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Welcome everyone. Welcome back to a brand new season of Holistic Living with Josh and Jeanne Rubin. As you know, we are really excited this year to launch a, I would say, anywhere from 9 to 12 shows with our one and only Ray Peat from RayPeat.com. Today's show we're going to be talking about inflammation. More his view on inflammation, where it comes from, what's involved in inflammation, what's in our environment and our bodies that's creating inflammation.
And our goal this entire year is to really kind of give everyone an education, whether you're a practitioner, whether you're the layperson. We feel like Ray can offer a lot of insight into what's going on in your life, your physiology. And we feel that not only can he add some insight, but it can educate you. So we want to start from the base, work all the way up to solutions, which will be last. And I'm sorry guys, let me just click Jeanne in because she has Ray on the other line. We're on Josh.
Yes, I hear her. Okay. Hey, hi Ray, how are you doing? Hi. So just to introduce and tell everyone kind of where we're going this year, starting at a base, really educating people from the why behind everything instead of always talking about solutions. So we're starting our show, our first show, with kind of inflammation. And I kind of talked about why. So as I mentioned before guys, we're kind of leaving the whole caller thing up in the air.
If we feel like there's a lot of callers and Ray sparks a lot of questions and interest, then we will take callers. If I feel like he's on a roll and we're learning a lot and I want to get as much in as we can in this short 60 minutes, then we probably won't take callers. Just two things. When you're on the line, just wait a little bit because if he's talking, I'm not going to interrupt him.
And secondly, when I click you on, please say your name and where you're calling from and I'll say your area code so I know or you know who I'm clicking in. So I guess here we go. How's it going, Ray? Very good. Have you talked anything about the history of what people believe about inflammation? Well, you know, our first question was kind of, you know, what I've gathered from a lot of your research and, Jeannie, you have, based on your science and research, kind of a very different view on a lot of things.
Why don't you tell us kind of how the definition in your eyes of inflammation has changed and kind of maybe explain the traditional definition and give your definition of what inflammation is. Okay. A. L. A. Metchnikoff, about 100 years ago, more than 100 years ago, discovered the phagocytes and explored the immune process in which when you put a splinter into an organism, white blood cell type cells engulfed it. And they would eat it if it was edible or just concentrate and form either like a sheath or a pus deposit around it.
For Metchnikoff, immunity was this sort of process in which certain cells protect the organism basically by eating it up. And that was considered sort of the essence of inflammation and it was a good thing. But for Metchnikoff, the immune system, he was looking at primitive organisms, cylindrates, and he viewed this eating process as part of the developmental process maintaining and generating the proper structure of the organism. There's an English doctor, Jamie Cunliffe, who is following up on Metchnikoff's idea of what the immune system is.
And as she expresses it, it's the process of cleaning up messes. But the general idea is that our immune system is primarily to maintain our organism. And the idea of being directed at foreign invaders is really secondary to the process of fixing anything that goes wrong in the organism. It's a developmental process primarily. But because of the person, Erlich, who got the Nobel Prize with Metchnikoff, he was working on toxins to kill invading organisms. The idea of killing invaders came to be identified with immunity and inflammation throughout the 20th century.
Inflammation was seen as a good defensive reaction against invaders. But if you try to continue the Metchnikoff-Cunliffe idea, the inflammation really is a problem rather than a solution. When things are really working smoothly, we can either tolerate the presence of foreign organisms or eliminate them without a big mess being produced. F.W. Koch was an American biochemist and doctor who showed that organisms can be tolerated at very high levels without producing disease when our immune system is really working. He gave another perspective on why inflammation is really something separate from the immune system.
About 20 years ago, people started shifting their thinking and seeing that degenerative diseases are all inflammatory processes. The hardening of the arteries, brain degenerative diseases of all sorts, including Alzheimer's disease, aging in all of its aspects involves inflammation rather than simply cleaning up the mess quietly. The factors with aging being an exaggeration of the inflammatory process suggest looking at the earliest stages of development, not just going back to Metchnikoff's evolutionary view of evolution, but looking at our development during gestation.
When the fetus or embryo is injured, the tissue is simply repaired without producing a scar or inflammation. So, the prenatal functioning of the immune system is basically what Metchnikoff and Cunliffe were talking about. It's keeping the integrity of the organism and not worrying about the process of killing invaders. What happens after the fetus is fully developed and is born, then there's no longer the mother's body and the placenta filtering the environment and all mammals have at birth a very low concentration of the so-called essential fatty acids, the polyunsaturated fats.
