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Well, welcome to this month's Ask Your Herb Doctor. My name is Andrew Murray and for this month Sarah won't be with us but she will be back in December. For those of you who perhaps have never listened to the shows that run every third Friday of the month from 7 till 8pm, we're both licensed medical herbalists who trained in England and graduated there with a degree in herbal medicine. We run a clinic in Garboville where we consult with patients about a wide range of conditions, recommend herbs, supplements and nutritional
counselling. So you're listening to Ask Your Herb Doctor on KMED Garboville 91.1 FM and from 7.30 until the end of the show at 8 o'clock you're invited to call in with any questions either related or unrelated to this month's subject of vitamin D. The number here if you live in the area 923 3911 or if you live outside the area the toll free number is 1800 566 837 23. That's 1800 KMUD RAD. And we can be reached toll free on 1 888 WBM HERB for
consultations or further information Monday through Friday 9 to 5. Well first things first we're very close towards the end of the players drive. There's lots of people here doing all the support that it takes to run a show like this and a radio station that can't emphasize enough is pretty unique in the States in terms of free speech radio. I know in England free speech radio was kind of maligned and pretty much kept in a very fringe area in broadcasting but not given any support other than local support and that's what keeps this show alive.
So thanks so much to all the people that are pledging money making donations supporting the radio show keeping it on the air to make this kind of program and all the other excellent programs that KMED brings that are just filled with alternatives. So this is an alternative medicine show and the other alternatives are also valuable outside sources of information that you're not going to get from the mainstream. I think in this last political campaign without being politically sided I would say that more so than ever we have seen the mainstream or
lame stream media completely eradicated, disingenuous and completely false. So it's excellent to see alternative radios, news sites and websites coming with the internet and the age of free information. I thought it's a very small piece I just wanted to say about the internet and it's the ICNN handover. It was under American governance for a long time but the present administration decided to pass that off but I'm not too sure whether this incoming administration will be able to do anything about that before censorship carries on like it is in China
for sure. Okay so this month's talk is on vitamin D. Most people will have recognized vitamin D probably from rickets in the early 1900s I know in England and in many countries that are north of 37 degrees there is really very insufficient sunlight especially in the winter months to generate vitamin D and so rickets was a fairly common presenting condition and still is in some parts of the world. So we're once again very pleased to have Dr. Raymond Peat with us who's a wealth of information and never seems to be any end to the things
that he knows, the things that he's found and his insights are as always outside the box so thanks so much for joining us Dr. Peat. I guess first things first would you just outline your professional and academic background for those people who perhaps have never listened to the show and then I can get into the questioning and I'd like to run along the lines of the vitamin D subject. Basically a PhD in biology including reproductive physiology and biochemistry at the University of Oregon. I know you've got plenty more in terms of research background
and I know it's led you in very many different directions. Steroids and their production and their uses etc. I know you're very interested in the anti-aging for one of the reasons of pregnenolone and/or progesterone and its anti-inflammatory and anti-aging effects. Now vitamin D is actually a pro-hormone, it's not strictly speaking in the sense of a vitamin is it? So in terms of the discovery of vitamin D and its association with rickets, do you think there's adequate vitamin D in the general populations? For preventing rickets, pretty
much all around the world there is very little rickets left but since the early 1900s, there was a period when people started thinking about nutritionally and eating a lot of food was established. That really cut off thinking and research about what vitamin D really is and what it's doing. In the 1950s, there was a period when people started thinking about nutrition for themselves like Adele Davis' books came out and the medical establishment reacted to discourage the public from using their own therapy. For example, vitamin A,
