Podcast 547: Up at 2AM to Pee? Your Food, Hormones & Prostate May Be Connected

SCOTT: All right. If you or someone you love is dealing with frequent night time urination, or as we like to call it, the 2 a.m. wake-up call, or prostate issues, this episode is going to be for you. It's going to change the way you look at food and hormones. And we're going to be jumping right into it after this.

Welcome everybody. This is the Life Enthusiast Health Shot podcast. Restoring vitality to you and the planet. I'm your co-host, Scott Paton. Joining us as usual, health engineer Martin Pytela. Martin, you're looking very, very dapper and debonair today.

MARTIN: I just turned up from a haircut. And so I'm just showing off that on top I have more than you. On the sides I have less. I had it buzzed away.

SCOTT: Yeah. Martin told me that he was going to go get his haircut about an hour and a half before our live stream and I thought, "Oh, he's never going to make it." So, I was totally prepared to run the show live by myself until you showed up, Martin, but you showed up with like minus 10 seconds to spare. 

MARTIN: Indeed. So, living dangerously.  Okay. 

SCOTT: And we have a comment from George that I'd like us to bring up because this just shows you dedication. “Greetings Scott and Martin. I have a video conference with the VA. I think that's the Veterans Association at 2 o'clock, 14:00 hours. Try to make this episode at 14:30. Cheers.” And I just thought, wow, when viewers comment on why they're not here.

MARTIN: But one, he uses the military time.

SCOTT: Yes.

MARTIN: Right. And two, yeah, veteran. Is it administration?

MARTIN: Something like that.

MARTIN: Well, anyway, yeah, he's a veteran. He is an awesome dude. And George, if you're not watching it live, we think of you.

SCOTT: Always.

MARTIN: I hope they treat you with respect.

SCOTT: Yes, that's for sure. And they should. All right. So, today we're going to break down 11 best foods according to ChatGPT to support your healthy prostate. And that may mean that in the conversation Martin's going to tell us that that actually is incorrect. And I know it's going to be wrong because what could be healthy for me might not be healthy for Martin because we have metabolic differences and individualities, which of course everyone forgets when they talk about health. They think one band-aid will fit all problems, and that's not the case.

MARTIN: And to illustrate, may I?

There are, in my mind, two reasons that you get woken up by your bladder. And one is that the pH of the urine in there is too acidic. It's irritating to the walls, and the body says get this out of here. And the other would be the inflammatory reaction upstream when you have a histamine reaction to stuff you eat. And so if there's already a lot of histamine circulating, it gets in your bladder and has the same effect. Get this out of here. And I can promise you that if you feed me chicken, I'll have to get up in the middle of the night. If you feed me lamb, I will not. That's me. Because my blood type is okay with lamb and not okay with chicken.

SCOTT: Interesting. So, one of the things that people say is, "Hey, you've got a prostate problem." Is that part of waking up in the middle of the night?

MARTIN: It could be because if the prostate is enlarged, it's pushing into the space of the bladder, so you have less room. But relatively speaking, I don't think that's the biggest reason.

SCOTT: Okay. Yeah, that's right. The prostate, if it's larger, it’s going to press on the bladder, which adds to the frequent urination.

MARTIN: But women have frequent urination, and they don't have a prostate, so go figure.

SCOTT: Right. Okay, so there are a couple other causes of nighttime urination I want to just touch on briefly. One, and there are four of them, so let me just say the four, and then you go after them. Type two diabetes or pre-diabetes, high carb diets we keep getting into this high carb problem, right? And I'm so glad that they flipped the pyramid over so that now it's like don't eat so much carbs. And I'm always shocked when I walked into the grocery store. It's like carb carb carb carb carb carb. You can't walk down an aisle without it being carbs, right? Really difficult.

MARTIN: It's the most affordable form of energy that we can have in the form of food.

SCOTT: Yeah. Alcohol, caffeine, excess fluids at night. The excess fluids at night. I'm guilty of that. I'll have half a glass of water about this size before I go to bed. Now, not necessarily this, when I jump into,

MARTIN: I'll drink the first half at bedtime and the other half when I wake up in the middle of the night.

