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It's so it's such a treat for me to introduce you all to one of the great mentors of my life, Dr. Ringby. [applause] I thought maybe a place to start would be with the question that I asked you because we do want to get into Szent-Györgyi and not our farberg and respiration and so on. But would be to start with the question I asked you before about how many languages do you speak? Well, people have been talking in Mexico of a professor introducing me and said that he was fluent in Spanish.
That surprised me because I had never thought of myself as being fluent in English even. But at the high altitude, that was 80 to 500 feet altitude. I think I was more fluent. [laughter] You were speaking about your trip and how you got involved with the Russians in CO2? In 1968, I took a trip to Russia to meet some of the professors I had been reading the word of. And it happened that most of them were on vacation all summer. So mostly I depended on publications.
Before 1950, there was quite a bit of Russian literature available in the United States. My parents and grandparents had some old books that I got my introduction to science from these books all the way from 1860 up to fairly recent stuff. And homeopathy and natural medicine. One of the people I ran across who was pretty famous back in 1945 or so was J.C. Bodes, who was a Hindu physicist who studied in England. And he invented the radio in the 1890s and was thinking about the connections between the device that he used for receiving radio signals.
He demonstrated in the 1890s setting off a bell across the auditorium and his receiver was powdered metal with an electrical connection. And the radio waves from, for example, just as far, but he had mitral wave, millimeter wave transmitters and such. So they were really very sophisticated for present technology. And he would expose these metal powders to radio waves and they would cohere and conduct electricity. And he naturally was thinking about the sensitivity of organisms in comparison with this powdered physical state of matter.
And to resensitize it, he would thump it, had a little thing called a decohererer. So as soon as it rang the bell it would thump itself and become sensitive again. And that kind of thinking, he started arguing that he tried to distinguish the properties of sensitivity that plants and animals have from the various properties of crystals, rocks, everything he could think of. And he showed that all of the defining features of life could be found in lumps of metal or rock.
And he devised a thing that would give a million times amplification, not resolution, but it would show motion amplified by billion times. And he could show that very easily you stimulate a nerve and it twitches. Most people don't think of nerves as being analogous to muscles, but they do contract when they're stimulated. If you stimulate them too much, it can even break the nerve fiber by contracting it until it maintains finding structure.
But he showed that rocks pieces of metal would twitch when they were stimulated by any means that mechanical and electrical properties went back and forth both directions. And the English physiologists and physicists of the time didn't like that at all. They were already getting committed to a mechanistic view of biology and neurology. And so he went back to India and set up his own research institute there which is still operating with his name. And I think it was Marconi who went to try to get him to develop the radio technology many years later.
But he was really about 120 years ahead of his time in everything. I know you wanted to speak in particular start off in terms of respiration about Szent-Györgyi and out of Harvard. So maybe you might start with that. When I ran into an academic biology, I realized that there just wasn't anything happening that seemed intelligent in American biology all through the 50s. So that was when I was going to college and I decided that I would just read in the library all the science I wanted and major in literature and philosophy and linguistics and such.
And when I was 18 I ran into William Blake in a literature course and realized that from the way he used language, he knew stuff about the physiology of the brain among other things that started me thinking in that direction. So I ran Swedenborg's work on brain physiology again in the 18th century. He knew stuff that was rediscovered only in the 20th century. But Blake was writing about this stuff 200 years too soon. And that helped guide me through the science literature. And finally, in 1968, I decided I could tolerate getting a degree in biology.
But I learned you have to be quiet, not say what you think, like one of my professors explained nerve cells and pH meters as both working on the basis of a membrane. And all through the 20th century they talked about the pH glass membrane. But I mentioned that you could get exactly the same pH measurements if you filled your glass membrane with mercury instead of acid. And I said, does that mean that the mercury diffuses freely through the glass membrane?
Or that when you put two chambers separated by an air space, I have to measure the pH on the outside of one and the solution inside another one. Does that mean that the protons are diffusing through that air space? I learned that you shouldn't do that. Well, I don't want to digress too much, but that sort of leads into a little bit about your discovery of Gilbert Ling. And it also made a huge difference in my life.
My first term in nerve biology that we're leading into a major body of work by Gilbert Ling, who came from China in the 40s. The 40s worked with Rafe Girard at the University of Chicago. He was the one that invented the glass microelectrode. And he was the one who knew how it worked. And in studying cells he couldn't accept the idea that it was penetrating a membrane to have its effect. And he said it was simply a phase contact like the pH meter. It was a surface effect of the glass.