As these are taken in from the environment without the filtering process of the placenta, the action of the immune system starts to produce inflammation and scarring and defective healing of the damaged area, where prenatally, without inflammation, everything proceeded smoothly, simply to create a new area, substituting for the damaged area, removing damaged material and smoothly reconstructing it. It's the accumulation progressively of the polyunsaturated fats that starts what we know as inflammation. When cells are inflamed, they shift from an oxygen-based metabolism to a simple sugar-consuming metabolism and are in an excited state that promotes cell division.
In this oxygen-free or oxygen-wasting environment, the cells begin to produce collagen as part of a repair process, but the ability to remove the collagen is impaired by the presence of polyunsaturated fats. The breakdown of the polyunsaturated fats involves the production of prostaglandins, which aren't really part of the essential development of the embryo and fetus, but they become very important as we begin eating the polyunsaturated fats. So, the presence of these excitatory mediators, prostaglandins, and the pre-fatty acids, blocks the cleanup process and keeps the inflammation going and leads to the production of a scar.
Depending on how unopposed the polyunsaturated fats are, you tend to get a bad healing and a big scar. That's part of why vitamin E, by opposing those processes, can practically eliminate scarring if you get a very high concentration in the presence of the healing process. Ray, can I interrupt you real quick? You're talking about the fetus and the placenta working as a filter in protecting the immune system against polyunsaturated fatty acids. If a mother has a diet high in polyunsaturated fatty acids, would the placenta still act as a filtering agent?
Yes. Normally, even people who have been on a high N-3 and N-6 diet, these come out, according to current definitions, as being essential fatty acid deficient. That's the argument for putting fish oil in baby formula and such. When you look at calves, they're extremely deficient at birth, but even the small amount of polyunsaturated fat in milk, maybe 2% of the fat, is unsaturated. They will gradually also start to load up as they grow, and their fats will become more and more unsaturated.
When people have tried to supplement pregnant women to correct that universal deficiency of the newborn, they find that the babies are born smaller, more susceptible to allergies and inflammatory diseases, and the worst part of it is that their brains are smaller, not just their bodies, but the brains are... development is retarded. People who are trying to show that the brain requires the N-3 fats were feeding these to pregnant women, and they expected to show that the fetus would be able to learn more easily in utero
with a higher concentration of N-3 fats, but in fact they found that they didn't learn... Yeah. And one of the events caused by the excess of N-3 in particular is that the metabolism of tryptophan, which should go largely to form niacin and melatonin, and this type of unsaturated fat in particular, followed by linoleic acid and N-6 fat, these cause tryptophan to be metabolized in a toxic direction, producing less niacin and more of the excitotoxic quinolinic acid and even more of the carcinogenic forms of tryptophan in the old derivatives. So, you know, you might have...
You know, this stuff is just fascinating. It definitely takes a little bit for a lot of us to wrap our head around, but, you know, what do you think causes inflammation? Do you think inflammation starts from polyunsaturated fatty acids, you know, from the food that people are eating? Or, you know, maybe you can elaborate that a little bit more for the listeners so they understand maybe where is this inflammation coming from? Is it just the food? Is it actually happening in utero? You know, where is it coming from?
Polyunsaturated is what starts it and instead of being a quick corrective process, it's the presence of the fatty unsaturated fats that cause, instead of correction, the inflammation, calcium uptake, accelerated growth and collagen production, and eventually calcification of the fibrotic scar material. The end stage is calcification of fibrous tissue that then tends to lead to atrophy and creates the conditions for degeneration into cancer. But the challenge, the worst challenge that we're constantly exposed to is the bacterial toxin production in the intestine. Everyone has it unless they've been specially prepared in a laboratory like germ-free rats,
but everyone develops these, a balance of colonic bacteria and the composition of the bacteria depend on what we eat. But there are always some that are producing endotoxins, lipopolysaccharide molecule that creates a stress poisoning physical disruption of cells lining the intestine. And this part of the reaction is to produce serotonin. The intestine is where about 95% of our body's serotonin is produced and it has various functions to stimulate peristalsis and activate some defensive processes and so on. But when there's a slight overbalance of the endotoxins
in relation to our ability to adjust the circulation and the phagocytosis and so on to get rid of the problem, then the serotonin starts to be the main problem. And the serotonin activates other things including the formation of prostaglandins from fatty acids and the release of nitric oxide and this cluster of things, most of which can have an adaptive protective effect. When there's not enough energy supplied to the organism and too much endotoxin from the bacteria, then the nitric oxide and serotonin create inflammation in the wall of the intestine and blood vessels
letting endotoxin get into the bloodstream and the endotoxin causes this effect throughout the body then releasing more nitric oxide than serotonin. And these things, the serotonin then becomes the main factor with aging and accumulated stress effects. Can you, you know, that's fascinating, I think people listening are going, maybe rewind a little bit, tell us what endotoxin is because I know from reading a lot, I would say from what I've seen, you're probably one of the only people that talks about endotoxin. There's a lot of people going, well what is endotoxin?
