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Welcome to this month's Ask Your Herb Doctor. My name is Andrew Murray. For those of you who perhaps have never listened to the show, they run every third Friday of the month from 7 to 8 p.m. And we talk about a wide range of topics related to health, alternative health and uncovering some of the lies and that's part of this evening's program.
I can be reached at business hours Monday through Friday, 1-888-WBM-HERB and people have any questions that we don't get around to having live on the air which we do from 7.30 until the end of the show. The questions can either be posted to me at [email protected] or you can go ahead and call up and leave a voicemail if you don't find a person answering. So like I said, it's a live show and from 7.30 to 8 o'clock, we have questions either related to this month's subject of more misconceptions, lies, education and re-education.
And if people have other questions for Dr. Peat about health topics or about substances or protocols, etc. The number here, if you're outside the area, the area code is 707-923-2513. So 707-923-2513. There is an 800 number. It's 800-568-3723. 800-568-3723. And we'll be taking calls from 7.30 to 8 o'clock. So this month I wanted to go over subjects, some of which we have covered for sure. But I can't emphasize enough the indoctrination that definitely myself has been through in medical education.
And which is very difficult. I think very difficult to unlearn. It's not saying that I haven't unlearned it. But it's I think it's far better if you're going to get educated in real medicine and science that you get your facts right the first time around.
I know Dr. Peat when he was studying had to overcome quite a lot of that bias while he was doing his PhD. And I think he would speak to the fact that he just had to keep quiet half the time because it would not have boded well had he have spoken up perhaps. But anyway, so I wanted to start off the show with a paragraph that I've kind of written to just introduce the subject and then to introduce Dr. Peat and then to basically get into the substance of tonight's show.
I wanted to say from the very beginning here that there's such a complex web of both ignorance, bias and deceit woven into medicine and its practice and evaluation from peer-pressured competitive education through to the brutal and exhausting residencies that are the perfect breeding ground for the lack of a questioning scientific inquiry and acceptance of the status quo. In terms of medical practice that it's no wonder progress has been slow and that the previously rational objective principles which it once stood on has now given way to marketing and designer drugs for ever increasing diagnoses.
Couple this with a biological understanding that's no longer holistic and it's a perfect storm. Advertising and marketing have probably been the most invasive elements of medicine and monopoly profits foster this arrangement superbly. Over the last 10 years of doing these interviews with Dr. Peat time and time again what I thought was grounded in science has been far from it and it's the reality of buyer beware.
Do your own research, question and search and don't just take your doctor's word for it. They're under pressure to perform and within the standard medical protocols not thinking outside the box as this is a surefire way to lose your license to practice as malpractice. So how do we get to this point where it was initially first do no harm and now the atrogenic death or disease is commonplace to the point research is biased. It's funded by powerful interests. It's doing more harm than good and it's supported by government.
Before we take a look at some examples in which stunning misconceptions are rapidly repeated as truth amongst the population let me introduce Dr. Raymond Peat. Dr. Peat you there? Yes. Okay well thanks so much for joining us again as you have been doing for a long time now. For those people who perhaps have not heard the shows before or even heard you would you give an outline of your academic and professional background?
I was a school teacher in several different subjects. First I taught college, happened to be introduced introductory physics for biology majors was my first college course that I taught but along with several other courses including art, theory and appreciation. And introduction to computers and different things but then I mostly was teaching English and humanities related subjects before I went back to get a degree in biology at the University of Oregon 1968.
I had already been teaching and studying in different subjects for several years. So I did my dissertation on first I was intending to do it on the brain nervous system to understand how that forms a basis for consciousness. But when I saw the world of neurology people, the brain researchers I looked for the other end of the animal and found an actually scientific sort of lab over at the other end of the department doing reproductive physiology.
