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Well, here we go. Here it would be the third Tuesday, and that would bring us to a time when we're grateful to have a lovely and talented Dr. Ray Peat on the air on the third Tuesday. And as long as the creaks don't rise, he said, we'll do it. He's a PhD, University of Oregon, specialization in physiology. Started working with hormones back in '68. Whoa, that's when I started radio in '68 in Armed Forces Radio. He was starting his work on hormones. Wrote
his dissertation in '72. He's got a great newsletter that comes out a couple times a month that you have a little link there on the show pages. You can get Dr. Peat's newsletter and it's great to talk to him from time to time. If you have an email for him, question Patrick at oneradionetwork.com. And out to the left coast, Dr. Peat, good morning. Good morning. How are you doing there? Very good. It has started raining. Winter weather is setting in already. You're in Oregon, right? Yeah. You get a lot of rain there?
Yeah. The weather has been pretty variable, but we're back to the old continuous rain it looks like. The ocean is warming up and when that happens, we get extra rain. Humid air condenses. I saw the... Oh, go ahead. Go ahead. The nighttime rain is the traditional northwest weather, but we have been changing over the last 30 or 40 years until it looked more like a Midwest climate. Summer rain and drier winters. But I think we're back to the old rain in the winter, night and winter.
I saw with the farmers of Albinac, they use sunspots and they're predicting a cold and woolly winter this year for a lot of the country. We'll see how accurate that is. I think the sun and the submarine volcanoes are really the important thing changing the weather over the long term rather than carbon dioxide. Yeah. Submarine volcanoes? Yeah. Yeah. The Pacific is really pretty full of volcanoes that actually are warming the ocean and they have cycles like sunspot cycles.
So they put a lot of heat down there and they're going on and we don't really know they're spitting up. Yeah. And they're teeming with life, primitive life forms that can live at extremely high temperatures. And so when the... So the ocean's warm and that causes all kinds of things to happen in the jet stream and change, weather changes more dramatically? Yeah. It changes the ocean currents. It's hard to imagine that carbon dioxide is like the devil. I mean, don't we want to keep more carbon dioxide in us by not breathing so fast?
Yeah. One of the anti-climate change people, he gets up on a box and lectures in London. He has a little sign that says carbon dioxide is the gas of life. Many people believe that. Gosh, how could you make it so... So political stuff. Who knows what's going on with all that? Well, Dr. Ray Peat is probably one of the few well-known people, well-credentialed people that got milk. You know, he's got that little white mustache thing. And you've been drinking milk for a long time now, and you do good with it.
Yeah. There were times, like when I was living in Mexico City, when it was hard to get good milk, the rich people would send their maids out at dawn to buy up all of the good milk. And so for three or four years, I went very light on milk. But the rest of my life, I've been a big milk drinker. A gallon a day. You're still doing that much? A gallon a day? No, about two and a half quarts, I think, averaging now.
We had an Ayurveda doctor on a couple of weeks ago. And Ayurveda, as you know, you probably do know, they've been a great proponent of drinking milk for a long time. Thousands of years, right? Yeah. I want to read you something out of her book. I think you'll find it fun. Her name is Marianne Tittlebaum. She's a DC, but we found her very, very, just, I don't know, very credible. She says dairy is perhaps the most misunderstood of all food groups. The ancient doctors said
that every food you eat spends three to five days in each tissue before progressing to the next. There are, as discussed earlier, seven tissues, blood plasma, blood muscle, fat bone, bone marrow, and reproductive fluids. This means that the food you eat today can sometimes won't nourish everything, all seven tissues, for about a month or so. The only exception to the rule is milk. It nourishes all seven tissues in one day. This milk is seen as one of the most nourishing foods of all life. This is why babies can live exclusively
off milk for the first year of their life. Do you think that's accurate with going through all the tissues like that in one day? I think some of that is historical metaphor, but there is some basis to it, undoubtedly, because it's now known that every tissue has its rate of protein turnover, and as your nutrients change, the food you eat guides the turnover of the proteins so that you get proteins suitable for the type of food you're eating. Every tissue, like bone, is extremely
slow to turn over most of its substance. Your liver is very fast, the skin and intestine are extremely fast, just a few days and they're completely remade. The heart has a slower rate of protein turnover, but everything, the mitochondria, the energy-producing apparatus is turning over constantly at its own rate. I think in general, the faster a tissue turns over because it's kept warm and well-nourished and unstressed, high stress will make you turn over your thymus gland and muscles and skin very fast, but in a destructive way.
A good, warm, well-fed condition, you do have a constant turnover and renewal of your tissues. It's like a streaming. New cells are being born as the old ones are being eaten up, and so you clean out the debris at a regular pace according to the tissue. I agree with you. I think that it's been my experience in the old Ayurvedic texts, which obviously is where this came from, they began at some point, they often got off very poetic and very beautiful words and they sometimes would expound a bit or maybe say, exaggerate
a bit on the benefits of stuff. You know what I'm saying? Historically, I think you nailed that not to say it's not true, but they were very poetic and philosophical and spiritual about the approaching of different things. I know one thing that I read years ago, they were big fans of ghee rather than butter. I read one book where this fellow said, this sage, "Well, if you have 100-year-old ghee, it'll cure anything." You know, that kind of thing. They would make these kinds of statements. I think your point is well taken about the
historical, but fascinating. Now, she's a big fan and Ayurveda has always been a big fan of, not a big fan, but actually saying this is the best way, is to boil the milk. Boil the milk for several reasons. I think it helps with the fat absorption and also if you have raw milk, maybe gets rid of any little buggies. They put cardamom and cinnamon in there to help do some things that I'll find it in here. What about you? Do you think, have you found any benefit in the boiling milk? Have you ever done that?
Oh, sure. Living outside of Mexico City where they have cows or goats, that's the custom. Everyone puts a big pot of milk on in the morning and brings it to a boil. Usually, they skim off the fat that rises and make special dishes out of that or else feed it to the cats and chickens. I wonder why you would do that. Wouldn't that fat be good? Yeah, if a person likes it, they have dishes and puddings and things that they make out of it. They use it as a sauce on tacos and such.
Now would there be any benefit to our listeners who can't have access to raw cows or goats milk to boil like an organic grass-fed milk that you get at the Whole Foods or something? Yeah, surprisingly, the damage nutritionally is very small. It oxidizes some of the vitamin A and a tiny bit of the vitamin C, but milk is still basically the best source of all of the nutrients when you compare it to the number of calories and protein in it. It has all of the nutrients except iron.
How about the cardamom and cinnamon thing? Any thoughts on that? Oh, each has its medical uses. I haven't been a big fan of them. Mexicans put cinnamon on their chocolate. What about this A1 and A2 milk? That's been going around for years and theoretically the A2 milk I guess is supposed to be the most easily digestible. What is that from? Maybe the Jersey's or the Holstein's? No, A1 is found in the Holstein's and then A2 is more in the Jersey's or the Guernsey's.