The same as the lightning chart, exactly the same surface electrical effect on a cell or pH meter or anything that has an electrical surface. And I saw that Gilbert Ling had answered all of the problems that my professor was talking about, but he had done it in a meaningful, coherent way that harmonized with J.C. Bowes and others. And I saw that Albert von Georgi was doing the same kind of coherent biology, had nothing to do with membranes. Sensitivity was an intrinsic property of the complex of proteins and other molecules and how they interacted electronically.
And I wrote Gilbert Ling and said, "Am I understanding this right? It looks like you've already solved these problems that people are confused about?" He said, "Well, the problem is you just don't understand what science is, but it's about mundane prestige." No. Well, it's never been about that for you, which is unfortunate because Dr. B. has always been so generous as he is today of being here. So maybe you want to go further a little bit more with the Szent-Györgyi and Otto Farberg.
I wrote to these people because they were doing the stuff that I thought my professors should be doing. And Szent-Györgyi, I saw, was related to another respiration physiologist, W.F. Koch. You've heard of the co-creation, probably the cancer treatment he devised in 1915, 1920, that was based on the quinone system. And the FDA chased him out of the country because they said that's a toxic molecule. There couldn't be any such thing as a free electron system in the cell.
And after he was working in Brazil for years, the ubiquinone quinzyme II was discovered doing exactly what Koch said quinones do themselves. And I saw that Szent-Györgyi had based his whole career on W.F. Koch's work, and Koch had even been a little bit ahead of Otto Farberg in understanding how respiration works themselves. Koch didn't concentrate just on mitochondria. He saw the whole system as an electronic unit that could be tuned up by such things as the quinones.
Szent-Györgyi, applying W.F. Koch's respiration for the end of work showed that if you put an electron donor of a certain variety into a cell, nothing happened or an electron acceptor like a quinone. Nothing would necessarily happen, but if you put a paired donor and acceptor into the cell, the cell would contract, showing that contraction was an electronic matter of donating and accepting electrons within a certain voltage range. And Koch said that this is what controls respiration and all cell functions. Gilbert Ling's backup to that view of how cells work.
Gilbert Ling called them the cardinal adsorbents, not just the quinone system, but anything that affects the system in the way that adsorbs to the protein and modifies the way the protein adsorbs other things. And carbon dioxide, calcium, and progesterone were things that Gilbert Ling had worked on. And that started me thinking about what is carbon dioxide, and that led into a whole rethinking of, I guess everyone knows the Henderson-Hessel-Waltch equation and how carbon, by carbonate, is the thing that you focus on to regulate pH and so on.
That was all the way from about 1910 up to the present. I think probably AC Gaiton's textbook of medical physiology is still teaching that. But essentially it was shown to be wrong the whole system of the whole context around the focus on bicarbonate as the regulator of pH and so on. But the rung dead lowering acid is the one based on the definition of an acid as a proton donor, the base as a proton acceptor. But there is a whole class of acids and bases which contain no protons. So, the theory can't be right.
And G.N. Lewis at the same time that Brent said Lowry got their idea accepted, partly because they fit it into a simple reductionist view of chemistry. Lewis, the Lewis acid, looks at electrons, and an electron acceptor is a Lewis acid and electron donor is Lewis base. And looking at Szent-Györgyi and W.F. Koch from the context of how acids and bases really work, you see that carbon dioxide is, well, if you visualize the co-creation, his most powerful reagent instead of being equinone with the double-funded oxygens joined by under the carbon grain,
his reagent that he made by spraying alcohol or methane under a hot plant and water and collecting it in water, which produced a purple dye at a very tiny concentration showing free electrons in the system. His reagent was just a carbon chain with all of the carbons having a double-funded oxygen. And so, if you look at carbon dioxide as the shortest co-creation, it not only fits into W.F. Koch's view of how respiration works,
but it explains that the Lewis acid is the carbon atom with its electrons so pulled away under the oxygen that the carbon atom is a strong electron acceptor. And so, it's instantaneously acidic. It doesn't have to form a carbonic acid. So, as the CO2 goes into solution, it doesn't go through that sequence. Well, it does eventually, but that doesn't have to do with its acidity. If it happens to hit a protein, it works like W.F. Koch's reagent, or ubiquinone. It absorbs to the protein.
