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Organic Grace is on the main street in Garboville and on the web at organicgrace.com. Welcome to this month's Ask Your Herb Doctor. My name is Andrew Murray. For those of you who perhaps have never listened to the show which runs every third Friday of the month from 7 to 8 p.m., I'm a licensed medical herbalist who trained in England and graduated there with a master's degree in herbal medicine. I run a clinic in Garboville where I consult with clients about a wide range of conditions and recommend herbal medicines and dietary advice.
And like I said, every third Friday of the month we have a topic that we choose to open up and once again I'm very pleased to have Dr. Raymond Peat to share his wisdom and his expertise during the show. From 7.30 to 8 o'clock at the end of the show, listeners are invited to call in with any questions either related or unrelated to this month's subject of longevity. So you're listening to Ask Your Herb Doctor on KMED Garboville 91.1 FM and from 7.30 to
the end of the show at 8 o'clock, as I said, you're invited to call in with any questions. The number here if you live in the area is 923 3911 or if you live outside the area, the toll-free number is 1-800-KMUD-RAD. We can also be reached incidentally Monday through Friday on 1-888-WBM-HERB for consultations or further information. So once again we're very pleased to have Dr. Raymond Peat with us. Dr. Peat? Yes, hi. Thanks so much for joining us again. I know that a lot of your background has been involved with reproductive physiology and
aging and so as always I would ask you just to introduce yourself and your professional and academic background for people perhaps who've never listened to you. Okay. I started getting interested in aging I guess in childhood but through the 1950s when I would mention it to people, a few of the very old people like a biology professor who studied around the turn of the century had some interesting ideas about the actual cause of aging and suggest possibilities for actually preventing it but most people in the 1950s weren't at
all interested in the idea of curing aging. It just was inconceivable that anything could be done about it but finally when I decided to go to graduate school in biology in 1968 to '72 at the University of Oregon, I intended to study brain biology but it happened that there were some good people working on reproductive aging so I did my dissertation on female reproductive aging and helped to answer some questions that I had been accumulating for 20 years but it really just opened up a lot of basic biological
questions that the whole nature of what an organism is and how it develops through time growing up from an egg to an adult. The whole process is something that used to be explained as sort of reading out from a pre-established blueprint in the genes and that led to the idea that there must be genes causing aging and death and rethinking that whole developmental scheme is necessary and if you see development as epigenetic or open to interaction with the environment then aging obviously is another epigenetic environmentally dependent process.
Okay, well what I'm most happy with and constantly amazed is your interpretation of a lot of previously held scientific facts for want of a better word that both I was taught when I was doing my degree and the science that we had was the same medical science that doctors get and still flawed with all of the same mistakes and what I really appreciate is you bringing out some very different perspectives on it which I think is very important and a very scientifically based perspectives and ones that are not actually hidden.
I mean they're there in the articles and the abstracts of published medical journals but it's very slow to reach the doctors. So in terms of tonight's show and going over longevity I think it's a subject that most people would be pretty interested in how to extend their lifespan and I know that there's lots of gene research and a billionaire investor who's trying to do 40,000 sequences a year and he hopes to get up to a hundred thousand sequences a year so hopefully trying to find
the answer behind aging and go through people's genomes and also their biomes to find out what they're dealing with and see if there's any link between those people that have degenerative disease and cancers and those people that perhaps don't but why it is that they all die and see if there's any kind of answers that can be found. I'm sure they probably will find some answers to given long enough. So getting on to longevity then I wonder if it's wrong to believe that we can extend our
lives beyond 120 in this current world and be both healthy and strong and I think what I wanted to ask you first was I read a recent study in a fairly popular publication about long life and health in general, excuse me, published by the University of Wisconsin. It was actually published in the online journal eLife. They were mentioning a trial that was done with a strain of E. coli and they subjected this E. coli bacteria to a normally lethal dose of radiation that would normally kill
a person and they took whatever few surviving colonies of E. coli that they were, reproduced them and doubled the dose and then took the survivors from them and doubled the dose until they got 20 generations down the line a colony of E. coli that were able to withstand a thousand times the lethal radiation dose that would kill a human and we're looking at the mechanisms behind this to see what these gene mutations had done to them to enable them to resist the effects.