When I was little we had a Holstein and then when I was about eight or nine we got a Jersey which we had for 10 or 15 years. I don't really see any difference and I think a lot of it is just marketing to sell something for a higher price if you have the right kind of cow. And Ayurveda says that the goat's milk is good, it's an excellent source, but it's just a little bit higher choice for cow's milk. That's interesting. Do you agree with that? Or do you not?
Well, my own preference is for cow's milk just because I'm more familiar with that. When I was in the first or second grade we had a Holstein and the neighbors had goats and their goat milk was very strong smelling and so I learned to prefer cow's milk. But if you handle the goats right, the goat milk will taste as good as cow's milk. So you say you're drinking still a couple of quarts a day. You find that's a lot of food for you and that provides a lot of your nutrition?
Yeah, milk has always, the last 40 years, has been the bulk of my daily food. When I would drink a gallon a day I would maybe have a couple of quarts of orange juice and some cheese or sardines or something for a supper snack and eggs for breakfast. That keeps you going, that will keep you going without losing, keep your muscles going. Oh sure, yeah. How about you now, if I recall your Revolutions Around the Sun which is called Age, you are 80, 83?
Yeah, I'm going to be 73 revolutions in November, we're about 10 years apart. What has been your experience, I know you paint, do you have to do other things have you found to keep your muscles from, what's that word they use for it, they always have a word doc, sarcopenia. Do you have any thoughts on that? Yeah, I noticed after about 10 years of just sitting around studying my shoulders got less rounded muscles. I could see in photographs that my shoulder muscles were smaller because
I wasn't working regularly. But just moving around my leg muscles have stayed huge. After not going skiing for example for 10 years someone told me that my leg muscles must be getting weak from just sitting around reading all the time. But I tested myself doing one leg sit ups and every 10 years I would do 10 one leg sit ups and didn't notice a significant dropping off with time. I haven't done it for 15 years though, I don't know whether I could still do 10. Do you do any other kind of exercise regularly?
No, just every 10 years I would test myself. So you like orange juice? Oh yeah, when good stuff is available. It should be thoroughly ripened. The commercial stuff they are used to selling unripe oranges and so if they accidentally get ripe oranges they add acetic acid to it. For example the concentrated or canned varieties very often have acid added but the acid etches the enamel off your teeth so ripe oranges are safer in every way. So you would want to rinse out your mouth with clear water after orange juice?
Yeah, clear water or maybe even baking soda if it's very acidic. What do you think about taking baking soda regularly? Some people advocate that, a quarter teaspoon or so. Do you think there is any value to that? Yeah, I know people who do as much as a teaspoon two or three times a day and think it improves their endurance and strength but even a fourth of a teaspoon two or three times a day people say that it helps reduce inflammation. I know people who used to get swollen legs when taking
a long airplane trip and when they took a teaspoon of baking soda in water before getting on the plane they stopped having the swollen feet. What's going on there? Can you surmise what you think metabolically is happening with the baking soda, sodium bicarbonate? The sodium lowers your aldosterone very quickly and aldosterone is a general stress hormone that tends to go up with cortisol which damages tissues but aldosterone causes a shift towards inflammation and fibrosis. So the chronic elevation of aldosterone leads to heart disease
and circulatory disease and kidney disease. So chronic intake of a little extra sodium such as you get with that small doses of baking soda, that has a chronic anti-stress effect keeping your aldosterone lower and that lets you lose the sodium fairly quickly and the bicarbonate part is quickly changed. There's an enzyme, carbonic anhydrase, that changes carbon dioxide to bicarbonate and bicarbonate back into carbon dioxide and at the surface of your cell when you're losing the sodium through your kidneys, your cells change bicarbonate
into carbon dioxide which is more soluble in the living cell. So it goes out of your blood more or less at the same rate that the sodium is leaving your blood, bicarbonate into your cells, sodium out of your body. So what it amounts to is the same as breathing a little extra carbon dioxide or failing to hyperventilate and low thyroid people hyperventilate and blow away the carbon dioxide they should be keeping in their cells. And so the supplement of baking soda is imitating to a degree the normal thyroid function, keeping your cells
more charged with carbon dioxide which is a stabilizing thing that has tremendous ramifications everywhere. When you are at a high altitude there's less oxygen and the oxygen normally in your lungs it exchanges with carbon dioxide and so at sea level high oxygen pressure pushes more carbon dioxide out of your blood. At a high altitude the lower oxygen tension allows you to retain more carbon dioxide and people have less dementia, heart disease and cancer at very high altitudes and live longer and that's very likely mostly the effect of retaining
the proper amount of carbon dioxide. So if you at moderate altitude if you're breathing more carbon dioxide like adding a supplement it can be with baking soda that extra carbon dioxide is to some degree imitating a high altitude or better thyroid functioning. Fascinating. So the low thyroid folks do they tend to breathe more, have more breaths per minute and then have less carbon dioxide which we know is good, is that right? Well relative to how much oxygen they need because the oxygen requirement is very low
in a low thyroid person so they don't need to move very much air. Like a quart of oxygen will last a low thyroid person maybe minutes where a high thyroid person would be gone in seconds. I've seen it in labs where we were practicing doing the basal metabolic rate test by rate of consuming oxygen and for example the typical old fashioned machine contains two liters of oxygen and I didn't know that I was hyperthyroid. I didn't have any signs of hyperthyroidism but in the standard test I emptied the machine in half the allotted
time so the tracing on the graph paper was almost a vertical line where it was supposed to be about a 45 degree angle to the right and according to the standards I was about four times the normal oxygen consuming rate which a doctor would say oh that's dangerous hyperthyroidism but I was fine, no health problems at all. Very interesting. Do you put much stock in taking the temperature to gauge thyroid function? Yeah, when you're producing energy at a high rate say 150% of the average you're maintaining
your blood sugar level because you're using the sugar efficiently, not wasting any. The hypothyroid person wastes sugar at a terrible rate because they aren't using oxygen properly. So if you're using sugar efficiently that means you don't experience hypoglycemia and so you don't produce very much adrenaline to regulate your blood sugar and so your adrenaline level is low, your stress level is low and everything metabolically is running efficiently. You're turning over your proteins but in a renewal way rather than a stress produced way. Here's an email from Beth about thyroid so
I thought I'd throw it right in there. Dr. Ray P do you think fluoride and chloride in a tap water and bromide in breads are having a major effect on our thyroids? Yeah I didn't know they were still putting bromide in bread. I don't think they are generally but maybe this lady knows. Fluoride isn't good if it's there, it should be avoided. Fluoride I think, I was for a while using a supplement of T3, a thyroid reactive thyroid hormone and when I would
go to San Francisco or an area where they have fluoridated water I would get a migraine headache and I looked up the amount of fluoride ions in water and the amount of T3, the number of potential sites for the fluoride to stick to and a glass of fluoridated water is enough to knock out a day's portion of the active thyroid hormone. Since I was using that active thyroid hormone it was very quick and very noticeable that if I drank fluoridated water for example in my coffee or orange juice I would get a migraine
