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Welcome to this month's Ask Your Herb Doctor. My name is Andrew Murray. From 7 till 8 p.m. this evening and every third Friday of the month, I produce the Ask Your Herb Doctor show and we are very pleased to have Dr. Raymond Peat with us every time it seems and thankfully so. For those people who live in the area, there's a 707 number and for those people outside of the area, there is an 800 number because it is a call-in show that we open the lines up from 7.30 until 8 o'clock
with people invited to call in with questions either about the topic of this month's show or other topics that are related to some of Ray Peat's research or are just health-related questions in general. So the number if you live in the area, if you're in the 707 area code, that's 707-923-3911. If you're outside of the area, we do get people calling in from all time zones across the states and people in New York and Finland and other South American places even. And the 800 number is 1-800-568-3723 for those people listening on the web,
especially the callers who are actually at 4 o'clock in the morning now. Actually, I think that 800 number might not work from outside of California actually, but almost certainly not internationally. How do people call in from Finland? I think he's just calling the 923 number like international calling. Okay. It's expensive, so I hope he's paying for it. He's awake at the time, so I know we've got a pretty good hardcore. An incredible wide range. Yeah, of people listening to what Ray Peat has to say.
Anyway, so this month we weren't here in February, but in January we did a show on the continuing misconceptions surrounding progesterone and the seemingly inexorable and continual promotion of estrogen by the drug industry and unfortunately by less informed medical care professionals who are bombarded with "research" into estrogen's benefits when actually the evidence fairly clearly shows that progesterone is in fact the protective hormone for which any woman either of menstruating age, if they are estrogen dominant or especially at menopausal times in their life from the late 30s for some women,
but mid 40s to 50s, progesterone is actually a very important hormone to maintain the anti-inflammatory arm, whereas estrogen is the most inflammatory hormone that is continually secreted throughout a woman's life. So in January's show then we discussed the PROTECT and SYNAPSE, these are acronyms, PROTECT and SYNAPSE trials of progesterone's anti-inflammatory effects used in the treatment of traumatic brain injury and the paper was published in the Journal of Neurotrauma June 1st, 2017 outlined several reasons the design was flawed and unsuccessful. These were primarily due to suboptimal dosing and treatment durations in the Phase 2 studies,
secondly the strategic decision not to perform Phase 2B studies before initiating Phase 3 and thirdly the lack of incorporation of preclinical and Chinese Phase 2 results as well as allometric scaling principles into the Phase 3 design. It's also been inferred the 6% soybean oil forming the lipid emulsion into which progesterone was dissolved in its own right causes neurodegeneration. Now Donald Stein, a 30-year PhD brain injury expert at Emory University was part of the team which published the paper in the Journal of Neurotrauma.
So pregnanolone and allopregnanolone are synthesized de novo by astrocytes and oligodendrocytes from cholesterol. Now astrocytes are found within the central nervous system and perform a variety of functions and oligodendrocytes which form the support and insulation to axons are also in the CNS forming the myelin sheath. Now pregnanolone and allopregnanolone are what they term positive allosteric modulators of the GABA-A receptor and demonstrate anxiolytic, sedative and anti-convulsant activities similar to the benzodiazepines like Valium. Now this same GABA receptor is also acted on by valerian producing the same effects used for low mood disorders, anxiety and sleep disorders.
Now when progesterone levels decrease, GABA-A receptor activity also declines and contributes to the excitotoxic effects accompanying insomnia and agitation with energy being wasted and reserves depleted. So once again we are very thankful to receive Ray Peat into the show. Are you with us Dr. Peat? Yes. Hi, thanks for joining us. As always I'd like you to outline your academic and professional background just for people who perhaps have maybe never heard you before. I'm PhD University of Oregon 1972. I started studying biology there in 1968 and specialized in reproductive endocrine physiology.
I studied a few other things previously. Okay, so notably I think I just want to mention for people I know you did a lot of research into aging and the negative effects of aging and what was understood with aging then because I think in terms of progesterone especially as an anti-quote-unquote anti-aging product, this research was also at the time kind of a touchy subject because I think the estrogen industry even then was pretty dominant, wasn't it? Yes, interestingly Donald Stein was studying psychology there right around the same time I was there. Okay, alright.