there were stories about how horribly toxic it was, it would destroy your brain and make your skin fall off and very little evidence backing it up. You can poison rats and mice giving them a million or so units of vitamin A. The same, there were some animal experiments with gigantic doses of vitamin D and supposedly there was a case of a baby whose mother gave it a million or so units of vitamin D or took it while she was pregnant and that supposedly
caused the bones to thicken so much that there was no room for the brain to develop. So the newspaper stories in the 1950s were saying that vitamin D causes brain damage. I had been reading Adele Davis in the 1950s but despite that, I was sort of directed away from vitamin D because there was such a taboo about anything more than 200 or 300 units per day. Okay, it's interesting, you've said that Ricketts is relatively unknown in the world. I know
in England, since I've lived here for 15 years now, but I know I kind of keep in touch with some of the news that comes from time to time that's worth looking at. I know in England, especially in Northern England, they were saying that Ricketts was starting to appear again. It's kind of a little bit off tonight's subject really. But the advent of fear mongering from cases of skin cancer, melanoma, the use of sunscreens, the inherent phobia about being in the sun, all of this was actually implicated in the British Medical Journal as being causative
for the rise in Ricketts. It was being seen again by doctors and some people had never seen it before. It was kind of the first times for 30 and 40 year old doctors. So there is definitely an amount of Ricketts that seems to be in the populations at Northern latitudes . But in terms of the vitamin D levels measured on blood tests, I know I've seen people with very low vitamin D and I know just like TSH as a measure of the call, the
body's call for thyroid hormone has been down revised by the Endocrinological Association of the USA. They brought it down from 4.5 to 3.5, highlighting the fact that there are more and more people with hypothyroid type tendencies. And so this figure has been down regulated. I know the levels with vitamin D, the beneficial levels have been raised so that the lower limit I think was 20 nanograms per mil. Now they've raised that to 30 and a lot of people and places are advocating levels of 50 to 70 nanograms. In fact, for
athletes, I think they've even come out with studies that show there's positive associations for 100 nanograms per mil blood levels of vitamin D. What do you think about that even in the absence of rickets that there is a tendency in the population to have low? Yeah, several of the conditions that are well associated with vitamin D deficiency, some of them have doubled and tripled in the last 20, 30 years. And it looks like it's because of that fear of the sunlight, sunscreen and such. I've talked to a few people who have had vitamin
D deficiency and they've had a lot of people who had 10 or below nanograms per milliliter or 15 or 20 and their condition really corresponded to how low they were. Like one woman in her 60s said she was so weak she could hardly walk. Her muscles were simply very, very weak at 7 or 8 ng per ml. Within a week of taking just a moderate, I think it was 5,000 units a day, she could walk around. When you look at the symptoms of people with 15 ng per ml,
20, 25 and so on, you can see gradations of that weakness, depression, shrinkage, and shrinking muscles, insensitivity to insulin, tendency to have high blood sugar, all of the most common diseases of stress. Blood pressure is also associated positively, isn't it, with a lower level of vitamin D? Yeah, everything related to aging and degenerative stress. Atrial fibrillation, enlargement of the ventricle, calcification of the valves, degeneration of the valves in several different ways, hardening of the arteries, calcification of the coronary arteries, even calcification to the extent of what they call a heart stone,
a huge mass of calcium. Okay, we'll get into plenty of the different conditions for which there's been lots of peer-reviewed papers written on processes that I actually wasn't that aware of. I think probably like most people have just associated vitamin D with calcium and phosphorus metabolism, weak bones, osteomalacia, and degenerative stress. So degenerative skeletal type situations. But there's a very clear and positive link to energy production and inflammation. And I know the last few shows that we've done with you, you've been looking a lot at inflammation and the processes producing inflammation and
the sequelae of inflammation and how inflammatory processes in general are extremely destructive and counterproductive to energy production. When you look at the mechanism of just the outline that calcium helps to balance, or vitamin D helps to balance the relation between calcium and phosphate to prevent the over-accumulation of phosphate and to keep up the right level of calcium. When you look at the relation of that balance to inflammation, it turns out that it's really a serious problem in the population, the amount of phosphate relative to calcium. And that's because people aren't eating enough