Cardinal adsorbent means that it's the one with power over other things, but still it's the whole system. Progesterone carbon dioxide potassium, magnesium, other things stabilize the system in a cooperative way. And if you disrupt one of them, it can trigger a release of all of them. And the ones that can put it back together are the powerful cardinal adsorbents. Carbon dioxide and protestron are in this group of the powerful adsorbents that can restore proteins after they've been excited and disrupted. If you look at the Lewis acid effect, pulling electrons out of the protein system,
it's what George did with his electron acceptor and donor. You pull electrons out, and if there is a source, the electrons will travel through the protein and change its confirmation. And in the process of causing the protein to retract its electrons, every ionized group is tending to associate with other oppositely ionized things, which in the physiological solution is likely to be sodium or potassium. Those are the main things that are attracted. It's the same thing that works in a water softener. In exchange resin, you put the charged resin in your stream of water,
and it binds to magnesium or calcium. And if you flush it with a big dose of sodium, you can wash off the more strongly absorbed calcium or magnesium or iron. And in the cell, people have taken pieces of hair, which are obviously dead and have no membrane pumps. They've washed the hair free of all counter ions, and what's left is a protein with some ionized groups. It's a weak acid. They then dip it in the serum or any mixed solution, and instead of picking up the sodium that's abundant in the serum,
the hair will re-establish the high potassium low sodium arrangement. It's a bulk ion exchange effect. And when you excite the cell, temporarily it loses that property and will pick up sodium momentarily and lose potassium. And we'll talk about that in terms of membrane pumps restoring the balance, but it's the protein. Gilbert Lang, that great redundancy has explained that over and over for about 50 years. And very few physiologists want to get involved in it because his math seems complicated for most physiologists
who are already committed to the kind of math that A.C. Geithin uses a simple reductionist sort of thing. Now in the boutique, in the way in which we kind of look at things from a boutique standpoint, I'm looking at the bore curve, the bore relationship. And so, maybe I'm not understanding this clearly, but our notion was that in the bore relationship, the CO2 coming in allows for oxygen to dissociate from the hemoglobin, but it was through this Henderson-Hasselbeck equation that we understand why the body continues to operate
poorly, in a sense, by over breathing and getting rid of more CO2. So, I think you're saying that that really doesn't quite work that way. Well, there are places where it doesn't work. For example, the textbooks say, well, you must have to lose bicarbonate in your urine if you're going to acidify it. But actually, good experiments show that you don't, in fact, have to lose bicarbonate to acidify it. And it's just bad bookkeeping. In most cases, they don't look at the total amount of carbon dioxide in the system.
For example, if you heat the bones of an average animal or a person at sea level, you can drive out maybe 100 liters of CO2 that was bound in the bones. But in experiments where they have kept, for example, for submarine studies, they'll keep people five weeks or three months or so in a chamber with 1% CO2 in the atmosphere, roughly 30 times the normal amount. And they see ups and downs of the bicarbonate doing something. But while there are these up and down active reactions happening,
they find that there's very little calcium. They're eating calcium rich food, but the urine has very little calcium, very little bicarbonate in it when they're being really well supplied with carbon dioxide. And after they've been out of the chamber, they keep pouring out bicarbonate and calcium. And if you look at people who live at 0.03 carbon dioxide in the environment through their whole lifespan, they're doing what these subjects were doing when they came out of the chamber.
They're losing calcium in their urine constantly and their bones and other tissues are chronically getting smaller over the decades. But just after six weeks in one of these chambers, someone calculated that at that, under those conditions, it looks as though the bones must be binding 1,000 liters per person, which would mean that you would gain or lose about 8 pounds in or out of the carbon dioxide environment. I know that you had mentioned, for example, that's a great story, so maybe you could tell it.
I think it relates to this very directly, and I thought you ought to write a little book which would be called The Naked Mole Rat and the Bats. So maybe you could go with that and give your idea of how come that makes such a difference, and maybe the beast about Mexico and the difference between Mexico and New York City. I went to study in Mexico when I was 18, and I had a couple of times in high school, and I had gone maybe 9,000 feet.
And I found that I was exhilarated, but closer to the top I got the more energy I had. And my whole summer in Mexico City, I had that same sensation that my brain was purer, and I had more energy. That was many things besides that got me personally involved in thinking about the respiration. One was that when I would swim, my friends who wanted to go down to see how deep they could go would take a rock, so they would sink quickly.
I would just let out a little of my breath, and I would sink like a rock, and I was always aware that I apparently, even though I seemed to have a normal amount of fat, I had to sort of struggle to stay afloat. I figured that I had very dense bones, and I read about a family of mutants who had osteopetrosis, which, if it's an extreme form, it can kill you because the bones close in on the marrow.
But this family just had the moderate form, and they lived in chronic respiratory acidosis because they couldn't efficiently expel the CO2 that they made, and so it made their bones become extremely dense. They call it the marble bone disease. Dr. Peat, I'm very interested in these experiments of this research that we did with living in environments or being exposed to extra-rich carbon dioxide air.