So my first question to you and this is something that I was just thinking about in terms of progesterone's protective effects because you've mentioned in the past how estrogen typically is associated with water logging of the cells and an excitotoxic state of the cell where energy is being wasted and I know you've mentioned a lot concerning substances like thyroid hormone and aspirin, pregnenolone, progesterone that protect against that. Do you think progesterone would be a useful substance in a heart attack if given soon enough?
I know that hawthorn extract has been shown to reduce ischemia following heart attack if given within the first few hours of the event. So do you think progesterone would be useful for a heart attack instance? Yes, in all sorts of crisis situations it lowers the damage that's done by the interruption of the oxidative processes. It lowers inflammation and helps to restore energy production. It's very parallel to the effects of T3, the active thyroid hormone and it helps to produce that and the T3 helps to increase the ratio of progesterone to estrogen
and T3 is equally acutely protective to the heart. Several years ago when they were doing heart transplants, they found that if they gave the donor, the heart donor T3 before removing their heart, that heart was much more successfully implanted. So I can't help but thinking from an energy supportive functionality that maybe that's how thyroid is working in terms of stabilizing cells, energizing them and making them ready for work as it were as opposed to the depolarized, you know, having spent its energy states that most substances like estrogen for example would promote.
Yeah, in the oligodendrocytes that you mentioned where progesterone is produced, T3 is the active thing that promotes its production there. Interesting. Okay. So I wanted also to ask you that, and again we've covered this in several radio shows in the past about the hoax of global warming and rising CO2 levels and all of the fanfare by Al Gore and others to levy a carbon tax on every single head on the earth to pay for the damage of our own success if you like,
or our own creativity. But we recognize that the early earth, if you look back at fossil records, the early earth records showed that the earth had a massive lush vegetation and that CO2 levels were significantly higher than promoting this vegetation. Would you, because I know you've mentioned in the past the similarities between carbon dioxide and progesterone. So just to help people encompass that thought of how beneficial carbon dioxide really is and equate that to progesterone's protective effects. One more comment on the relation between T3 and progesterone is that both of those increase the production
and retention of carbon dioxide. And another point on giving progesterone to a recent heart attack, the effect of estrogen on the energy production, which makes the heart able to beat. Estrogen delays the restoration of the energy needed to make the heart beat. And that shows up as prolonged QT interval. And progesterone shortens that interval, makes the heart less likely to have a rhythm problem because it accelerates the ability to return to the resting, energized state where it can beat rather than having an arrhythmia event. And carbon dioxide has that same muscle stabilizing effect.
At high altitude, for many years they've talked about the lactate paradox. A person can work full force at high altitude without producing the excess lactic acid that they normally would produce at sea level. And that's because the body at lower oxygen pressure is able to retain a higher balance of CO2 in the tissues. And that stabilizing effect in the working muscle is very similar to what progesterone is doing in the heart and brain. Okay, so this again probably lends some more credence to the data showing that people living at high altitudes have longer lifespans.
Yeah, and if you look at how sleep is affected under stress, when someone is having altitude sickness, they develop insomnia. And it's primarily the low thyroid people who develop altitude sickness because they hyperventilate. Rather, they were hyperventilating chemically even at sea level. And when they go to high altitude, that hyperventilation or a low retention of CO2 shows up as an acute problem. But at sea level or at high altitude, if your thyroid function is good and you're well saturated with carbon dioxide,
your restful, slow-wave sleep, the deep part of sleep, is longer in proportion to the amount of CO2 in your tissues. And they've experimented with having people sleep in atmospheres from one-half percent to one-and-a-half percent or even higher. At those moderate but greatly increased CO2 levels, there's a dramatic improvement. The slow-wave deep sleep is extended greatly in the around one percent CO2 where normally it's only about 400 parts per million. And that's the regenerative part of sleep, isn't it? Yeah. Okay, let me just hold you right there.
One little question for me first is, does that imply that when athletes are taking oxygen on the sidelines of the football game, they should have some carbon dioxide mixed in with that or just doping yourself with carbon dioxide in general would be a good athletic performance? Yeah, it should be five or six percent CO2 and fewer oxygen. And on some of the Mount Everest experiments, it was traditional to have a plastic or rubber bag to zip the person up inside the bag with oxygen
at the high altitude to help them recover if they were becoming mountain sick. And someone found that what happened in that plastic bag was they concentrated their breath, CO2 increased, and they found that giving the high altitude sickness patient pure CO2, like a five percent additive, would cure them as well as the oxygen supplement. Okay, let me hold you there for a moment, Dr. Peat, because the lights did flash about five minutes ago, and I was kind of holding off just to get a little bit further down the road here.