And so I did my dissertation on that age related processes in the uterus how aging changes the respiratory mechanism and process of the reproductive system. And since then I have just been continuing to work on everything between the brain and the reproductive system related to biology. I spoke a little bit at the very beginning here to the whilst you were going through your education probably on numerous occasions you've come across research papers suggesting something quite the opposite of what was being pushed and/or what your dissertation would have or should have contained perhaps.
That's an interesting point there. For example my thesis professor Soderwal asked me how my work was going and I said it was looking like the older animals had more intense respiration in their uterus which would be the same as increased estrogen. And he said oh that's interesting, carry on. And other professors would have said wait that's contrary to the textbook stop and do something else. In fact I had watched professors in other departments say oh you have to find something that is going to be consistent with our project here.
How often was that the case perhaps where you come up with some information or some evidence of counter? In this department Soderwal in the reproductive physiology he was on the female reproductive physiology side. He accepted anything we came up with. I think that's probably what I was expecting to hear in terms of maintaining their egos and all the quote unquote hard work they did to get where they were. I think the reason for that was the female reproductive physiology was low rank on the totem pole of the sciences.
Interesting, well that's probably a very pivotal point at this point in time. I wanted to say to you also that you've repeated this quote quite a few times that a lie spreads around the world faster than truth can get its tight shoelaces. And when this lie is promulgated by big pharma and big advertising the FDA as well as the government there's little opposition. It seems so often that the lie is so massive and the deception is so apparently clear when you look in the right direction until it's challenged.
People accept it as fact and I know we've gone through this again and I hope it doesn't bore you. And the reason I want to ask about some of these questions as related to your newsletter is that I think I myself I think I'd be the first to raise my hand. And say that I think the initial education does such a good job of brainwashing you in a certain direction and everything you read, everything you see, everything you hear by most people recapitulating these lies that they don't know any better about.
It makes a very kind of very strong fortress that you have to break through in terms of I know that you've practiced this a lot. And since I've been working with you and Sarah's been working with you I've seen definite positive changes in the way that you apply the science of what you've been talking about on the radio shows here with progesterone and pregnenolone using thyroid aspirin.
And the other compounds that you're talking about as being energy saving not energy wasting and anti-estrogenic and all of these things have just flown in the face of everything that I would have been taught which was current medical model. And which is still to this day being taught and which big pharma and advertising continue to push and so the question of the serotonin and the reuptake inhibitors is something I wanted to visit again.
And obviously if people are listening, great because you're hearing it right now but obviously the radio shows are archived. People have put them up on YouTube, they're on our website although I've got a backlog of the best part of a year and a half that I need to put up.
But people need to hear it time and time again because otherwise it's just swept under the carpet and tomorrow you'll hear how good SSRIs are or you'll look at the TV, well not that we have a TV but people that are watching TV are seeing these adverts for these drugs and oh it's just normal.
Oh you take an SSRI if you're depressed and so I wanted to basically get you to go through serotonin and the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors to get an idea of this kind of ideology that they're pushing because the fact is it's not the way it is. And so I think people really need to hear this and this as well as a few other substances that we'll cover in the show. I just want to make it very clear for people what these things are so they get prescribed them.
They need to know ahead of time what they're dealing with. So yeah, the archives are there and I've often said these shows will stand as a kind of testimony over time to your work and understanding.
So would you please explain what we're told about serotonin first, I mean how they say oh it's a happy hormone and how they get away with that, how we're told it's useful and then go through the misconceptions of it being a happy drug and then explain what you know and understand about its activity to make it very clear for people to know what it is they're dealing with. I have looked at that recently on some of the best known medical websites on the internet and they're still basically saying the same thing.
No one has looked at the critical information, at least in a very public spot on the internet. And in the first several years up into the mid and late 60s, people were still looking at the actual research and they would look for things that worked with it or antagonized it. And they saw that things like the ergot family, LSD and related things were able to block it, prevent the actions of constricting muscles in all of the known tissues. By blocking serotonin you're saying?