dairy? Or green leaves. Green leaves and cheese and milk are really the major good sources of calcium. And meat, nuts, grains, beans, all of those have terrifically high phosphate content. The excess phosphate and the reaction of the parathyroid hormone to that high phosphate intake, it's exactly the same as a deficiency of vitamin D. So too much phosphate, too little vitamin D, and you get what amounts to an early stage of chronic kidney degeneration. Parathyroid hormone and phosphate are called uremic toxins, late stage kidney disease. But people are starting that process very
early and they don't eat enough calcium and vitamin D. Okay, well I want to talk a little bit about the natural conversion in the skin, the process by which sunlight activates the cholesterol precursor, and then how those metabolites are changed in the liver first and then in the kidney and how they become active and how this could play out in people with liver disease as well as kidney disease and how this could negatively impact them because they've automatically weakened the process by which this pro-hormone is converted into the active form. So you're listening to Ask
Your Ob-Doctor on KMED 91.1 FM from 7.30 until the end of the show at 8 o'clock. You're invited to call in with any questions. Dr. Ray Peat is joining us once again. We're discussing the widespread use of vitamin D and how important it is and I think the lack of sunlight and the phobia surrounding sun and cancer, how this is all playing into decreasing our levels and how there aren't that many foods that really produce or have enough vitamin D in
them to actually keep levels of vitamin D at good levels and how those levels have actually been raised in terms of the reference range for blood tests showing a positive association with increasing levels of vitamin D and decreasing disease. So number here if you're in the area it's 923 3911. If you live outside the area there's a 800 number which is 1-800-568-3723 or 1-800-KMUT-RAD. So lines will be open from 7.30 on. Dr. Peat, talking about the conversion
in the skin and again I wanted to also bring up the fact that I had heard and read that washing directly after sunbathing was actually counterproductive because you can wash the precursor metabolite off of the skin. I don't know how you view that as true or that's just some bad science and then the conversion of the cholesterol type molecule in the skin into the 25-hydroxy form and how that is then further hydroxylated downstream by the kidneys to the active form. What do you think first about washing if you're sunbathing and I think
I read only 20 minutes was necessary to produce peak amounts of the pro-hormone so that the body actually stopped producing more after about 20 minutes so it wasn't necessary to lie out in the sun all day to get adequate vitamin D from sun exposure from UVB mainly. I think that's only when you're in the middle of the day at a moderate latitude. The UVB is so low most of the year in the high latitudes that it takes a long time to get enough but
in like from 11, 10 to 2 in the summer in high latitudes it only takes 15 or 20 minutes to get enough. Okay because there's a definite decrease in UVB exposure with angle of the sun I mean yeah so okay given that you're perhaps I don't know down in San Francisco or that kind of latitude then from I know probably September through to April, May you're probably not again getting exposed to enough sunlight and if you are you probably need
to be out in the sun probably for an hour or two then rather than 20 minutes. Yeah and the color of your skin, the natural color makes a tremendous difference and age makes a difference. There is apparently less cholesterol metabolism and such in an old person and just the degree of pigmentation influences the amount of reaction you have to the ultraviolet. In Mexico for example even the women who are outside all day if they have dark skin and are only exposing their face and hands they tend to be deficient in vitamin D even at
high altitudes and brilliant sunlight. Because I read the association between previous kind of agrarian lifestyle or at least labor based lifestyle where most people worked for a living with manual labor. I don't mean people don't work at computers or whatever these days but a manual labor they're outdoors and more associated with agrarian lifestyles, farming and just being outdoors whether it's cutting wood or you know any other outdoor activity. Those people obviously then were getting exposed to sun but obviously with our modern lifestyles
you know most people are kind of indoors and sedentary which brings its own other negative components to health. But in terms of the amount of sun that people get and using supplementation I think probably supplementation is one of the easiest way to go about getting adequate levels of vitamin D because I don't think, do you think people get enough vitamin D from the food that they eat? No, that's almost impossible. If you drink say 2 to 4 quarts of vitamin D supplemented milk if it isn't whole legally it has to be supplemented with