But let's take this first call and see where this call is going. Caller, you're on the air. Where are you from? Hello, you're on the air. Where are you from? Yes. Hello? Hi. Where are you from? What's your question? Yes. Hi. I'm from Southern California. I have a question for Dr. Peat. Go ahead. Yes, go ahead. Hi, Dr. Peat. Thank you so much. Thank you for all your contributions to humanity. Thank you. I would like a question about, I have a sibling who has a history of infertility and has had very high prolactin levels,
and she cannot bring it down with Westroid, thyroid, two grains a day, or progestin. And she follows your diet very carefully. What else can she do for her prolactin to bring it down? Has she taken her temperature and pulse rate to see how she's responding to the thyroid? Yes, she does that very well. She does all of that. So you think it's a thyroid medication that's not working for her, the two grains of Westroid? Yes. It's really important to look at your various indicators. For example, the Achilles relaxation reflex.
If you kneel, let your toes hang down, have someone thump your Achilles tendon so that your toe jumps out, it should relax just like a piece of floppy rubber if your thyroid is good. About two-thirds of the population, it comes back like it has a door closer on it, meaning that if it was in your heart, it would be a prolonged QT interval. It shows up as a delayed repolarization or relaxation of the muscle when your thyroid is low.
I found it pretty commonly that what you think is going to be a sufficient dose for someone, they start using it and actually have to increase it quite a bit more than they were using just to get the effect. Some people are just very stubborn. No one is alike. I know you've mentioned a lot with temperature and pulses as a diagnostic indicator of someone's metabolism, Dr. Peat. You've also mentioned just a minute ago the Achilles tendon reflex and what you call the repolarization,
that very quick flick out but the slow return to normal, that's indicative of the cell's stressed state where it's not repolarizing quick enough. That is a sure sign of hypothyroidism. For the lady who is just listening to that, if you basically kneel on a chair and have your feet extended behind you and then someone can tap your Achilles tendon and see the reflex response there. Was there anything else that you think might be responsible for the hyperlactin or do you think it's pretty much something that could be corrected with thyroid hormone given enough?
Isn't it a tumor growth or anything like that that could be causing it? If there's really a tumor that's secreting it, bromocriptine is almost always successful at shrinking it. But if the tumor isn't very large, you can, I think, just as reliably do it by keeping your thyroid function a little above normal for two or three weeks and watch the prolactin as you first should see the TSH go down close to zero because the same serotonin which rises in hypothyroidism activates the production of prolactin.
So the TSH descent will be followed by a slower lowering of the prolactin. Okay. I have two more questions. She wanted to know how you cook and safely cook and eat your mushrooms and also your marmalade. It's just having difficulty making those two. What was the first thing? Mushrooms. I guess for the anti-aromatase activity. Oh, yeah, I think it's safe to eat about a cup of well-cooked white button mushrooms every day. And then I think the lady was asking how to prepare them, but you would just... Just boil them. Yeah, okay, you boil them.
Okay, how about frying them in butter? That tastes good too. They should stay at the boiling temperature for at least an hour. I know when my wife does it, she does cook them for at least 40 minutes, but you think about an hour, don't I? I think so. Okay. They're probably safe after even 15 or 20 minutes, but just to be sure. She was just talking about it tonight. She was just saying how you'd mentioned that raw mushrooms have cancer-promoting substances in them, but that the paradox was that well-cooked mushrooms had that anti-aromatase blocking activity.
Yeah, and with marmalade, it's important to get good organic oranges. You don't want any insecticide or fungicide in your marmalade. You either use the seed or you don't, the orange. You just said you need to make sure you've got a certified product because any residues will be in the skin, and that's where you're going to be making your marmalade. But not the pith of the orange, correct? No. No pith. Okay. Just making sure. Thank you so much. I really appreciate everything. You're welcome. We do have two more callers.
