we have more children and young adults identifying in a different way than biologically? I don't even know the politically correct way to talk about this, to be honest. No, I think, again, it's sort of like spaghetti and the sauce all mixed together. So a lot of this is Fatish and attention grabbing. Sort of like back when I was in high school or college, cutting was a big thing and 60% of the girls in a high school class were cutting themselves.

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So there's that part to it. But why take this really unusual and bizarre thing and make it fadish if there is not some underlying issue? And I don't think that these children have any higher incidence of transgender than they did back in 1970 or 80 or 90, when about one out of 3000 people, if you did a Pet scan on their brain and you found that, okay, one out of 3000 men were wired as female. And there's some interesting things about that because the fetal brain is female until at some point during the second trimester, where a chain of events end up with histamine release on these little cells called microglia, which rearrange your neurons. And there's some areas of the brain that get changed if you're male.

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Otherwise we're all female. So of the one in 3000, only a small percent wanted to live as a female. They were happy with the way they were. Maybe their sexual orientation was different, but they were happy living in a male body.

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And then a small percent wanted to live as a female, but didn't want to have any surgery. And then an extremely tiny percent wanted to have surgery, which is a really big deal and not a topic for this conversation. So it was a very tiny part of that. I think what's really going on now is that it's not that you are the opposite sex, it's that you aren't ASEX interesting. And I think phthalates play a big role in that.

00:23:28
So if you're having teenage years are very difficult anyway, and you're trying to figure out your sexuality, what are these things that are growing? What are these feelings I'm having? Am I attracted to males, females? Both? What's going on?

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It's all very confusing, and it's a time of experimentation, and they need to be supported and nurtured because it's been going on for hundreds of thousands of years, right? Exactly. It's not something that just happened yesterday or last week. Exactly. So they just need to be supported and they figure it out.

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And usually by the age of 21, 24, people figure out what they want and who they are and so on and so forth. And that really is the normal progression. But when you have your brain's even hazier and you really don't know because you've had miswiring from phthalates, just like Add increases with phthalate exposure. So you're really making teenage years even more difficult than normal. Unfortunately, the true response would be to nurture the children more and allow them to safely explore without doing anything permanent that they would regret later.

00:24:46
And this is the approach that actually the northern European countries I didn't really mean to go on to it this long in our talk, but the northern European countries are now banning hormone and transgender surgery until over 21 because they realized there was just this massive regret by 24 where majority of them were suicidal. And it obviously was not helping the situation at all. So they just recently banned that. And that's a reasonable approach to take. But it's just nurturing.

00:25:20
You have to replace what's missing, and what's missing is this testosterone hormone. So we should probably get back to. What and I want to get back to that experiencing, but real quick. Real quick, because you talk about the thiates, is that correct? Am I saying it correctly?

00:25:37
The thiaates, the plastic phthalates. Phthalates. What can people do to minimize their exposure to thoxiates? Well, you can reduce your exposure to phthalates. I don't even think it's possible to minimize your exposure to phthalates when they're doing micro filtering of people's blood.

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80% of people's blood has microscopic plastic in it. That's how prevalent it is, because it can go into your lungs, get into the tiny vessels in your avali, the little lung air sacs, and it can go across, and it can get into your bloodstream. 98% of top water in the US has plastics and therefore phthalates in it. You can filter it out. You can use a whole house filter.

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You can use something like a zero filter, other filters, maybe the Brita filter, to take phthalates out of your drinking water. You can stop drinking water out of plastic containers. You can stop storing your food in plastic containers, particularly if there's an oil in it. You can stop cooking in anything that's plastic you can try to stay away from all processed foods because you can start looking for phthalate free, deodorant, phthalate free makeup. But phthalates make things flow smoothly.

00:26:59
So not only is it in your lipstick or your sunblock or your shampoo, but it's also in concrete to make it flow easier. It's just impossible to avoid phthalates completely. When you look at the fish going into the Chesapeake Bay, three of the river tributaries have rockfish or bass in which 60% are intersects. 60% of the fish are hermaphrodite because of the phthalates in the riverbeds that are leaching out, probably from plastic facial beads and other things that got into the river. So 60% are hermaphrodite fish.

00:27:39
They can't reproduce. It's absolutely stunning. And people don't know this.

00:27:48
So, yes, you can do things to reduce it, and I encourage everybody to do everything to reduce it. We have to find a substitute for phthalates. We can no longer manufacture this amount of phthalates. It's in your vinyl seats, in your car. It's just everywhere.

00:28:05
And phthalates, not only can they be ingested and get in your system, but you can put them on your skin and it goes through your skin, or you can inhale them and it gets absorbed. So they're everywhere. Wow. The second thing is crazy, but yeah, go ahead. It is crazy.

00:28:25
If people only understood, there would be a massive worldwide revolution killing us. It's killing our children, it's killing our fertility. It's making us not productive. It's destroying the planet. Well, it is.