Maybe tell us, like, what is endotoxin and where does it come from and elaborate even more on how it affects us because as far as I know, like I said, you're the only one that really talks about it. It's normally just part of the bacterial cell structure, the covering of the bacteria contains a starch-like molecule with some fatty acids attached to it and it happens that these are not only structurally part of the bacteria but organisms have been dealing with them for so long that they are sort of our basic signal
of the need to defend ourselves against the environment. And so they are very good triggers of such things as the production of serotonin and nitric oxide. But all bacteria produce, they sort of leak these little molecules as they're forming new bacteria or being stressed, the bacteria will produce more of these chemicals that have a physical irritating effect on the lining of the intestine or through the blood vessels once they get out of the intestine. So how do we get exposed to these? Do we get exposed to these from meat?
Do we get exposed to these from the foods that we eat? Oh, yeah, they're constantly being produced in the lower small intestine and colon. And the upper part of the intestine normally is completely free of bacteria. But when we eat undigestible food, starches and complex fibrous materials, lignans and so on, these feed different combinations of bacteria depending on how undigestible they are. And you can create particular symptoms like when they feed one type of starch that humans can't digest but bacteria do, they find that the rats eating these rather than more digestible starches
become anxious and aggressive because of disturbance of things like serotonin and nitric oxide. And so it's the particular amount and type of bacterial toxin is determined mostly by the presence of chemicals or things in our foods that we can't digest. If you think of what happens to vegetables, if you keep them warm, uncooked vegetables will very quickly start producing bacterial overgrowth and foul smelling substances. When they're eaten, if they aren't reduced to a liquid by chewing or preparation, this material passes along into the lower intestine and supports the same kind of foul bacterial decomposition products.
And if that material gets mixed with more proteinaceous things, undercooked beans for example, then you get a different category of toxins, the indoles, indole amines, things that resemble serotonin and histamine and things that resemble our natural inflammation producing chemicals. Some of them come directly out of the bacterial interaction with beans and vegetables. So just elaborating a little bit more on the endotoxin, because I know you talk about it a lot, because we're talking about inflammation, how does this affect going into perpetuating the cycle of inflammation? How does this affect the liver?
If the liver is affected, how does it affect other parts of the body in regards to the detoxification of estrogen and leading to more cell proliferation and inflammation? The liver should absolutely destroy any of these toxins that reach it, that get through the intestine. But when the intestine is in bad shape, if the liver isn't well nourished and well supplied with thyroid hormone to give it the energy to produce the antitoxic processes, the poorly nourished liver or the low thyroid liver lets basically all of the junk absorbed through the permeable injured intestine,
lets all of it into the system. And then you get things like leakiness of blood vessels, which in the brain can cause symptoms like multiple sclerosis and edema in other organs, inflammatory processes involving the leaking movement of big molecules in the liver of blood vessels and other cellular compartments where they shouldn't be able to get under good conditions. I'm going to take a call, Ray. We've had a guy waiting on the line for a while. Actually, the show's started, so I want to take the call. He might have a question for you.
Let's see what he has to say. Caller from the 858. Where are you calling from? Hello? I can hardly hear you. You're going to have to turn up your volume. Are you there? Where are you? Where do you live? I don't know. We're going to have to let him go. All right. We'll move right along. Taking calls is always a challenging thing, I swear to God, since we started it's always really challenging. We'll talk more about inflammation. He'll probably call back, I guarantee it. We're talking about inflammation, where it comes from.
