Podcast 046: Magnesium and Iodine for Hormone Health

Martin Pytela and his long-time co-host Scott Paton once again deliver an engaging, educational podcast episode. The topic is Hormonal System working on understanding the underlying issues of many chronic health problems.

Throughout the discussion, Martin and Scott touch on two important methods you can use to balance hormones and restore proper cellular health. Cellular health is so important because each cell contains its own life force which combines with others to produce a full-fledged life form. If the cells aren’t communicating properly with each other, or if they are not performing their intended function, it’s no wonder you are not feeling  right!

One of the better ways to reassert proper cellular health is with Magnesium Supplementation. Known to soothe the nervous system, it provides deep rest and produces amino acids which are a very important part of the chemical processes which are going on at all times throughout your body.

The next solution is no secret to those who live near the ocean. Kelp and Seeweed, rich in iodine, have been prized by coastal peoples for millennia. Natives were known to trade with inland tribes, and in return for their kelp, the most prized possessions of the inlanders. It should come at no surprise then that Kelp and Seaweed have tremendous healing powers. Modern scientific analysis is showing us that edible seaweed leads to longer lasting life and less mineral depletion throughout the bloodstream.

Podcast 046: Magnesium and Iodine for Hormone Health

Scott Paton: Welcome back everybody. You are listening to the Life Enthusiast Co-op podcast, restoring vitality to you and to the planet. I am your co-host Scott Paton along with Martin Pytela. Hey Martin, how are you doing today?

Martin Pytela: Doing good Scott. How about you?

Scott Paton: Excellent. Excellent. So, for the last five weeks we have been talking about detoxifying, inflammation, malnutrition, metabolism, inflammation – I think I said that before, oxidative stress, and you know basically the five main areas where people have problems and cause illness and it occurred to me that another area that sometimes people have problems with is in the area of hormones. I know, particularly as my mum got older and went through menopause, she had a lot of problems with her hormones and I thought it would be kind of an interesting continuation of our previous discussions.

Martin Pytela: Certainly so, hormones are the next layer up. Their function is related to the state of everything else. If you are dealing with toxicity or malnutrition or whatever, if your body is not running correctly, it will be out of balance hormonally and it will not produce them correctly.

Scott Paton: So, when we are talking about hormones, like what generates them, where do they come from like… I don’t think.

Martin Pytela: It is a complicated situation. The endocrine system consists of many glands. The thyroid, the adrenals, it’s all controlled from the pineal gland, which controls the pituitary gland, which then controls all of the other ones. You know we have an article on the website in the Health Concerns about Hormonal System and there is an article called Endocrine System, Hormones and Glands which people would be well advised to go take a look at. There’s a cool picture on that page and it explains how the pituitary gland is dealing with stuff and how the hypothalamus works and all of that. All of the bits and pieces that interact. The biggest issues for people are typically the thyroid gland, which deals with the overall metabolism and the sexual glands, which would be ovaries for women and testicles for men and then the adrenals. The adrenals are mostly involved in the stress kind of cycle of the human existence. Adrenals produce cortisol, epinephrine and norepinephrine. These are the fight or flight response hormones. Adrenals also put out aldosterone, which deals with the osmotic balance and then cortisol, which deals with the glucose synthesis. Cortisol is the hormone that deals with how energetic you feel or don’t feel and if you are stressed a lot, you end up with too much cortisol, which causes your body to breakdown and age quickly and…

Scott Paton: This is the reason why we should be making sure we spend some time relaxing and mediating and getting into that sort of state of relaxation.

Martin Pytela: Actually, you are right. That’s exactly how you deal with it. Yes. You need to both exercise hard to get the adrenalin worked off and then you need to [laughs] funny way to put it, you need to relax hard.

Scott Paton: [laughs] Right.

Martin Pytela: As I said, with commitment. Like fully relax as opposed to just be always on edge. It is really hard to relax watching a horror movie or a thriller movie which keeps you on the edge of your seat. When you are a young person, you don’t mind going to movies and come out of there all buzzing, but in your 50s, you would like to sit down and relax with something rather than have yourself all keyed up, right?

Scott Paton: So, the picture that I am getting because you kind of lost me with all… some of those words and you know [Voice Cross Over]

Martin Pytela: Yeah, I don’t want to spend time on that either.

Scott Paton: But the picture I got was if you were a car and you know you just had the pedal to the metal until eventually what happens is you either run out of gas or you burn your engine out, right?

Martin Pytela: Right.

Scott Paton: And that’s the way we are in our society today. We will get up 15 minutes before we have to be in the car to get into rush hour traffic, to get five minutes late to work, so that our boss yells at us, so that we are behind for the whole day until we end up working late and then getting back in the car and driving through rush hour traffic for two hours until we get home, at which point, we get home, we sit in front of the TV and we turn on the TV and we watch Halloween 15 or something like that that gets us all stressed out or a hockey team or a football team and they lose and so… but then we just collapse in bed and sleep and we just go that over and over and over again and of course that is extremely stressful on our hormonal system, right?

