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And now, here are your hosts, Josh and Jeanne Rubin. What up, everyone? This is Josh and Jeanne Rubin from EastWest Healing and Performance. For some reason, at the beginning of every show, we have a problem with that little intro that we have. And it's so great, but who cares? Welcome again for a great show. We're going to have Ray P. on once again. And prior to me doing his intro and talking about the show, of course, I want to tell you a little bit about what we do.
For those of you who don't know what we do or who we are, we own a – we say a wellness company down in San Diego area, Carlsbad, California. We work with people that have GI problems, hormone problems, you know, physical problems, a little back pain, things like that from all over the world. And we get clients as far away as Norway, Israel, Switzerland. So we work with a lot of clients via Skype, long distance, phone, as well as in person.
So check out our website at EastWestHealing.com if you want to learn more about what we do, as well as check out our webpage because there's a lot of great resources on there, websites, articles, YouTube, things like that. And you can get linked from our website to our YouTube page, blog, Facebook, all those great things. Stay tuned as well, our website in the next three months is going to be changing dramatically. So we're really excited about that. We're going to be launching some products and things like that. Definitely stay tuned.
So today's show, once again, is we're going to have Ray Pion. We're going to be talking about basically sugar and really kind of dispelling some of the myths about sugar, and really talking about why we need sugar, the types of sugar, and what Ray's thoughts are on sugar. And for those of you that don't know Ray or what he's about, you can visit his website at RayPeat.com, R-A-Y P-E-A-T.com. Ray is, has a PhD in biology from the University of Oregon, and he specializes in physiology.
He's taught at many schools from the University of Oregon to different naturopathic schools, to other schools down in Mexico. And he started his work in regards to hormones, such as progesterone and things like that back in the 1960s. So if you want to learn more about him, definitely check out his website. He's got a lot of great articles. They're very in-depth. He does have a lot of good books that you can buy. They're on back order right now because he's just a little bit, I guess, overwhelmed and inundated by e-mails.
So before we get them on, one thing I wanted to bring up was, once again, you know, for a lot of people, they're e-mailing Ray, and they're e-mailing Ray. And the thing about Ray is he's a very humble guy from how I know Ray, and he's going to keep basically answering your e-mails, and he's going to keep doing it. And the problem is, this is the reason why he's put up sending the books, because he's super busy. So I've said before, all this great information, you know, he's kind of a scientist. He's not a nutritionist.
And all this information is due to, obviously, being able to do the research. So all I ask, this is not what he asked, this is all I ask, that if you keep e-mailing him and he keeps sending you e-mails back, you can go to his website, you can find his address, and all I'm asking, or all me and Gina are asking is, send him some money. I don't care if it's a dollar. I don't care if it's $5, $10, or $500.
Please send him something because this great information can't get out unless he can do the research. And the more time you take, essentially, for free, in a sense, he can't do this research. So please, and I know for a fact people are not doing it because I've talked to people that is very excited about, oh, they send me back all this information, I'm reading it over, it's a super long e-mail, and then I ask if they sent him anything and they say no. So please, please send him something.
So let me get Ray and Gina on. Let me see if I can click them in. I think we're in, Josh. We've been on. Yes. Yeah, I can hear you. Are you there, Ray? Yes. So, Ray, I don't know if you want to add anything to what Josh was just expressing, and I'm not sure exactly what your thoughts are on that. We just want to make sure that people are respectful of your time and energy. Yeah, I'm sending fewer very long answers now that more people are writing. I'm trying to condense my answers. Yeah. Yeah.
Awesome. Well, we appreciate that you take the time to do so. I know we've got a lot of people's interest as far as what it is you do and what you've learned through your research. So, again, we appreciate that. Yeah. And I know a lot of people appreciate it too because, you know, our listeners on the show and inquiries we get in regards to your stuff, the buzz is out, and you're definitely making a difference. And I know -- well, my perception is that's kind of what you want. So it's great stuff.
So we definitely appreciate it. So hoping everyone heard that. So let's talk about sugar, starch, glycemia, all these important things. Or I should say, you know, it's in our industry. This is probably the one topic that really people are interested in because there's so much out there. So I guess starting off before we get to nitty-gritty, you know, there's many different types of sugars, and you can kind of touch on that. I'm sure we'll touch upon it. But you have so many people out there saying don't eat sugar. Sugar's in everything.
It's going to take away from it, cause diabetes, cause insulin resistance, creates cancer, and increases ages in the body. You know, you name it, it's bad, bad, bad, bad, bad. And then we look at your research, and it's completely different. Now, of course, we have to talk about the type of sugar, but kind of what got you started on really focusing on starch or sugar or glycemia? One of the things was reading John Yudkin's book, the English guy who wrote a book saying that sugar causes heart disease.
And he was very clear showing that sugar increases cholesterol, and that was back in the time when everyone was saying cholesterol causes heart disease. And I was very impressed by his research. But since I saw cholesterol as a protective factor from studying progesterone, I saw that if you were deficient in progesterone or under stress, your body would increase production of cholesterol to make more progesterone to protect your systems. And so I believed Yudkin was on the right track. And since I saw cholesterol as protective rather than harmful,
I took his evidence to mean that sugar would help resist stress. So that started me along that line. And I had been a migrainer for all my life, and I gradually came to see that a change in my rhythm of eating in relation to activity was usually what brought on a migraine attack. And often I would have very odd food cravings just before the migraine appeared, and even shortly after eating I would get food cravings. And I started trusting those cravings and eating again,
and I found that if I ate enough sweet stuff like a quart of ice cream when I felt a migraine coming on, it wouldn't come on. And I was also a sort of a problem sleeper. If I stayed up just an hour or two after my normal bedtime, then my sleep would be disturbed even for a couple of following nights. And one night I was talking on the radio, and I wanted to keep going hour after hour, and I had a friend go out and buy me huge milkshakes about one an hour,
and I was able to keep talking until 1 a.m. and didn't have any problem at all going to sleep. And so I recognized that I had a peculiar need for sugar when I was doing anything unusually stressful. And so that started me thinking more about the physiology of it. Now, there's so many myths out there about it that when I say "it," I think we have to start elaborating, I guess, on the types of sugars, you know, monosaccharide, ditachoride, or whether it's a fruit or if we're just talking straight sugar.
Now, there's so many myths out there. I guess getting into the physiology, most people don't advocate using carbs/sugars to actually increase health. I mean, most people out there, like the paleo diet, are saying high protein, low carb. And all these people say if you want to lose weight, which we know that doesn't mean it's healthy, eat high protein, low carb. And you kind of go the other way in a sense. Now, physiologically, what's the importance of getting the sugars in our body? At one time, I was experimenting with chocolate as a source of magnesium.
And I found that bitter chocolate, like coffee, was extremely high in magnesium and some other nutrients. But chocolate happens to be very high in leucine, and it would give me low blood sugar, and I would crave something to eat very shortly after eating a lump of black chocolate. And that started me thinking about the amino acids in relation to blood sugar. And I saw that several of the amino acids in proteins are powerful insulin stimulants. And when you eat protein by itself, you stimulate insulin secretion, which is needed to metabolize the amino acids.
But in reaction to the insulin, your liver has to put out glucose to keep your blood sugar going, so your brain and blood cells and kidneys and so on can keep working. And if your liver is somewhat low on glycogen, then every time you eat protein and have an insulin secretion, your body secretes a compensating amount of cortisol to bring your blood sugar back up. But the cortisol brings your blood sugar up at the expense of protein. And so partly cortisol, the first tissues that cortisol breaks down are your thymus, gland,
and other immune cells and the muscles. And if you eat lots of protein, in spite of the high cortisol, you can keep your balance such that you are replacing your muscles and thymus gland, but you are running on a constantly high cortisol secretion. And my previous interest in diabetes, I had seen that doctors simply neglected to measure hormones that were related to blood sugar when they would prescribe insulin. Calling a person a diabetic, they said they needed to take insulin the rest of their life.