I know some people do use a pith, but we never did, and you're making it with good navel oranges that are ripe and ready. Right now, folks, if you want to make your marmalade, they're all there. They won't be around for long, a very short harvest for navels. Anyway, we've got two more callers, so let's take this first call away from them. Where are you from and what's your question? Hi. I'm calling from Finland. Okay. I was just talking to them. How did you call in? Do you call a regular 707-923-3911 number or? That's correct.
Okay. There you go. All right. Well, good for you. It works fine. Go ahead. Yeah. I was wondering about the potential positive but perhaps also negative effects of donating blood for the donor. I was wondering if, for example, this might help get rid of perhaps metals, and I was also wondering about could the longer lifespan of a female be linked to the fact that they are basically getting rid of blood for the life every month. Yeah. Well, from an iron perspective, definitely good to donate blood to lower your iron.
But Dr. Peat, what would you have to say about donating blood? Yeah. As far as heart disease goes, the incidence of heart damage of different types increases at menopause so that women become similar to men for the high rate of heart damage, and that's probably because they have been throwing away some excess iron while they were menstruating. Besides the red cell iron that you lose, I think you can get a great benefit if you aren't eating too much iron.
If you keep your red cells but donate the plasma, it might not be good for the recipient, but it's very good to get rid of some of your stress-induced microspheres. There you go. That's another way. Did you get that? Absolutely. Thank you very much. And again, you're doing a lot of good to a lot of people. Thank you for that. What time is it quickly in Finland again? It's between 4 and 5 a.m. and the temperatures are, I believe, around 7 degrees Fahrenheit. 7 Fahrenheit. It's pretty cold. Negative Celsius.
Okay. Well, hopefully you're keeping your vitamin D levels up. Could we use you as a Finnish correspondent sometime? Absolutely. Okay. Hang on for a second. We've got another caller for the show right now. We have at least two more. So let's take this next caller. And then, caller, you're on the air. Where are you from? New Jersey. My name is Joe. Hey, Joe. Thanks for calling. What's your question? First one in the context of CO2. I guess progesterone, sugar, and other things will help, plus thyroid hormone will increase CO2 just by diet.
But you've also mentioned in the past about CO2 sort of cartridge, taking that CO2 gas and putting it in a bag and putting it in your body. Is that sort of a distressed application? Or if your body is -- your cells are smart, if you use that bag of CO2 on a regular basis, would your body acclimate to it and actually get better at retaining CO2 because it would essentially -- the cells would be memorizing it. And I'm sorry, I'm not a philosopher for simplicity's sake.
Obviously, I'm butchering it. But is that -- or is that more a one-off situation? No, I think that's exactly what happens. You're training your cells to take advantage of the lactate paradox effect. The longer you stay under the influence of higher CO2, your bones are charging up on it. If you're in a submarine, for example, for two months, you are still assimilating CO2 into your bone structure. And so it lasts a long time after you're at high altitude or in a submarine. Okay, so you're saying that what I'm saying, it makes sense.
So if you actually did that, you are teaching your body, and that would be a pretty powerful way to supplement the normal -- I mean, if you're taking a little bit of progesterone as a man, I guess that's okay -- but normal thyroid, you know, salt and sugar, and things that actually increase your thermogenesis and your CO2 retention. Is that accurate? Yeah, you're training some parts of your brain not to be hypersensitive to CO2. Estrogen makes your nerves overreactive to CO2.
So under the influence of too much estrogen, everyone hyperventilates and blows out too much CO2. And the CO2 temporarily sort of anesthetizes that process and gradually trains you to stop hyperventilating. Okay, great. I'm glad -- I've been reading a lot of your stuff, and as I read it, these thoughts come to me, and that's never been discussed. That's a really good thing to know. How long would you have to do it? I mean, if you did it for -- it's like you -- I think another person, maybe one of the moderators,
said that she went to one of the mountains in Mexico, and you said the health benefit lasts for -- if you're there for two -- a week, it lasts for a long time afterwards. That's essentially another way of saying what you're saying, the body gets used to the CO2. Some of the Russian studies where they took animals up for six months, they were still showing the greater mitochondrial efficiency at the end of their lives two years later. Wow. Okay, the second question -- thank you for that -- the second question relates to the most --
this whole notion that Amanda's brought up on toxic metals. So there's hair tests that you can get, and this has actually never come up on any of these shows or even in your writings, where you can actually measure the amount of metal, toxic metals, and preferred minerals in your hair because, unlike the blood, it's -- the hair's dead, but there's no reason not to give you a relatively accurate reading of what your toxic metals are. One of the toughest ones, it seems to me, is the concept of balancing copper and iron.