from extreme hypothyroidism. Cynthia writes in I take 60 mg one grain of natural thyroid every day, it seems my TSH levels are normal one or two, my doctor likes that. Does Dr. Peat think that if I just keep doing this that my thyroid will never be able to make this what it needs to on its own? I've seen several people who were hypothyroid who when they took the amount that brought their oxygen consumption up to the right level had recovery of their own thyroid function
and could stop taking it. It doesn't happen very often but I've seen several people who cured their low thyroid by supplementing thyroid. So explain what you mean taking the oxygen level, how do we know? How would you know? Well if you're sick with low thyroid you have a variety of symptoms and these individuals responded to supplementing their thyroid the way any hypothyroid person does but in a few cases they were able to maintain their metabolic rate and stop taking the thyroid because the thyroid had restored, the supplement had restored
their anti-stress metabolism, it lowered the adrenaline and cortisol and allowed the tissue to start metabolizing by itself and producing its own thyroid. And usually a person's body is loaded up with anti-thyroid substances, polyunsaturated fats built right into the structure of the cell, not only in the fat tissue but in their muscles and brain and so on. Especially after the age of 20 the tissues start building polyunsaturated fats right into the structure and when you're under stress you release some of those polyunsaturated fats into your bloodstream where they interfere
with thyroid function. So the average person in their 20s or 30s or older needs to, if they're hypothyroid, they benefit from taking a supplement for at least a few years until they can change the composition of their body. Are they better off to take the lowest possible amount when they're doing that? I mean just to make it work, to help it make it work on its own? If you happen to take too much you'll get breathless, consume too much oxygen. I've
done it many times and just standing up to answer the telephone I would start panting and I had to cut back on my thyroid. But I've seen people, well myself for example, when I was judging just by how I felt I would supplement the thyroid and one morning I noticed I had dents in my throat beside my Adam's apple where the thyroid gland had been about the size of my finger pressed into my throat and I realized I'd shrunk my thyroid gland. So
I stopped taking the quick acting T3. The next morning my neck was smooth. And I've seen several people who were taking too much thyroid and have shrunk their gland and in just one or two days it comes back massively. If one is taking some thyroid meds as we call them, what's the role of taking supplemental iodine if you're not taking a thyroid or if you are? Foods such as milk and eggs always contain thyroid even though seafood is the known reliable source of trace minerals, selenium and iodine particularly. But since thyroid is a fertility
hormone, animals can't produce eggs and milk if they're very hypothyroid. So you're assured that milk and eggs will always contain some iodine and some equivalent thyroid supporting substance. So there was a study back when iodine was sometimes used as a dough conditioner instead of bromine. And at that time the average American diet contained several times the ideal amount of iodine. And it has been about 60 or 70 years since there were hypothyroid low iodine areas in the United States like the Great Lakes region was famous greater
belt. But since food technology has started using so much iodine, there hasn't been any iodine deficiency zone in the U.S. And what happens if you take even twice, two or three or four times the amount needed by the body, you start interfering with the function of the gland. And often people supplement more than a milligram up to as much as 10 milligrams a day and that seriously damages the thyroid. Every couple of months I hear from someone who has damaged their thyroid by taking several milligrams a day of iodine.
Is that a lot of milligrams? Yeah, the required amount is about a tenth to a fifth of a milligram per day. And taking a half a milligram per day, chronically looking at a big population, that's enough to increase the incidence of thyroiditis and eventually thyroid cancer. So it sounds like what I'm hearing you saying is with some good foods, milk or eggs, we're going to get enough? Yeah. And it's seriously dangerous in the long run to supplement too much iodine. I do really well and others have too. They've mentioned with this, you know,
the salmon, you can get, you know, the little thin slices. What do you call that? I guess smoked salmon and things like that. You think that's a generally good food? Yeah, it's nutritious, but you can overload on polyunsaturated fat if you eat salmon all the time. Oh, there's poofas in salmon? Oh yeah, a lot of poofa. Really? What are they doing there? I thought that's a fish. Yeah, the cold water fish eat algae. The algae is the source of the poofas.
So you tend to, you like to gravitate more towards the warm water fish? Yeah, as far as it's available, but a small amount. There are some low fat fish that come from pretty cold waters. Cod and soil are the lowest fat fish that I know of. I think they're safer than salmon if you're going to eat fish every week. Oh really? Okay, can you stay right there? We're going to take a little break here. Patrick Timpone on Radionetwork.com. One of the most powerful antioxidants ever is actually Brown's gas. Well, hydrogen and
the machine that we have, the AquaCare machine, makes Brown's gas, which is, it's kind of different than actual molecular hydrogen, Brown's gas, and that's what George's machine makes, the one that we promote. It's very quiet and you can bubble in the water and then breathe it and they have a whole little setup there, which is digital, and depending on your body weight, you know exactly how much to put in there, you just dial that in. And when you do just the water, you can just dial in 100% of the Brown's gas going into
the water, drink the water, and then if you're going to drink it and make water at the same time, it's fine, because you'll still make plenty of hydrogen in the water. It's a fascinating, most abundant gas or thing in the universe, hydrogen. It's just like, I think 96% of everything that's out there. So we have a great little machine that we promote, and if you use promo code 1RADIO, you get a 10% and look upon it as an investment, and you're out there a couple
thousand bucks, but this thing has got a lifetime warranty, lifetime warranty, and also a one year no questions asked money back if you don't like it. Now that's pretty cool. Lots of safety features that most of the hydrogen Brown's gas machines do not have, and that's important, because hydrogen, molecular hydrogen, and making Brown's gas, it's a very energetic substance, let me put it like that. I mean, you can do hydrogen cars and hydrogen whatever. You know, it's very, it's volatile, so you got to be careful with it. But your body likes
it's one of the biggest antioxidants and anti-inflammatory. Good things are going in my body with lower inflammation. I can feel it. I can just feel it. I don't know why I just feel more comfortable in my body after breathing this gas. It's a nice thing. And here's more on it from George who makes the machine. This was previously with George Wiseman about his AquaCure machine making hydrogen gas and water out of the same hose. Listen, the body accepts that gas and uses it to heal everything. It's like the fountain of youth. It's a astonishing the
amount of ailments. In fact, in scientific studies, and they have over 1000 scientific studies now, they are showing that it either helps the body heal directly or indirectly from virtually every ailment that ails any water-based life form. But it works just as well on animals and plants and lizards and birds and everybody. And you're saying this because this machine called the AquaCure split into five different parts. Six. I got hydrogen, oxygen, electro-enhanced water, water vapors, monatomic hydrogen, what else? And monatomic
oxygen. Oh, the monoxygen. And that's what your machine does? It splits it? Yes, it makes that mixture inside the machine and all that comes out a single hose, the same hose. Gas? As a gas, in gaseous form, yes. And you breathe it or you put it in water? So if you bubble the browns gas into this water, into let's say distilled water, it will go to a negative ORP. And when you drink that, it actually gives your body an electrical energy, these