But having some of these people test their cortisol, we saw that very many of these so-called diabetics just had very high cortisol, and sugar happens to be the best thing for lowering cortisol to normal. And since high cortisol gives the impression of diabetes causing high blood sugar, you get the unexpected effect of when you eat sugar, you lower the cortisol. And some of these people had a very quick recovery from their so-called diabetes. Now, I wrote a couple of things down besides the 20-plus questions I have. Talking about cortisol, I'll take a little tangent here.
There's so much out there on adrenal fatigue. In my perception over the years is a lot of people took Hans Helier's work and kind of misperceived what he was putting out in regards to his general adaptation syndrome. And you talk about high cortisol and using sugar to actually lower cortisol. What about people that have low cortisol? Is that possible or is that just a fluctuation of maybe being hypoglycemic? In Helier's studies, he never talked about adrenal fatigue. Exhaustion was his word when you would stress an animal terribly.
The first couple of days it would get ulcers, and if it didn't bleed to death, it might adapt. But if you kept the stress up, you would eventually kill the rat from stress. And he had the different phases, the shock, the adaptation, and the exhaustion phases. And in the exhaustion phase, the animal would die from stress. And he very early in his studies found that pregnant animals didn't need their adrenal glands. And as soon as they would have a litter, then the next stress would kill them
because their progesterone was no longer being produced to compensate for the adrenal absence. And so he gave some animals a daily dose of progesterone after taking out their adrenal glands and found that they would live a full, normal, healthy life lacking their adrenals absolutely. So the adrenals are there to regulate your sugar and salt, and it happens that progesterone just as nicely regulates sugar and salt metabolism. And to produce these hormones, either progesterone or the adrenal hormones, you need various nutrients, but especially to convert cholesterol into pregnenolone
and then the other steroids, the essential factors are thyroid hormone and vitamin A. And those are so closely connected that they travel in the blood on the same protein and are taken up by the steroid synthesizing cells on that protein, transported right into the mitochondrion for enzymes. And you use those to convert cholesterol into the pregnenolone and the other steroids. So if a person is deficient in vitamin A or thyroid, their cholesterol tends to rise, trying to compensate for the deficient ability to produce the adaptive hormones.
So with a thyroid or nutritional deficiency, you can be deficient in the steroid hormones, but it isn't the fault of the adrenal glands. The adrenal glands are extremely adaptive. When someone wants an animal that can't produce adrenaline, since the core of the adrenal gland is where adrenaline is produced, they would scoop out the contents in the adrenal capsule, including the cortex, and there would be a layer of adrenal cortical cells left in this capsule, and within just a few days, the adrenal cortex hormones would have regenerated. So you can basically destroy the adrenals.
And if you have a few cells left and have good nutrition and thyroid function, the adrenal cortex will regenerate very well. Right. And I think it's important for everyone to know, the reason we're talking about this kind of caveat is because cortisol is a glucocorticoid. It's going to regulate blood sugar, and so many people are doing labs and saying, "I need supplements," when we need to look at blood sugar. Are we eating the right foods? Are we eating the wrong foods that we can't even break down?
Are we eating foods that block sugar from getting in the cell? Yes. That's where fructose and sucrose come in, because fructose is the most powerful sugar at regulating blood sugar both up and down. It's been used in diabetics for decades as a small supplement to help bring down their blood sugar, but it also is effective in hypoglycemia because it helps to regulate insulin production and slowly turns into glucose, helping to regulate glucose use, whether you're low or high as the starting point. Can you give some examples for people that are listening and might not know,
like where would they get fructose? Oh, health food stores used to sell pure fructose. I don't know if they still do since the sort of mania about it has started or the phobia. But I think some bakeries use it, but I don't recommend it in any of those prepared foods because it's almost always combined with starches, and starches have a very quick ability to turn into glucose, where fructose is a very slow, controlled converter into glucose, and so it regulates insulin. I want to take another little caveat because you were talking about insulin earlier
and something a lot of people get confused about, and it even kind of confused me at the time, is in your article you talk about insulin, and you talk about how insulin itself has been found to account for only about 8% of the insulin-like activity in the blood, with potassium being probably the largest factor. Can you elaborate on that a little bit for everyone? Yeah. Several things imitate the function of insulin. For example, if a diabetic exercises, just whatever the exercise is doing is increasing the cell's ability to take up and use glucose,
the leucine in some foods like chocolate acts like insulin and will duplicate the functions of insulin to let you use your sugar faster. But potassium in these studies, they found that potassium itself has that effect, and that's probably one of the things involved in exercise insulin-like action. And since fruits are one of the best sources of potassium, that is another thing that makes fruits a good food. Usually they have about 50/50 fructose and glucose. A sucrose molecule is one half fructose and half glucose. And besides that balance between glucose and sucrose,
the fruits always contain a lot of potassium and some other minerals. Magnesium is another one that helps regulate glucose. So when you take, for example, orange juice or grape juice or the fruits, the high potassium content reduces the amount of insulin you have to secrete to handle those. And that accounts for why they're much more smoothly handled than a similar number of calories in the form of starch. Right. So kind of going with that, you know, obviously we know that you're an advocate of sucrose,
and we'll talk about the different types, but you're talking about fruit. I guess for the listeners, what types of fruits do you recommend, and which ones do you think, I guess, could hurt us versus help us? Because I know one of your biggest things is everyone out there is looking at what is good for us, kind of your philosophy, and I don't want to speak for you, but it's almost like what actually can hurt us. So maybe talking about some of the fruits that you think are beneficial and why in regards to sucrose,
but also some of the fruits that could actually be not beneficial for us. There are -- almost all of the sweet fruits are on balance better than the alternative of eating bread and pasta and cereals and such. But among the sweet fruits, there are some factors that make a choice possible. For example, bananas, unless they're ripened to the point that they're sort of a translucent amber mush, the average way people eat bananas is almost all starch with enough sugar to make them pleasant tasting.
But the high starch content is not an ideal food, not only because it has a great tendency to stimulate insulin, but also because when you don't eat it with a lot of fat, the starch grains actually can get into your bloodstream, and large starch grains are often bigger than red blood cells, so they clog your small arterioles and cause chronic tissue injury. Gerhard Volkheimer was the person who did that, and some of his articles with very nice photographs, micro photographs of plugged arteries
and of the starch grains actually in process of being absorbed into the bloodstream and lymph system are on the Internet. Besides the starch problem with some fruits such as bananas, you have the allergy problem, and I think that's partly because of the industrialization of banana farming, use of a lot of chemicals, and just overuse of the soil stresses the plants. And you've heard of the latex allergy, probably corresponding to the banana allergy. Both of those, the rubber trees and the banana plants are both highly industrialized, stressed crops,
and I think it's the defensive stress substances that the plants evolved to kill insects that were attacking them. Those highly cropped species produce this insecticidal enzyme, which happens to be highly allergenic to humans. And so even apples, some brands of apples have quite a high allergen content, and cooking many of the allergenic fruits makes them safer to eat. And the same with the starches. Very well cooked starchy fruits are much safer than the raw fruits. And a third factor in fruits to watch out for is the serotonin content.
Bananas, again, excel in their high serotonin content, which has, before people were aware of it, they were diagnosing intestinal tumors when they found high serotonin content in the urine, because some tumors produce excess serotonin. And if you eat bananas or prunes and plums, kiwis, several types of fruit are high in serotonin, so that's just one factor to be aware of, but starch and allergens are probably generally more important. And pretty much that leaves some things like watermelons and grapes and citrus fruits, oranges in particular.
