What You Should Know About Your Glands
By John Tintera, MD
_http://www.westonaprice.org/archive/tintera.html_
(http://www.westonaprice.org/archive/tintera.html)
[Reprinted with kind permission of the Adrenal Metabolic Research
Society/Hypoglycemia Association Inc., Ashton, MD. This article was first
published
in Woman's Day, February 1958. Dr. Tintera was a pioneer in the use of
adrenal cortex extract for the treatment of hypoglycemia, allergies, fatigue
and adrenal exhaustion. ]
Your adrenal glands are the regulators of your disposition, your
efficiency, and even of your personality. Whether they regulate well, and help
you,
or regulate poorly, and harm you, depends, in large measure, upon what you
eat. Therefore, it is quite possible to improve your disposition, increase
your efficiency, and change your personality for the better by selecting
the foods you eat with a knowledge of what happens to those foods once they
are inside you. This means getting to know your adrenal glands and what they
do and showing them proper respect.
The adrenals are part of the endocrine system of glands which are the
chemical "policemen" that regulate the functioning of our bodies and minds.
The
study of this system is endocrinology. It is one of the remaining
frontiers of medical science. I work on that frontier; I am an endocrinologist.
What isn't yet known may well be more than is known. But what is known proves
that these endocrine glands play decisive parts in making and keeping all of
us the kinds of persons we are, for good as well as for ill. The most
important and decisive part is played by the adrenals.
Only in this century has science become sharply aware of the importance
and subtle workings of the endocrines. Implausible, this; but understandable.
The connections among the glands and their cooperative endeavors are so
very well hidden, it is no wonder they weren't easily found out.
All other glands have ducts or channels which carry their secretions to
the places where those secretions serve purposes which are self-evident. The
endocrines have no ducts. That they secrete and so are glands is anything
but obvious; the purposes of their secretions are heavily cloaked by
chemical subtleties. Their appearances are different and they're widely
separated.
The pituitary gland is a round mass no larger than a large green pea,
attached by a stalk to the brain stem. Yet it has three sections, each a busy
factory turning out a variety of chemicals. The thyroid gland, deep down in
the throat, resembles a small oyster although in color it is beefy red.
Adjacent are the parathyroids and they remind you of BB shots. Most persons
have four, but some have only one and others have as many as eight.
The adrenals rise somewhat like mushrooms, one from the top of each
kidney. They're each two glands actually, a core (the "medulla") and casing
(the
"cortex") like a nut and its husk. But that's little in the way of
concealment when you consider the pancreas gland which lies against the back
wall
of the abdomen. It has a duct leading into the intestine which is plain to
see and so you might think it was no endocrine. But a few tiny segments
("islets") secrete without there being a duct for the secretions, and so these
segments form an endocrine gland. Recently, a much-neglected endocrine
gland, the pineal, located in the middle of the brain, has been shown to have
an
influence on some of the functions of the adrenal, specifically in
relation to mental disorders. Little more than this is known about the pineal.
The
sex glands (ovaries and testes) complete the endocrine system.
The endocrines are connected by the blood stream. They work this way: the
pituitary secretes a particular chemical into the blood which floats it to
the casings of the adrenals. They respond by secreting a particular
chemical which the blood floats back to the pituitary and causes it to slow
production of the adrenals-rousing chemical. As more and more of this
adrenals-responding chemical comes into the blood, the pituitary stops
producing its
chemical altogether, until such time as the adrenal chemical is again
insufficient.
The pituitary manufactures and secretes particular chemicals to stir up
each of the other endocrines, and each one responds in the same way. All
these command-and-response chemicals also are speeding, slowing, and above
all,
coordinating all other bodily systems: the heart-lungs-blood system, the
digestive system, the thinking-feeling-perceiving system.
In the last few years it has been shown that the seeming "master" of all
this, the pituitary, has a master. The pituitary is connected to the floor
of one of the tiny pouches or ventricles in the brain which has nerve
connections with the brain's centers of seeing, tasting, hearing, and feeling.
This floor is called the hypothalamus. That it secretes has been proved. Here,
then, is an easily crossable two-way chemical bridge between "body" and
"mind."
Science had believed for centuries that the nervous system was the supreme
coordinator of bodily functioning, despite the many marvels of
coordination and balance which nervous workings couldn't explain. As the
chemical
secrets of the endocrines have been revealed, it has become more and more
apparent that the endocrine system and the involuntary nervous system work
together most intimately.
Take the "alarm reaction." "Stress" has come to the body. A "message" is
transmitted to the cores of the adrenals by the nerves. The cores secrete a
chemical into the blood stream. This chemical steps up the action of the
heart and narrows the blood vessels so the blood will be pushed through them
with more force. It also relaxes and enlarges airways so the lungs can take
in more air, more quickly. When this chemical reaches the pituitary, it
secretes chemicals which cause the adrenal casings, the thyroid, the
parathyroids and even sex glands (which are not exclusively sexual in
function) to
secrete theirs. All these chemicals complete the instantaneous preparation
of "body" and "mind" to deal with stress. The end results are the seemingly
superhuman feats of muscular strength and of quick thinking which we all
know the human being can and does perform when he has to.
The pituitary is known to secrete a dozen or so chemicals, the adrenal
casings, thirty-two. The other endocrines each give off one principal
chemical, so far as is known. But there isn't a doubt of there being endocrine
chemicals not yet identified. These chemicals are called hormones and their
hidden powers can astonish you.
For instance, one pituitary hormone regulates the growth of the infant
into the adult. If there is too little of it, you have a dwarf; if too much, a
giant. The absence of the thyroid hormone used to doom otherwise sound
babies to idiocy. Then endocrinology discovered that when the occasional baby
born without a thyroid is supplied regularly with the thyroid hormone of
meat animals, he develops normally.
These are only a few wonders out of many. To my mind, the most wonderful
of all are the chemicals of the adrenal casings. They maintain life, nothing
less. Life without any one of the other endocrine glands is possible
although it is a fractional, even a monstrous life. Life without the adrenal
casings secretions is impossible.
The principle reason why this is so is that they are the prime regulators
of the chemical processing which converts what we eat and drink from
chemical substances which are useless to us into substances which cause our
bodies to function, to grow and to change, and to provide the materials for
necessary repairing and rebuilding.
(http://www.papercut.biz/emailStripper.htm)
[CONTINUTED at _http://www.westonaprice.org/archive/tintera.html_
(http://www.westonaprice.org/archive/tintera.html) ]
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