I study a therapy that exists in Europe. It used to exist in North America called the Naheembath. Are you familiar with the Naheembath? The Naheembath? I write articles on it. I would love to get this to you later. They're being conducted in Europe for people with heart disease, and so they're immersed in carbon dioxide gas either in the water or in dry. And it's the most exhilarating experience I would be elated for five days. Yeah, if you have a tank of gas in a big plastic bag, we sometimes sit around watching TV sitting.
So you know who this is? That's what I wanted to tell the story of the naked mole rat and the bats because it's very poignant in terms of exactly what you're talking about. Okay, tell me, because I will ask you another question. In another 1941 publication in the journal of growth, three different authors, two of them were talking about bacteria, anaerobic, anaerobic, another one about protozoa. And they found that none of the single-celled organisms, even the anaeros, which can live totally without oxygen, none of them could live without carbon dioxide.
If they're making carbon dioxide and you remove it as fast as they make it, and don't let them build it up, they can't survive. So that gives you a picture of all of us that raises the question, what's the ideal amount of carbon dioxide in the environment? The carboniferous period where life and evolution were so abundant had, I think it was 20 times as much carbon dioxide as we have now. And the temperature was pretty stable all through those changes of carbon dioxide. The expansion of vegetation, for example, will reflect infrared light back into space.
So it's sort of like the earth has a thermostat that will regulate for huge changes in CO2. 30 years ago, they discovered undersea vents that miles down in the dark, the density of organisms from bacteria through worms and crustaceans, even eels. The light density is 10,000 to 100,000 times too dense to account for by solar energy. They're all getting their energy out of this volcanic stuff. There's one called the champagne vent, which is exuding streams of liquid pure carbon dioxide, where these very odd organisms are thriving have very low oxygen environment.
But it says that these primitive organisms love the most carbon dioxide possible. When you look at the lifespan, not only our loss of bone and tissue with aging, but all animals and even plants suffered from a lack of carbon dioxide. If you lower it, even plants won't do well, single-celled animals and so on. These quite a few animals have learned how to optimize CO2 in their environment.
Salamanders and frogs, for example, will burl in the mud. Frogs will leave their nostrils out and breathe as their skin is not losing carbon dioxide anymore when they're buried in the mud. They gradually load up on carbon dioxide. They found frogs in cement castings that broke open decades later, the frogs hopped out. Also in the 1940s, people experimented with, for example, poisoning to death, rats or mice with 50% carbon dioxide and keeping them dead for an hour and then reviving them, and they had no brain damage.
Giving zero oxygen supply to rats, if they gave them extra CO2, they were damaged by the absence of oxygen. For us, like the primitive organisms, it's more essential than oxygen. There's a hole over all the continents, I think, have variations on these, but they're about the size of a big mouse, and mice usually live two and a half years maximum or something like that. The naked mole rats that they've had in labs, even though they weren't in their natural habitat, lived 30 years.
They not only live in burrows, but they close off the entrances to their burrow and keep the oxygen way down less than half of atmospheric and the CO2 up around 5 or 6%. That's more than the submarine experimenters got, but it increased their longevity tremendously. Queen bees lived, one calculation was they lived 47 times longer than the worker bees, and the worker bees every day go out into the atmosphere, and they build up many times more free radicals, lipid peroxides in their tissues than the queens, because they're out breathing pressure.
Queen is breathing 5 or 6% CO2 in the hive, and also the workers eat pollen and get a lot of polyunsaturated fatty acids that in the absence of carbon dioxide, these things produce the lipid peroxides. In one experiment, people increased the CO2 in the tissues three times normal and saw that the normal amount of lipid peroxides went down to zero.
I'm talking to you, I have a question for you. Recently I read a medical paper about neuropathic experience, and they had several patients who went into cardiac arrest when they were dying in a hospital, and then they returned to life. The only common denominator that they could find between these people was that they had very elevated levels of carbon dioxide, and I'm wondering if you could respond to that.
A few people in the last 10 years are starting to, I guess they're discovering it themselves, and then looking back at the literature and seeing that carbon dioxide protects not only against free radicals, lipid peroxidation. One group, Kogan, is the Russian's name who has done a lot of work on the antioxidant effect of CO2. But quite a few people are now just the last few years, starting to talk about permissive hypercapnia, where instead of ventilating someone to death, that's two or three of the most popular ways hospitals kill people. It's giving them pure oxygen.
When people, for example, aren't getting enough oxygen to the brain, they'll give them pure oxygen, and then hyperventilating them, the idea is to shrink their brain by hyperventilating, because it shuts down the blood circulation of the brain. But if they're dying of lack of oxygen to the brain, it's not what you want to do. One of the first experiences I had with carbon dioxide therapy was a person who several times had rushed to the emergency room with stroke symptoms, paralysis, and I think it was called a transient ischemic attack.