Now, do you -- would you put mangoes in the allergy category and the pineapples in the banana serotonin category? Yeah, pineapples are known to have a fairly high amount of tryptophan that can contribute to the serotonin. And mangoes, I'm not sure -- they're in the same family as poison oak. And in the tropics, after I had enjoyed about a kilogram of mangoes, some people said, "Oh, didn't you know about mango sickness?" And it's well known in the tropics, but I think it's partly that they are sort of a fibrous fruit,
and partly if the fiber isn't handled by the right bacteria, it can cause toxin production in the intestine. My next newsletter is going to be relating to the issue of fiber, soluble fiber or anything, any carbohydrate that isn't sugar can potentially feed bacteria that produce toxins and cause systemic stress. Awesome. We look forward to that one. I want to talk about the gut, but talk a little bit more about serotonin. I'm not sure where I read this, and I could have read it incorrectly, but you talk about CO2,
and when you talk about hibernation in relation to serotonin, but also glucose in the body playing a factor in that. And I don't know if it was -- if you're having low glucose blood sugar levels and you're releasing the cortisol, and you go into that gluconeogenesis state and you break down your tissues, if you have that excess serotonin, I'm not sure where I'm going, but what's the connection between all that? Serotonin, like endotoxin and histamine, serotonin is a major trigger of the stress adaptation system,
and so it turns on the hypothalamic protein hormone that turns on the pituitary hormone that turns on the adrenals. So serotonin works at a very basic level to increase the stress reaction. And the Internet is full of people saying that sugar will raise your serotonin, but I think what they're meaning is that you feel good after you eat a bunch of sugar, and feeling good is supposed to mean that your serotonin is up, but actually it's free fatty acids which cause your brain to take up more tryptophan and make more serotonin,
and you produce more free fatty acids when your blood sugar is low and when you're under stress. So stress or starvation, hypoglycemia, will make you produce these free fatty acids which will send serotonin into your brain and trigger the adaptive stress reaction which brings out the cortisol. So if we're not eating the right foods, we're not getting enough sugar, protein, fat, whatever, we're not storing it, which we should talk about. There's a question from a listener that emailed me and wanted to know,
if they want to lose weight, is it important to actually metabolize fatty acids and use fat for energy? And you're actually saying the opposite of most people, it's actually harmful. Can you elaborate a little bit more on the dangers of liberating free fatty acids besides the whole serotonin connection? When you're at rest, the resting muscle is metabolizing a very small amount of fuel, just a maintenance amount, but its fuel at rest is fatty acid. And at maximal activity, you are burning almost pure sugar.
So at rest, the fat is being handled by your muscles and not causing any great rise in free fatty acids. The muscles use it just about as fast as it's released. But if your liver is well energized with thyroid hormone, all the nutrients including adequate sugar, your liver is able to treat any excess free fatty acids produced by stress as any other toxin, and your liver can attach glucuronic acid to these fatty acids and excrete them in the urine and bile, just as if it was insecticide or something you had eaten.
So a healthy liver, keeping your liver well energized with thyroid and sugar, will gradually help you get rid of stored fat. And when you exercise on, for example, a low carbohydrate diet and start mobilizing more and more of these free fatty acids, some of them at an extreme will turn into ketones. And the ketones are good, safe energy for your brain and heart. It's the free fatty acids that don't turn into ketones which are harmful. The problem with most of the free fatty acids is that on our current or 20th century diet,
these tissues are pretty well filled with polyunsaturated fatty acids. And these, when they're liberated, instead of supporting the full high-reach metabolism, they suppress the mitochondrial metabolism by interfering with the thyroid hormone in proportion to how unsaturated they are. And so as soon as you get stressed enough to start eating your own stored fats, these stored fats, if they're polyunsaturated, happen to block the thyroid function and turn your metabolism down. And so within two or three days of going on a diet,
a person's metabolic rate drops so tremendously that at the end of 10 to 14 days, they have lost very little weight, but almost all of that weight is muscle tissue because of the stress produced by the low blood sugar. So when they put people on a moderate low-calorie diet for the same length of time, they find that they lose mostly fat and very little protein tissue. So it's the degree of the free fatty acids being mobilized that suppress your ability to burn calories. Right. I hope everyone kind of gets that.
But the bottom line is if you don't take in the right types of sugars, you actually facilitate the stress reaction, which facilitates the catabolic reaction. And if you're storing toxins in your liver or gut, you can't detoxify them. If you have polyunsaturated fatty acids in your tissues and you start breaking down your tissues, you lose weight because you're losing muscle mass, but now you're just perpetuating the stress cycle, which actually will downregulate the immune system and the thyroid. So you might "be losing weight," but you're actually doing it in a very unhealthy way.
I want to go back to the fruits a little bit because I know you talk about ripe fruits a lot, and I want you to touch on that for the listeners, but also when you talk about oranges or orange juice, why you recommend no pulp. This next month's newsletter is going to discuss that, but basically it's that any pulp is a potential food for bacteria. They did experiments with rats, giving them various kinds of fiber. Many of the most popular health food fibers increased the toxin formation in their intestines,
and they found that with fiber added to the diet, fiber that could be fermented by bacteria, the animals became both anxious and aggressive. Just leaving that fermentable fiber out, the animals were friendly and confident. The commercial orange juice in the last few years, there have been new technologies developed. You might have noticed that there's more pulpy orange juice on the market. I think it was about 15 years ago the Environmental Protection Agency told the industry that their mountains of waste from making orange juice were attracting too many insects and other pests,
and they had to find a way to dispose of it. One of the technologies that they used to dispose of it was to dissolve it with enzymes and to leave a large part of the pulp dissolved in the orange juice. When you squeeze a ripe orange naturally, if you let it stand in a glass in the fridge for a few hours, the bottom will be orange and the top will be clear, but much of the commercial orange juice, the fiber has been chemically altered so that it will never settle out.
It's actually a new chemical substance that people have never eaten before. It's like any of the other gums or fibers that can be intestinal toxins. Right. It's almost like caromaginizing the juice. Many of these fibers that people were thinking they were eating to protect against colon cancer, some of them actually increase the incidence of colon cancer in experimental animals. So now they're using humans to dispose of all the -- everything. Instead of throwing it out for the insects, we're just becoming the disposal. That's great. Cool. Awesome.
It's the same thing that happened in the fish industry. The fish factories, canneries were creating mountains of either land polluting fish waste or they were dumping it in the oceans and creating messes in the surrounding ocean. And they were told to clean up their factories and getting rid of the various components of the waste that contributed to the marketing of fish oil. Right. Amazing. Now, going back to the thymus, I know at least what I've read, everyone says as we age our thymus shrinks, yada, yada, yada.
And you talk about how -- I'm not sure what article, and I could be quoting it incorrectly -- how as we age, your thoughts are because of poo-fizz and radiation and all these different things, and because we're basically not getting the right types of sugars, and we're in this catabolic state -- lost my train of thought here -- that we basically -- we'll actually shrink the thymus because we're in that stressed state, and it's not normal for that to happen. Maybe that's why we're seeing all these autoimmune diseases or people in a weakened state.
Yeah, one of the functions of cortisol is to maintain blood sugar, but one of the ways it does that is to block the use of sugar for most purposes. Red cells can keep using it in the presence of cortisol, but immune cells that the thymus consists of mostly can't use sugar in the presence of cortisol, and the presence of cortisol forces them to metabolize fats, and especially unsaturated fats will quickly kill the thymus. And it only takes -- I think it's about three hours typically for the thymus gland to disappear during profound stress.