Yeah, blocking the nerves, the main nerves that produce serotonin are just turned off by LSD and psilocybin and the best known psychedelics. As that was being known in the 1960s, the government was also coming out and starting to criminalize the psychedelic chemicals which were in the news repeatedly as anti-serotonin agents. And when the government criminalized these, the drug companies were starting to see that they could form the basis of drug products.
And it was in their interest to say that those evil illegal drugs are anti-serotonin and naturally they make you insane and kill you and so on. Because the good stuff which makes you sane is serotonin and that created a foundation of public opinion to build the whole myth on. The same way the government puts out stories politically and economically and such to create a background of belief in which future events can be backed up. So the government has been creating political myths, the chemical companies use the government to support their economic sales myths.
And protect the companies no doubt. Yeah. To some degree for sure. The companies are supposedly defending the healthy sane parts of the organism and the psychedelic people are threatening the sanity of the population. So that implies if you go crazy when you take an anti-serotonin agent then what you need is some products to increase your serotonin. So tell me what you know about the harmful effects of serotonin because obviously these things, we'll talk about the SSRIs, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors just after.
But what do you know about serotonin and why you don't want to be exposed to it and why you don't want it lingering longer? Yeah, the animal research has the advantage that they can take fluids from anywhere in the animal or grind up its brain and extract. See what's actually in there where you can't grind up a person's tissues. If you stress an animal, injure it in horrible ways, suffocate it for example, you will increase some of the stress hormones, cortisol, estrogen, serotonin.
Our chronic stress increases serotonin in the brain as well as several other tissues. If you make an animal unusually happy, comparing an average lab animal or one which has been tortured deliberately or one which has been put in a big vacation space with entertaining things to do, the one that is suffering from all kinds of mistreatment will have high cortisol and lower adrenaline usually. The cortisol is driven up by the corticotropic release hormone which is activated primarily by serotonin.
So serotonin, in triggering the stress hormones, rises itself and so in these miserable animals, their serotonin is higher. The happiest animals have the lowest serotonin as well as lower acetylcholine and generally a little higher adrenaline. They're very alert, learn very well and have very low serotonin. If you give these exactly the same chemicals that you are giving starting to increasingly young kids, if you give SSRIs to adolescent hamsters for example, they become vicious and aggressive. Do you understand the mechanism by which the increased serotonin would cause the aggression? What system that would be supporting?
I don't think anyone does. Alright, but aggression is definitely associated with increased serotonin. Yeah, there are lots of situations, different parts of the brain will show different amounts but in general, you can suppress the aggression by giving them hopeless kind of stress. Okay, like the inescapable stress that you've mentioned in the past? Yeah, the hopeless, helpless stress. Serotonin seems to be the crucial thing for putting that into effect and anti-serotonin drugs are starting to be used as anti-depressants but they have been used to cure learned helplessness and so on.
There you go, that's it in a nutshell, we've just said just in that last sentence that anti-serotonin drugs are being used. About 35 or 40 years ago, a psychiatrist, psychologist, C.R. Kloninger was defining personality types and relating people to animal studies. He was proposing that higher serotonin in the process of making people more depressed or anxious or aggressive, the type of personality promoted by that was harm avoidance. Rather than creative activity, the animals figured out different ways to avoid being hurt, fearful, anxious and so on.
Now isn't suicide increased as part of the kind of disclaimer literature in SSRI? Yeah, looking at the brains of people who commit suicide, they have found several different kinds of support for the idea that they were suffering from excess serotonin production.
Okay, you're listening to Ask Your Herb Doctor, KMUD Galbraith Hall, 91.1 FM from 7.30 to the end of the show at 8 o'clock. You're invited to call in. Any questions? The local number here is 9233911. The area code is 707, so that's 7079233911 or you can use an 800 number. That's still in effect, is it? The 800 number? I'm not sure. Okay, all right. Well, the 800 number is 800 KMUD Rad, which is 1-800-568-3723. But if you just dial 707, you'll get here from anywhere.