electrons. Instead of sucking energy from you, it gives it. So you can have water that is healthful and not healthful just by the energy that's in the water. You want to get one? Me too. Ours is on the way. Check this out. Lifetime warranty on the machine itself. And then a one year, no questions asked, money back guarantee if you like the machine within a year. I mean, have you ever heard of a warranty like that? The AquaCure. Use promo code One
Radio. Promo code One Radio for a 10% discount. It's in our store on OneRadioNetwork.com. And keep in mind the idea of dehydration, truly the lack of hydrogen. Dehydration really helps your body to become hydrated. Really nice machines. Wayne Blakely is with us and he makes the Living Streams products. There's two different bifidos. Let's talk about the straight product that is bifido and then there's bifido 2. What is the bifido used for? The bifido is used as a probiotic nutrient which has curcumin
in it and turmeric in it which has certain minerals and nutrients in it that helps the body especially absorption of your food. Curcumin is the most researched supplement in the world. The researchers don't really understand how curcumin works in the body. And curcumin is very hard to digest in the digestive tract. So we pre-digest the curcumin which has, we buy our curcumin from India because it has a mineral in it called yttrium. And we use the bacteria to break down the yttrium, the correct bacteria to break down the yttrium
so our body can assimilate it so we can absorb our food correctly and it stops plaque in the body. Pretty cool stuff isn't it? Wayne's on it. And the lack of bacteria in the soil in this country is the whole issue. Why yttrium is in short supply. Very unique products. Living Streams. He's talking about the bifido and it's in our store on oneradionetwork.com. The Ayurveda lady that was on the show, we're going to have her back on, Dr. Teitelbaum. She was really, really big on Moringa too. It's an incredible tree, nutrient, herb, whatever
you want to call it. And if you want to get a real natural whey, full fledged whey, Wayne has a Moringa product that's in a probiotic. Very easy to absorb and you get a big bottle of it and you can just drink a lot of it. Moringa is pretty amazing what's going on with Moringa. So, fun things. They're all in our store. Excuse me. All in our store on oneradionetwork.com. Had to cough there. If you would like to get more information, you can talk to Wayne's protege or helper, Marilyn, 360-912-2981. She can give you more
insights on this or that or what is good for, we have some things for perimenopause. Wayne is very careful. He doesn't say a lot of stuff because, oh, you know the FDNA, they get all carried away. Can't make any claims. And I understand. But Marilyn can give you some information. She doesn't do medical advice, neither do I or nobody on our guest list ever do medical advice. It's all up to you. But anyway, these probiotics work like probiotics are supposed to. LivingStreams, oneradionetwork.com. We talk about your health, wealth and well-being on oneradionetwork.com.
Well, it's an honor to have Dr. Ray Peat on our show. He's consented to come on on the third Tuesday and we're here. So, Dr. Peat, thanks so much for coming on from time to time. People like you. People like you. You're a rock star around here. They just like you. What do you know about vasovagal SYNCOPE? An emailer is talking about the vagus nerve gets activated due to stressors. The heart rate slows. Blood pressure drops. Blood vessels in the legs can dilate. The blood pools in the lower part, flowing to the brain and may
be nausea and things like that. This lady, Mona, wants to know that what besides the stressor is causing the vagus nerve to react so. There has to be more to it than simply being a response to being hot, emotional, scared when in a normal life setting. Low thyroid people tend in that direction. I wrote some newsletters a few years ago on shock and the history of shock goes back a few hundred years, but it really became a major aspect of physiology just a little over a hundred years ago, the beginning of the
20th century. One of the pioneers was George Washington. He was a great physicist. He was a son at the Cleveland Clinic, which was founded by G. W. Kryol I. The son was a pioneer in both thyroid therapy and breast cancer treatment. He innovated the lumpectomy rather than the horrible radical mastectomy and he practically eliminated thyroid surgery. He went from over a thousand surgeries a year in the clinic to just about a dozen by understanding how the thyroid can be treated. His father was the real pioneer that led to that understanding
of the thyroid. His thyroid work grew out of his surgical experiments in which he really explained more than anyone else what shock is and how the vagus nerve governs shock. What happens in shock is that signals are sent to all of your body cells, turning off the ability to use oxygen. The use of oxygen is what thyroid is in control of. The more thyroid you have, the more oxygen your cells can use. Within a broad range, that means that your metabolism becomes more and more efficient as you use more oxygen. The low
thyroid person is wasting their energy. In shock, it's even worse than hypothyroidism. It simply turns off the mechanism for using oxygen and burning any fuel. It imitates death basically. When a person in shock is cut, their blood stays bright red. They aren't using the oxygen in their blood because the tissue is simply switched off metabolically. It's like turning off thyroid in a nervous or electrical way rather than a chemical way. The George Washington trial showed that stimulating the vagus nerve was the basic signal for turning
on shock, whether it was caused by loss of blood or pain or fright or whatever. The signals through the vagus system were able to switch off basically the life process temporarily. That process is easier to trigger the lower your thyroid function is. You become more of a vagal organism when your thyroid is lower. People generally, if they're going to keep functioning at all, they compensate for that exaggerated activity of the vagal nervous system by pumping out extra adrenaline. Their adrenal glands become overactive and they run as much as 40 or 50 times the normal amount
of adrenaline production, compensating for that abnormal activity of the vagal opposing system. The parasympathetic system is the vagal system and the adrenaline system is the sympathetic nervous system. Surprisingly, many people are running with both sides of their autonomic nervous system running at an extremely high rate. If something interferes with their production of adrenaline and sympathetic activity, then they drop into the vagal state and move towards shock, fainting for example. Kyle, is that K-Y-L-E? This work seems to feel like it was long ago. I didn't understand the question.
Kyle, this work with G. W. Kyle, was this long ago? Oh, Carl. C-R-I-L-E. Oh, C-R-I-L-E. Oh, Carl. Okay. Long time ago? Yeah, the senior trial died I think in the 1940s and the junior died not long ago in the 90s, I think. And what did he do to lower all these surgeries that he went from thousands to a handful? What did he do? Oh, supplementing thyroid basically. Oh, he just gave supplemental thyroid. Yeah, things they were calling thyroid cancer. It was just a minor condition that he could
turn off just by giving them a full replacement dose of thyroid. Really? Was he using TSH and all that as a metric? No, not at all. TSH measurement came in later really and he used it to measure the amount to realize that people developing these symptoms of thyroid cancer, nodules and so on, were experiencing the same condition that iodine supplementers experience with a very high TSH. And so he understood that TSH was driving towards thyroiditis and eventually he was diagnosed with thyroid cancer. And so he would give usually three or four grains of
armor thyroid sufficient to lower the TSH to zero. And then these people without thyroidectomy or maybe just partial removal of the cancerous part would live a normal life. Just keeping their TSH down so that any surviving cancer cells wouldn't be stimulated by the TSH. My goodness. Three or four grains. Now a grain is 16 milligrams. I mean that's a lot, isn't it? Well, two grains was the average dose for just the run of the mill. Was it? Low thyroid, middle-aged person. But sometimes just to have good functioning, some people
took three or four or even five grains. The armor company sold tablets of five grains. Veterinarians found that that was the right dose for cocker spaniels. A couple of breeds of dogs needed about five grains a day and quite a few people, they sold bottles of I think it was 500 five-grain tablets and $10 or so. And I've seen a few people who needed more than five grains, 10 or 15 grains a day to cure their problem and then they would settle in on four or five grains a day for maintenance.