And so if a person is killed really instantly at a young age, they'll still have a thymus gland, but if it takes them a few hours to die, the thymus gland disappears, and that's really part of the reason that they've thought that the thymus disappears in adulthood because by the time a person is dead, they will have gone through some stress that melts the thymus gland very quickly. And given the right nutrition and hormones, the thymus can almost as quickly regenerate itself. Interesting. Huh.
Yeah, I mean, it's amazing how many people have adrenal fatigue or have an autoimmune disease, and it's amazing that people aren't looking at physiologically what the body's not getting. And a lot of the times, like you say, people's meals are either fat deficient or protein loaded. A lot of times, carb deficient, meaning the wrong types of carbs or sugars per se. So talking about fruits and things like that, you know, you talk about fruit juices, you've talked about which things to stay away from because serotonin content in the fiber,
you know, so people know what fruits -- what about vegetables in regards to sugars? What's your thoughts on the different vegetables? We've talked about polyunsaturated fatty acids, so I don't want to go tremendous into that, but what about like -- what are some of the vegetables you recommend and why? Well, the low fiber, low starch things, there are a few of them that are called vegetables. For example, small summer squash, they're actually fruits, but since they end up more starchy, they're usually thought of as a vegetable.
But if you eat a tender summer squash with some butter, the small amount of starch in it, if it's well cooked and eaten with butter, it's very similar to eating fruit, high potassium content, high magnesium. So would you say that most of the vegetables you recommend are either very close to the ground or even below the ground? Yeah, generally the roots don't have -- fruits are almost designed as food. They're food for the seeds, and so they aren't designed as a tissue that has to replace itself,
like the leaves are part of the energy factory of the plant. And the roots are essential, but they're protected against grazing animals, for example, and so they have antifungal chemicals more than anti-grazing animal chemicals. And so aside from those mild toxins that are mostly directed at bacteria and fungus, the roots are pretty free of the plant defensive toxins. And so if they're cooked, for example, young turnips and young potatoes that haven't maximized their starch production, eaten with butter after being thoroughly cooked are pretty safe. And potatoes are almost unique among the plant materials.
The liquid part of the potato in between the starch grains happens to have the equivalent of amino acids besides some protein. These are keto acids, which are -- they can be used as fuel by the brain and heart as a substitute for sugar or fatty acids, and they're really an ideal anti-stress fuel. But they can also be, just by attaching an ammonia group, they can be turned instantly into the essential amino acids as needed. And so apart from the starch, the potato is a very amazing food.
And I've seen a few cases of people who had basically incurable problems, undiagnosed, but they were clearly dying, who just juicing a few pounds of potatoes and cooking the juice with a centrifugal juicer, you throw out the starch grains almost completely, and then you cook it just like you were scrambling an egg, and the juice coagulates so it's sort of like limp mashed potatoes. And this provides both energy and the essential amino acids, but without stimulating insulin or cortisol. So it's sort of an emergency food for almost any stress problem.
R.L. Veitch is the famous ketone researcher who -- his ideas are now being applied to cure Alzheimer's disease because the ketones provide energy that the deteriorating brain can't get from either fat or sugar. And so I think potato juice would be a fairly economical and safe way to get the ketones that Veitch has been recommending. K. When using the potatoes, Ray, would you still suggest using it with a carbohydrate and a fat because it would be considered a protein or would it be used by itself?
How exactly would you go about using that as a therapeutic tool for somebody? R.L. Well, the people that I've known who used it, one was a man who hadn't slept for months and had almost no mentality, but his sister made him a big bowl of the cooked juice, and before he finished the bowl, he was asleep. It simply energized his brain enough that the stress hormones that he had been suffering from for months disappeared. And another one was a girl who couldn't digest anything.
She tried all kinds of food, but she had wasted way to about 65 pounds. Every time she would eat normal food, she would burp ammonia, and that was what gave me the idea because R.L. Veitch had used his synthetic ketones for treating kidney disease patients who had the problem of disposing of excess ammonia if they ate proteins. And since I knew that potatoes contained the ketones, I made her some juice, and she ate it without burping ammonia and digested it perfectly well. And just a few days of doing that and she was completely recovered,
just went straight up to 130 pounds. So, fascinating. There are lots of tropical fruits that contain some, at least, of these same keto acids, but several times over the last several years I've tried to get together the stuff, but the chemical companies now won't sell even keto acids and such things to independent researchers because of the new homeland security laws. Right. Let's kind of skip a beat a little. What's your thoughts on honey and maple syrup? Honey is basically almost pure sugar with some minerals, and so it's a good food.
It isn't that much greater than just plain white sugar, but slightly nutritious. And maple syrup is probably, chemically, it's probably more nutritious than honey. It has a very high potassium and good magnesium content, but the problem is that it's heat-treated, boiled down, and very hot oxygen-exposed glucose can make some allergens, so you have to be cautious with any of the dark, concentrated sugars like molasses from cane sugar or the maguey agave sugar, the same thing. It's boiled down until it's potentially allergenic. Now, when we brought it up, because we have a lot more questions,
when we brought it up, let's talk a little bit about sugar itself, sucrose, which is that nice acronym, white table sugar, the white sugar that everyone says stay away from. You know, you've got people like Dr. Lustig talks about the toxicity of it, sugar, the bit of truth, I mean, everything bad about it. And then we have you who recommends it for particular reasons, and I think most people are probably listening in for this more than anything. So, can you just kind of break down what it is, why you recommend it, how you use it,
why you feel it doesn't cause diabetes, you know, I guess as much as you want? Okay. For about 45 years now, the mechanism of how diabetes comes to exist has been understood. It was an Argentine who did the first studies that just sort of incidentally showed that sugar was actually protective against diabetes, but some Israeli researchers over the last 15 years or so have very clearly shown that it's the polyunsaturated fats. This was very clearly set up by a man named Randle,
and some people refer to it as the Randle cycle except there's no cycle involved. He showed that as your free fatty acids increase, your ability to use glucose decreases, and that has been seen in hospitalized patients when they give them an intravenous emulsion of soy oil, for example. Within 15 minutes, their ability to metabolize glucose has practically disappeared. The Randle cycle is the instantaneous diabetogenic effect of the fatty acids, but if you do that chronically, you not only block the various tissue cells from using glucose,
but you gradually overstress and poison the beta cells in the pancreas from being able to keep producing insulin. In some of the studies that I mentioned in a couple of newsletters, they have found that sugar stimulates regeneration of the beta cells in the pancreas. That was back in the 1940s, right? Well, that regeneration was just about five years ago, but it was in the 1940s that the first research was showing that sugar was protective. So why do you think there's so much misconception? I mean, you have all these people saying it's bad.
I mean, I have my theories on it, but it's a sucrose, so it's glucose or fructose, and how do you recommend people using it, or do you recommend people using it? And can you actually take too much of it in the body? Yeah. You can produce the toxic effects in the animals. That's what so many people are doing, giving them 60% of their diet as sucrose or fructose. And at that point, you can make them fat and get various signs that they interpret as harmful.
But a lot of these studies, even at the very high levels, they're exaggerating taking things as signs of harm, which are actually signs of adaptive, corrective functions that if you extrapolate from their results that they get in five weeks or 10 weeks in animal studies, if you extrapolate the very data that they're publishing, it would look like the animals would have a better outcome at the end of their lifespan if they stayed on even the high fructose diets. But there are a lot of these studies that are very clearly designed as propaganda against fructose,
and I don't have any idea what their motivation is, but they're biologically and biochemically irrational and irrelevant. Probably about 100 people have sent me certain studies. Three or four studies in particular keep appearing. Somehow they're circulating on the Internet. And when you look at those studies that are being used as propaganda against fructose, they contain information that suggests even large amounts of fructose might be therapeutic. But going back 20 or 30 years, you see enough research that it's actually defining the mechanism so you can somewhat judge how much fructose in the diet is safe.