00:28:38
It's destroying the other animals too. And it's making us dumber, sicker, more aggressive, and it's not good for the survival of the human race. This is by far the biggest threat that all life form on the planet face. It's not whether the temperature is going up or down, because we can all adapt to that. Whether it goes up or down.

00:29:08
It's not the 0.4% of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. It's the poisoning of our environment and the effect that it has on the hormonal systems. So just briefly, what's a hormone? So when there were little single cellular organisms billions of years ago, when that was the only life form on the planet, things were fine. Everything was inside one cell.

00:29:34
You could have your chemical reactions, the cells would divide and that would be fine. But once you started having multiple cells creating organisms, they had to communicate with each other. And the only way they can communicate with each other is if they secrete something, which we call a hormone that would influence other cells behaviors that were part of the same unit. You with me? Yeah, I'm with you.

00:30:00
That's really what a hormone is. And of course, evolutionarily. We think that the oldest hormone was a testosterone like hormone, which is why still it's the most abundant hormone in most all life forms today. Now, granted, my testosterone and a dog's testosterone may be a little bit different, but your testosterone and my testosterone. We're the same species, we're the same golden retriever.

00:30:21
It's identical, right? And so since this hormone that controls metabolism, inflammation, is responsible, its deficiencies responsible for most chronic diseases, is being suppressed by phthalates. One of the things we can do, since we can't completely eliminate our absorption of phthalates, is to replace the testosterone. And when you looked at things like menopause, which you talked about earlier in the show, what's menopause? Well, menopause now occurs while you're still fertile.

00:30:52
I have plenty of patients in their 30s who have menopausal signs and symptoms. They may not have hot flashes and they may not have vaginal dryness, but they have all the other signs and symptoms of not sleeping well, gaining weight around the middle, being depressed, being irritable, feeling weak, feeling sad, feeling like their life is not good, arguing with, fighting with the kids, fighting with their husband. We think, oh, that's just what happens. It's not really what happens, because when I give those women in their 30s testosterone, because their testosterone is obviously low and measurably low, their life gets better. They're back working out.

00:31:41
They're not fighting with their husband, they're not fighting with their kids. Life is much better. They're much happier. If they had been put on antidepressants for these symptoms, most of them get off it. If they've been depressed in their teens and 20s, then no, they're not going to get off it because that's a biochemical issue.

00:31:54
But if it's a hormonal issue, then they come off it. And then certainly as you get older, your testosterone level drops even more. So, for example, in females, by the time they're 40, their testosterone level is less than half of what it was at 21. Now, that was bad. And back in, the women would go through this sort of changes.

00:32:18
Some of them would, some of them wouldn't in their fifty s and so on. But now, at 21, you're already 60% lower than you were in 1970. So now you're dropping another 50% by 40. So now you're 30% of what you would have been at a healthy level. So that's why now there's fertile women having these menopausal symptoms.

00:32:42
As an aside, we're talking about estrogen. And I train hundreds of OBGYN doctors who at first think I'm very maybe not informed, don't know as much as they do, maybe that they don't quite believe me. But their patients are demanding hormone Pellet therapy, testosterone Pellet therapy. So I come to my course and they're shocked to find out that we've known since 2000 that 100% of the estrogen inside your cells, or my cells, is made from testosterone inside the cell. Estrogen in your bloodstream doesn't cross into your cells.

00:33:21
So when your bones get weak, you get osteopenia. Osteoporosis. You can give you all the estrogen you want in your blood. It's not going to do a darn thing. But if you give testosterone, then your bones can make estrogen.

00:33:31
And you can start saving and preserving and even growing bone mass again. There is no point in giving estrogen pellets because all estrogen does in the blood is stay in the blood and stimulate external receptors. So it stimulates your breast, which is not what you really want to be stimulating, and it stimulates your uterine lining, which isn't what you really want to be stimulating. It can get into the cerebral spinal fluid and improve hot flashes. That's the only thing that estrogen in the blood can do.

00:34:05
But that's not the way you were designed when you were eight. You weren't having hot flashes. The testosterone was getting into your brain and it was being converted into estrogen, just like in my brain. Converted into estrogen. And then it prevents you from having hot flashes.

00:34:19
So this whole estrogen based industry is bad news. And there's some studies that show that giving estrogen increases dementia and Alzheimer's. It shows some studies show that increases the friability or liquid aspect of plaques so that it increases strokes. So it's not at all a hormone that we should be replacing because it's made from testosterone inside the cells. It's crazy.

00:34:53
People think, oh, I need it. No, you don't need it. That's a myth. And most of these doctors were taught this way and believe it, even though in 1985, for example, there was a large study done. Well, it wasn't that large, but it was a great study done, called a double blind crossover study.