SCOTT: Yeah. So, I don't know about excess fluids. Although now, when I was in South Africa, I messaged you because you had given me, or I had bought some pills, which structure water and I put these into a glass container, filled it up with water, let it sit overnight, dumped it, filled it up with water, let it sit overnight. And then I started drinking it, and I wasn't drinking a lot more than I was normally drinking, but I was peeing out over a quart in the middle of the night. Ask me how I know. I had a quart bottle because I was upstairs. There was no bathroom upstairs, and I didn't want to walk downstairs in the middle of the night and fall. So, I’d wake up, I even showed you, right? “Look how much is coming out. And you said, "Yeah, like you're flushing out stuff that had never been flushed out, and it was working better." And of course, now I'm not doing that at all. I'm back to normal. Even though I'm still using structured water. So you’re flushing things out. So excess fluids at night or during the day or not even excess, if it's actually doing its job, you may find that all of a sudden: “I'm not peeing just a little bit.”

MARTIN: I'm having trouble recalling the name of the hormone. But there is a specific hormone that is urine retention capacity, capability, and young people have loads of it and old people don't, and I'm watching. Sure enough, I forgot to take away my phones. 

SCOTT: We're a busy office.

MARTIN: Well, that too, but it's my job to take them away, and today I was late arriving. So, I'll say it one more time. My grandsons, they don't have to go for hours on end. Just don't. They come home from school, and we ask them, "Do you need to go?" “No.” An hour later or two hours later: “Okay, maybe.” Right. So, you can take them for a car ride that's four hours long, they don't complain. They don't have the need because their body is able to hold it. 

SCOTT: And you and I are saying, "Stop. There's a tree."

MARTIN: Two hours. Two hours is my car ride limit. I have to break it up. Mind you, I want to stretch my legs anyway. 

SCOTT: Right. So, that reminds me. I'm in Canada right now. I'm visiting my mom who's 93 years old, and she commented the other day. She says, "You're going to the bathroom a lot." And I thought, "Huh?" Am I?” And then I counted how many times I went, and it worked out to two, two and a half, three hours, right? And I thought, "Oh, no. That's good and normal, right?"

MARTIN: Yeah.

SCOTT: People around you may have some issue, and they don't go for a long time or they're constipated, and they don't go for a long time, and they think it's normal, right? So yeah, don't. So the lesson here is don't assume when somebody says something and you know it's somewhat critical or you take it somewhat critically, which is what I did, well there must be something wrong if I'm going this often. No, you have to figure out what it is for yourself.

MARTIN: And I would just say that you're normal for a 60 plus fellow who's just not 10 years old anymore. As a 10-year-old, you don't have to go from the morning to the afternoon.

SCOTT: That's right. Okay. And the fourth one, so we had type-2 diabetes, pre-diabetes, carbs, we have alcohol, caffeine, excess fluids. The fourth one is medications, kidney damage, sleep apnea. So those people treat the symptom, not the cause. So let's discuss those a little bit here, right?

MARTIN: So the first one, of course, would be the pH balance, right? The people who are oxidizers are automatically acidified by eating starchy foods, therefore pushing themselves into the need to go more often. It's a guarantee. So half the population automatically is destined to be more likely to get diabetes, more likely to need to pee more often. That's just by recipe. And you mentioned the society is pre-programmed by government decree because they have started writing tax subsidies for big agriculture for wheat, corn, soy, and maybe lentil. They are all subsidized heavily. And I guess from the military perspective it makes sense because they're easily stored.

SCOTT: Right.

MARTIN: Like you can fill a silo full of wheat and it'll be good two, three years.

SCOTT: So, let's go back 10,000 years or maybe 5,000 years, right? So, you're the king of a small country…

MARTIN: 5,000 years ago, hunter-gatherer. You're no king. You're a tribal leader at best.