And I know you've mentioned if you eat with your meat, you eat -- you have coffee. But I think that only gets rid of the heme iron. I don't think there's any way to get rid of the non-heme iron. So I'm wondering, as you get older -- I know you'll probably consider yourself older after you get over 100, but for other people, iron-copper balance gets really challenging over time, particularly if you lose the CCO enzyme. So what is it that you can do, aside from giving -- giving blood is stressful in the body, too.
So I didn't actually understand your answer to the last gentleman, but it's not just iron, and it's not just copper, but copper, iron, and manganese apparently are very complex in the body, and toxic forms of that can really create havoc. And you really haven't touched on that. Do you believe in hair tests, in summary? And what's your view on how to balance the copper, iron -- Hair is extremely able to bind even out of the air, but so many people have copper plumbing nowadays.
If your water is at all acidic, it will absorb enough copper out of your plumbing to totally invalidate any hair test if you wash your hair, because your hair will catch all of the copper to saturate it just out of the wash water. Interesting. Okay, so you're saying hair tests, by definition, are generally not valid because they -- Yeah, toenail clippings are considered better, but even your toenails can soak up, if you wash your feet too often, they can soak up minerals out of the water, especially copper from the plumbing.
Well, how do you get rid of toxic metals, and how do you balance copper and iron over time? Because apparently you're supposed to lose your copper as you get older, and as you mentioned, both men and women retain more iron. Men may be earlier. That's essentially probably why they die earlier, generally speaking. That's why I advocate eating shellfish, because they use copper for blood instead of iron. And a constant once a week shellfish will, I think, keep your copper up where it should be.
Do you agree there's a balance between the two? Are they fighting for -- Yeah, with age, as you overload on iron, that tends to displace copper from the enzymes, where it's used elastase in blood vessels, tends to deteriorate as it loses copper with aging, and the pigment is displaced. Karl Pfeiffer, who was big on the fear of copper, took a little sulfur every day, because he knew it would reduce the absorption of copper. But when I met him, he was in his 70s, and he had no trace of pigment anywhere.
His skin was absolutely pink, and his hair was pure white. I think that was because of creating a deficiency of copper by too much sulfur. Interesting. The last question -- I'm sorry, one other -- so I saw an article, and it talked about all these health people, Adele Davis, who you've referenced, many others, Jim Fix, all these people were the rage, right? And they're all dead, like, before 70. You're probably going to be 120 before you consider yourself a senior citizen.
But I don't think there's anyone who is -- well, there's no one as expert as you are, but also who understands it fundamentally, because it appears that you define the age, you know, too. A lot of the people that you've studied didn't make it that long, so they clearly didn't fully understand it, or it's possible that you just got lucky genes. I don't know. Adele Davis, I think she lived to about 80, but she was totally misinformed on the polyunsaturated fat issue. I think she included it in her tiger milk recipe, for example. Okay.
We do have two more callers, so let's give these callers a chance. Thanks for your call. Okay, next caller, you're on the air. And where are you from? What's your question? Hello. I'm from Blue Lake. I'm a member, and thanks for your show. Hi, Dr. Peat, Dr. Murray. I have always had high estrogen my entire life to where I'm 59 now. I stopped menstruating at 55. I was high estrogen to the point that I had the brown blemishes on my cheeks
and bursted cysts throughout the entire time of my, like, 8 or 10, which are incredible. So you were saying about the correlation between high estrogen and inflammation. I haven't been able to listen to the show for a long time, and I'm wanting to know. Now I have Lyme issues and I have Candida issues and things, and I'm wondering, I've heard that Reishi can help with this, help counteract this estrogen. I mean, now it seems lower since I've reached menopause.
I think I have a better sex drive than I've had in the last 25 years, which is very strange. And I just am wondering if Reishi can still help. I'm still having these inflammation issues. Okay. All right. Well, let me just quickly say, first of all, progesterone is the counterpart to estrogen dominance or any estrogen issues you would have had in inflammation. Dr. Peat, I wanted to ask you, you've always, because when I was studying, it was always that testosterone was the drive, you know, for males,
and it was the thing that was responsible for virility. And you're actually saying that estrogen is very responsible, more responsible for sex drive. And there's this lady, and she's just called in now saying her sex drive is better than ever. What do you think? Very strange. Dr. Peat, what do you think about estrogen in relation to sexuality? It just takes the conversion of any androgen to estrogen in certain parts of the brain to increase the libido. So it doesn't have to be in your serum. Right. I see. Okay. So it's a conversion of an androgen.