00:35:09
And a double blind crossover study means the patient doesn't know what they're getting, the doctor doesn't know which drug they're giving, and then about halfway through, they flip the protocol. So if you got A, you got B drug, and if you got C drug, originally you got D drug. And then you just tally up the results at the end, you break the code and everybody finds out what ABC and D were. So this study was done 1985. It was in a large OBGYN group that was doing a lot of hysterectomies where they're taking out ovaries.

00:35:38
And so therefore you knew that it was automatic menopause. Right, because the ovaries were in the bucket and they gave people ABC and D. And one of them was testosterone alone. One of them was estrogen alone. One of them was a mixture, and one of them was a placebo, like a sugar patch.

00:35:59
So at the end of the study, the absolute best treatment for women once their ovaries removed were was testosterone alone. And the higher the dosage, the better they did. The absolute worst treatment was tied between the placebo and estrogen alone. This is in 1985. Wow.

00:36:20
The residents that were trained after that were still taught by the residency program, which is of course, in part funded by their medical society, which is funded by the pharmaceutical industry. They were taught to give Premarine, which is estrogen, a horse estrogen substitute. They were taught to do that even though this study showed that it was as good as placebo, basically all it would do was stop hot flashes. All the other symptoms would be raging. They see this study when they come to my course, and they're like, oh, my God.

00:36:55
And they have this look of horror on their face because they realized they had been treating their patients wrong for decades. Exactly. And you know what? They feel terrible. Of course they do, because people become doctors to serve others and to help people.

00:37:10
It's part of who you are and in your fabric. So I remember when I first started getting the treatment from you, the hormone replacement pellets, I don't even know how many people are like, oh, aren't you worried about increased risks of cancer? Because I think that it's just been ingrained in society for so long that, oh, you don't want to do hormone replacement therapy. It's going to make you worse. And I'm here to say, eight years later, it's the best thing I ever did.

00:37:44
And not only has and it's interesting. And I know I've talked to you about this before, that if I come in late for the treatment because you need to come in every three months and life happens. And sometimes I need to call your office after we get off this and schedule my next appointment. As a matter of fact, But I noticed that the symptoms start coming back. And what happened for me that I know a lot of women are going to be very interested in is that I was extremely thin my entire life.

00:38:16
Of course, I've been an athlete my entire life, so part of it was because I'm so active. And I think genetics play into that. As I started going into my really from the early 40s up until I started the treatment, I couldn't lose weight no matter what I did. It didn't matter what I did, I could not lose weight. And I ended up, after starting the pellets, lost 25 pounds.

00:38:40
And I've kept it off the entire time.

00:38:45
That right there is like, if for any reason I don't have hot flashes, I've gone through menopause. I don't have any symptoms. I'm happier. Because the hormones do play a huge role on your mood, right? And on testosterone, everything works.

00:39:03
It works like it did when you were in your 20s.

00:39:07
So you hit a couple of important points. Commonly, people will be, oh, no, testosterone that'll cause cancer. Let's look at the science again. In this book, I have a chapter on breast cancer, a chapter on prostate cancer, a chapter on mood disorders, a chapter on everything with the science references for the people that are really geeky like me and want to look up the science articles to show that everything I said was true. So another reason that it's both for the public this book is for the public, and it's for doctors.

00:39:36
So let's look at breast cancer. I did a podcast on my website, which is nobody wantsyouhealthy.com that's pretty easy to remember. And I did a podcast with Rebecca Glaser, dr. Glaser worldwide, you know, hundreds of articles she's written, lectures around breast cancer surgeon, and now all she does is hormone relation to breast cancer. She did a ten year study with testosterone Pellets and found that it reduced even in women that only took the Pellets once a year.

00:40:07
And you're supposed to have it four times a year, but even once a year reduced breast cancer, risk the incidence by 40%. On the patients that were doing it at least three times a year, they were at a 60% or higher reduction in the rate of breast cancer. All the studies, thousands of studies show that testosterone inhibits breast cancer cell growth when you study it. And then you can add other things to it, like anastrozole with the Pellets, which is a whole other topic we can get into later. But the metabolism you're talking about.

00:40:44
So testosterone increases adiponectin. So you can start using your fat as a calorie source again, as opposed to storing all your calories as fat, you can start using the fat. And to the last point that you sort of alluded to is, yeah, you notice it when you stop taking it. Right? And so people will feel great, feel great, and after a couple of years, they're like, oh, I feel great.

00:41:07
I think I'm good now. I don't need it anymore. And believe me, within two months of stopping being late, they are like, when can I have the next appointment? Yes. This is not a cure.

00:41:20
I wish it was a cure, but I can't cure the population because we're poisoned. That's right. So people will ask me, well, when should I stop the therapy? And my smart ass answer, which is also my true answer, is, as soon as you're ready to feel as lousy as you did when you started the program. That's right.