vitamin D but that's only, I forget, I don't know what the current amount is but I think has been around 300 units per quart, something like that. Okay, per quart. Wow. And I think the modern levels that are advocated now up to 2,000, I know 2 to 4,000 IU per day so if you're getting 300 IU from a quart of vitamin D 4 to 5 milk it's going to take a lot of milk to reach that. And it is in a few other foods, things like oily fish but again I know
you're not an advocate of oily fish from a PUFA perspective. Egg yolks as well I think 20 IU per egg yolk so you're not going to get a lot of vitamin D from eggs either. Is there any other forms of vitamin D rich foods? Oh well mushrooms, mushrooms. They've been exposed to light, have a lot but interesting. During the 40s and 50s the main form of supplemental vitamin D was synthetic by ultraviolet radiation of fungus and the research that changed the
popularity of that claimed that it was responsible for the hardening of the arteries of young people starting in the 40s and 50s. And this hardening was because of calcium deposition, aberrant calcium? Yeah which normally happens in a vitamin D deficiency but there were publications arguing that the use of the synthetic vitamin D might have been contributing to abnormal calcium metabolism. I don't know if that's true but that came out around 1970 and milk added, it was switched over to vitamin D3 right after those articles came out so I think
they were just being cautious. So you said earlier that mushrooms exposed to light are a significant source of vitamin D. Did you know, have you any figures in terms of per ounce of mushrooms consumed what you'd get? No I don't know. It depends on the type of mushroom and the intensity of the ultraviolet. Interesting because we always think about mushrooms growing in the dark or in the woods or something so they would irradiate with UVB then mushrooms at some point in our history. Yeah and if they gather them outside just
being exposed to daylight for a few hours is enough. There have been studies using mushroom powder as a vitamin D supplement. It only took I think it was less than an ounce of powdered mushroom to make a distinct rise. It actually depressed the vitamin D3 and increased the vitamin D2. Wow that's interesting I've never heard of that. So this would be things like the common field mushroom, the white kind of the white agaric mushroom that's kind of common culinary mushroom that would be growing in the fields, button mushrooms. These
would be sources? Yeah if they've been exposed at all to sunlight they probably account for quite many people have a measurable amount of D2 in their serum. Interesting. Now the other thing I just want to go back a little bit. You've been an advocate of mushrooms specifically for something else, certainly for producing a soup of mushrooms and having this as a dietary supplement. Yeah for the anti-inflammatory, anti-cancer functions. Interesting. Okay so I guess getting on to specific diseases that have been characterized
with low vitamin D and how the studies have shown in cohorts of people that they've tested, those with higher initial levels of vitamin D did better in the outcomes than those with low. I know I've always associated vitamin D with bones because of rickets I think most people have. I don't know how many people are actually aware of the cancer association with vitamin D, how many people associate TB and multiple sclerosis and rheumatoid arthritis with vitamin D. But I'd like to bring out some of these things and get your perspective
on the inflammation that's happening and how you tie in the inflammatory process through parathyroid hormone which I know you've always said is inflammatory and how through using thyroid hormone and pregnenolone being two anti-inflammatories which quell that inflammatory cascade how they tie into how you see these inflammatory disorders that I've mentioned rheumatoid, MS, etc., cancers. So looking at something that I haven't mentioned which is fibromyalgia, I saw that there was a definite, well it was a theoretical mechanism because they haven't tested it any further but I know the fibromyalgia syndrome where people have
very tired, aching muscles and they feel muscle bound and they just can't move because their muscles are functioning. I know you'd probably associate that more with hypothyroidism and low thyroid state because you've clearly spoken many times about the patella or the Achilles tendon reflex and that's a direct response of the muscle not being able to repolarize quick enough and this lag phase that happens with the twitch. How do you see fibromyalgia in terms of vitamin D deficiency being relative to energy production and repolarization?