Martin Pytela: Right. So, this stuff doesn’t do you any favor because it keeps stressing the adrenals and you just squeeze the adrenals, and squeeze the adrenals, and squeeze the adrenals, asking them to do more and eventually you will end up in adrenal exhaustion, which is a very nasty condition and I could read out to you the symptoms of adrenal fatigue. Okay? This is a very, very cute little list, goes something like this; anger or irritability, low body temperature as in you are always cold, find it hard to warm up, weakness, unexplained hair loss, nervousness, difficulty building muscle, and also gaining weight, depression, apprehension, inability to concentrate, excessive hunger, tendency towards binging, binge eating, tendency towards inflammation, again, all stuff in the body starts hurting, you know like all over body pain.

Scott Paton: Say pain in the body like fibromyalgia or arthritis, would that be part of that too?

Martin Pytela: Yeah, that’s part of the syndrome, yeah, and then poor memory, that would be inflammation in the brain, brain fog, mental confusion, frustration, and that is related to the guts, right? So, you get irritable bowel syndrome or something similar. You get diarrhea alternating with constipation, swings of both. You can get it into the immune system, especially the liver, you get hepatitis and things like that. Then it starts going systemic where you have allergies and chemical sensitivities. People will be oversensitive to smells like perfumes or chemicals or develop sensitivity to something like latex or touching things. They will have contact dermatitis, which is the illness of the skin just getting totally upset with you, with touching things, what else. So, heart palpitations, insomnia. You know, what happens in the body, it starts losing its ability to absorb magnesium. So, when we start supplementing magnesium, we already went over that list several podcasts back, right? When we start soaking it in magnesium, you start under, what’s the word, removing some of these deficiencies that have accumulated. So, the antidote to a bunch of this is for instance the magnesium supplementation.

Scott Paton: Right and the way that you recommend doing it to get the maximum absorption of course is to soak in it, have a nice, hot, warm bath, put the magnesium salts in that, let it be absorbed through the skin, the pores of the skin, and what happens when you sit in a bath?

Martin Pytela: You have to relax.

Scott Paton: You have to relax, right? Altogether…

Martin Pytela: Yeah, so, it’s a forced therapy. We are getting two things done at once.

Scott Paton: But think about you know if anyone has ever been to a spa or gone to a massage therapist and had a really good massage, you know, you just feel that relaxation. That’s such a good feeling, right?

Martin Pytela: Oh, yeah. The sensation is awesome and that’s exactly what happens where the effect of the adrenalin and cortisol are being washed out of your body.

Scott Paton: And that’s the natural state of our being, but we create a life where we are not able to have that.

Martin Pytela: Yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, the classic example would be Tony Robbins. Let me give you an example of a classic adrenal exhaustion model.

Scott Paton: All right. I look forward to it.

Martin Pytela: Tony Robbins, here is a guy who decides that he can overcome any obstacle by simply driving hard and he just goes and goes and he did it for five or ten years. He just pushed and pushed – he would stay up late and whip himself and just do his state management, mind over matter. I mean he totally managed to mentally overcome the pain and every signal that his body was giving him, telling him you are overdoing it; eventually, he crashed. I am proud to say Robbins research is buying the magnesium supplements from us and using it happily.

Scott Paton: So, he is on his way to balancing all that out again.

Martin Pytela: Right. Yeah. He has a chance, but he, you know, he damn near killed himself because just like you said about the car, you know, pedal to the metal, you eventually burn the engine out and he was doing it.

Scott Paton: So, I think one of the questions then that people have to, particularly listeners listening to our podcast, it is really important to take a look at your lifestyle and the lifestyle that you want and then what changes do you need to make… to convert that into a healthier lifestyle.

Martin Pytela: Right. Well, you need to understand what you are working with. Not everybody starts with the same bag of gifts. Some people have more physical endurance than others. Some people have better mental capacity than others and so on. You need to work with what you’ve got and then go for it.

Scott Paton: And then be aware of the results that you can get from things that you do.

Martin Pytela: Right. Yeah, listen to your body, right?

Scott Paton: Yeah. Like one of the changes that I have made in my life since we have started doing these podcast episodes together is I make sure I go for an hour walk a day.

Martin Pytela: Awesome.

Scott Paton: If it is absolutely torrential downpour, I will miss that day, but, you know today it was like okay, I have got a bunch of work, I did a little bit of work and I said you know what, if I don’t go for this walk, then I am just going to use my work as an excuse not to, but I walked along the river, among the trees and squirrels and just wow, what a nice life and you know the work doesn’t go away, right? [laughs]

Martin Pytela: No.