I'm sure a lot of people are going to have to listen to this over and over to gather it. We've talked about endotoxin. We'll go back to maybe some of the other, I should say, inflammatory facilitators in our food and in our environment that can cause inflammation. With chronic inflammation, where does it go from there? What do we see in our society today when it comes to chronic inflammation? When the liver gets weakened by the bacterial toxins and lets them into the system, the liver also begins to fail to regulate the body's own hormones.
For example, estrogen accumulates when the liver is being stressed by endotoxins. Such that, for example, in a fertility clinic, the doctors tried giving infertile women an antibiotic and they were checking their hormones. Shortly after they took the antibiotic, the women reported that they didn't have their fatigue and premenstrual type symptoms. But their blood tests showed that right after taking the antibiotic, their estrogen levels went down sharply, their progesterone went up at the same time, and the cortisol and other stress hormones went down.
So that they had created a fertile endocrine pattern just by taking an antibiotic. The same thing has been done in rats. They take estrogen and cortisol down and progesterone up with an antibiotic. I've seen the same thing just with a carrot salad, because the carrot is an unusual vegetable in being antifungal, antibacterial, and very resistant to production of endotoxins. So it works like an antibiotic on the intestine, reducing endotoxins. And when the liver is failing because of the endotoxin burden and your cortisol and estrogen are high,
that goes with a systemic excess of serotonin and deficiency of thyroid hormones. So serotonin lowers cellular oxidative metabolism and energy production. One of the biological effects of high serotonin is to allow rodents to hibernate. When they're under stress and the serotonin goes up, these rodents are able to drop their body temperature enough to go into a torpor and get through the stress of bad food supply. And when the days get warmer, for example, their system starts destroying the serotonin and bringing their metabolism back up. But when people who can't hibernate,
when people are constantly exposed to the endotoxin, serotonin, pre-fatty acid, and estrogen pattern, all of these things lower their ability to produce energy and tend to cause the body temperature to fall. And as part of the defensive system, serotonin happens to increase the pituitary hormones to compensate, for example, by driving the thyroid gland harder. Serotonin stimulates the TSH, the thyroid stimulating hormone. But it also stimulates ACTH, prolactin, gonadotropins, growth hormone, everything. It's just sort of an emergency turning on the pituitary to try to drive everything up to compensate for the fact that
the mitochondrial energy systems are being blocked by these same substances. So just for everyone listening, he's just basically naming specific hormones and things in our body that will create inflammation, poke calcium from the bone, drop body temperature, inhibit our immune system, just to kind of clarify all that. Yeah, and all these pituitary hormones in themselves, since they're endogenous, doctors like to see them up in a certain range. So they don't like to see a very low level of FSH, LH, TSH, and so on.
And they'll tell you that if you take thyroid to suppress your TSH, you're going to cause problems. But in fact, the TSH itself causes most of the problems that are identified with hypothyroidism. High serotonin is associated with low thyroid function and high TSH. But the TSH itself contributes to a great variety of inflammatory processes, atherosclerosis, increased blood lipids, increased blood pressure, and the whole range of conditions that seem mysterious to the doctors that believe you should have your TSH and thyroid hormones in the so-called normal range. But this is actually part of the inflammatory range.
Now, is inflammation, I guess, important for the process of healing? Or should we say it's essentially a bad thing that's going to create disease, or is it actually a process? Well, it's the healing process of the Metronikoff-Kunliff view of the immune system. There's always the opportunity when your pituitary is revving up, it does increase the output of your thyroid gland and increase steroid production and such. But it happens that the counter effect of the energy-lowering effect with aging tends to win out. And even though the pituitary is potentially having a curative effect,
as long as you're continuing to be exposed to endotoxin and unsaturated fats and the toxic prostaglandins, then your adaptive processes are going to be constantly at every moment thwarted by these inflammatory things rather than the corrective energy-producing reactions that would happen to the fetus. Thank you. I'm going to take this caller again and see if we can get him back. It's the same guy that we had earlier. It's a caller from the 858. What's your name? What are you calling from? Hello? This is the reason why I cannot stand taking callers.