My goodness. It seems like a very high dose what we hear around. So how did this Carlisle, how did he judge the dosage if he wasn't using the labs? The basal metabolic rate was still in use through the 1940s and into the 50s. Then the chemical, the first test was a blood test called protein-bound iodine. It came in just around the same time that Synthroid came on the market. It turned out 20 years later that it was an absolute meaningless thing. But at the time,
I was in junior high at the time and several of my friends said they had learned that they didn't have a glandular problem because the protein-bound iodine showed that they had a fully normal amount of protein-bound iodine in their blood. And so they had discovered that they were just gluttonous. So they brought this med thing out right when the Synthroid came out. I mean the test. Yeah, yeah. It really was part of a marketing system. Those rascals. What they did was blame the problem on the patient rather than supplementing with Armor
Thyroid which was a good reliable product. My goodness. So back to Mona who brought up this whole Vegas. So she might have on both ends working overtime with the sympathetic with the Vegas and then the adrenaline. How would then how do you lower all that down? Is it just looking after Mr. Thyroid? Using your temperature and pulse rate, you can come fairly close to the old oxygen consumption test which that's still the ideal way to prove hypothyroidism. But you can make a very good
guess by taking your temperature before you get out of bed in the morning and checking your pulse rate at the same time. If you're lots of the low thyroid people are running on high adrenaline which rises during the night and that tends to push up the cortisol. The adrenaline sometimes will cause 90 or 100 beats per minute heart rate when you're waking up sometimes following a nightmare. And if the cortisol goes up higher than average it always tends to rise around dawn. But the higher your cortisol rises the higher your
waking temperature will be. The adrenaline speeds your pulse at dawn, the cortisol raises the temperature and helps to push the heart rate back down by bringing your blood sugar up. So just that one measurement can be ambiguous, high adrenaline, high cortisol or low. But if you then take your temperature and pulse rate an hour or two after eating, the food will lower your adrenaline and the daylight and food will lower your cortisol. And very often these people who woke up seeming to have a very normal 75 beats per minute pulse
rate and 98 degree temperature, these people will sometimes drop to a 55 or 60 pulse rate and 96 or 97 degree temperature at 11 o'clock in the morning. And what does that tell you if that happens? That they're super low thyroid. Okay, so the Broda Barnes thing wasn't kind of sort of right. I mean if you had a 98, you know according to Broda Barnes then you were good but this whole adrenaline and cortisol thing you're saying, maybe not. In hot, humid summers in Eugene, I first started questioning Barnes's temperature measurement.
He worked at Fort Collins, Colorado where it never gets very hot and humid for very long. And I saw that people in this hot and humid weather, even very hypothyroid people kept a normal temperature. But usually with a normal temperature, they would get a slow pulse rate. So I started adding the two together but then I saw that a very stressful night time would make both of the indicators sometimes look normal at dawn or waking. And then they would go down on a cool mid-morning or afternoon.
That's fascinating. That's very, very, very interesting. So you have mentioned before that folks if they want to start taking a thyroid, that they start slow and do it maybe even half a grain or something for a couple of weeks. So you think that's a good idea to get the body kind of used to it? Yeah, that is a traditional way to say ideally a month because your adrenaline and cortisol are going to come down as the thyroid comes up. So at two weeks you might seem just right
and then you start slowing down again when your adrenaline comes down towards normal. So maybe 30 grains, half of a tab might be a good thing for a few weeks or a month. Watching those measurements because it's like a sawtooth pattern. You're rising up and rise to normal and then your hormones adjust and you slip back and then you increase the dose and rise to normal for a while. And then if you normalize your adrenaline and lower your stress, then your metabolism slows down again for a while.
So that's why if you do both you can kind of gauge. So what you want is after an hour or after eating around 11 or so, the ideal would then be the more 98 temp and more higher pulse rate? Yeah, 80 or 85 in the middle of the day is a good pulse rate. 75 at least and 85 or 90 is okay and temperature 98 or 98.5. Well could you diagnose for Patrick here? I'm like 60 all the time. It just doesn't
change. I mean it seems fine to me. For me doc if I had 75 I would think I'd be like total anxiety or something. Oh no, the thyroid, one of the things it does by lowering the stress hormones, you feel more and more relaxed. Put the higher pulse rate. Yeah, but how you feel is a good indicator. You don't want to push it into the anxiety because that means you're turning on your stress. And serotonin is an additional complicating factor. The vagal system and the adrenaline
system is one complication of interpreting thyroid function, but the serotonin also tends to go down as your thyroid comes up and the serotonin is a promoter of hyperventilation and so the low blood glucose, low oxygen consumption person often will have a higher blood sugar and that person often will have an actual hyperventilation driven by the increased serotonin and that serotonin disturbs both your adrenal mineral regulation and your parathyroid hormone. It drives your parathyroid hormone up and that is worse if you're low in either
calcium intake or low in vitamin D. That's why I talk a lot about calcium and vitamin D in relation to thyroid because low thyroid means usually higher serotonin activity, hyperventilation disturbed calcium metabolism and dependence need for more vitamin D. We talked a bit about dopamine last hour. How does dopamine play into the whole, what we've just talked about the last 10 minutes, dopamine? It's similar to the adrenaline or sympathetic nervous opposition to the shock tendency of the vagal or sympathetic system. It's the body's balancing factor for serotonin. You
can get too much of both of those and you get symptoms like nightmares. Water and salt regulation become a problem when those go up. So you want to keep your serotonin down and under control and then your dopamine will take care of keeping things in balance usually. So on the shock idea, you're talking about it could be a traumatic event in someone's life. Yes, an emotional shock will turn off your thyroid function and all of those other, the adrenals and the parathyroid system tend to get out of control as your thyroid goes down.
I wonder why though after you get over the shock and you forgive the shock person and all that and spiritually and emotionally that these thyroid wouldn't start to get its act together without the meds. I think that's because of the tissues having been slightly deranged by storing PUFA in their fat. Usually young people can take a big shock better than people in their 30s and 40s when their tissues are destabilized by the fat. An emotional upset will more relax and cause a chronic thyroid problem in a person in their 30s and their teens.