For example, there were studies in which they added to just a standard lab cow mixture, they would add the ability to drink, say, a 30% sucrose water, a very syrupy solution, or they could choose Coca-Cola plus their lab cow and drink as much as they wanted, or different percentages, but usually a pretty high percent of sucrose in the diet. And these animals, given, for example, Coca-Cola or the equivalent in sucrose, were able to eat 50% more food than the animals on just the lab cow without getting fat.
In other words, a tremendous increase in their metabolic rate. And that's one of the clues to the protective therapeutic effects of fructose, is that it catalyzes your ability to oxidize glucose at a higher rate. So for a failing heart, for example, or a damaged liver, it works like the active T3 part of the thyroid hormone to increase the production of ATP and get the cell going as a catalyst. And it doesn't really take very much fructose to have that boosting catalytic effect. So there's -- I don't know what the minimum is,
but just a very small percentage of your diet can have an extremely beneficial effect. And then there's a middle range where it's still not clear how much is safe. And then the extreme range where you're eating almost nothing but sucrose or fructose, where you do get some degenerative processes. But those are being misrepresented really out of context by so many people. Now, would you say it's not the sugars themselves, but it's our diet that's high in the unsaturated fats that essentially makes the sugars look bad? Yeah.
When you look at the figures over the last 50 years for the national diet in the United States and a few other countries, a few people are saying that it's the high fructose corn syrup or the white sugar or something that's causing these degenerative diseases, diabetes, obesity, and so on. But the real figures show that what's increasing is calories and polyunsaturated fats and starches and actually a slight decrease in the proportion of the sugars in that total. But the calorie consumption has increased, but mostly through starch and polyunsaturated fats.
And those are the things that I think are well established for causing obesity and a lot of the degenerative diseases. In the case of insulin, it's very clear that it's polyunsaturated fats. Because it blocks sugar from getting in the cells, so it keeps your blood sugar levels high all the time? Yeah. Okay. Well, it's not just that they're considering the amount of sugar that's been taken, but how phobic people are to sugar, how it's clearly not having an influence, looking at the numbers, just like you were saying, Ray. I've always thought that the same.
I just never knew how to -- just didn't know what it was I was looking at. So it makes perfect sense with the shift in the diet. Yeah, there are some studies that show that the toxic effect of these fibers that can cause anxiety, aggression, and bowel cancer, fats defend against those processes by probably suppressing bacterial growth. And the best fats at suppressing bacterial and fungal growth in the intestine are the saturated fats. So butter and coconut oil, for example, are protective against the fibers.
So it's important to include some of those in your daily intake. If you get enough protein, 80 to 100 calories or more -- 80 to 100 grams per day or more, and if you consider the importance of fat and the essentiality of protein, then that leaves you only a certain amount for carbohydrate. And that, I think, is where fruit sugar and other sugars are a safe bet, even if all the rest of your calories are in the form of fruit and other sugars.
I think that's safe, as long as you're getting your saturated fat and protein. Great. Yeah, I think people need to realize it's all about balance. He's not just saying eat carbohydrates by themselves. We always say it's all about the balance of macronutrients, proteins, carbs, and fats, the right type, the right ratios at the right times, but always having them together. One thing I noticed, Ray, is what are your thoughts on -- people are storing glycogen in their liver. What would cause someone to not be able to store enough glycogen,
or what would cause the liver's inability to release the glycogen? Well, thyroid deficiency is the most common reason for that. The enzymes are very sensitive to the presence or absence of thyroid. Selenium is needed to activate the thyroid, and ultimately the other B vitamins and all the nutrients are needed. But the most common problems are low thyroid and low selenium. But to use the selenium to activate the thyroid, you need glucose. And the fructose happens to be the best stimulant for the liver to store glycogen. The current phobia people are talking about fructose increasing triglycerides,
but before it does that, it powerfully helps the liver to replenish its glycogen stores. And then if you eat too much, you can eat a lot of excess sugar, but since it stimulates your metabolic rate, it takes a big excess before you start converting much of it to the triglycerides. Those triglycerides are then available for storage in your fat tissue. So the animal studies show that you can eat lots more calories in the form of sugar before you start storing the triglycerides in your adipose tissue.
So going off that and talking about the fructose in the liver, do you feel that there's a such thing as, you know, having an intolerance to these things? Because there's some people out there that say, "Oh, when I have fruit, it doesn't matter what I have it with, I just completely crash and I get spacey and I can't even have like one ounce of juice." What are your thoughts on that? I mean, can we have an intolerance to these things or no?
Yeah, some people who have been low thyroid for a long time have bacteria living right up the top side of their intestine, right up near the stomach, and some people even get conditions that will support fungal growth in their stomach. And those, usually about two or three people somewhere in the world are in that condition where if they drink juice, they'll get drunk because their stomach is brewing alcohol at a high rate. But short of that, lots of people have a reaction from bacteria high up in the intestine, which are competing for their absorptive systems.
The bacteria get the sugar as fast as they do, and usually the bacteria live in the lower parts of the intestine, and the sugar is usually absorbed very quickly in the upper part of the intestine and doesn't reach the bacteria. So if someone has been under stress and low thyroid, they can have that bacterial problem that makes them sensitive to sugars. So how do you work around that? Just introduce things a lot slower or just take other...
It's probably analogous to the lactose problem. They talk about a lactase deficiency, but bacterial toxins injure the lining of the intestine. These studies have, I think there was one or two that showed a similar effect with sucrose, but quite a few studies have shown that sickness can create the lactase deficiency. Low thyroid, low progesterone, or a bacterial infection, those are three of the known factors that affect the intestine's ability to break down lactose. And so you can, besides using small amounts of milk, or in the case of the juice-sensitive people, small amounts,
you would want to experiment with things that suppress the bacterial growth and replenish your thyroid and progesterone levels so that you can produce the proper sucrose and lactase enzymes. And that's one of the things that the fungicidal root vegetables can do. Raw carrot contains its defensive antibiotics that allow it to live in moist soil without rotting. And so if you grate a carrot or just eat raw carrots, you're suppressing a lot of these bacteria and fungi that will cause food reactions. Another plant that grows in dark, moist conditions are the bamboo shoots.
They're white because they haven't been exposed to the sunlight, and so they're growing in humid, warm conditions, and they are a good source of antibiotics. Now, we've talked about it a couple times, but it keeps coming up, and I know it's a big topic for a lot of people. And I know your view on it is very different than other people's views out there. And this whole thing on candida, now we know that we actually have that inhabiting our GI system. It's a symbiotic relationship, and you have a lot of people out there saying,
"Well, if you have a candida overgrowth, that you need to cut out all sugars from the diet." Now, what's your take on why do we get the overgrowth? And from what I've read, your belief -- I could be speaking wrong -- is because we're not getting enough sugar, because they feed on sugar. So they're not getting enough. They're going to overgrow to kind of go elsewhere. It's almost like an immune system reaction. Rene Dubot, who was a bacteriologist mostly, mentioned that -- I think he had some pictures of the candida-type yeast, which were starved.
And when they're fed sugar, if you have a lot of them in your stomach, you can get drunk on the fermenting sugars. But in the intestine, normally, if they're living far enough up that they even get the sugar, they should be way down in the lower intestine. Your sugar should be absorbed in the upper couple of feet, two or three feet of intestine. But if they do get sugar, the worst they can do is make ethanol. And ethanol in small amounts isn't at all harmful.