I told him about the Russian research with carbon dioxide and suggested he drink a Coke when he had his attacks, and that worked for him. And I mentioned that in a nutrition class, and I had said soda water, meaning like a carbonated water. But the next week, one of the students said that she had interpreted as baking soda in water, which basically is the same idea, but she said she gave a spoonful of baking soda to her mother, who had been half paralyzed for six months.
And 15 minutes after drinking just a glass of baking soda water, the paralysis lifted and stayed away. And they're doing that sort of thing now just by not ventilating people to death, as is the typical hospital practice. Wasn't there a time when firemen had the CO2? Yeah, Jan Dale Hemerson, who he's on the quoted Friedrich Mischer, the guy who discovered nucleic acids with one of the early researchers in 1865. Mischer, besides working on nucleic acids, was a person who realized that you could cure shock with carbon dioxide.
And Jan Dale Hemerson, I have a septic shock, for example, anything that causes the loss of circulation, instead of giving them oxygen, you would give them carbon dioxide, and Jan Dale Henderson knew about this work 50 years before his time. And in the 20s and 30s, Henderson devised systems with 5%, sometimes 7%, or even 10%, carbon dioxide. The 5% mixture in oxygen is now called carbogen, but he had fire departments all over the United States and a lot of hospitals using 5% carbon dioxide for starting babies breathing.
And treating shock cases, right after the Second World War, when several factors came in, that went out. Medicine became purely productionist and mechanical and mistaken after about 1945. A few people are using it. A friend's grandfather, 94 years old, had become sick. He wanted to travel around the continent. He went to Munich, I think, and spent four days getting what they called carbon dioxide therapy in the hospital, and went back to resume this trip around the world. I'm sorry, we have a lot of people want to ask some questions.
Can you talk a little bit about carbon dioxide and hyperbaric oxygen therapy? I have a friend who had been using hyperbaric oxygen therapy, and I was talking about the carbon dioxide and the essentiality of that. So he added some, he didn't have good regulators, but he had a cancer patient was the first one he tried it on with. He had been unable to talk for several weeks because the cancer was very far advanced, and he added a few percent of carbon dioxide to the hyperbaric chamber.
And he said the window steamed up so he couldn't see what was happening. And I lost contact with the guy and was afraid he wasn't communicating, so he had anesthetized him. And when he opened the chamber, the sheet around him was saturated with water. It is not only in diuretic, but it caused him to vaporize huge amounts of water. And he could talk as soon as he came out of the chamber. It had taken the edema out of his tumors.
Do you have any idea about the mechanism of that, how carbon dioxide under pressure will work? The same as just increasing the concentration, I think. It just makes the, gets it into your tissues faster. But it's, whatever the conditions, it's still going to equilibrate into your bones and other tissues. And all of your tissues go through that adapting process. You'll change the proteins, loading them up with carbon dioxide, and that makes them have a higher affinity for potassium and progesterone.
And then you'll that'll induce new protein synthesis to suit the situation. And so it's a fairly prolonged thing to adapt, and no one really knows how long the ideal adaptation is. But I've seen people just by breathing in a paper bag a few times a day bring their blood pressure down 30 points and keep it there just in two or three days. The group in the Institute for the Achievement of Human Potential in Philadelphia at Glendom and masks these kids who are brain damaged and it creates a tremendous change in wheel cell activity.
And they're really recovering much more rapidly just masking because he masks himself too so you keep his memory. Well, there was another animal who I didn't mention the bat. Bats like to live in caves and have a fairly high carbon dioxide environment. And they physiologically have a very intense metabolic rate. So they're producing it. Even when they're hanging in their cave, they're still adjusted to this high tissue and serum level of carbon dioxide.
And people abandoned them over the years and someone found a banded bat that didn't know how old it was when they put the band on, but it was banded 42 years previously. And as a physiologist, you basically have a lot of months that lives about two to three years ago also. I didn't know that. But once I was carrying a big tank of carbon dioxide and I was aware that the valve apparatus happened to break and be like,
I was holding a rocket. So I tripped on steps and as I fell, I knew I didn't want to drop that thing and knock off the valve. So I went down with it and landed on top of my hands with my body and the tank. And my hand immediately started swelling and turning blue and I immediately got a plastic bag and put my hand in the bag of pure CO2. And in 15 or 20 minutes, it looked like a fresh hand except for some scraped up pieces of skin.