Okay. Well, the Reishi mushroom, I've heard, is good for inflammation. And these things, this inflammation issues with the lines and different things, and I'm not sure if I'm fighting it well, but do you think Reishi is a good thing, or are the button mushrooms, like you said, I know they should be all cooked. I think, and again, it's a little bit of a re-education exercise here. In terms of the actuality of Lyme's, I have known people that do respond to ELISA tests with very strong positive banding.
But Dr. Peat, you're not that convinced about Lyme per se as opposed to low thyroid issues and other inflammatory processes that could be borne out by low thyroid that actually respond well. Your body will go into a chronic inflammatory state in reaction to the Lyme bacteria. Yes, I've had the ELISA test. Candida and so on. If you get your resistance up and your, for example, DHEA, pregnenolone, and progesterone will favor the right conversion of just the right amount of estrogen, not too much.
And you can boost that regulatory effect if you still have too much general estrogen with things like the mushrooms, aspirin. What did you say you said, DHEA and something else, and then progesterone in a well-moderated dose? Pregnenolone. Pregnenolone. Okay. I have one more question, sir. With iron, you were speaking of iron and how too much iron for even women, and I've never known that, and I haven't been able to hear enough of your talks on this show to know what you meant about iron not being great for us.
But I've been told my whole life that I'm iron deficient, and I've tried to correct it naturally with molasses, blackstrap molasses, and cider vinegar and things like that, and I'm wondering if I'm on the right track with that. Doctors for at least 100 years have been diagnosing iron deficiency in women. A hundred years ago they were prescribing arsenic to three women, but either arsenic or iron supplements do stimulate the production of red blood cells because the red cell production depends on stress,
and you create a local oxygen deficiency with arsenic or iron, and so it can increase the formation. But the problem is usually that your long bones, arms and legs, the temperature of your extremities goes down as your thyroid function decreases or your estrogen increases. So high estrogen always tends to cause slight anemia appearance just by slowing the production of red blood cells. That makes sense. So I also have high lead content in my blood. I got a chemical test and I have lead.
Drinking milk, orange juice and coffee will correct that over a period of weeks. Okay. Thank you so much, sir. Okay, you're welcome. Okay, we still have another caller on the line. Let me just say this quickly before that caller gets on. The number if you're in the area is 707-923-3911 or the 800 number is 1-800-568-3723. Dr. Peat, we're very lucky to have him on the show. So go ahead, caller, where are you from and what's your question? I'm James. I'm from the Southwest. My question was how come I'm boarding for like an hour or better?
What was to say again? I didn't actually--just tell me where you're from again and what was your question again? I'm from Sodor Cove and I was just curious on the why boarding the mushrooms for an hour or so. Right, right. Okay, he's wondering why you should cook mushrooms for an hour in order to get that activity that you've mentioned or we've mentioned in previous shows about the aromatase blocking activity. The hydrazines are heat sensitive. It's believed that the hydrazine compounds are the carcinogens and they evaporate and break down
and around an hour will drastically lower the concentration. Longer would be better, but I think it's completely safe because it's a balance between the pro-carcinogenic hydrazines and the anti-cancer agents which are multiple such as lowering the aromatase function. Thank you very much. Okay, you're welcome. Okay, so we have another caller. So caller, you're on the air. Where are you from and what's your question? Is it me? Yes, where are you from? What's your question? Okay, I'm from Virginia. Virginia. My question is relating to ornithine. What was that? I didn't catch that.