Yeah, and that way you pay the bill instead of us. We didn't quite make our pledge. All right, there you go. Oh, look out. Okay, and I wanted to remind our international listeners, please do hit the Donate Now button because I know a bunch of you just tuned in and you missed our pledge drive because it was at the wrong spot and I know we have a bunch of regulars. So thank you for listening. You're good. Okay, so Dr. Peat.
I wanted to mention that 50 years after he and his partner defined the famous experiments for learned helplessness, he and his partner revised their theory and decided that it was in humans too caused by increased serotonin. Originally, they had suggested it might be the loss of serotonin, but they have changed their minds now. And then again, the kind of other misconception that people have that serotonin and melatonin are just happy chemicals and that we need more of it. And so why is it we're just so brainwashed into it?
Especially when the people who really have defined the context for current discussion have changed their minds. Okay. Okay, so I wanted to talk a little bit now about monoamine oxidase. And again, this in conjunction with serotonin, it's as most people have heard of MAOs and MAOIs, the monoamine oxidase and the monoamine oxidase inhibitors. Again, this has been completely deranged in terms of what's actually happening with it. But monoamine oxidase and it does actually break down serotonin. That is truthful enough. They haven't. That's not been altered.
And we have these medications, MAOIs, the monoamine oxidase inhibitors to prevent the breakdown and increase the levels of serotonin available. They're also marketed for improving other monoamines like dopamine and norepinephrine, saying that these can increase as low levels are implicated in depression. What do you think about low levels of these monoamines, other monoamines like dopamine and norepinephrine in depression? You've already mentioned the animal experiments with the more attentive hamsters or whatever rodent that was that was used.
When they all come up together, things tend to stay more in balance when you have adrenaline, norepinephrine, dopamine, acetylcholine all coming up at the same time. Okay. Now, wouldn't you suggest that antiserotonin drugs would be useful for Parkinson's? They are being used for all of the things now known to be promoted by serotonin. There are antiserotonin products starting to be studied and recommended against cancer, arthritis, autoimmune diseases, depression, psychosis. I wonder how is it that we go three or four decades under this complete farce and people suffer and/or die,
and then four decades later it's just what you've mentioned about a lie getting around the world faster than truth can tie their shoelaces. Because it's only really been in the last couple of years that there's been a pushback against polyunsaturates and actually some studies showing how beneficial saturated fats are. I think there's a historical rule that every stupid medical idea lasts about 50 years.
And again, I can't help but thinking it's just the brutal egotistical education that doctors go through and that they come out the other side of it thinking that they've got a handle on it and they're not going to listen or read anything else. And this is what they're going to prescribe because science has got it right and the drugs that they've got on their hands are indicative of the disease and it's standard medical practice. And next. Okay. A local caller got it in five words. How does psilocybin fit in? Okay.
So Dr. Peat, you mentioned first off the ergotamines or the LSD psilocybin being used as anti-serotonins. Psilocybin, I think, works very similarly to LSD on suppressing the serotonin nerves. Some of the others, there is a little overlap with the amphetamine derivatives and mescaline I don't know that much about, but it doesn't work exactly on those same nerves.
I'm pretty sure I read that Colorado or one of those states there have legalized psilocybin and other hallucinogens as part of a bit like the 215 was here 15, 20 years ago started as a kind of treatment for various different medical problems that people get a certificate for. So that's interesting. If that comes around because like you said, all the initial research into LSD and psilocybin was probably going in a pretty good direction until it was scuppered by the serotonin industry.
They were seeing good results in treating alcoholism and depression and a lot of psychiatric things. Yeah. When do you think serotonin would be useful? I mean because I know we produce it ourselves so it's got to have some activity that you could quote unquote call useful. But is there any instances where you think serotonin is useful? I think the place it operates is so at the heart of things that it's best to let it develop under its own rules.