I have to be honest with you. That's why I almost am going to abolish taking calls. That's a good idea. So we talked about inflammation, where it goes, the hormones, its process. You talked about carrots and you do talk about carrots a lot and its effect on endotoxin. Can you talk about maybe other foods that are anti-inflammatory and at the same token talk about foods that are inflammatory? Well, calcium is sort of a central thing. It stimulates cell energy production and when the cell has what it needs such as sugar and the vitamins and minerals,
the calcium will increase the oxidative metabolism and cause the cell to unbalance, have higher energy and ability to prevent the harmful accumulation of calcium. A calcium deficiency turns on the inflammation related processes to attempt to correct the calcium deficiency and this leads to eventually the calcification of soft tissues that shouldn't be calcified. So this is the main reason that I recommend using milk rather than meat because of the high calcium content. Meat has a very high phosphate ratio to calcium
and eggs would have the right ratio if people would eat the shell as well as the egg. So with milk you get a very good ratio of calcium to phosphorus and the parathyroid hormone that is suppressed when we eat enough calcium and get enough vitamin D and vitamin K, the parathyroid hormone has some of the inflammation promoting effects. So keeping our hormones low is really one of the goals of eating right. The pituitary should be as quiet as possible, parathyroid hormone should be low, estrogen and cortisol should be low
and the steroids that are protective, pregnenolone and progesterone primarily and DHEA in itself, these are produced by getting enough vitamin A and vitamin E and the oil soluble vitamins K and D. Keeping the polyunsaturated fats down is essential for all of these. Too much unsaturated fat will turn off the production of pregnenolone and progesterone for example and increase the cortisol and estrogen. Interesting. Yeah, alright guys, Ray, you know if you read his stuff over and over, he's a big advocate of dairy and not an advocate of polyunsaturated fatty acids
and you can check out our YouTube page and blog and website, we've done some stuff on that so you can understand like what foods have polyunsaturated fatty acids. He's not a liver oil advocate and he's a huge dairy advocate and kind of a moderate protein advocate in a simplistic sense. Alright, I'm going to give this caller one more chance. He's back on, he's persistent so it could be a she. Let's try. Caller from 858, what's your name and where are you calling from? This is your last chance buddy. Yes, no, see you later.
He can probably hear you, why don't you tell him to email you the questions that might... Yeah, if you have a question, feel free to email us at [email protected] and I don't mind asking Ray the questions. Sometimes when callers call in personally like this, it just takes away time from the show. So Ray, just to kind of get a sense, I mean I know when people think inflammation they relate it to redness and swelling and stiffness and pain and all of those things. However, you know, there's also that aspect of inflammation that you don't feel.
So how would somebody know aside from, you know, arthritic conditions or diabetic or those types of things, how would you know if you're suffering from some form of inflammation, underlying inflammation? I mean, is there any signs? The defects in the energy process will show up very early as poor sleep quality, tendency towards insomnia, fatigue or excitability, many nervous problems, inability to concentrate or being twitchy and tense. The energy of the nervous system is probably the most sensitive indicator of a process tending in the direction of too much inflammation.
So it would be safe to say that most people are suffering from some form of inflammation. Yeah, by the time you're 8 years old or so it's starting. So in saying that, as far as speaking about polyunsaturated fatty acids and whatnot, would you say in general eliminating them from the diet as much as possible or in moderation if somebody is more on an even keel or more on a health... I mean, what's the guideline as far as polyunsaturated fatty acids are concerned?
I know that's a big question. I mean, people are like completely eliminate them 100% because they're completely toxic or their response in the body is completely toxic to the body and the systems and whatnot. So where is the fine line there? Well, it's for example a healthy 8-year-old with a very intense metabolic rate. Kids have 2 or 3 times the rate of metabolism as adults and that's largely the accumulation of these pro-inflammatory things. But a healthy 8- or 10-year-old person can burn a very large amount of polyunsaturated fats so that they accumulate it more slowly.
Once your metabolism has slowed down after puberty, then a very high likelihood of it getting incorporated into your tissues is the rule. And once your body has incorporated these pro-inflammatory materials, every time you're under stress or haven't eaten for a certain length of time, your body will resort to burning the liberated fats which come partly from your fat tissue, the fat-looking material, the stuff that looks and feels like fat, but partly from the breakdown of other cells that liberate phospholipids. And the stress will activate destructive breakdown of protein tissues,
including your skin and first your thymus gland and muscles. But the skin is broken down and used for food, both for protein and fat per energy. So if you can dispose of these toxic stored materials through a healthy liver, your liver will sense them when they're released into the bloodstream and will treat them just like any toxin and will attach either a sulfate or a glucuronic acid to them and excrete them through the kidneys like a toxin. And if your liver is losing energy and not able to excrete them as a toxin,
then your various tissues, including the liver, will have to oxidize them for energy. And that's where they quickly poison the energy-producing apparatus and are turned into inflammatory mediators, increase the serotonin. So you can limit that breakdown by keeping saturated fats in your diet. Coconut oil has enough of the short chain, very water-soluble fatty acids that they will be taken up by preference and protect the mitochondria from the stress-released polyunsaturated fats. So you were saying earlier, even with the vitamin E being more of an opposing factor, coconut oil works the same as well.