And Dubot showed that if you starve these yeasts that are just happily making some ethanol out of the sugar, when they don't get sugar, they start sending out pseudopods, or pseudohyphae, I think he calls them, which are invasive filaments that will sink into the intestine looking for sugar. And that's the point at which they can actually travel through your intestine and get into your systemic tissues looking for more glucose. So really, having sugar in your diet, if you have a fair infestation of yeast for some reason in your intestine,
sugar is a defensive means while you're trying to figure out how to get rid of the yeast, which carrots will usually do fairly quickly. Interesting concept, yeah, I mean, there's so much out there, and I find there's so many people that are doing the "fungal diet" and actually it makes it worse. And then we find when they follow a lot of your philosophies, it actually downregulates it. And I think, of course, the hyperadrenaline, hypocortisol state has a lot to do with it downregulating that. Just a little caveat, this is a question from a listener.
What are your thoughts on like Stevia and Xylitol, all these other "sweeteners" that everyone is pushing? Are they harmless? Are they harmful? In themselves, I think they're pretty harmless, but the problem is that there have been quite a few studies in both humans and animals in which the sweet taste activates your sugar metabolizing systems very powerfully. And one of the consequences is that they tend to increase your appetite, and they make you eat or want more calories than if you had eaten sugar. And so as a diet food, they're ineffective.
And the fact that they're causing such major changes in things like glucagon and insulin and several of the related glucose handling systems, they haven't been in enough situations that people really know what the long-range effects are going to be. They might contribute to chronic stress, for example, by constantly confusing your system, telling your glucose regulating systems that you're being provided what you need, and then it turns out that you aren't, and so it triggers more of the cortisol to maintain the blood sugar.
One of the things we do notice with people, and this is quite common, is when we use the fruits and veggies, all goes well, people are feeling great, when we start to filter in the sugar and using the sugar syrup, cooking it down in small amounts over time, we're noticing that some people do get acne. What are your thoughts on the acne? Is it because of insulin? Is it because of androgens? Is it a liver detox issue? Is it maybe a vitamin A deficiency?
I think things that activate your skin cause it to produce more moisture and oil and make it more attractive for germs to grow, and vitamin A is essential for several defensive processes, including the immune system, and all of your surfaces become susceptible to infection in a vitamin A deficiency, but especially an increasingly warm, moist, functioning skin needs more vitamin A. The thyroid, which uses vitamin A to make the steroids, will make your skin moister and oilier under most conditions, and so sugar activating your thyroid revs up your ability of your skin cells
to produce what they should be producing, except if you're deficient in vitamin A or some other immune factor, then you're going to grow bacteria in your skin. So it's more of an immune system kind of inhibition that's creating it. Would you recommend cutting out the sugar itself and using more of the fruits and vegetables until you kind of bring the system up a little bit more? Because I find with a lot of people this is quite common, especially in women,
and I'm trying to figure out if it's a detox liver issue, adding in the vitamin A, it's not really doing the trick, or should we just cut out the actual sugar syrup, use the fruits and vegetables, and then we bring the body up to more of a homeostatic state? Do we add in the sucrose? Well, eggs and shellfish and fruits and cheese and milk, all of these are very effective at improving your immune system. Okay. Have you ever heard of Emanuel Cheraskin? He was a dentist who did nutrition research.
In one of his surveys, he plotted the number of symptoms people chronically had against the amount of vitamin A in their diet or supplements, and he found that from very low vitamin A intake all the way up to 100,000 units a day, the symptoms and complaints decreased very consistently as the vitamin A increased. And I think that's because of its role in making the antistress hormones and the immune factors. Right. If your thyroid is low, too much vitamin A will suppress your thyroid. They have to be exactly balanced.
And so some people who take big doses of vitamin A get symptoms of vitamin A deficiency as well as thyroid deficiency. And the higher your metabolic rate, the more vitamin A you need and can use. So up there -- Sorry. Acne is a good indicator that you're doing something out of balance, but it's hard to guess without blood tests. Right. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Now, I know your take on this, but for the listeners, what's your take on insulin resistance? Like what do you feel is creating this? Because everyone says it's sugar.
We work with people all over the world, and we start talking about eliminating grains, and we start talking about vegetables and fruits and sugars. Everyone's so afraid they're going to get insulin resistance or diabetes and all these things. What are your thoughts on what's creating it? It's the polyunsaturated fats, very clearly. In many of the animal studies, sucrose, because of its fructose component, increases the ability to dispose of glucose nicely. So either increasing insulin sensitivity or not affecting it, but still preventing hyperglycemia from eating more sugar.
And you can instantly demonstrate the effect of polyunsaturated fats, by blocking the ability to use glucose. And for people that listen to the early access, people can really start thinking outside the box and never believe everything you hear. Really do the research. If you listen to one of our first shows with Ray, if you visit his website, you read his articles on unsaturated fats, it really makes a lot of sense. And then start applying some of the principles to see if it works. And it's a process.
Just because you have a negative symptom doesn't mean you're not moving forward. The healing process and his recommendations, if you can piece them together from the shows and his articles or working with someone, it's an entire healing process and it takes everything to the next level. It's not just about eating food. It's about eating the right types, ratios, frequencies to meet your metabolic needs. And really finding out based off Achilles reflex or pulse and temp, if what you're doing is actually working. Are you pushing yourself thermogenic? Which is very important.
I think you should usually see a good result within an hour or at most a day or two when you start avoiding the harmful things and getting the necessary things. It is pretty rapid. You're making us sleep, man. I love it. You're enthusiastic. You make it seem so easy and it probably is. So what would you say if someone does start increasing their -- let's say they start eliminating all the poofers, they start eating "according to your philosophy," they're increasing their sugars and they're finding the balance, but they're still getting a low temperature,
would you say that maybe they've been in such a deficient state for so long that it's going to take a little bit longer? Or is it maybe their body detoxing from the unsaturated fats? Or is maybe what they're doing just off? Well, frequent feeding is one of the things that will help to keep from having the up and down reaction. The fatter a person is, the longer it's going to take to get away from those stress reactions every time you forget to eat the right things.
And women with a monthly cycle have to keep that in mind, that the ability to handle sugar and fat varies with the amount of estrogen, thyroid, and progesterone. And so typically women will have a relapse after a couple of weeks when they get into that part of their cycle. And women should think in terms of that maybe six weeks before they can get past the cycle of ups and downs. Now, talking about that, you've talked about progesterone a little and thyroid and its relation to sugar and its importance.
Can you elaborate a little bit on estrogen and how that plays a role in the inflammatory cycle of not getting enough sugar in our body, or the right types of sugar I should say? Surprisingly, some of the things that are blamed on fructose, such as increasing triglycerides, estrogen has been known to do that. Cortisol is really the main thing that increases the so-called inappropriate blood lipids. Good triglycerides made from sugar or other carbohydrate really aren't harmful. They're just evidence that you're under stress and eating more than you need.
Insulin and cortisol are usually the main factors increasing triglycerides. But estrogen tends to interfere with the oxidation of glucose and shifts you to being forced to oxidize polyunsaturated fats and tends to give you lower blood sugar problems, at least temporarily under the influence. And chronically, all of the effects of impaired glucose oxidation and increased reliance on fatty acids. And the oxidative metabolism is disturbed in numerous ways by an excess of estrogen. Androgens and progesterone and thyroid are all protective against those effects of estrogen.
Now you're talking about frequent eating and that's something we really try to get people to do because A, we see a lot of people actually under eat calorically, which is kind of reiterating what we talked about. But when people get sugar cravings, what are your thoughts on sugar cravings? Is it really just listening to your body and your body saying, "Hey, I need more sugar," in a sense? Yeah, sometimes salt will help with that. Women on their monthly cycle at high estrogen times will typically have either or both sugar and salt cravings.