And I told that experience to some friends who had arthritis in the knees and they put their legs in a bag of pure CO2 and they leave the arthritis just in an hour or two. My question is, if you administer a higher level of CO2, then the organism is able to tolerate. Would it not induce breathlessness and re-breed out the CO2? It stimulates its own production. When I was talking about the effects of polyunsaturated fats and thyroid and estrogen on respiration,
I would concentrate on the electron transport chain and the cytochrome oxidase enzyme, which is under the influence of thyroid or altitude. You increase the amount of, not only of total mitochondrains, but of the, especially the cytochrome oxidase enzyme, which is what uses oxygen and governs your rate of oxygen consumption. How much of that enzyme you have and how active it is. And when you saturate a cell with a very large amount of CO2, you activate chronically, you increase the number of mitochondria.
But fairly quickly, you increase the amount of the cytochrome oxidase enzyme and increase its activity almost instantly. The first thing you see is that the whole oxidative balance of the cell is increased towards the oxidized state, pulling electrons out of the system. Diabetics, in the cytoplasm of a normal person, you'll have a ratio of 5 or 600 NADs to each NADH. When you plug up the cytochrome oxidase, that's in Barbara's idea of what happens in cancer and start running on increased lactic acid formation. The NAD is being consumed in making lactic acid.
And although this pours lactic acid out into the system as a hormone of stress and toxic inflammatory effects, it leaves the NADH in excess. So that where normal, you have a ratio of NAD to NADH of several hundred to one. A diabetic who is a person with cancer has a reduced amount of NAD because the NADH is being increased in forming lactic acid. And the pH inside the cell increases during lactic acid formation.
If you look at the equation of supporting lactic acid and using up your niacin cofactor, you see why it increases the pH of the cell for the lactic acid to be produced and leaving. And so the several effects of the carbon dioxide shut off the glycolysis and it also shuts off lip palaces. A diabetic is forced to use increased amounts of fat and free fatty acids poison the mitochondrion so they can't respire as in the barbaric effect of what constitutes cancer, the defective mitochondrion, especially the cytochrome oxidase.
So you're turning off the crucial thing in the barbaric cancer explanation, turning off the lactic acid production. At the same time, you're increasing the cytochrome oxidase and shifting the balance of the cell so that the diabetics or cancer patients will have much lower ratios of available NAD. And just by looking at the ratio of NAD to NADH, you can see that the diabetics and degenerative diseases generally have an over reduced cytoplasm. And the stressed system, besides being reduced, that means it's got more electrons than it should have.
This makes the whole system have, in the sense of alkaline things as being electron donors, it shifts the whole system's pH towards the alkaline direction. And that is involved in loading up the system with water. If you put acid in a gelatin solution, it excretes water. If you alkalineize it, you puff it up so it's just a physical effect that water is attracted towards the electron-rich polymer. So carbon dioxide is changing the water economy of the cell. It's a physical arrangement which affects the enzyme glycolysis and respiration.
And you're actually increasing all of the aspects of the oxidized condition of the cell, pulling the electrons out of the system in effect at the same time that you're activating the oxygen as the ultimate electron, et cetera. So if you want to damage the respiratory apparatus, you can cut off the oxygen without supplying the CO2 or if you make too much lactic acid available. The same thing happens, but lactic acid displaces CO2 so you hyperventilate when you make too much lactic acid. And if you hyperventilate, you make too much lactic acid.
So like just driving on the freeway, you probably are shifting your balance by hyperventilating in the mechanical sense and that pulls the cells in the direction of making lactic acid which keeps the stress system going. Now at hyperventilates, again, for example, in Mexico City versus New York City, much more pollution than Mexico City and yet the rate of asthma there is lower than it is in New York City. Yeah, and Mexico City is much more polluted than most of the U.S. cities.
And the kids who grew up there, very seldom, have asthma, but if they go down to Acapulco where the air is very clean coming in fresh off the ocean, a lot of them get asthma attacks going down where there's more oxygen. And the oxygen excess seems to be the big thing. So is the oxygen excess not the difference in terms of the tension at the higher levels? Well, yeah, the oxygen is pushing the CO2 out of your system. Yeah. Other questions? Yes. Thank you. [INAUDIBLE] Oh, many years ago people studying hot spring beds.
You know, people have known about carbonated baths of the natural sort for thousands of years. Already in Europe, in the 1700s, there were several big companies. Sweppies and a Hungarian company, a Swedish company, German and English companies were already bodily carbonated water from their springs. And that was Joseph Priestley, the guy famous for oxygen. He was one of the first people to devise a way to artificially carbonate water, making a conic drug product essentially. But the Japanese, I think, were the pioneers in doing the physiology of how bathing in carbonated water works.
And the reasoning is you can only get a certain amount of carbon dioxide into warm water. And the body already has more carbon dioxide than that. So what the mechanistic idea is, if you have a membrane and things always go down gradients, you must be losing carbon dioxide into the water even when it's carbonated. But the Japanese found that it actually goes into your body up the so-called chemical gradient, as if it's being pumped in.