I think it's parallel, almost identical to the hypothyroid condition. All of the energy -- all of the inflammations that you get with low thyroid function are structurally and functionally similar to those you get from a vitamin D deficiency. The thyroid stimulating hormone is an agent of those inflammatory processes. Actually more than the direct effect of thyroxin which lowers TSH, the TSH itself directly activates and causes tissue to release the inflammatory cytokines, interleukins and so on and parathyroid hormone does that. Just by taking vitamin D or increasing your calcium intake or decreasing your phosphate relative
to the calcium, all of these changes in your diet will lower both TSH and parathyroid hormone and both of these hormones are directly involved in things such as mast cell activation, releasing histamine and serotonin, increasing all of the cytokines, tumor necrosis factor, nitric oxide, all of the things that promote degenerative inflammatory processes. So functionally vitamin D and thyroid are really parallel. You can't quite separate them. And then looking at the response to the immune system amounts to infection or other symptoms like infection or cancer or inflammatory responses. There are lots of papers published for, and
again this is a little bit of a divergence, I know tuberculosis as a lung disease. There were other lung type pathologies which were definitely seemed to improve and had lower morbidity associated with it with people that had higher vitamin D levels. There are vitamin D levels when they are brought into hospital. The higher the vitamin D when they come in, the more likely they are to go out alive. I think it's probably a no brainer if somebody is in, for many different, I mean how many
different illnesses are there that you can say don't have an inflammatory portion to them? Not too many, right? I think inflammation is one of those widespread systemic processes that happens in many pathologies. And so I think just recognizing that vitamin D is implied in inflammation, suppressing inflammation would make anybody want to supplement with vitamin D, wouldn't it? Yeah, and HIV, AIDS, malaria as well as tuberculosis are very widespread conditions that are known to increase their morbidity and mortality in proportion to how low the vitamin D is.
I read an article about a compound called catholicidin and this was an antiviral defense that again was heightened by vitamin D in the body and that lower levels produced lower levels of this compound and also decreased natural interferon production. So these would tend to implicate viral conditions to be positively associated or the outcomes of viral conditions to be positively associated with increased vitamin D. Yeah, and I think the viral process is basically an energy process. When the cells are well energized they're resistant to infection and replication of viruses.
And again, you're just saying that's from an energetic point of view to be able to withstand the processes that cost energy to drive a system more positively than being overwhelmed as it were. Yeah, and I think you can see the energy process in the brain conditions that are associated with vitamin D deficiency. Brain injured patients have very low vitamin D and probably the injury itself is causing it to be lost in some way. I read that Parkinson's was also implicated in low levels of vitamin D in some Parkinson's
patients showing that that was a kind of interference either with dopaminergic type interference or another neural signaling interference that vitamin D positively influences. And the prion diseases are probably influenced because vitamin D prevents the polymerization of the prion protein which is involved in scrapie, mad cow disease, Alzheimer's disease and probably several other of the degenerative brain diseases. Anxiety and depression are associated with very low vitamin D. Yeah, interesting. Again, that's an interesting thinking about things like from a perspective, things like hypericin from St. John's Wort being a classic treatment for depression and
how the alchemists classified St. John's Wort way back before there was any "science" although they were very methodical and very scientific in their own right. They classified it as heating and drying in the third degree saying that it was a solar rule by the sun. And so that again, anxiety and depression with St. John's Wort use is kind of hand in hand with the sun and its energizing effects if we want to get kind of holistic about the mechanism by which that works.
Okay, we are listening to Ask Your Rev. Dr. K. Medhi Galvan, 91.1 FM. From now until the end of the show at 8 o'clock, you're invited to call in with any questions related or unrelated to this month's subject of vitamin D, its metabolism and the effects that it has on the body. It sounds like someone's coming into the show to do some plug-in for the pledge line so let's bring him in now. So we're stealing the airwaves. Go ahead. The reason we're here is because people contribute and they pay for it and
they support it and it wouldn't happen otherwise. Right, and we need the community support and there's a reason we have, you know, why you're on the air and why we have these talk shows is for the community to communicate with each other and it's a really important aspect of KMUD and thank you so much. Oh, you're welcome. For being here. My name's Ruby, voice in ether by the way. And I'm Rob and when I, especially when I started listening to this station when I moved
out here, I always thought of the talk shows as sort of the community sitting around the campfire, you know, exchanging stories and ideas and I don't think that's too far off from what actually happens. So how far are we from reaching the... Oh, we're close. Yeah, I saw that. We're at $91,146. So thank you so much callers for calling in to 923-3911. And we only need another 3,500. No, yeah, 91, if you said 91 something, this says 90,800. We're so close.