Dr. Ray Peat is with us and you can see on the show page there where he has a bi-monthly newsletter and it's very affordable. You can click on there and sign up and get some cool stuff and help support him so he can buy paints and stuff. What's more effective, eating a whole orange, drinking its juice or eating marmalade? The marmalade has the extract of the peeling which has a lot of therapeutic things. I haven't seen any real comparisons but people occasionally have advocated eating the peeling raw but
that's extremely hard on the stomach and cooking the peeling extracts some of the anti-inflammatory things. Naringin are major protective factors in the orange peeling that you get in the marmalade and the added sugar is an added anti-stress factor that supports your thyroid. Ideally the juice you can get all of those good things in the absence of the marmalade is a kind of a medical substitute. If you have good oranges you wouldn't want to eat the number of oranges it takes to make a gallon of orange juice but it's fine to drink a gallon
of orange juice in hot weather. All of the fiber in an orange would probably be a burden to your digestive system. I experience malabsorption that no matter what or how much I eat I stay underweight. Symptoms like gnawing, ulcer type pain that flares up at night to cause insomnia and eating iron rich foods like organ meats which were previously well tolerated now exacerbate this pain. So getting some ulcer type pain at night and can't seem to gain weight can you gauge what might be going on for this person?
My personal experience and knowing half a dozen other people usually men, I can't gauge how many people in their 20s and 30s can eat several thousand calories a day without gaining weight. I've known people who weighed for normal height 130-140 pounds, very skinny who were eating 3-4 thousand calories a day. Based on my own experience when I first supplemented thyroid, I was in my late 30s I think, suddenly I didn't need to eat so much. My calorie requirement dropped in half simply by adding thyroid. So I suggested that to these skinny men who
were eating 3-4 thousand calories and staying very skinny. Suddenly they had the same experience. They didn't have to eat more but suddenly they put on muscle and that shows that thyroid is an anabolic hormone when it's in the right balance. But if it's deficient and you're running on adrenaline, your cells know that the energy isn't being produced in the right way, it's being produced by the stress of adrenaline. So you're burning calories under the influence of adrenaline because these cells can't retain the magnesium that stabilizes
the energy level of the cell. Your thyroid can be making you use the oxygen and you're producing the ATP and be fairly efficient in those ways. But in the absence of a certain amount of thyroid, your cells lose magnesium and so they have to make the ATP again. So you're making ATP at a high rate but losing it because it breaks down in the absence of magnesium. Supplementing magnesium for about an hour will relax and stabilize the cells but you need a certain amount of thyroid to make the cells retain it and stay in that
efficient relaxed condition. It's a matter of letting your cells relax so that they can build themselves up instead of being constantly running and stressing themselves. So that's where the thyroid is visibly a very powerful anabolic hormone. So that's a little counterintuitive because isn't often hypothyroidism connected with overweight? Very often but if you look at the old textbooks, at the beginning of thyroid surgery, they forgot to replace the thyroid hormone with a powdered or squashed up animal thyroid gland and when a person's thyroid gland was removed, they went into cachexia. They looked like
an advanced cancer patient, worse than sarcopenia. Sarcopenia to an extreme degree, they wasted away in the absence of the thyroid hormone and that's what's happening to these often young or middle-aged men who are just moderately hypothyroid but it's enough to move them into that catectic or sarcopenic state of not being able to build their muscle fast enough. This is from Cindy. She's in Alabama. I've been told that when a person has Hashimoto's or other autoimmune issues, they should not use natural desiccated thyroid medications
such as Armour or Nasothroid because the body will attack these because they are natural ? The body supposedly does not attack the synthetic medication like Synthroid and I prefer not to use the synthetic. What is your view on this? The autoimmune so-called condition is an excited inefficient state like when the cell can't retain magnesium, it stays in an excited state. If there's a hormone additionally increasing the excitation like TSH, it stimulates the thyroid gland and if it gets the nutrients,
it needs to make the hormone in the right balance, not too much iodine, then the cell is energized and works. If something is lacking so it can't produce the thyroid hormone, the TSH keeps rising, stimulating it more, driving it harder, stressing it more until it is killing the cells causing thyroiditis. In a condition of inflammation, your immune system comes in to activate the turnover, the phagocytosis of the damaged, overexcited, overstressed cells. The immune system is clearing up a damaged tissue and that has been experimentally
shown several times. For example, in artificially inflamed brains in animals, they find that what they thought was autoimmune inflammation of the brain caused by a virus or some external cause was actually being remedied by the immune system. If they removed that autoimmune inflammation and the body, the inflammation killed the animal. The immune system antibodies directed against self, if they're properly supported, are cleaning up the damaged tissue, remedying the problem. People have demonstrated that where you have the so-called autoimmune antithyroid antiglobulin, antiperoxidase enzymes specific to the thyroid, if they supplement enough
thyroid to lower the TSH, you stop producing the antibodies and the antibodies, when they finish cleaning up the damaged tissue, will gradually fade away. It takes several months of keeping the TSH low. There have been several publications demonstrating that the condition corrects itself after several months. It applies to things like rheumatoid arthritis and several other types of so-called autoimmune conditions. Do you know anything about the calcium powder made from pearls? If you don't have any experience with the pearl itself, it's a good source for calcium.
If you have any experience with the pearls, it's a good source for calcium. And egg shells and oyster shells and other sea creatures' shells. But you don't have any experience with the pearl itself? Pearl? Yeah, pearl. No, no. You don't? Chinese medicine and all you've had to use is pearl for different things, and that's what she was asking. They're made of calcium carbonate. Oh, they are? Good, so that's a good source then. Another question, well, I'm glad to hear. We thought so.
Another source of calcium would be in fish bones, she's asking. I used to eat sardines with fish bones. They seemed digestible, but now with avoiding poopers, would the bones from cod or some other source be good as calcium source for those with sensitive guts? It is a calcium source that is okay, but the trouble is that it is calcium phosphate. Phosphate has an excitatory effect, and most people are overloading on phosphate, and so the bones will move in the right direction.
But if you're still eating a lot of meat, meat and grains and legumes, for example, are overloading you with phosphate. And so calcium phosphate helps, but it isn't as effective as calcium carbonate. The carbonate, you like the carbonate. Yeah. I love this show, writes Cody. She's in Florida. Well, thanks, Cody. I'm interested to know, oh, you asked Dr. Peat, how long he sleeps each night. And do you sleep uninterrupted sleep? She's asking about your sleep. It depends on how good the weather is, how good my food was, and so on.
But seven and a half to nine hours, it's variable. Usually, I wake up during the night and have some milk and sugar or orange juice to lower the stress. Having milk at bedtime will lower several of the stress hormones. I've got in the habit of, if I wake up in the night, having some sugar and milk or orange juice and milk, and that resets the hormones so that you don't experience the same amount of stress around dawn.