And women avoid eating salt, for example, because they're told it will cause them to retain water. But it's also a diuretic, so if they overcome that phobia and eat salt just as they crave it, it will usually prevent many of the symptoms of the premenstrual problem of water retention and edema. The sodium helps to increase your metabolic rate, so you use sugar more efficiently. So when you have a sugar craving, having something both salty and sugary is probably the best. Interesting. Now, can you really eat too much sugar? I mean, is it dangerous?
Can it happen? Or right now would you say that people are so deficient that it's not really possible? Yeah, your appetite is a pretty good guide. When you get low blood sugar, if you have a very concentrated form of sugar rather than fruit, if you eat a pound or two of candy, for example, you'll probably feel sick. It probably is injuring your stomach just by its osmotic concentration, and it can cause diarrhea when it disturbs your intestine and stomach enough to overcome the adaptive ability to absorb it and handle it.
But most of the claims of people like Lustig are really based on a lot of mistakes and misleading interpretations. I advocate using the fats regularly every time you eat. It's good to have some fat and protein at the same time. So I think appetite will usually tell a person that something is wrong if they try to go several hours with nothing but a lot of sugar. Right. It's all about the balance. All about the balance. Yeah, I mean, there's just so much out there.
I mean, this is a topic that, you know, it's kind of endless, but, you know, from studying your stuff over the years and incorporating it, it's definitely made a change, not only in our lives but clients' lives, because so many -- you know, it's like in front of us, so many people are overweight and so many people are staying away from these types of carbohydrates and sugars. And most people advocate staying away from "sugar" to lose weight. Would you actually advocate staying next to it to lose weight? Yeah.
Stimulating the metabolic rate, different studies say that it increases your fatality by 25% or 50% to burn calories. Right. And if you're backing that up with a balance of saturated fats and good proteins, it really is a help for losing weight. But two other factors that help to increase your metabolic rate are salt and calcium, and that's why I advocate cheese and milk as good proteins, because of their high calcium content, which helps to raise your body temperature and metabolic rate. Great. Great stuff. So I guess I'm kind of out of questions.
If we have any callers that have questions, feel free to call in. I had a lot of people email me questions. I'm not sure if you want to add anything else, Ray, in regards to sugar, the stress reaction, the body hormones. But I think people listening to this, of course, probably listen to it over and over again, and if they connect the dots, it all makes sense. And I think my biggest -- my recommendation or my perception of Ray's work is you have to really read through it and connect the dots, because
it's not -- it's there. You just have to really read through it and start connecting things and make sense of it. And when you do, it's going to be very enlightening. A little brain-twisting, but very enlightening. So do you have anything to add, Ray? No. No? I think we covered a lot of really great stuff today, and I'm very excited about getting it out there and allowing people a little bit more information, because it's been a big question for a lot of people, and it's -- I think
it created a lot of clarification on the matter. Yeah, I'm -- I've been thinking of writing an article about fructose and sucrose beyond the one I did on diabetes or the glycemic index. I think that would be brilliant, Ray. I think I've read that article at least 20 times, kind of decipher it and break it down. But it's so fascinating because it really is understanding the different types and how the body is able to metabolize and use that energy efficiently. And it's clear that people have gotten very confused that all the different
things that they're reading and that are being presented to them is what's right and what's wrong. And this, again, is the way the body works, makes perfect sense. Yeah. And -- Hey, Ray, we have a caller. Do you mind taking a caller? Okay. Let me get them all. Caller from 847, you're on the air. Yes, I'm here. Hello. Hello. You're on the air. Yes, hello. Do you have a question for Ray? Yes, I have a question for -- yes, I do. Go for it.
Okay, I wanted to ask him, I have problems with drinking milk that it creates a lot of mucus, cow's milk. It's not so much so when I have goat's milk. What I'm wondering is I still have starch like in the form of corn. If I stopped all that kind of starch, would I be able to tolerate milk again? Would it not make me mucousy? Yeah, goat's milk is fine, and cheese, if you can get cheeses without additives, they're nutritionally just about as valuable as fresh milk.
But the starches in corn and other grains are complex enough that a lot of them won't be digested by human enzymes, and so they feed bacteria. And the type of bacteria that you happen to have will govern the kind of reaction you have to those starches. So having a food like raw carrot in your diet regularly helps if you're going to eat some starches periodically. Carrot helps to reduce those allergy effects that cause mucus. Does that answer your question? I could probably switch back.
I was wondering, so I could probably -- I'd like to go back to cow's milk because it's cheaper and it's easier to get. So I guess that if I had the carrot, then I would be able to go back to cow's milk and get off goat's milk. And sometimes changing the brand, I've noticed that at the same supermarket, one brand of milk will cause digestive irritation, something the cows ate, I think, and if the milk tastes good, I find it usually is easiest on my digestion.
And some people have told me that the ultra-pasteurized milk that was heated to a very high temperature, it's a little lower in some nutrients, but people tell me that they can handle that better than fresh milk. And other people react to that but don't react to fresh milk. So trying -- switching brands of cow's milk might make a difference. Okay. Thank you very much. I appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you. I have a quick question. You keep mentioning the raw carrot, and I completely understand the purpose of it.
Would you recommend eating that by itself, or would you recommend eating it along with other sugars? It contains a little bit of sugar, and that's pretty much the only thing you absorb from it. If you eat a lot of it and have a low thyroid, you might absorb enough carotene to have an antithyroid effect. So you want to look at the palms of your hands occasionally, see that you aren't getting orange calluses. But it prevents the absorption of anything you eat with it or slows it greatly.
So you don't want to eat a big plate of carrot salad when you're eating your main meal because you might have low blood sugar for a couple of hours because it's blocking the nutrients. Okay. Perfect. We've got one more caller. Do you want to take one more caller, Ray? Sure. Okay. Caller from 417, you're on the air. Yes, thank you. I was referred to Dr. Peat a couple months ago by someone I have actually stage 4 melanoma. And anyway, I've not gone through the traditional orthodox approaches. They really have no hope for what I'm doing.
And I changed my diet pretty radically based on what I understood Dr. Peat to teach. And essentially, I guess the question is this. I was instructed to eat potatoes and sugar but balance it with cream of tartar for the potassium content and to eat saturated fats, butter and coconut oil and actually rice products, no gluten, et cetera. And I just wondered if there was anything else because I know there are people out there who may not have melanoma but they do have cancer or they
know people who do have cancer or people who have immune suppressive disorders that if that's what a diet for someone such as myself, that's the most conflicting problem I have is no matter where I turn, they say eat this and then don't eat this. And then I found Dr. Peat's suggestion is very impressive and that it makes sense. And so anyway, my biggest struggle right now is what should I eat knowing how critical my body condition is that I can't afford to make mistakes in this point forward too much.
How does your intestine react to things like potatoes? Actually, it has responded very well. I have no issues there at all. I've gotten so much weaker, not since I started what you told me, but I was getting weaker before that. So on a scale of 1 to 10, I'm probably about a 3 or so. I just don't have the energy to do a whole lot of anything. Are you getting enough calcium from cheese or milk or something? Probably not. Actually, I was told by a person not to take calcium,
that they did a urine sediment test or something and said I had too much calcium. So no, that's one thing that I am low on. I'm probably intake-wise, I really haven't really eaten, except for butter, that's probably about it. The parathyroid hormone tends to promote tumor growth and eating plenty of calcium and adequate amounts of vitamin D and vitamin K, K1 and K2, help you handle the calcium. And I think it probably takes 1,500 milligrams a day of calcium anyway to get your parathyroid hormone down into a safe range. Okay.