SCOTT: Okay. So, when we become kings, we know one thing for a fact. There are droughts and people are going to starve. And if people starve, they're going to kill the king. So what does a king do? He finds something that he can store away for a non-rainy day, right? And what is that? That's rice, wheat, that sort of thing. Carbs. 

There's no refrigeration. There's no freezers. You can't store meat. So what do you do? So that's what they did. And then all of a sudden there was no rain, and the crops failed. No problem. They pull out a couple cart loads of wheat, and they grind the wheat. They make bread, manna, right? They survive. And now we live in a world where yes, there's a drought over there, but we get food from over there. So, we don't need to worry about starving. 

And what do we still do? The same thing that the king did. He just gives us bad food. And yeah, when we should, like those subsidies, they should say “Okay, we need a year's worth of food, like season to season, and we're going to stick it here.” And you hear stories about huge warehouses full of butter and stuff, but what should we be subsidizing? We should be subsidizing organic, good, organic growing of meat and vegetables and fruit as opposed to subsidizing this crap that you end up eating all the time.

MARTIN: Yeah. We should have grass-fed cow on the hoof out there grazing in the forest or in the meadow saying, "Well, when we need you, we'll hunt you down, and we'll eat you."

SCOTT: Right. Right. Okay. So, that's the carb stuff, alcohol, caffeine.

MARTIN: Well, so those would be the irritants, right? The drugs will cause dysregulation of normal physiology and cause you all kinds of issues, but the most interesting ones are the histamine triggers. So, you have foods that are rich in histamine like chocolate and strawberries and fermented foods like sauerkraut and aged cheese and salami. Those are all things that will automatically supply you with more histamine, which will be more triggering to frequent urination than not.

SCOTT: Right.

MARTIN: And then there are the accumulators. Cinnamon's one of them. What else?

SCOTT: What do you mean by accumulator?

MARTIN: It will gather up all available and hold onto it longer.

SCOTT: Oh, like absorb?

MARTIN: Supplying it. It's just hurting it. Hurting your current supply.

SCOTT: So, would that increase your peeing or decrease it?

MARTIN: Likely increase.

SCOTT: Okay.

MARTIN: Yeah. Cinnamon bun would probably be a nice thing to eat for dinner if you want to wake up in the middle of the night.

SCOTT: Got it. Okay.

MARTIN: Yeah.

SCOTT: So we're going to veer into the realm of enlarged prostate because for us guys we don't want it, and also that possibility is for why? So there are, first of all, what's DHT?

MARTIN: Oh, dehydrotestosterone. That's a hormone that is the incorrect metabolite of some people say testosterone, but more than that, it's the metabolite of estrogen. So, the weirdest thing with men is that when they make an excess of DHT, they have this pattern of baldness like what you have. And so it's likely that you don't metabolize grains and seeds and nuts in a way that allows you to not make phytoestrogen, which then gets metabolized into DHT, which then causes you to lose your hair sooner than not.

SCOTT: And it could affect your prostate.

MARTIN: Well, that too, but more than anything it affects your liver, which is interesting. Now the prostate business is interesting in the following way. Iodine. Iodine deficiency, more than anything, will cause hypertrophic prostate issues. I've had multiple guys to whom I say start taking iodine and call me in three months, and sure enough, yep, prostate size reduced.

SCOTT: Cool. Oh, he's back. Welcome George. We shared your original comment. Appreciate having you with us. And he also says, "I don't have to pee at night anymore, but my stream is always slow, and emptying takes forever." Well, I have some hopefully good news for you, George. My stream, I'm amazed. It's like a fire hose. However, it's like a fire hose, and then it drips for about three minutes. So, I can't get the last bit out, but..

MARTIN: Oh, god. 

SCOTT: Yeah. So, Iodine is good. All right. So, I know we have a liquid Iodine in our store. Would you take a little spoon and put it into some water and drink it? Like how would you?

MARTIN: Iodine?

SCOTT: Yeah.

MARTIN: Yeah. Iodine in water. Drops in water. Don't take it straight. It tastes awful.

SCOTT: Yeah. And that's, of course, a big lesson, right? If it tastes great, chances are it's addictive, and it doesn't help. But if it tastes terrible or it doesn't taste like anything, then it's probably good for you.