So please call in and pledge and donate and give. We're not far away. So it's very important that we keep this station fully funded. I mean, over and above the 90,000, 95 is the goal, but obviously any more over and above that is totally works towards supporting the show. We always appreciate the extra funds. It always disappears at least as fast as it comes in. That's one of the sad realities. Where are we at with that thousand dollar? We're really close. We made about a third of it, but we still need a little bit more
and we're trying to reach that before eight. And so let's call in 923-3911. And yeah, so the way a challenge works is somebody ante's up a thousand dollars, but we don't get that money until other people match that challenge. So like I said, we have a little over $600 to go until we meet the challenge. So 923-3911. 1-800-K-MUD-RAD. We've got a whole half hour to do it, but don't waste time folks. 923-3911. We'll let you get back to it. Thank you. No problem. Yeah, you're welcome.
All right. Okay. Now I will get right back to the topic of vitamin D and its association with various pathologies here that I think some of which I hadn't realized until I started looking at this information earlier on today. Okay. So if you're in the area and or on the internet and you have any questions again, 923-3911, I know people are going to call in and pledge. That's what we want. So let's see the lights lighten up and see who's calling. There is a 800 number, which is 1-800-K-MUD-RAD
for those people either listening to the internet or in a different state. We often have people from the middle of the country and the East Coast calling. So Dr. Peat, I said at the beginning when I started introducing this subject for this evening that I found a very interesting parallel. But again, I'm always very cautious how far down the rabbit hole to go knowing that there's such a lot of misinformation, especially in science. I mean, talk about a revelatory electoral cycle, what we've seen from the mainstream
media, what we've seen, all the stunts they've pulled, all the lies, all the cover-ups, all the conspiracy. It's everywhere. And I don't believe that it's not in medical journals or in especially in pharmaceutical press releases. So getting to the subject of the conversion of vitamin D, first in the liver and then in the kidneys before it becomes active, are you aware of anything that would bypass the necessity for healthy livers and healthy kidneys in order to have adequate vitamin D? If not,
that I think is a main stumbling block that people need to know about and hear about. I think the low level of vitamin D and calcium is probably the cause of the sick liver and kidneys. Interesting. Go on. Rather than being a product, and so supplementing just with calcium and vitamin D, I think in many cases will correct whatever the liver and kidney problem is. It isn't a matter of curing the disease so that they can make or activate vitamin D. It's a matter of getting
the vitamin D and calcium into the system. And maybe you don't need to think about the disease of the kidney and liver as having some other mysterious cause such as a virus. Okay. Because I read one particular abstract that seemed to show that the... Okay. This was the other subject, vitamin D receptors. Now given that, I think you have said that there are many different places where the tissues in many different organs and other tissues including nerve presumably, where vitamin D receptors are located. So they are
ubiquitous a little bit like the sites that are binding sites for various different molecules or hormones or drugs or other things that the body produces. But in terms of what they call the vitamin D receptor and its ubiquity in the body, it's reasonable if you know, but is it reasonable to increase the amount of vitamin D receptors that your genotype would express in order to overcome any shortfall in the absorption of vitamin D or the pickup of vitamin D? The receptor is the problem of some of the stress conditions make the receptor disappear.