Yeah, what fun. So you put, say, if you would have milk in the middle of the night when you wake up, would you put actual sugar in there or honey or maple syrup? What would you use? Pure white sugar is the safest. Really? Single figure. Pure white sugar from Hawaii, right? Why is that the safest over? You would think honey or maple syrup is a better choice, no?
Honey is very good, but if the bees happen to eat something you're allergic to, you can have an allergic reaction to the plant substance that gets into the honey. And maple sugar is extremely nutritious for minerals, but the heating process makes the sugar allergenic. I didn't know they heated it. I thought they just kind of dumped it out of the old tree.
It comes out in a very liquid, slightly amber color, but a very pale, thin liquid, and it has to be evaporated, and they use heat to evaporate it. Theoretically, you could do it at room temperature with a high vacuum, but it's economical to heat it. In the heating process, there are small amounts of amino acids in the juice as well as minerals, and when you heat glucose with an amino acid, it produces a toxic reactant. So your go-to is C&H pure cane sugar from Hawaii? Well, actually...
You could probably get an organic one, though, can't you? Yeah, you can, but it's so well washed, you get 99 and more percent pure sucrose, but I think beet sugar might even be better. Ooh, beet sugar. Is that white? Oh, sure. Yeah, they're washed. They would be brown, but they wash the molasses away, and the molasses is brown partly because of the heat process reacting amino acids with the glucose, making a brown substance that is similar to the substance that's produced in aging, reacting glucose with amino acids.
Have I read or did I dream this, that a lot of the beets are genetically modified now? You want to do organic? Oh, probably, but you hopefully aren't getting any proteins. The proteins are the allergenic, toxic form, and that's what genetic modification does, is make new kinds of proteins, which are toxic and allergenic. Here's one. I know that Dr. Peats recommended raw carrots, cooked mushrooms, bamboo shoots for the antibiotic properties, but that our gut bacteria can get used to these. Is just alternating with those enough, or should one supplement with doses of antibiotics?
Oh, yeah. If you're having a problem with hormone imbalance and stress, at a fertility clinic about 35 years ago, they discovered, they had the theory that infertility might be caused by germs, and so they gave some women antibiotics and didn't do much for their fertility that they saw. But a lot of them said that their PMS and headaches had gone away, and so they started measuring their hormones, and they found that in fact it had improved their fertility balance by lowering estrogen and cortisol and increasing their progesterone.
And that wasn't just a fertility clinic in humans, but people then tested it in animals, and a course of antibiotics reliably lowered estrogen and cortisol, the stress hormones, and increased progesterone. And that's the idea of the fiber. When the fiber is working, it is binding and eliminating estrogen so it isn't reabsorbed and passed through the liver repeatedly. The fiber eliminates estrogen, that lowers the stress, so your cortisol goes down, and that combination allows your progesterone to be retained properly. Go figure. That's really interesting.
I sure like Dr. Peat's show. Thanks for having him on. On a previous show, Dr. Peat mentioned possibly placing a red light at your bedside with a timer to come on intermittently through the night to eliminate the reduce of stress caused by darkness. Could you further ask about implementing this idea and if it would be helpful or not? Maybe somebody else mentioned that. I don't know if you said that. Sorry. Did you talk about that idea of intermittent red light?
Yeah. I've tried different things, and it bothered me to have it come on in my face, and so I made a paddle or a belt with LEDs and found that putting it on my leg didn't bother me so much. And shining red light on your blood anywhere in your body has a de-stressing effect, but I have not consistently used that. I think it's adequate to have a chronic daylight, continuous incandescent or sunlight during the daytime is enough to lower your stress.
But I think it is good to have an air ionizer running all the time, especially during the night, because negatively ionized air activates your lungs' ability to lower serotonin and lower the stress of night. What's an air ionizer? What does it do? I don't know if I know about that. Oh, that's a negative ion generator? Yeah. It adds electrons to the oxygen and it creates, in effect, radical, as far as your lung enzymes can tell, it's activated metabolic oxygen, more immediately accessible to destroy serotonin as it reaches your lungs.
And the lungs are constantly keeping your serotonin in check. When a person has a digestive problem that wakes them up at night with various symptoms, including insomnia, that irritation of the intestine is putting tremendous amounts of serotonin into your blood, carried on the platelets, depending on your lungs to inactivate it. And if your estrogen happens to be high, then your lungs are relatively inactive in destroying the serotonin. Many things can make your lungs inefficient, leaving the serotonin active, causing insomnia.
What do you do in a case like that in the middle of the night? What would be any kind of symptomatic relief? Milk and sugar. Last month, Sue, she's in Canada, she talked about how, Dr. Peat talked about how protein powders, except for gelatin, contain some toxic amino acids. Please ask Dr. Peat whether hydrolyzed collagen powder is as effective as gelatin powder for protein and whether it has toxic effects. I know that the amino acids tryptophan, cysteine, and methionine are the ones that are susceptible to toxic oxidation, and gelatin just doesn't have those.
And so you can predigest the gelatin into the amino acids. Hydrolyzed gelatin is short peptides and some free amino acids. As far as I know, they're easy to digest and are no more problem than natural gelatin. So you like the Great Lakes gelatin and those kind of products as protein powders go, you like those the best? Yeah, or making your own gelatin with chicken back wings and legs and feet. Yeah, we've been doing it with the feet in a crock pot and boy, is there a lot of gelatin in there? Holy cow.
Yeah, it's a lot. I mean, you put that in the fridge and it's just solid, just like solid as a rock. Yeah, that's very good protective nutrition. An adult can use a very high proportion of their protein as gelatin. A growing kid needs some of those potentially toxic amino acids. Tryptophan and cysteine are needed for growth, but once you have achieved full growth, all they're needed for is things like the turnover of cells. Renewal is running at a lower rate than expansion of volume.
I should mention that a fellow, Tony, has put together a really nice little array of these red incandescent lights, the chicken lamps. There's five of them and they're on a board with a little switch in there. It's in our store. Very well built and you can just probably set this guy somewhere in your living room, I guess, at night or wherever you stay and just shine the red light on you and it would be beneficial, wouldn't it, Dr. Peat? It doesn't have to be all that close to you?
No, and it penetrates very well, red light. If you've looked at your hand against the sun, you can see red light coming through. That's because red light penetrates very well and the blue and green light is absorbed superficially. So, relatively weak red light will penetrate your tissues. So, the length, the distance between these lights is not critical? No, the brighter, the quicker it works, though. Sure, sure, sure. These guys get pretty hot, so I guess you have to gauge that of how warm you want to be.
Yeah, in the winter, though, I mean, just keep warm, my boy. How important is an optimal thyroid function to consider, writes an e-mailer, for stomach acid production due to the high concentration of mitochondria in parallel cells where stomach acid is produced? Thyroid makes carbon dioxide and the carbon dioxide is flowing in proportion to your metabolic activity. It's the oxidizing function governed by thyroid that creates the stomach acid. So, you start with carbonic acid and use that to energize the production of hydrochloric acid. So, low thyroid would often be correlated with low stomach acid?