MARTIN: Yeah. Okay. So, that would be my number one go-to. What did you find in the records of the?

SCOTT: Well, they talked about inhibitors, and they had four herbs. Saw palmetto, stinging nettle root, pumpkin seed oil, and milk thistle. So, I thought we should talk.

MARTIN: Awesome. Okay. Those are all well worth having in your diet. Well, so let's start with the saw palmetto. That's famous for getting you the beta-glucans. 1,3 Beta-glucan is the stuff that is anti-inflammatory in all organs, but especially for the prostate for sure.

SCOTT: Stinging nettle root.

MARTIN: Yeah. Stinging nettle is a phenomenal anti-allergenic. It's great for anything allergy-related. So it will make you less allergic to everything, therefore a lesser reaction like that.

SCOTT: And then the Pumpkin Seed Oil. That's an interesting oil. I never really, I've seen it, but it's not one I've paid any attention to.

MARTIN: Yeah. This especially comes to the Austrian or Styrian pumpkin seed. The pumpkin in Styria is different. It's greenish rather than pinkish or orange. And it's more green. And it's very good at having the type of nutrients that are anti-inflammatory in general. In fact, we do sell pumpkin seed oil, and we do sell pumpkin seed protein, and those are two different things, but they both are very helpful.

SCOTT: Great. Getting back to the iodine. Dave says, "I'm taking 10 drops of thyrodine, one of our products, per day for months now." And,

MARTIN: Yeah.

SCOTT: Dave, have you noticed a difference? What has your observations been? We're very curious to hear.

MARTIN: Yeah. I've been taking six drops for years. It will depend on the person. It will depend on your genetics whether you need a lot or not. 

SCOTT: Okay. 

MARTIN: But the best indicator, of course, is that your morning temperature is, at 98 degrees or better Fahrenheit or 36 and a half Celsius.

SCOTT: Okay.

MARTIN: The last one you mentioned was something root.. was it milk thistle? So that's a liver tonic, right? Milk thistle is awesome at the liver and again your liver is responsible for methylation. Methylation is what reduces the toxicity of things in the body. If you fix your liver, everything else functions better in your body. So.

SCOTT: Yeah, liver is one of those foundational things, isn't it?

MARTIN: Yeah, of course.

SCOTT: Yeah, you say of course, but the average person doesn't pay any attention to their liver.

MARTIN: Well, they pay attention after they have been diagnosed with fatty liver disease.

SCOTT: Once they're in the hospital, they pay a lot of attention to it.

MARTIN: Yeah. And you know what's interesting, right? You can get there with alcohol, but you can also get there by eating too much carbohydrate. Starch.

SCOTT: And Dave says, “You just went over my experience. No, peeing at night, but a slow stream.” Everything filtered in the liver according to our friend George. Absolutely. That's what it is. It's your filter system, and we naturally change the filter. It regenerates itself and everything else. So that's the good news. You don't have to do something to keep it. You just have to look after it, right?

MARTIN: Yeah.

SCOTT: And then the last part about insulin resistance and prostate health we want to go over is high insulin triggers IGF-1, which stimulates prostate growth, and that could be frequent eating diets, poor metabolic flexibility.

MARTIN: Yeah. Which of course how do we get the insulin triggered? We get it triggered with overeating carbs or overdoing stress. Remember the following. Stress, and it doesn't matter what it is, emotional, physical, mental. You go into stress mode. It sends a signal to your adrenals to put you into fight or flight mode. Cortisol is released. Cortisol mobilizes all available glucose or glycogen for the fight or flight situation that you're going to be in. But you're not. You're sitting in a car or you're sitting at a desk in a chair. And so your muscles are not going to burn off that energy, and instead insulin gets mobilized, and it gets converted into belly fat and other inflammatory signals in the body.

SCOTT:: Right.

MARTIN: So Dave says iodine is not helping with his stream. So we'll have to find out what else. Well, maybe it's time for the 1,3 beta-glucan, which would be the saw palmetto or something of the sort, right?