But it's because like the bones can store thousand liters per person, all of your tissues, other people have experimented with storing meat in carbon dioxide. And just a chunk of dead muscle can store a huge amount of carbon dioxide. And it's the same thing that happens in the border effect. On hemoglobin, the carbon dioxide makes the hemoglobin as a unit a little more acidic by retracting the electrons. And that's just enough to make the oxygen a little less sticky to the protein.
But the whole body has this affinity for carbon dioxide that binds strongly enough to pull it right out of the water. And it can be in the form of bicarbonate or carbon dioxide gas. It still flows up the gradient into your body. And the main thing seems to be the carb amino formation on lysine and other amino groups in proteins that works in the war effect. But we're made of proteins that are rich in lysine and other amino groups.
And even the nucleic acids contain some amino groups that physically just are going to have to associate with carbon dioxide. And when you look at protein hormones, for example, pituitary hormones, if you really pay attention to a given hormone, like you call it growth hormone or prolactin or whatever, it's really a family of substances. And their composition will change and their function will change according to how much carbon dioxide that they're exposed to. Because all of them have some lysine or other amino containing proteins, amino acids.
And when the carb amino group is formed, instead of being an amino in contact with the water, it's this more acidic carbonyl-carbon dioxide bound under the amine. And the so-called receptors in the cells that respond to each of these hormones. The hormones change according to the CO2 they've been exposed to, and the receptors also get carb amino groups formed on them. And just a few people have been studying that, but it means that insulin, for example,
there's a difference between carb amino insulin and plate insulin. They're the same hormone and the so-called insulin receptors are carbonated or not. And they behave very differently. So just looking at the concentration of a simple hormone, you can interpret it until you know how carbonated the cell is. And then the carbonated hormone is going to be different in relation to the carbonated cell. And then by just big, big, like a leaf bag, and just fill it up. Yeah, just add a welding shock, squeeze all the air out and then fill the bag up.
And you have to hope it's heavy. You can feel the weight of it. And if you hold it up once it's full and climb over the edge so you don't spill it, then close it up. As soon as it touches your skin, you can feel it's hot because it's causing vasodilation. This is a gas, this is a gas itself, it's in the bag. Yeah. It's heavy, so it stays now. I don't know if you wanted to, you had a question. Yes, I did.
So when you first were talking, Dr. Peat Gush, I'm trying so hard to stay with you here. And you mentioned that Henderson has a lot, but probably is not a valid theory anymore. And I have used that in my talks about the potato and CO2 and acid. But is it true what you're saying that it's, am I getting it right? What you're saying is that it's more related to these proteins and the carbiminos. Would you clarify that for me, please? Yes, the carbon dioxide directly acidifies, not only the hemoglobin in the red cell, but
it acidifies your whole system and makes the cell have a greater affinity for oxygen. So it's causing the cells to pull oxygen in as well as driving it off the red cell. And where the Henderson-Hasselbalch goes wrong in the worst way is how kidneys behave. If you look up Peter A. Stewart's, the strong ion difference is what is the first substitute in the Henderson equation? 30 years ago, he said, what is the role of bicarbonate in acid-base regulation? He said simply none. But he was only talking about the blood related, not about cells.
He's only sort of halfway there. You have to think about how the cell is being made more eager for oxidative processes when it's well-carbonated. You can approach the carbonation, for example, with pregnant or progesterone. You're contributing to pushing the balance in that way so that hormone will make the cell have a greater affinity for carbon dioxide. And estrogen does the opposite. Instantly estrogen within two or three minutes you can see the cell begin to take up water and begin to make lactic acid poisoning the respiratory system.
So there's a balance between estrogen and progesterone and how that pulls water out and puts CO2 in. Here's one of the most popular books that was built on a lot of Dr. Peat's work, but not only popularized it, but I think kind of brought it down a bit. It's by John Lee, the book called What Your Doctor May Not Tell You About Menopause, but it's much more well-explicated by Dr. Peat's book himself, which is from Menopause. Which is also from PMS to Menopause, female hormones in context.
I'm sorry, I want to make sure we care two other things and if we have some time we'll come back to you and be glad to. Because most people are not aware of the relationship between thyroid, thyroid, hormone and CO2, so would you just speak a little bit about that? Besides the thing I've mentioned about the rabbit bones being over developed in the presence of either carbon dioxide or for thyroid. There have been many experiments using just T3, the active thyroid hormone, in mouse skull bones, which you can grow in a culture dish.