Make them disappear? Yes. So that I think getting enough calcium and vitamin D and good nutrition generally is necessary to make sure that you aren't suppressing the receptors. Some of the receptor repression is done by over-methylation and that can be something that your mother, for example, was deficient in vitamin D or calcium. That sets up a methylation pattern in subsequent offspring that can affect their sensitivity to vitamin D. By methylating the receptor or other interacting. Do you know how long lived these receptors are then? If you talk about a kind of transcriptional
event that occurs in DNA to produce all these different things, one of which is the vitamin D receptor, which is so important because it has such an implication in so many different inflammatory processes, not just degenerative bone disease but down to cancers. How long these vitamin D receptors last once they've been produced and therefore if you're talking about the over-methylation being negatively associated with these vitamin D receptors disappearing or not being produced. That would be the rate at which they're replaced and I don't know specifically how long they
last but other receptors are typically turning over very fast so the cells can remain adaptable usually just two or three days and much of the receptor has been recycled. Okay, we do have a caller on the air so let's take this first caller. Caller, you're on the air, where are you from? Hello? Hi, you're on the air, where are you from? Philipsville. Oh, Philipsville, hi. What's your question? A while back I had a vitamin D test and I was kind of low and they said to take more
and then I think I was checked a while later and they said I was on the low end of normal but I still needed to up it and they suggested I take 5,000 units a day so I was taking 5,000 units a day but I also take a multivitamin, kind of a strong multivitamin mineral. I'm a little older so I want to make sure I get everything I need and I noticed that the multivitamin had 3,000 units in it so that meant if I was taking both every day I'd be getting 8,000
a day. Is that too much? Well, I would wonder first how quantitative the amount was actually in the tablet if it said 3,000, how bioavailable it was over a liquid form if that was... It was a liquid capsule, the 5,000. Yeah, the liquid capsule was a 5,000 but what was the 3,000 one that was in the multivitamin and that was in the tablet? Yeah, that was in a big pill. Yeah, so Dr. Peat, 8,000, if she got 8,000?
Yeah, if you figure that being in a bathing suit in the sun for 20 or 30 minutes enough to just start turning pink, that can make 10 or 15,000 units. Oh, okay. So 5 or 10,000 units is never going to be harmful. So that's not going to be harmful. So if I take... Because I was starting to take the 5,000 one every other day because I take the other one every day. But you think I should go back to taking the 5,000 every day with the multi?
Yeah, I've never heard of 10,000 a day being harmful. All right, and this is only 8. Did you say that you need added calcium for the vitamin D to work better? You need a good ratio of calcium to phosphate. I think it's really protective to take in well over 1,000. I try to get about 2,500 milligrams of calcium per day. I see. And what are the foods that are good for that? Milk, cheese, and leafy greens that are well cooked and the water they cook in.
They have to be cooked because I eat a lot of salad, but those aren't cooked. We can't digest raw leaves, so most of the calcium is not being assimilated from salad greens. So I should eat like cooked broccoli or something like that? Yeah, yeah. Okay, how much? Anything green, like green beans, anything that's green has the calcium? One or two big servings of kale or chard would give you a good part of your day's requirement, but I think the best way is to have more than a quarter day of low-fat milk.
Well, I can't possibly drink a quarter day of milk. I eat a little cheese, you know, and sometimes a little sour cream. Just for example, can I just ask you this? How much do you weigh? I'm not going to tell you that. No, you should. Come on. You don't ask a lady her age and her weight. No, no, it's important. I need to ask you. You need to tell me. I ain't going to tell you. Okay, well, Dr. Peat, thanks for your call. I wanted to do a...
What does it have to do with my weight? Oh, it has a huge amount. So if you like... I'm a bit on the heavy side, let's say that. Yeah, well, there's been very, very, very positive associations with an inability to absorb vitamin D. And I'm not saying you're obese, but in obese people. So the body fat has a direct, yeah, a suppressing effect on vitamin D absorption. So Dr. Peat, how about that? You understand that. Well, vitamin D and calcium both have a direct suppressive effect on fat formation. The fatty
liver, for example, is in animal studies, it's corrected by both vitamin D and calcium. So that suppresses fat. That will help you not get so fat if you eat vitamin D and calcium. And the high calcium intake by itself, just with a normal amount of vitamin D, is very effective at preventing overweight. Oh, that's good to know. And what did you say would happen to the kidneys? That was something bad would happen to the kidneys from not having enough calcium or not enough calcium and vitamin D?