SCOTT: Yeah, if you're doing something for months and well, sometimes it's maintenance, right? You need iodine. We know that's true. But you may not see it working on things that you're aware of.

MARTIN: Yeah.

SCOTT: It's like we're our own major experiment, right? Eating sugary donuts is not a good idea for Scott.

MARTIN: Yeah. So, the other thing is, of course, you can just do an exam on yourself. Of course, you can go to your doctor and ask him to do the prostate exam for you. The way you'll find your prostate is, it's, you have to go after it rectally. So, you go in, it's about a finger deep, and it's on the up side. So, is it up? Yeah, it's up. So,  I check it all the time, right? In the shower, soap up. And put your finger as far in as it goes and then go looking, feeling for that object. It should feel about the size of a walnut and about a similar type of surface, somewhat bumpy not smooth. So that's where you'll find it. So if it's big, you'll know about it because you'll feel it big. Yeah. He calls it I don't know. Well, it's the rectal acces. Yeah. I guess most guys will feel a little uneasy about it.

SCOTT: Yes. And if everything works.

MARTIN: Anyway, it can work. My grandfather who suffered with prostate troubles would go for prostate massages.

SCOTT: Oh.

MARTIN: Back then it was just sort of, what do they call it? Chuckle chuckle wink wink. Grandpa is going for a prostate massage. But it had to have been done rectally, and it had to have been done with the intention of stimulating the release of the ejaculation, right? Because that's where it comes from. When a man is having his ejaculation, it's the prostate that does this squeezing action that pumps the thing out.

SCOTT: Yeah. So, you got to look after it. It's important.

MARTIN: Yeah. Right. 

SCOTT: Good old Dave. Thank you for participating, Dave. We appreciate you. Used Saw Palmetto for years, kept upping the dose, finally gave up on it.

MARTIN: Didn’t do a damn thing. Okay. Well, time for some Styran pumpkin seed then. 

SCOTT: So, we do have some products, two products that we want to talk about and,

MARTIN: All right.

SCOTT: First one is the pumpkin seed protein.

MARTIN: Right. Yeah. So after you squeeze out the seed oil, you're left over with the physical mass, and that's what this is. So this is an isolate with the pumpkin seed with the oil removed. Handy. All the polyphenols are in here.

SCOTT: And that is pretty important.

MARTIN: Yeah. And it's all about stimulating recovery and healing and all of that.

SCOTT: Right. And basically, it's raw, vegan, organic, kosher, and non-GMO. 

MARTIN: Go figure, right? It's a plant, a natural thing.

SCOTT: Yeah. And all it is is Pumpkin Seed Protein, that's it. When it comes to ingredients, you can't get much more basic than that. And that's what we want. 

MARTIN: Right on.

SCOTT: And then the other one we wanted to talk about was Maletone.

MARTIN: Male tone.

SCOTT: Male tone.

MARTIN: It got a name from the male tonic essentially, right? And it's a herbal thing for the boys. And this is a herbal, classic Western herbology where you extract using an organic solvent a whole bunch of herbs and you put them in a bottle. And this is indeed improving the male health and you can, if you want you can look at the ingredients in there. There's a list of six or seven.

SCOTT: There’s our saw palmetto.

MARTIN: Yeah. Saw Palmetto, that’s Rhodiola, that's the anti-stress, and turkey tail that's anti-inflammatory and Reishi, that's again, anti-inflammatory.

SCOTT: Maca, that's one I really like. I take that often.

MARTIN: Yeah that's for energy and endurance, and marshmallow is anti-inflammatory and,

SCOTT: Ginger root.

MARTIN: Yeah, that's a stimulant to make sure that these things are moving along.

SCOTT: And certified organic and wildcrafted. Talk a little bit about Earth Friends. They're an amazing company. We really like them.

MARTIN: Well, now it's us. Now it's the Exsula team working it because, unfortunately, the formulator Elijah Free that's where the ‘EF’ comes from. Earth Friend, Elijah Free, he was an awesome master herbalist, and he designed these things. But Elijah bought the wisdom of having himself vaccinated when the COVID thing arrived, and then he got himself a turbo cancer and passed away.