For example, the tryptophan which is turned into serotonin, it has a resonant aromatic electron system which is very responsive to light, electromagnetic energy and oxidation reduction. And this is in practically all proteins, this amino acid. So those proteins intrinsically have their electronic uniqueness which makes them responsive to the interaction with other molecules and lets the whole molecule have the possibility of resonantly interacting with its environment. So it's sort of like the nerve center of each protein molecule.
And the structure of most cells, every cell in some condition is built on and uses to move the micro-trabecular, micro-architecture of the cell, a framework of filaments and tubes that give the cell stiffness and movement. And these are increasingly being thought to be electronically or oxidatively interactive with mobile electrons giving the tube a special function in the structure, not just stiffness but also electronic interactions across the whole cell simultaneously. So again, it's like the nerve system in a protein is tryptophan, the nerve system in the cell is the micro-tubules containing these proteins.
And serotonin acts on these responsive proteins and micro-tubules and other systems in the cell with a special interaction. So serotonin can stop the polymerization of the micro-structure of a cell, can interrupt it so that it can start de-differentiating and getting ready to divide. And when something is so basic to the existence of a cell, I think it's the worst thing you can do to try to intervene by giving a pill to someone. It's like if you have an electric motor trying to pour a car into it for fuel or gasoline.
Or giving it lightning to try and make it work when all it needs is a 120 volt system. Alright, well listen, we do actually have a bunch of callers lined up, so let's start taking these callers and see where they go. So caller, you're on the air, what's your question and where are you from? I'm from New York, can you hear me? Say that again, yeah I lost the first part of that. I'm from New York. New York, okay, welcome to the show, what's your question?
Yes, so this is for Peat, basically I was physically active on table 50 when at that point I got a sprain on my ankle and the doctor diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis. Then when I read more about that on the internet, it looks like hundreds of clinicians have this, and then they seem to treat everybody pretty much with steroids. So whether it's a previous case or a simple case, it looks like they have the same kind of treatment. I don't mind, I don't feel that crazy, but the doctors have diagnosed already.
Does Dr. Peat have any ideas yet, suggestions? Dr. Peat, I've got a lot of feedback on my end here and I couldn't really make out a lot of what he was saying. I couldn't either. Rheumatoid arthritis is what I had heard about the diagnosis of the ankle. Yeah, I heard that, but what was, yeah, but was he looking for your approach to rheumatoid arthritis? Was that what you wanted?
Oh, no, no, I'm just saying, mine seems to me, based on the pain and things like that, it's so less severe compared to some other real, you know, RA symptoms. But still, the doctors say that, you know, the treatment is pretty much the same, with the steroids and things like that. Okay. So, it's like hundreds of conditions of RA, they say, you know, so how are they able to, first of all, you know, diagnose anything as an RA, and then, you know, give the same kind of medication, whether it's severe, less severe, simple cases.
So this is about the differential diagnosis for rheumatoid arthritis? Or I think that he thinks he has a very mild case of the rheumatoid and doesn't want to do the really intense intervention. So, Dr. Peat, I know you've got a different idea and intuition about rheumatoid, not intuition, it's based in science, but how would you approach rheumatoid arthritis? I've seen several people, it seems like every couple of years I run across one, and their doctors have all told them that they're incurable and just stop thinking about it apparently.
They don't want to, at first, they don't want to hear criticism. Doctors sometimes are telling them to take estrogen even, but always glucocorticoid is part of the treatment. But I think if you find out what's causing it, sometimes you just discover that the easiest thing is to realize that maybe you didn't have that diagnosis in the first place. The foods that you're eating or supplements you're taking, or especially if you're taking a serotonin or an estrogen drug, those are enough to bring it on.
We still believe in the inflammatory process mediating swollen joints and the presence of rheumatoid factor in the blood. Do you think that's definitely a differential? No, it will go away if you don't have it anymore. Same with lupus. Another person with lupus recently stopped thinking she had lupus and just started correcting her diet and taking vitamin D and thyroid.