Yeah, slow digestion. All of the digestive processes tend to slow down. But gastroparesis is supposedly a mysterious condition that is usually immediately remedied by thyroid supplements. Oh, my goodness. Well, let's see. It's time to go here. Let's do a couple more, then we'll let you go. What? Oh, there was one here I thought was interesting. Many Catholic monks somehow live past 100 while nothing but bread and water. Do you think their lack of movement may have conserved their carbon dioxide? That's a great question.
Yeah, the church, both the Orthodox Church in the Caucasus region and the Catholic Church in South America, for example, they've been keeping marriage, birth and death records for hundreds of years. And they've documented lots of people living 130, 150 years and more in these areas. In England, they keep pretty good records going back several hundred years. And they have the record of one old guy, Old Parr, they called him, lived into his 150s, according to good documents. And he was taken to visit the king because he was such an exceptional person.
He died shortly after visiting the king and changing his diet. He said he had habitually eaten cheese and bread crusts, very, very cheap, minimal diet. But he died after having some banquets with the king. Oh, because they eat all this rich food, the king's. And an autopsy found that there was no disease in his body in his 150s. And in Abkhazia in the Caucasus and Vilkabamba in the Andes, there are well documented multiple cases of people in their 140s and 50s and older. And what kind of diets did they get to 140? Very simple diets.
And those are high altitude areas where they have both sheep, goats and cows. And so they eat a good proportion of milk and cheese in their diet, as well as having the high altitude environment that spares their carbon dioxide. And the monks and priests have usually a very simple routine diet. I think sometimes they might fall into just the right balance of nutrients, not too much meat, for example. Meat is a very pro-aging thing because of the low calcium, high phosphate content. I think that the high phosphate is probably one of the life-shortening things.
So there we are with the phosphate again. You don't generally think, or maybe I don't, I'm just not thinking properly about bread as being nutritious. But I guess it depends on the original grain and how it's made and everything. A little bit, yeah. If it's made traditionally, letting the yeast rise gradually, keeping the grain moist, the grain thinks it's sprouting when you let it leaven naturally. The moisture activates enzymes that break down the gluten and reduce the toxicity and make it more digestible. So it's a reliable, simple carbohydrate source.
And it does provide the trace minerals. And if they have cheese or milk to balance that, the calcium becomes the predominant mineral, which I think has an anti-stress, life-prolonging effect. Well, that's kind of fun. You could just live on toasted cheese sandwiches and milk. That would be kind of cool. Okay, finally, what's your take? I don't know if we've ever asked you about this, about the whole gluten thing. Give us your, to kind of wrap up your opinion on what's going on with this gluten sensitivity, or how it began and stuff.
Partly, the seeds and grains have their plant defense systems. Leaves contain insecticides and flavor irritants that discourage grazing from cows and insects and worms and such. And the seeds are very important for the plant's survival, just like the leaves. The worst toxins tend to be put in the seeds to block digestion and cause as much trouble for the predator of the plant as possible. And polyunsaturated fats are able to inhibit digestion if they're an oily seed. And the high-gluten seeds, the gluten itself is able to block digestive processes and cause inflammation.
There are parts of the gluten molecule that have similar effects to estrogen for creating allergic reactions in the intestine, inflammatory reactions. And if you let the enzymes activate the seeds so that, as far as it knows, it has succeeded in becoming a plant, then the intense toxins of the seed have been inactivated and you have the stem chemicals, which are much less toxic than either the mature leaf or the seed. So leavened bread is detoxified basically when it's soaked for about 12 hours in moisture. So is the gluten sensitivity a real thing?
Yeah, it's an objective thing that if your immune system is very active and stable, you can adapt to it and pass it along quickly enough without damage. Have you had experience with some of this real ancient wheat, einkorn, the real deal? Have you ever experienced any of that? If they aren't leavened, the smaller seeds have some of the more intense toxins, same with small beans. The embryo is a larger part and the storage protein is smaller, but there are some very intense allergens in the smaller, more primitive seeds.
So it's still important to make sure they're well leavened. So the leavening, the yeast and the sourdough make it nicer for us? Yeah, less allergenic. So if you were going to do some sprouts, do you do sprouts at all? Do you make your own sprouts at all? Not for many years. If you were going to do some, somebody wants to know what would be your favorites to do? The most digestible is what they're asking, George.
Oh, they're all vastly more digestible than the seeds, but they should be cooked. To improve their digestibility, they should be well cooked. Oh, you cook sprouts as well? The Chinese, either a bean or a grain, if it's fully sprouted, develops at least twice as much protein value as was in the bean or the grain itself. So you're getting an actual protein supplement when you're sprouting. We used to do black beans and other beans, aduki beans, and you can sprout those guys just on a wet towel, right?
And you can see a little tail come out, and then you can cook them. So it really soups up the protein, huh? At the same time that it's reducing the allergenicity and toxicity. Wow. And you can pretty much sprout any kind of bean, can't you, Doc? Can you soak them first and sprout them? Yeah, if they haven't been sterilized, which some products in the U.S. supermarkets have been irradiated or heated or chemically treated. Do you know if they can irradiate organic? Do we know if that's a protection, being organic?
I haven't heard what the latest standards are, but they're pushing in that direction. Are they? Yeah. Well, Doc, so it's such an honor to have you on and people love you. And you're just one of our most popular podcasts around here. You get a lot of hits. So thank you for that. Final question before you go. What are you are you focused on anything in particular research wise that maybe we'll talk about next month or anything that's really have your has your interest?
Yeah, I'm trying to put together a more systematic picture of how serotonin fits into stress and aging. It probably is a point where intervention to reduce sickness, autoimmunity and age related degenerative conditions. I think aiming towards lowering serotonin is going to be one of the most productive things. I see research moving in that direction, contrary to the powers of the pharmaceutical industry, which want to still say serotonin is wonderful stuff. You should buy our antidepressants, but there are alternative antidepressants being demonstrated to be safer while lowering serotonin and promoting health rather than degrading health.
So that's the research you're working just off the top to do. Did I ask you? Sorry if I if I did some natural ways to lower the serotonin. Did we did we talk about that? Yeah, we've already covered a lot of thyroid, vitamin D, calcium, sugar and the things in orange juice. Oh, good. All our favorite things. Calcium and orange juice, vitamin D. Good. Well, Dr. Peat, thanks for being here. And we'll we'll see in about a month or so. And maybe we'll have more to talk about serotonin. Dr. Peat's website is raypeat.com.
And we'll have a link to that and also right to a place where you can sign up for a for a heads up every other month. How much does your does your love twenty eight dollars by email twenty for how long? Two years. That's good for you. So every other month you get twelve issues for twenty eight dollars. Good job. All right, Dr. Peat. Thank you for being here. We'll see you real soon. OK. OK. Thank you. Yes, sir. Bye bye.