So supplement with -- I have been taking vitamin D at least 5,000 units a day, and I have eaten a lot of vitamin K from vegetables, although I've been cautioned not to eat too many of those now, even though that's -- I've eaten very nutritiously and healthfully in the last decade. That's what's so surprising. And I think, though, that maybe I did too much with seeds and nuts and veggies. I'm not sure, but for whatever reason, my body gave out. Yeah, I think seeds and nuts are a problem for anyone because of the
unsaturated fats in them. And coconut oil, I think refined odorless coconut oil can be a big part of your calorie intake. Some cancer therapies have used, I think, as much as five ounces a day of refined coconut oil. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. One final real quick thing here, and that is -- because I do a lot of research, and that's been kind of my life anyway, and not to your degree, but that there is a physician in Ohio who advocates this heavy use of fish oil for cancer therapy.
And then I found a research paper and actually spoke to the physician back in Boston who has done all these studies. I know mice are not the same as humans, but how fish oil had a profound impact on melanoma in these laboratory results that they have over the last five years. And so, again, I realize that there are articles that talk about fish oil being detrimental for colon cancer and other things, and then you might find it beneficial here or there. But I know that wasn't your subject matter today with fish oils.
But, again, do you have any impact in terms of how that might be where the lab mice have profound improvement with fish oil? People who funded those labs in the laboratory, I mean, that's a huge factor in regards to what they're looking for, in my opinion. Do you use any aspirin? I have just started recently taking that. I was told that that had an anti-inflammatory impact, so I just started that. I just heard from someone about a week ago who has -- he was on the anti-AIDS drugs and getting sick, but he stopped them.
And he's now using 4 1/2 grams a day of aspirin. And his blood tests showed that all of his immune factors that aren't known to promote inflammation and tumor growth, they were all down in the normal range, and aspirin seems to be the basic thing. I've had outbreaks of things that a couple doctors were sure were melanomas, big, black, growing things. And when I have an outbreak of those, I a few times have applied either progesterone or DHEA near them, and they quickly moved away or disappeared or fell off.
But basically increasing my thyroid to the point where I'm hypermetabolic will make all of the visible ones dry up and stop growing or eventually fall off. Okay. And so would taking desiccated thyroid be a good idea? No. What I've always used since the original armor stopped being available 20 years ago, I've been using either Cytomel or Sinomel, a Mexican version of Cytomel, which is quick-acting, and so you can adjust the dose up and down. So if you get too hypermetabolic and out of breath, you can stop taking it
for a few hours and come back to a comfortable level. But I've seen several people -- someone just a few weeks ago had a mole that was growing and was about two inches long, and within a week, when he took big doses of Cytomel, it had disappeared. Wow. Impressive. All right. All right, Matt, I'm going to take another call. Yes, sir. I'm going to take another caller. Thank you very much. Yeah. Thank you. Thanks for calling in. Okay, we've got time for one more. Do you mind taking one more caller? Sure.
I meant to ask you this at the beginning of the show. This is a huge caveat. Do you prefer that we call you Ray or Dr. Peat, or what do you prefer? Ray's good. Ray's good. Okay, I just want to make sure, you know. I meant to ask you at the beginning of the show, but I always call you Ray, and it just happened, and I know you're a PhD, so I want to make sure that if you want to be called doctor, I'll call you doctor. Yeah, PhDs aren't doctors under law.
I know, I know, but some people, you know. Okay. Caller from the 610, you're on the air. You got a question for Ray? Hi, yeah, my name's Andrew. I have -- I guess they call it delayed sleep day syndrome, so I usually can't fall asleep until 4 or 6 a.m., and then I can't wake up until late in the afternoon, and I wonder if that's a problem with adrenaline. The sound is very spotty. All I could hear was a problem with adrenaline. Oh, I'm sorry.
I haven't fallen yet, so I can't fall asleep until 6 in the morning? Oh, for falling asleep, sometimes a very small dose of thyroid. One doctor who had been awake for two or three days, absolutely awake, I gave him 10 micrograms of cytomelan the next day. He said, "That stuff's better than morphine." I've been taking Xenoplus, and it worked the first day, and then the effect wore off. Yeah, the sugar is the next best thing. I use a glass of sugar with maybe two or three tablespoons, a glass of warm
milk, and three tablespoons of sugar dissolved in it will usually have an effect similar to the thyroid. Oh, okay. Thanks. I have one more quick question. I heard that you can use just pure T3 to figure out the thyroid dose that you need, and then later you can go back and switch that over to a desiccated or to Xenoplus. Yeah, for a person who's in a hurry, that's the way to find your total required. Okay. So when you're converting the dose, how much -- how does the T3 convert to the T4 in equivalency?
The traditional equivalency is 100 micrograms of T4 are equivalent to 25 micrograms of T3 or one grain of traditional armor thyroid. Okay. That really depends on how much sugar is in your diet and how high your cortisol is and several things. So those are just traditional rough estimates, and it might be very different for some people. Is there a dose that some people find works really well? Like are people using 30 micrograms or 60? Well, the body only produces four micrograms per hour typically, and so
whenever you take more than that, if you're going to take 10 micrograms, it's good to have it with food so you don't absorb so much that your body experiences the excess. It's good to supplement in something like two micrograms per hour on average. So 10 micrograms with lunch will spread out for a few hours as you digest. Okay. Thanks a lot. Thanks for calling in. All right. So I think that wraps it up. We're almost out of time here, unless you have anything else to add in there, because I think we covered a lot today.
I know I learned a lot. I'm going to have to listen to this show another 10 times again. Anything else to add? I don't know. Okay. Well, once again, we really appreciate you coming on. I know the listeners really honestly appreciate not only coming on the show, but the work you do, the honesty and modesty that you have, and just the philosophies that you're putting out there. So we definitely appreciate everything you do. Okay. Thanks for having the show. All right, Ray. Have a great day. Thanks, Ray. Have a great afternoon. Okay. Bye.
All right, bye-bye. All right, guys, there you go, another show with Ray. Keep in mind, I just want to say something. This philosophy, it's not cookie-cutter. It's not take this much of that, this much of this. Eat this fruit and you'll be awesome, or eat this much protein and fat, you're going to be great. Everything is person-dependent. And that's the tough part with this because it's not cookie-cutter. And you have to keep in mind that, you know, Ray makes it seem so easy,
and I'm sure it is, but I know it's challenging for a lot of people. And you can't just start eating the foods he recommends and go, "Oh, this doesn't work." It's all a process of fine-tuning. And that's when this really comes in. And, at the same time, if you're thinking about buying supplements or medications he's talking about, they're actually quite useless if your nutrition, frequencies, ratios, calories is not in order. You can actually cause more harm. So don't start jumping on the Internet and buying T3.
It can actually make things a lot worse and take it and convert it into reverse T3. So make sure you really study his philosophy. You know, go to his website, listen to our radio shows. You can work with people like us. We have clients all over the world. There's other people out there as well that are trained in his philosophies. You know, so definitely find someone because it's not easy. It's a process, and it's a process of really understanding the body and the
foods we're eating and how our body reacts to them and how to adjust based on our metabolic demands. So hopefully you enjoyed the show. We don't have our next show scheduled. I got an e-mail, Ray, thinking about maybe doing it on salt and dairy or something like that. But definitely appreciate everyone tuning in again and supporting us. It really means a lot. And that's about it, guys. I'll see you guys later. Great day. Need one more reason why your Safeway store is just better? How about free Cuisinart Classic Cutlery or Elite Flatware? That's right.
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