If the caller was asking for this, I know that in terms of traditional herbal medicine for the treatment of rheumatoid, excretion is definitely a system to be supported and strengthened as is things that support the liver because of the excretion. So basic things like celery seed and devil's claw have totally been used as anti-inflammatories, I think mainly, and then any of the kind of waste clearing products like burdock or yellow dock to aid in either bile production and metabolism as well as to improve the laxative effect.
I think there's definitely mileage in clearing waste and the anti-inflammatories. Just avoiding some of the foods that have been causing intestinal inflammation, I think, is the first thing to look through your diet and see what things might be hard to digest or might be leaving something inflammatory and using a regular fibrous food in the diet sometimes is enough to tremendously reduce inflammation. There you go, because you're a complete proponent of bowels being the seat of your health and so improving your intestinal health would decrease endotoxin, etc.
Okay, so let's take the next call to make sure we get through these two before we carry on with tonight's discussion. Caller, you're on the air and where are you from? Hopefully, there's no feedback. Hi, I'm from the San Francisco Bay Area. Oh, hi. What's your question? My dad recently had a health scare where he was on vacation at high altitude and he experienced shortness of breath, excessive coughing, blood in his phlegm, and feeling tired. In a hospital, a doctor at the hospital took his blood work and diagnosed him as having a heart attack.
After more blood work, like a day later, a CT scan and further assessment, they said he just had pneumonia and they said it was not a heart attack, but I wish we could have avoided the harmful effects of the CT scan and just got the diagnosis of pneumonia first. My question is how can you diagnose cardiovascular disease in a safe way without resorting to a CT scan or angiogram? Basically, what's the ideal way to diagnose cardiovascular disease? Dr. Peat.
I think the first thing a person notices is that they're having trouble doing their usual energetic activities. There's something going wrong with their circulatory system. And then would you be thinking along the lines, I mean a typical model would be stress-induced pain, exercise-induced pain for angina for sure and in terms of functional stable or unstable angina. I find that kind of strange that they would put down to the event as a heart attack. There are certain enzymes that are leaked by cardiac muscle in response to that ischemia that's the result of heart attack.
So how reliable do you think those enzymes are as a marker? Somewhat, but I wouldn't trust them in myself. There are a couple types of enzymes. One is a particular heart protein. You can trust that. But just stress and exertion, the same way that you can damage a muscle by running too far or too fast uphill or such, over exertion. And so if your energy supply is low, if you're hypoglycemic and running on fat and stored energy, exertion can damage any muscle including your heart muscle just by extreme over exertion.
So if it's just somewhat borderline evidence of a heart attack, you wouldn't necessarily do anything more than take good care of yourself. I want to ask you this question for myself. I'm just curious as to your response. But one of the first things that they'll want to do, I imagine, not a medical doctor, but I imagine they'll want to do an examination of the vasculature of the heart and inject dyes and give you an angiogram. What do you think about the components of the dye and/or any risk associated with angiograms?
If you're not sure that your heart has been slightly injured just because you have a slightly different feeling, when you get a chemical injected into your heart and then especially if you exercise with that chemical in your heart, the chemical itself is going to irritate things and cause some damage. So it isn't an entirely free and safe thing to do. You have to really suspect that there's something to look for and then what are you going to do if you find it? Right. I mean, stencil bypass artery grafting is current.
For about 30 or 40 years now, there has been what they call a MAGIK, standing for magnesium, glucose, insulin, and potassium, which they give to someone if possible at the very beginning of a heart attack. But at any point, it accelerates the healing of the heart. Both glucose and insulin lower the free fatty acids, which are a major damaging factor in causing a heart attack and will actually be made worse by the dye examination. But this treatment they give is a simple injection of magnesium, potassium, and insulin. Interesting.