Yeah, vitamin E and coconut oil have very similar effects. And fruit, besides having the sugar which helps to restrain the breakdown of tissues, the minerals, potassium and magnesium and calcium in the fruits, help to stop that process too by acting sort of like insulin to inhibit the breakdown of tissue. We got another caller. I'm going to try to take this caller. It's not the 858. I'm sorry. Anyone with 858, I can't take your call right now. Call from the 450. What's your name? What are you calling from?
Hi, my name is JP. How are you, Dr. Peat? Hi. Do you remember me? Yes. Yes, he's a good friend of me. Good question, Dr. Peat, for the audience now. What is your advice to reduce the cortisol secretion during the workout in the gym? Do you have special advice to reduce that during and after the training? Several years ago, someone was taking blood samples from people in the morning just before they went for a jog and then when they got back, they had some people eat breakfast before they went for a jog.
They found that the people who did that amount of moderate exercise without eating breakfast had broken chromosomes in their white blood cells. It's sort of like radiation injury to exercise on an empty stomach. It seems to be mostly the sugars and minerals in eating breakfast. Probably just a glass of orange juice and milk would be enough to prevent that stress-induced chromosome damage. Okay. Do you agree about the bitter chocolate to prevent the cortisol secretion before the workout? Yes. Chocolate is probably mostly the leucine content of the chocolate.
It's a very high protein content, but leucine acts like insulin and helps to prevent tissue breakdown. So, chocolate is an anabolic protein more than many other proteins. Okay. And is it okay to eat chocolate alone or especially with other food before training? I think it's good to have some sugar with it. Okay. Thank you very much, Dr. Peat. Thanks, Justin. Bye. I think that was a great question because I know your take on exercise, but a lot of people that tune in listen to exercise, so it's great to get.
I think it's important because everyone out there is so keen on supplements and the reason I like your approach and philosophy is because we use what Mother Nature has provided us with, definitely in a different way than most people, but you're just big on the nutritional side of it and I think people need to hear that, especially pre and post-workout. So, I hope a lot of people are tuning into that in regards to, yeah, he's talking about maybe a supplement here and there, but it's really using nutrition to match the physiology of the body.
Yeah. There are some supplements that are worse than others. Right. The most dangerous are the carotenes because they act very much like a polyunsaturated fat. They are polyunsaturated and the tryptophan and hydroxy tryptophan activate the inflammation process very directly. And that's part of the biggest thing we get from people is a lot of people don't understand that process and they're pumping tryptophan in the body, pumping melatonin into their body without really knowing the negative cascade of effects they're creating. So, I'm hoping people that are listening are picking up on that.
We've got another call and we've got about nine minutes left, so I'd love to take it. It's a different 858, so let's hope it's someone tuning in. Call from the 858. What's your name and where are you calling from? Hello? Same caller. No, it's a different caller. So, well, we've got about eight minutes left. No other callers. Is there anything else in regards to inflammation that you want to talk about, you know, just so people can have a better understanding? Well, another dangerous thing that many people are using now is the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors.
Those, to the extent that they do raise serotonin, their antidepressive effect is probably because they activate other things in the brain, but they are being found responsible for increased osteoporosis and breast cancer, and I think they'll probably be found to contribute to obesity. Now, what do you say, because a lot of people listen, and I know there's a lot of people out there that are taking these things, and they say, "Well, what's my choice? My doctor tells me I need them. I don't know what to do." What do you recommend?
Things that promote your real energy production while lowering inflammation. The thyroid hormone is, doctors have a very strange idea about it that was produced by the pharmaceutical industry, but thyroid hormone itself is anti-inflammatory, partly by suppressing the pituitary thyroid stimulating hormone, which is inflammatory. And so the things that support the thyroid, such as the saturated fats and sugars and salts, all of the minerals that are called electrolytes, calcium, magnesium, sodium, and potassium, all of these help to protect tissues and work with the thyroid to produce the right kind of steroids, pregnenolone and progesterone.