Not enough calcium and vitamin D or too much phosphate. The combination, any of those will cause your parathyroid hormone to increase. And elevated phosphate and elevated parathyroid hormone are very toxic to the kidneys. Well, I actually had an overactive thyroid that I had developed a few years ago. I hadn't had it before. And that led to atrial fibrillation problems. And I had a radioactive iodine to shrink the thyroid. So now I take 88 micrograms a day of thyroid to keep it up to the normal
level. So I assume I'm getting the normal level of thyroid that I need. Yes, thyroid works in many ways similarly to vitamin D and regulates calcium and magnesium in particular. Well, I'm taking both. So I guess that's a good thing. Okay. Well, thank you. Thank you for your call. We do have another caller. So let's get this call. And the lights are flashing again. So let's take this call away from. What's your question? I am calling you from Finland in Scandinavia. Thank you. Finland. Okay.
I was wondering if yourself or Dr. Peat could enlighten me about sediment in the urine. Is this a good thing? Is it normal? Any observation about sediment in the urine? Yeah. Okay. Well, first of all, do you know, is this sediment, is it a solid sediment? Or are you talking about an amorphous kind of sediment that's actually part of the fluid make up? I mean, is it crystalline? Yeah, like a dust, like cloudy. If you let it, let's say if you would urinate in a jar
and let it sit, it would have, it will make a cloud kind of a. Have you ever had any investigations for any kind of kidney stones or any type of calculi that you know of? I've never had an issue with that. I actually started investigating that when I heard claims from people eating mostly fruit that this might be a sign of good assimilation of or good function of the kidneys. But I'm not sure about the scientific claims. Okay. Dr. Peat, what do you think?
If you have a fairly high protein intake and your urine is on the acid side, down around pH five, and you have a very high calcium intake, say from the equivalent of two liters of milk per day, you'll have a lot of calcium appearing in the urine. And if the urine is acidic, it isn't likely to form stones. But when it stands, the pH can rise. And as the carbon dioxide evaporates, and that can precipitate crystals. So other things being equal, it isn't necessarily harmful to have a precipitation in the urine.
Okay. Did you get that? Thank you very much. Yeah, you're welcome. Thank you. Thank you for your call. Okay, just quickly switching to urine as a kind of urinalysis. And do you think that people that have clear urine are, for want of a better word, healthy compared to those people that have not cloudy through pigmentation, but you know, less than see-through, opaque type urines? Do you notice any association with that? Because I'm sure people have wide ranging presentations from both color and opacity. I think the clarity is largely from the amount
of fluid you're drinking. And if the urine is acidic, I don't think some cloudiness is going to hurt. But there can be bad causes of cloudiness, infection, for example. And I think the yellow color of urine is considered to indicate cell turnover. So sometimes the morning urine will be yellow and the afternoon urine clear. Because during the night, with the high stress hormones, a lot of cells are breaking down. And the fragments of the nucleic acids turning over, I think, can produce some of the yellow pigment.
Okay, well I'm afraid that is all we've got time for because we're coming up close to two minutes to eight. Thank you very much for your time, Dr. Peat. I wanted to mention that the clotho protein that we talked about a few months ago, which is the anti-aging protein, it's very similar to vitamin D in some of its functions. Vitamin D deficiency produces the degenerative changes that a mutation or deficiency of the clotho protein can produce. Interesting. Well, I really wanted to talk
more to you about the vitamin D receptor and how that could be enhanced. Because I think vitamin D is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of the process of inflammation and all the diseases associated with it. So maybe next month we can pick up just the last part of what I wanted to look at with vitamin D and maybe bring the vitamin D receptor into more light and help people understand how important vitamin D is to get, especially
now we're going into the darker times of the year. So thanks so much for your time, Dr. Peat. The calcium metabolism and sugar oxidation is another subject we talked about. Excellent. Good. I've got some notes here. Thanks very much. Okay. Thank you. Okay. So for those people that have listened to the show this evening, thanks for either calling in or listening. I can only hope that there's lots of people out there who listened and didn't call. But I would also stress the point that this is a funded radio station.
We do need your financial support. So hopefully the phone will ring off the hook once 8 o'clock comes around here and people will start pledging. For those of you who've listened to the show, thanks so much. The truth is out there. There's lots of information on the internet. Don't believe the media. The media is dying. In fact, the media is virtually dead. I think it's got a 6% trust rating at this point in time. So thanks for listening and until December next month, good night.