The glucose itself helps to reduce the stress. The insulin helps to lower the fatty acids and let the heart use the glucose. Both of those help the cells to take up the potassium and magnesium they need to restore their energy. A small amount of orange juice or sugar with the active T3 hormone has been used the same way. The T3 is anabolic like insulin, helps the cell to take up both the magnesium and potassium.
I just wanted to also say from an herbal medicine perspective that in Germany, they have published quite a few papers supporting hawthorn extract. And they said in their papers that if a patient is administered hawthorn extract within 12 hours of a myocardial infarct, it significantly decreases the ischemic damage. So I think there's a rational use for anti-oxidant anthocyanins that are contained in the product for heart attack. But I just want to make sure people are aware of that. That's actual reality. Good research from Germany.
Okay, I think we have two more calls on the line. Let's take the next call. A call away from, what's your question? Hi there, have you got me? Yes. Hi there. I'm from the Garboville area. Thank you very much for the call, for the show. A while ago you were speaking about serotonin and anti-serotonin compounds, for the lack of a better word, that have been used in a psychiatric sense. And my father battled his entire life, as far as I know, and had multiple diagnoses.
And I remember clearly Haldol and Thorazine, and I may be just asking inappropriately, but was the action of those antipsychotics similar to the antidepressant action that you were speaking of? Was there an improper use of these compounds 30, 40 years ago? Thank you very much. One second. Thorazine and? Haldol. I remember Haldol as being an antipsychotic. I was, you know, a teenager and was helping him, so I may not have remembered the name correctly. Dr. Peat, do you have much to say about Thorazine and/or Haldol? I've not heard of Haldol, I've heard of Thorazine.
I have the impression that Haldol was a danger to that system, but I'm not sure about Thorazine. I think the main problem with that was that it was given in such large amounts that people lost functioning. Indeed. But it was a supposed antidepressant, right? Or antipsychotic. Antipsychotic. I think mostly it just quieted people down. Okay. Thank you very much. Yeah, you're welcome. Okay, we have another call, so let's get this next caller. Caller, you are on the air. Where are you from? What's your question?
Hi, I'm from Utah. Andrew. Hi, Dr. Peat. Dr. Peat, I was wondering why you choose to live in Oregon as opposed to someplace like New Mexico with a lot of sun, highly elevated, possibly cleaner. Thanks. Definitely not for health, but it was the location of the University of Oregon library. I lived close enough to it that I could walk to the library regularly. In Los Angeles, for example, there was no way to get to a big library simply.
There we go. Okay. Simple answer. I know you've been asked that before. I've even thought it myself and asked you. Okay. All right. So the number here, if you're in the area or out of the area or anywhere else, 707-923-3911. And then from now until about five to the hour here, the next five minutes, you're invited to call in with any questions related or unrelated to this week's discussion of what we're told is the truth, but actually what the science shows us.
I was going to actually ask you about the next thing that is a mistaken belief. Oh, and there goes the light. So rather than me, let's get the next question. Cora, you're on the air. There's one more coming in. Okay, Cora, you're on the air. Where are you from? What's your question? My question is I'm from Arcata. My question is maybe a little pep talk on skillful eating for diabetics.
All right. You want a pep talk for. Okay. Well, Dr. Peat, I know you're going to have a very different answer to the medical elective. In terms of a diabetic and their diet, what would you speak to it? Well, avoiding serotonin, promoting drugs is one thing because that's a factor in creating diabetes as well as the other things it does. But my experience with diabetes started with my father having a diagnosis of extreme diabetes of the classical kind in which he had lost about 50 pounds of weight.
It wasn't very big to start with. And by looking at the old literature, medical literature from the beginning of the century, they found that eating certain foods, in this case it was primarily brewer's yeast, but he totally cured himself, lived about 35 years after that. And that got me interested. And I read that in the 19th century, England and France, there were two doctors who absolutely cured the mortally sick, very, very profoundly diabetic people by loving them.