I'm not sure Dr. Peat would have-- Ornithine, it's an amino acid and I believe that it helps remove ammonia and I know that Dr. Peat has mentioned in the past about potato juice being boiled and that helping to use the ammonia to make amino acids for the body, but what about at night if you're having trouble sleeping, taking a little bit of ornithine to mop up what is typically excess ammonia in everybody's body? Is that reasonable? It might help with the ammonia, but I would worry about the promotion of cell division
if you used it clinically. It's one of the things that activate cell division. I see. So which amino acids--I know you're not-- Well, it's the keto acid equivalent of the essential amino acids that the keto group is substituted with the ammonia, so they turn into real amino acids rather than keto acids. I see. Okay, so then you're saying that's not a good idea. What about L-threonine? It's the only other amino acid that I was thinking about. That one I've read on some of your blogs that--
blogs, not that you've written--that threonine is helpful for preventing cancer and maybe helping metabolism. I don't think it's very safe to use individual amino acids. Glycine is the only one I know of that is safe by itself because it can be used as energy. One other question. I think earlier on the show you were talking about insomnia, and I think it happens to me sometimes and other people, and if you get up in the middle of the night, it's no fun because it's hard to know what to do.
I know I've heard some of your suggestions, but if it's endotoxin-related, there's a product called monolaurin. I don't know if you've written about it, but it's related to coconut, and you just mentioned Lyme disease. Apparently people think that that is useful for that. Is that safe to take? Is that useful instead of carrots periodically to sort of readjust your intestinal flora in a positive way? It does have a good effect killing a lot of fungi and bacteria, but several years ago when the guy was promoting its development, I forget his name,
but he asked me to sign on to advertise it, and I asked him if he had done any tests to see if it didn't have an action-like soap on the intestine. It is an emulsifier, and in a large dose I think it could be irritating to the intestine, but he didn't have any opinion on that, so I didn't participate. So is your view that periodically that could be useful from time to time but not on a regular basis, or don't do it ever like ornithine? I would just be cautious.
Like MCT, the part of the coconut oil that is more liquid, just a small amount of that can cause intestinal irritation and diarrhea in quite a few people. Okay, so you're saying that's the highest risk side effect. If you don't get that, then maybe the intended effect is positive. Yeah, it's probably not doing any harm. Okay, so one is completely unrelated. My question, you talk about not eating too much muscle meat, right? And I think you've made comments that in the past, you know, people used to eat the heart, the brain,
you know, the kidneys, everything, but now liver is something that's a clean organ, and you can eat that. What if you were able to get from clean animals? Desiccated heart, brain, but periodically it's not as good as the actual organ, maybe not as clean, but if it's from a grass-fed animal and you get a little bit from all the different organs, would that have some rejuvenatory effect or not? For example, the brain has a very high concentration of progesterone, DHEA, and pregnenolone. In a man or a woman?
Yeah, it's like taking a supplement of those steroids. Oh, you're saying if you did all that, you're saying that would be the equivalent of taking a supplement of those hormones? Yeah, eating the brain. I knew someone who was Norwegian. She said that in her coastal villages, everyone ate fish head soup at least once a week, and she said that everyone that she knew lived to be 95 if they were eating their fish head soup. I know you've always advocated the whole animal, I think way more than meat,
when we first started finding out about you and working with you, and you've always said that things like bone broths are now the biggest thing on the supplement shelf, and I think they have been for about a year ago when I first saw them. But anyway, things like bone broths and knuckle broths and lamb shanks are gelatin-rich, and it's the wide range of amino acids, not just the muscle meat that's the actual beneficial effect or beneficial part of the proteins that we get from it, and way more balanced and less inflammatory than muscle meats.
So does that mean the answer is that if you could get a grass-fed desiccated product that had a lot of the different organs in them that it may be beneficial, even though desiccated powder form is not ideal, but if it's the only way you can get it and you're relatively sure that it's what the product says it is, presumably that would be beneficial? I would worry about the dehydration process. The fatty acids and the tryptophan and cysteine are very sensitive to oxidation, and they can break down into a lot of toxins.