Scott Paton: It waits for me. It is going to be there no matter what and there is always more work to be done and it is not like it is ever going to end. So… and nobody that I am doing the work for cares. Like it is not like it is late.

Martin Pytela: Even the other side of it, if you are stressed, you become inefficient. Your creativity goes downhill. Your productivity goes downhill. It actually does make sense and an intelligent boss will know it that a rested employee is a creative and joyful and mistake….

Scott Paton: Free…

Martin Pytela: Reduction or whatever… well, I just got lost in the sentence, but you know you stop making all the mistakes that you do make if you are stressed and tired.

Scott Paton: Right. It’s a stronger team.

Martin Pytela: Yes, exactly. So, I would highly advise that people indeed relax and especially buy our magnesium, right? Nudge, nudge, wink, wink.

Scott Paton: Right. Right. So, aside from the magnesium and rest, are there anything… any other thing, well and you said have really energetic exercise, is there anything else anybody should look at when it comes to supporting their hormonal system?

Martin Pytela: Well, you know, that was the adrenal gland. So, that’s just part of the issue. The other big player in the hormonal system is the thyroid gland, which… this is the one that the medical… that the establishment medicine has got so wrong. It is just so badly managed. They think that you can just simply supplement your way with thyroxine or with Synthroid or some other synthetic thyroid hormone into happiness.

Scott Paton: Oh Martin where would I get this iodine?

Martin Pytela: Well, there are two ways to go about it. One is the natural route and the other one is the tincture route. The tincture, you can go to a pharmacist and ask for a Lugol’s Solution. That’s spelled, L-u-g-o-l’s and they look funny actually because of course iodine these days is used in the production of crystal meth. So, you need to kind of…

Scott Paton: Oh, I see…

Martin Pytela: Yeah. You need to kind of look like a respectable citizen when you go, okay? Shave that day or something like that. Anyway…

Scott Paton: Right. Right.

Martin Pytela: And you know it is cheap. I mean $10 will buy you a year’s supply of it.

Scott Paton: Wow.

Martin Pytela: But it is not natural. So, the absorption isn’t great. The other way to go about it is to go with natural stuff, which is either kelp or dulse or both. These are grown in the ocean. We sell the Sea Plant Minerals made by SuperNutrient Corporation and they have gone to a great length of research to find energetically consistent product. So, it’s organic from Iceland somewhere, Laminaria digitata, which is one of the species of the sea plants that does a good job of it.

Scott Paton: Wow.

Martin Pytela: And so you can get lots with that in a controlled manner and the other way you can get plenty of it is of course in all of the Exsula superfoods. Dulse and kelp is one of the standard bits that we put in there. We are well aware of how important iodine is in human body and how much we need to supplement it.

Scott Paton: Right because we don’t really get it from our North American diet at all do we?

Martin Pytela: Well, it’s not in the soil. So, you don’t get it in anything other than sea vegetables. You know, in Japan, for instance the normal dose a Japanese person is at least 100 times higher than what the North American gets.

Scott Paton: Wow.

Martin Pytela: Because, they you know, it’s in the miso soup, it’s in the nori that they wrap around their rice bits and pieces, but also they use kelp to fertilize their gardens. They actually drag kelp and throw it on the soil and let it rot and grow vegetables with it. So, even their regular cabbages will have more iodine in it than North American…

Scott Paton: Right. Right.

Martin Pytela: Let me tell you the function of iodine in the body. You know, sure it is involved in the thyroid gland and so it gives you the overall metabolism, but also it’s the body surveillance mechanism for abnormal cells in the body. It triggers the apoptosis, which is the preprogrammed death of cells, meaning if the apoptosis process is not working, you are getting cancer. Iodine makes sure it is running right.

Scott Paton: That’s a pretty crucial element of your health.

Martin Pytela: Yeah, well, these cancer rates that we are seeing are partially because of low iodine levels in the population. So, yeah, that’s the thyroid hormone or thyroid as part of the hormonal system.

Scott Paton: Right and something that we have neglected.

Martin Pytela: Oh, totally.

Scott Paton: Through our lifestyle, through our nutrition and through a lot of pressure and a lot of stress on that aspect of our body.

Martin Pytela: Yeah. There is something known as the, you know, the women get their menopause, which is a naturally induced end of the reproductive cycle. If they had sufficient iodine in their bodies, they would have a fairly regular menstrual cycle and even their menopause would be a fairly uneventful transition from one side to the other. Instead, they get these horrible sweats, you know, these night sweats; I mean part of it… that’s thyroid going completely crazy because thyroid is the one that has a lot to do with thermoregulation.

Scott Paton: Yeah, I remember my mom, she would have… she would be hot and she would be cold, freezing, then she would be hot again and sweating.