They showed that T3 very quickly stimulates respiration and the deposit of calcium carbonate as the newborn is calcium carbonate rather than calcium phosphate. As I said, the cytochrome oxidase is what thyroid acts on primarily. I think it's the main thing is to increase the production of CO2 and the affinity for oxygen. That ends up suppressing lactic acid formation and doing the opposite of what estrogen and polyinsaturated fats do to your respiratory system.
One other whole system that I didn't mention that causes biochemical hyperventilation, in other words the production of lactic acid instead of carbon dioxide is the endotoxin or lipopolysaccharide from bacterial activity in the intestine. Under stress, the circulation to the intestine is reduced and it becomes more permeable, more endotoxin gets into the bloodstream. Once it gets past the liver, it releases the inflammatory cytokines, nitric oxide and tumor necrosis factors that work with estrogen as an anti respiratory adaptation.
Anything that slows your liver function such as low thyroid will let more endotoxin get in your bloodstream and let more estrogen remain there. Both of these in turn lower your CO2 production and thyroid function and so it can be a vicious circle that starts just with stress or eating something wrong. And how you explain the three types of mechanism for, they've done studies on rats and they show that estrogen has a great protective mechanism for the brain to maintain a healthy, happy brain of rats.
In the 50s and 60s, there were studies in which estrogen or insulin would be given to one group and while they measured brain metabolism and growth, and they saw that either estrogen or insulin would stop brain growth completely where by lowering blood sugar was what they were studying at the time but estrogen lowers oxygen of eligibility and insulin lowers glucose of eligibility and so those are essential for brain growth.
And I don't know. Well, no, what it does, the O methyl O methylation of brain transmitter substances is this process is blocked by estrogen so that you accumulate that acts like an adrenaline or brain transmitter accumulator. The estrogen has a toxic effect on the detox enzyme system that should lower your brain transmitters and cocaine and estrogen have almost identical effects on this enzyme system
acting like an antidepressant or the cocaine effect, which is an excitement. So cocaine is really a safer solution to increasing brain activity than estrogen because estrogen has these liver and thyroid suppressive effects and increases vascular permeability and tendency to blood clot and so on. So it's a very risky way to increase your brain function. Somebody just ran out and they're going to have a bunch of cake cocaine available for a second.
Final thing I wanted to, you know, just have one mention because this is someone again that partly any of you, certainly not myself, will have heard of and that's just a moment about May one whole. She has a website, IS, IS, but if you look up her name, M-A-E-W-A-N-H-O. She, for example, has put worms under a geological polarizing microscope and demonstrated that you can see coherent polarization streams
through the worm. Her book is, I think, called "The Worm and the Rainbow" and I got interested in her work when I was in Mexico in Michoacan. They used to test their fish and lay them out in the market on a newspaper or magazine or something and you could read the fine print through a fish the size of a trout. Just like a lens, when you cook them and ate them, they had bones and blood vessels and organs and so on, but in the living state you could see right through it like glass.
And the only way to explain that is that photons are behaving in a way that is very hard to explain to May one whole is working. >> So from TROMP, Royal Book called "Psychical Physics", I think about 1940, but in the 30s, the idea of life as a liquid crystal was already catching on. And that was just one of the things that in the late 40s got knocked out by a standard reduction of medicine.
>> That is the work of Gerald Pollock, who really believes the water of the body, you know, it's supposed to be looked at as the e-membranes. Pollock is talking about the liquid crystal as the controlling factor of the movement of metabolic metabolites in the system. >> Yeah, I think that's going in the right direction. Gilbert Ling has the fine details on how it works. Gilbert Ling.org is his website.
>> Well, Dr. Peat, is there any final comments that you would like to, you know, we could go on for hours and hours and years actually, but is there any something that you felt like you would like to say to this group in terms of your life experience and sharing your own sense of wisdom about what you might say to us? >> Well, for people in alternative holistic health interests, carbon dioxide is really a good thing to focus on because if you think of context as being what's missing from a reductionist medicine,
every life process, carbon dioxide is a context that you have to take into account. And if you look at any tissue or organ or system in any kind of organism, the way carbon dioxide behaves in that organ or system is going to be a model for the way carbon dioxide works in other systems. So your heart and brain, same thing if you are hyperventilating your heart blood vessels, clothes off, metabolism goes bad, you get heart pains or heart attack clotting and so on.
And the same thing, clotting or trenching the schema, spasms in brain, just simple carbon dioxide will cure or prevent the most drastic sort of biological events and thinking of it as the context for interpreting physiology across organ systems. You have a good defense against the basically silly arguments that the standard medical people make against thinking physiologically. Because their physiology is always applicable, fully up to a certain limit and very narrow range.
I think we are about to set it together, we're going to have to finish over. Thank you very much Dr. Peat, it's just an absolute problem.