So you would have to be sure that it was dehydrated under nitrogen. It just seems like a risk. And that's why you're always advocating good quality food as your source of nutrition, because it's alive and hasn't been processed. Eggs, for example, have lots of extremely beneficial substances. Some of them are just being discovered, and they're always fresh. No one eats a snail egg. Good point. Okay, we better hold it there. I've got a few things I wanted to ask Dr. Peat myself. Thanks for your call. Dr. Peat, okay, it's already eight minutes to eight,
and I think we've got callers from 7.15 at the outset. I've hardly got through anything compared to what I was going to ask you about, and I guess we're going to have to do it next month. But I think I wanted just to ask you about a catamenial. I never even actually heard the phrase, but catamenial epilepsy and the estrogens. And I was reading about the classes of estrogens and how these both estrone, estriol, and estradiol, how they trigger epilepsy, because I've actually had a couple of female epilepsy patients
that really responded very well to thyroid and progesterone. Have you come across catamenial? Oh, yeah. Okay, what's your experience? Katharina Dalton was one of the early people working on that. In the 1940s, she started treating premenstrual syndrome with progesterone, and there isn't a terrible difference between catamenial epilepsy and PMS. One of the first people--maybe it was the very first person I ever-- no, the second person I gave progesterone to was someone who had migraines when she was in her 30s, and she was a schoolteacher, and a doctor said, "Migraines are like epilepsy,"
and so he prescribed an epileptic treatment, which she said had made her too stupid to tease. So when the fall term came, she stopped it and had an epileptic seizure, and the doctor said, "See, I told you her migraine was right next to epilepsy." But anyway, she kept having seizures until she was in her early 50s when I saw her, and every year the urologist would give her an IQ test and say, "Now your IQ has deteriorated to the point that you're an idiot. Don't go out of the house alone."
And her son brought her to talk to me, and I showed her how progesterone can be absorbed through the skin, and she had two stiff arthritic fingers. She dipped it in the solution of progesterone, and I gave her some to take home and a chart to fill out, and a few days later she came back all by herself with her chart filled out showing that her symptoms had all disappeared, and she was grinning and bending her fingers.
And within a few months she went back to graduate school and got straight A's, got a master's degree in gerontology. Wow. Gerontology. The psychologist, urologist was right that epilepsy is closely related to PMS at least. She was simply having a premenstrual migraine, and sometimes that fades over into epilepsy. Well, let me hold you there, and I'll just finish up with the last few minutes to let people know more about you. Thanks so much for joining us, and we'll definitely carry this on next month if you're available. Okay.
Okay. I wanted to let people know that Dr. Peat's website is raypeat.com, and that website is full of articles related to things like thyroid and aspirin, cascara, progesterone, the things about Alzheimer's and cancer and iron's toxicity, and lots of articles fully referenced. Basically, almost close to peer-reviewed articles because of the work that's gone into them. But Dr. Peat's a rather controversial figure, unfortunately, because a lot of what he says flies against the medical establishment in terms of their indoctrination. But like anything else, you know, science is such a positive thing because it's reproducible,
and you can't pull the wool over science's eyes, really, a true science, you know, that is objective and empirical and reproducible. So as time goes on, a lot of what we've been told was good for us has been shown to be bad for us, and those things that were bad for us are shown to be good for us. And a lot of the times it's a kind of corrupt process of either drug manufacture or just downright criminal behavior on behalf of some of these huge corporations like the fish oil people.
But anyway, so his website is raypeat.com. And next month I will finish off the progesterone versus estrogen data with a few other questions I had for him and a discourse by a Swedish PhD who's a specialist in female reproductive hormones who just goes on and on and on about how positive estrogen is for you, quoting all these bizarre statements that I know Dr. Peat's going to have some fun debunking.
But just to show that it's a deeply entrenched belief, and I remember him saying, "A lie gets around the world faster than truth can get its shoelaces tied." So just be aware, people. The Internet's an excellent resource for all sorts of things, but it is mixed with good and bad. But anyway, pure science for science's sake can be found.
And again, the last thing that we'll do after we finish up with the progesterone and estrogen is do a little expose on positive thinking and quantum research's bystander effect now showing that the observer has an effect on the experiment without actually doing anything. It's just quantum science is coming of age and the Internet is the age of knowledge. And I think more than ever, we are ready to receive what we're getting now. And so a lot of the old dogmas are just fading away, fortunately. We really are coming into an age of enlightenment.
So for all of those who asked questions this evening, thanks for tuning in and firing Dr. Peat up. And the same time, third Friday of next month from 7 to late, I'll be back. And wow, we've now gone forward an hour. So for whatever that means, it means we just open our eyes at the same time. But the clock tells us the time's different. Anyway, thanks for those calling. And if you want to find out any information about myself, westernbotanicalmedicine.com is our website. Yeah. Thanks so much for listening.
Fish heads, fish heads, roly poly fish heads, fish heads, fish heads, eat them up, yum.