SCOTT: Oh.

MARTIN: So what do you do? So we ended up inheriting or purchasing the leftovers of his business. He did that voluntarily in his last months. He worked with me to get me the recipes and how to do it and whatever else. So we have it, and we now make it in our shop using his instructions.

SCOTT: Thanks a lot big pharma. You hit the nail on the head there. And so I want to talk about this for a second because how often does somebody come to kind of the end of their term here and then say, "You know what, Martin? You've been such a big supporter of us. Your philosophy aligns with ours, and we don't want this to end, and we trust you to keep it going. I think that's really a huge testament to you and the work that you've done over the last 40 odd years.

MARTIN: True enough. Yeah. It's really hard to fake trust, right? And I tell my staff, trust is gained or built by teaspoons and lost by buckets.

SCOTT: Yeah. George: “Exactly. Yes.”

MARTIN: Right.

SCOTT: Yeah. If your prostate is enlarged, you need to do something about it. There's lots of things that you can do about it that don't cause bigger problems.

MARTIN: Yeah.

SCOTT: And if you're peeing in the middle of the night. “We have total trust in you, Martin.” Thank you, George.

MARTIN: Yeah. Trust in Martin and tie down your camel.

SCOTT: Tie down your camel. Yeah.

MARTIN: It's an old Arabic proverb. “Trust in Allah and tie down your camel.”

SCOTT: My dad used to say: “Strong fences made good neighbors.”

MARTIN: Yes, sir. That's a different thing, right? Of course, understanding boundaries and understanding that from here to here, and don't be telling me what to do inside of my domain. 

SCOTT: Right.

MARTIN: And I won't encroach on yours. 

SCOTT: So, Martin, I just want to put this out to everybody. If you have an issue with your health, but in this particular case where you're up at 2 am every night peeing, contact Martin, and you'll either get him or one of his amazing coaches and talk to them, and they can give you some really good suggestions and ideas on things that can help. 

MARTIN: And if you call me specifically at 2 am, I am sure to be annoyed and work really hard at not getting those calls.

SCOTT: Yes. Reasonable time, please. So, Martin, any last words before we sign off?

MARTIN: Well, aging sucks. I'm not immune to it. I am not nearly as perfect as I was 40 years ago, but I am hanging on in a much better shape than a guy of my age. I am not taking any pharmaceutical drugs, and I'm still functional. So, there must be something to doing the natural therapy where we're able to do well despite the advance of time. So I would encourage every one of you to contemplate that there are natural means to get better function, and they include understanding which foods or combinations of foods are compatible with your genetics. So start from there. Metabolic typing really helps people understand what's going to keep them healthy and then supplying the necessary baseline ingredients. Iodine is one of them. All of us thyroid dominant people, and I think it's about half the population, need more iodine than the other types. So contemplate that.

SCOTT: And I'll throw this in, and that is I keep thinking oh, I need more iodine, and then I look at my Exsula or Heart Studies formula or Lazarus, and it's in there.

MARTIN: It is.

SCOTT: And we need more. But it's there. So, it's really important that you get a good superfood that's a basis of your diet. Because that gives you all that different variety and all those things that we don't normally, that we don't get in a box. I'll put it to you that way. Right.

MARTIN: Yep.

SCOTT: And Dave says, "Yeah, amen. I take no pharmaceuticals either." Yes. Well, we're creating our community of people that know that you can take a pill for a long time and then you have to take another pill for a long time, and then you have to take a third pill for a long time, and you're making people very rich who have no concern about your health.

So with that, thank you, everybody for joining us. Thank you, Martin, for taking time out of your busy day. I know you've got a lot of calls you have to return now. And you've been watching or listening to, depending on how you're consuming this information, the Life Enthusiast Health Shots podcast. Restoring vitality to you and the planet. See you next time everybody.

SCOTT: Bye-bye.

MARTIN: Bye-bye. Thank you.