At first, they thought they were just going to let them die happy by not starving them for sweets, but they let them eat as much sugar as they wanted. And that happened to be almost a pound of sugar a day. And instead of dying over a period of several days, the conversion of protein to sugar decreased and finally stopped and they recovered. They stopped wasting. Yeah. And what they had done was broken the pattern of stress simply by letting them follow their appetites.
And that led to investigating what actually is the cause of diabetes, not eating sugar for sure. Sugar, the beta cells that make insulin are always regenerating and sugar promotes that regeneration and supports it. If you don't have sugar, they can be created as insulin producing cells and die. And it's the free fatty acids which are killing the beta cells constantly. Right. Because if you don't have enough sugar, you break your muscle tissue down, you generate free fatty acids in an attempt to raise glucose.
So there is animal research that really pretty well explains it, but doctors don't want to listen to that. Well, there's the whole medical malpractice thing that they are under because they're not following standard medical procedure because that's not the way forward for them. Okay. Well, let's take this next caller because we do have one more caller on the end. Let's get this question. Where are you from, caller? What's your question? Hi, I'm from Texas and my question is besides altitude, is there any other characteristic that affects thyroid function?
So I actually heard population density is associated with serotonin levels like that. Is there any other characteristic of a location that affects thyroid? Dr. Peake, did you get that? Not all of it, but lipid situation, how it affects thyroid. Also, what was the first thing you said, caller? So I know altitude for a location affects thyroid function. Is there anything else, any other characteristics of locations like total rainfall or just some other metric that is related to thyroid function?
Yeah. Is there anything that you know that positively stimulates thyroid function, maybe the sunlight or we've mentioned altitude or CO2 in certain geographical locations that would be positively beneficial or improving thyroid function? Well, avoiding very long winters is important because of the stress of the long nights. But I think altitude is very important because the high oxygen pressure at sea level is constantly creating stress in itself,
random tendency to oxidize fats spontaneously which disappears at a higher altitude. When you find the right altitude for your particular adaptation, then you're able to retain the right amount of carbon dioxide so that oxidative processes run more smoothly without stress. Okay. Well, listen, we've actually, thank you for that Dr. Peake. We've only got a few minutes here to the top of the hour and the engineer says that there's an easy question here that was called in. So let's just get this one. And it's five words. Does acetaminophen impact steroid production?
Definitely impacts the liver, but does acetaminophen impact steroid function? Nothing that occurs to me right now, but through damage to your liver, undoubtedly will. Undoubtedly, yeah. Okay. Well, thank you very much again Dr. Peake for giving your time and I'll spend the next couple of minutes letting people know how they can reach you and/or read about your work. Okay. Thank you.
Okay. So for those people who called in tonight, thank you. For those people that listened and didn't call in, thank you for listening. The shows are archived on KMUD's website. So if you go to the audio archives, you can look at Friday Night Talk every third Friday of the month from 7 to 8 p.m. is the show that we're on, although they only keep the archives for two months, I think, or 90 days.
They used to keep it for a long, long time, but they only keep it for three months. Anyway, so a lot of the radio shows that we've done with Dr. Peake over the last 10 years are on our website, which is www.westernbotanicalmedicine.com on the resources tab in the right top corner.
Drop that down. All of the shows that we've done up until 2017, the end of 2017 are there. I've got 18s and 19s to go up, just haven't done it at this point in time. And there's a lot of the radio shows that have been put on YouTube.
So there's a resource out there, and Dr. Peake, who's the creator of all of the content, folks, and that's another moot point here in terms of copyright and it being put up on YouTube without our permission. The actual information is Dr. Peake's own original work, so he has copyright on that work. His website is www.raypeake.com, and he's got lots of articles that he's written over the years that are fully referenced, extensive scientific articles, and his knowledge and wisdom has been poured into them.
Just like these radio shows, they're for the future generations and for the truth to bear out, what he's been saying all this time. Until the third Friday of October, happy fall.