Martin Pytela: Yeah, oh yeah.

Scott Paton: Flipping back and forth.

Martin Pytela: Yeah, some women have to change their you know nightshirt three times a night because they just sweated completely wet you know, just nasty, however, it is not just a woman, there is now a Aging Male Syndrome that’s being identified and we write about that on our website too in the disease information on the hormonal system and here are the symptoms of a man whose… you know, the what’s the hormone, androsterone and going from the testosterone, right?

Scott Paton: Yeah.

Martin Pytela: Once you get low testosterone levels, this is the sort of stuff that a man starts looking at, feeling fat and gaining weight, problem sleeping, losing interest in sex, feeling irritable and angry, losing motivation, losing drive at work, problems getting erections, nervousness, problems with memory and concentration, indecisiveness, tiredness, muscle loss, and then mood swings, depression, and hair loss. We can relate right?

Scott Paton: [laughs] Yeah.

Martin Pytela: I mean I have had mine… you know, like I am over 50 something now and I mean I have had my run into that. You know my body wasn’t working as well it should be and I was not taking enough iodine and I had a wake up call, I all of a sudden… I was starting to have bunch of these symptoms and so I needed to up my iodine intake quite a lot and so the way I was doing it was I first went on the tincture route. I was painting a 2 inch by 2 inch square on the… on my belly essentially and when you are watching it, your body will absorb it and as long as it is absorbed within 24 hours, you need to do another one and then you can make them smaller. So…

Scott Paton: Interesting. Well, Martin, that’s just been a fascinating… we just had a fascinating discussion. I mean this is just the very, very interesting information and I am always amazed at how we keep coming back to doing the basics and a lot of problems go away because if you didn’t list just one or two symptoms for the guys or one or two symptoms for the women, I mean that is a pretty long list and I think all of us would look at that list and say, “Oh, yeah, I felt that” or “I felt this” or whatever, right?

Martin Pytela: Yeah, at least half of them…

Scott Paton: At least half of them and of course we are… we know we are all low on iodine and nobody ever talks about how important it is to get that back up to a proper level.

Martin Pytela: That’s correct. So, that’s again, you know, I need to plug in the Exsula superfoods. They are formulated to make up the difference between good nutrition and what you are able to get out of just eating from the grocery store.

Scott Paton: Right. Right.

Martin Pytela: It’s pretty much insane for people not to be buying something like that.

Scott Paton: Yeah because yeah, just a little bit of prevention a day will make rest of your life a lot more fun, right?

Martin Pytela: Yeah. Well, this is going back to the premise of the functional medicine or the systemic medicine where instead of having to try and fix you and rescue you in an emergency room, I get to deal with the problems when they are still little and reverse the chronic problems that you would otherwise end up with if you don’t correct them nutritionally because they are either toxicities of something you ingest or malnutrition from something you don’t get.

Scott Paton: Yeah. That’s right. Cool. So, if anyone wants more information on what we have been talking about today, you can head over to www.life-enthusiast.com and then just click on the disease information and the hormonal system and there is….

Martin Pytela: There is enough reading to keep you busy for a week.

Scott Paton: [laughs] That’s right.

Martin Pytela: But you don’t have to read every word of it. You can just open the page, look at the top of the few paragraphs, and say, yeah, yeah, this applies to me and read that.

Scott Paton: That’s right. That’s right and if you are interested in any of the products that Martin has talked about, just look on the right hand side and usually there is a number of them shown there or head over to I think it’s brands and company and Exsula Superfoods, right Martin?

Martin Pytela: Yes, that’s correct. Brands and companies, that would be Exsula or under products, look under superfoods and under products, look under magnesium; those two things will make a wonderful difference in everybody’s lives.

Scott Paton: That’s right and if you have got any specific questions that you want to talk to Martin about personally, what’s the number people can get a hold of you at Martin?

Martin Pytela: We are at 1-866-543-3388 or if they really want to talk to me direct, the number is 775-299-4661.

Scott Paton: Awesome and if you have enjoyed this podcast and you want to listen to previous podcasts that we have done, head over to lifeenthusiast.podomatic.com. We have got them all there and feel free to leave a comment. Any questions that you have got, you can leave them there as well and we will discuss them in upcoming episodes for sure.

Martin Pytela: Yes, indeed. That’s enough for today isn’t it?

Scott Paton: That is. We have come to the end of this podcast episode. I hope that you have all got a lot out of it. I know I have and Martin, thank you so much for taking time out of your busy day to share this very interesting and powerful information with everybody.

Martin Pytela: Oh, we all are welcome. We do it for greater good of the mankind.

Scott Paton: That’s right.

Martin Pytela: That’s our motto.

Scott Paton: That’s right. Restoring vitality to you and to the planet. Bye everybody.

Author: Martin Pytela