Fascinating stuff, Ray. Yeah, I see it as another call to me. I love it, and I... Sorry. Yeah, Ray, I mean, it's such a bummer because these shows are 60 minutes and it's just... I wish we could do it much longer. I could definitely listen to you all day and learn from you. So I know a lot of listeners really appreciate you coming on and kind of sharing your wisdom and experience because what you have to kind of preach is a 180 of what most people preach. So what's the word I'm looking for?
Breath of fresh air. And necessary. It's necessary that this information get out there. We appreciate you taking the time to join us and be open to sharing this information because when we started looking at it and reading your books and your research and all that, it was very hard to take. It was very hard to swallow because it was so completely 180 of what we have been told and so many people are suffering unnecessarily so because they're so misinformed. There's one little anti-inflammatory tidbit that's very easy to do that I haven't mentioned.
It's connected to the fact that once the inflammation starts to lower your energy, it becomes a vicious circle. Right. And cold feet and cold hands creates an inflammatory condition. When the blood drops a few degrees to circulate through your cold feet, it releases inflammatory mediators. And so just, for example, sleeping with a wool cap and warm socks can help greatly with inflammation as well as insomnia problems. Right. Because we can guarantee that we'll be at home tonight sleeping with wool caps. Yeah, yeah.
I'll be drinking my milk, putting a cap on, and boots and jumping in bed with my birthday shoes. Well, we don't have any of the callers. I don't know if we've got a couple more minutes if you want to add something in regards to inflammation or if you want to tell a little bit more people about where they can learn more about you. You're totally welcome to, Ray. Well, calcification and osteoporosis are two very important aspects of inflammation. The inflammatory substances, prostaglandins, serotonin, TSH, the cytokines, interleukins,
break down the healthy bone structure and at the same time put calcium into your arteries and brain, pineal gland, every place that you don't want calcium. So just taking aspirin, for example, to lower inflammation will help to prevent calcification of your arteries and help to strengthen the bones because inflammation is affected by so many things. And something as simple as aspirin helps with osteoporosis. Great. It's great stuff. Guys, I know he's modest. If you want to learn more about him, check out his website, Ray, R-A-Y-T-E-A-T dot com. He's got tons of articles.
We posted a lot of links on our site, eastweshealing.com, bring you to his site. His articles are deep, as I mentioned, but just read them and reread them and reread them and reread them. I'm going to put up another 10 or 15 articles in a few days. Awesome. Oh, great. He's also got, you know, I'll add that to my stack of articles to read of yours. Because I've printed out every article from Ray's website, guys, and it costs you, about black and white, about $260, but it's worth it.
He's also got five or six, you have five books, Ray, or six? Five. Five. He's got five books. They're awesome in regards to PMS and hormones and menopause and nutrition for women. So definitely check them out. They're cheap. I think you can get all of them with shipping for maybe $70. And they're probably some of the best books I've read. I think I've read, and Jeannie's read them, we've read them numerous times. So check those out. So we really appreciate it, Ray. Another great... Okay, thank you.
So we look forward to having you on again. We just want to say thanks and have a great day. Okay, thank you. Great, thanks, Ray. Bye. Bye. All right, guys, thanks for tuning in. We've got 30 more seconds. I know 60 minutes with Ray is definitely not enough. Personally, it's a lot of information. It's deep, challenging information, but, you know, the goal is to... I think at the same time it's enough to allow you to swallow it and get ready for some more.
Yeah, well, the goal is to really listen to the show and re-listen to it and really give you a place to start learning. Not to really give you an education in 60 minutes on inflammation. It's really kind of an outline so you can start researching estrogen, progesterone, researching serotonin, researching what inflammation is and what polyunsaturated fatty acids are. You know, if I'm pregnant or want to become pregnant, how do I create the body to facilitate life in an embryo versus facilitate inflammation?
We really appreciate everyone tuning in. Tune in, check out our Facebook, Josh Rubin, Jeanne Rubin. We'll be posting tons of articles as well as our next show with Ray in February, which will be on... I'm not sure yet, but it'll be another great topic. So, thanks for tuning in. We'll see you in February. You know that feeling you get when you find a really great deal on something? It's like, "Wow, today's my day!" Well, you can get that great deal feeling over and over again at the Safeway Stock Up Sale.
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