00:41:42
And they look at me quizzically, and I said, yes. It's like taking thyroid hormone. If your thyroid doesn't work, you take thyroid hormone every day. That thyroid hormone is not going to make your thyroid work any better. Your thyroid shot.

00:41:53
Right. So you have to take it every day. So I have a 98 year old on testosterone Pellets, and she is dysfunctional without it. But when she's on it, she lives independently, she falls, she doesn't break her hip, she sleeps well, she's socially interactive, her mind is good. It makes her healthy, happy, functional, productive.

00:42:19
Wow.

00:42:25
I don't even know what else to say, because you've covered so much data that if people don't get this, then you don't care about yourself enough to really take control of your own health. Yeah. And people need to. I've had men in their 20s come in and their testosterone let's just say this. So in the US, the doctors typically have been studying testosterone in men because they were still miseducated that testosterone is for men and estrogens for women.

00:43:03
So in the US, we've looking at men and we know that when you're below 300, which is a severe deficiency, regardless of what the lab range says, your risk of death from all causes is between 60% higher and double over the next five years, depending on your age. If you are 450 or lower, that's a severe deficiency. Your risk of death is 20% higher to 40% higher, depending on your age. The American clinics of cardiology show if you're a man and you're below 550, your risk of heart attack is 30% higher over the next five years compared to men with testosterone. So above 550, you have the lab ranges that say somewhere between 188 hundred is good.

00:43:47
Well, basically, as far as I'm concerned, everything below 550, you should get treated. So that's weird then in Germany, where they're more advanced about studying about testosterone in women because it is the most abundant hormone, they found that 24 is the cut off for severe deficiency. Well, I get lab sheets that say between zero and 80 are the normal levels in a woman, zero of your most abundant hormone, the one that controls inflammation and prevents chronic disease? Zero. Really?

00:44:20
So 24 is a cut off for severe, which is a 40% to 100% increase in death over the next five years. And about 34 is the moderate deficiency in females. So once they get below 34, they're symptomatic. When they get below 24, they become very symptomatic. I get women ask me, well, what can I do to increase my testosterone?

00:44:45
Just without taking anything. And one way to do that, or the only way I've seen them be able to do that is by lifting weights. If they really get into lifting weights in the gym and do it three, four times a week, five times a week, they can improve their testosterone. The problem is that only a small percent of them will actually be able to get it to a level where they are healthy and no longer have symptoms. Yeah, because you have to do a.

00:45:15
They'Re being poisoned by the phthalates. Right. So they're being poisoned by the phthalates so you can't make the testosterone. So you're doing the right thing and you will feel better lifting weights. So I highly encourage all of my patients to do it.

00:45:26
But to get rid of all your menopausal symptoms is not going to be what the majority experience with lifting weights, although they will feel better. So that's not a bad thing they should be doing, for sure. Mark, we could talk for hours. Definitely want to have you on again. We can continue this conversation.

00:45:48
Is there anything else, anything else you want to say to the audience that you haven't said before? We close, there's a lot of things, but we'll save it for another time. I encourage them to please support me and get this book, Nobody Wants You Healthy. And you can find it at Nobody Wantsyourhealthy.com it's sold on Amazon. And the first couple chapters are sort of my personal journey and how this happened and how it affected me personally, because many advances in medicine were started by personal experience, and then it goes into the different diseases and how phthalates affect the environment and how phthalates affect humans.

00:46:28
And then the last chapter is called Why Nobody Wants You Healthy. And it helps people understand why your regular doctor doesn't know about this, was never taught about this, why there's a lot of rumors about how this therapy is bad when in fact it's life saving, because people get angry. They're like, wow, I've been on this for two years. My life has changed, my marriage is better, my kids are happier, I'm getting promotions at work, I'm losing body fat, my sex life is off the know. Why is my doctor not doing this?

00:47:02
And so the last chapter, Why Nobody Wants You Healthy, explains that this really isn't a conspiracy. It's sort of just the way that we had set up corporate America and then the administrative state, and the money flows. And it objectively starts back in the 18 hundreds with the resistance to hand washing before doing exams and surgery to the equally absurd resistance to curative therapies that we're experiencing from pharmaceutical companies with their people at the FDA that they fund with the politicians, where Pharma is the largest lobbying group in the country by a factor of two over the next. So there's a lot of money flow and a lot of ego and a lot of control of funding, of research and manipulation of the governing laws and regulatory bodies. So it has everything in there from soup to nuts, and hopefully your audience will enjoy it.

00:48:09
And I look forward to being on again. Yes, absolutely. Thank you so much, Mark, for joining me today. Thank you to the audience and get his book, Nobody Wants You Healthy. It'll all be in the show notes.

00:48:37
Thank you so much for joining me. And as always, I hope that you and your family are healthy and safe and that you're live are filled with peace, joy, and happiness. Take care, everyone.