So they were talking about the ability to repair DNA as a primary objective in facilitating longevity. What do you think about the protection of DNA in our body as a method of sustaining longer life? I think there is a parallel between what the bacteria are doing and what happens to humans exposed to stresses like radiation but the single celled organisms are essentially different in how they respond to stress because 20 generations of bacteria would be just a few days and so they couldn't possibly be evolving new DNA sequences to make new functional
proteins in such a short time. The radiation degrades proteins so it tends to simply knock out functions when it's damaging the DNA and the bacteria that died had their DNA so damaged they had lost function and the ones that survived simply didn't lose the function but their defense processes were activated and so what they were getting with each generation was an intensification of the defense reactions that ordinary bacteria have and things like bacteria, yeast and protozoa when they're under stress they can either decide to reproduce faster, live more intensely
and divide more quickly if their genes are still working or they can go in the direction of sort of dehydration and radiation forming a spore and eliminating a lot of water makes the DNA very resistant to radiation because water is part of the hydroxyl radical is what destroys the DNA and so without any water tied to the DNA it's very resistant. So that's why spores can live for so long in the desert. And so if humans tried to do that the cells under stress would either multiply very rapidly
and that would be a cancer or they would go into something worse than hibernation in which they simply dried up and were like a suspended mummy-like existence. So it just doesn't work for humans. The same idea is that we have ways of handling damaged genes or threats to the genes and what people do or animals is to kill the whole cell when the organism senses that the DNA has been damaged beyond the capacity to repair it. So if it's happening very fast the cells will turn over quickly but to not form a cancer
they have to let the damaged ones sort of a triage beyond a certain degree of damage they have to let the cell die and the quicker it can die the more material is available for stimulating stem cells to replace it. I think a major factor in aging is that things interfere with that whole process of either repairing or letting the cells die quickly to be replaced. In old age the process of cell death is retarded. Suddenly the cells become old, they can't decide what to do and so they slow down the
whole organism metabolically slows down and in that slowing down process they have some undesirable products like lactic acid that cause problems for the whole organism instead of just dying and getting it over with. So you're saying that the process of apoptosis or that cell program death is actually slowed down in normal human aging? Yeah, I think people are now looking for what the factors are that retard that quick replacement, quick apoptosis and activation of stem cells. Interesting. All right, we're getting on to energy.
I know that you're very interested in energy promoting substances and thyroid and progesterone, aspirin etc. being amongst some of those definite energy promoting substances. Well there's a compound called NAD, NAD+ and another form NADH which is very important in terms of intracellular, extracellular energy conveyance and powering reactions. So the article that was using the E. coli forms and resisting and providing a strain of E. coli that was super resistant to radiation was also mentioning that this compound NAD+ was another target therapy and they'd actually produced a form, a patent, obviously a patented
form of this product that they were trying to sell and I think that's also part of this evening show is to try and highlight some of the mistakes that we commonly are bombarded with in terms of being told it is the truth and we'll bring out a couple of these and you'll specifically identify the mistakes that the authors of the publication or the promoters of the product were guilty of perpetrating if you like. But NAD+ then as a compound, how important do you see NAD+ and therefore this company's
new product to be taken as a supplement to raise NAD+? How important that would be in our biological systems? Our cells are constantly in a process of oxidizing and things like sugar, the electrons go to the oxidizing NAD+ and reduce it so that it becomes NADH and NADH can then pass those electrons on eventually to oxygen. So there's a streaming through NAD+ and NADH to the mitochondria and oxygen and that in the normal metabolism, you should have 300 to 500 times as much NAD+ as NADH because
it's in a rapidly oxidizing state and stresses that interfere with oxygen or that subtract the NAD+ and NADH, the lower the supply of total NAD and NADH is, the more easily a stress causes a failure of the balance, so it shifts more easily to a very reduced NADH dominant. So stress depletes NAD+? Well, it depletes both of them. One of the things that depletes both of them is damage to the DNA such as radiation and in repairing the DNA break, there are enzymes that build up a chain of repetitive bases
so it's a meaningless chain but it plugs up the hole basically in the DNA and to do that, to repair the chain, the ADP is attached. ADP comes from the supply of NAD and NADH and so when you get a nick in the DNA, you have this huge amount of NAD+ and NADH available and you draw it down to repair the damage. If you draw it down in repairing too many broken DNAs, then that interferes with the energy production of the cell.
And if you have ways to block those enzymes and stop the DNA repair, then the cell can make the decision to die and stop wasting energy and instead it becomes raw materials for the stem cells. Is there anything that you know of that would more preempt that destructive apoptotic phase rather than wasting energy trying to repair damage, chromosome damage? Yeah, there are several drugs that will block that enzyme. Its initials are PARP, A-R-P and so PARP inhibiting enzymes can save cells from dying unnecessarily.
If you inhibit that process, you can give the cell a chance to rest or you can inhibit it and let it go ahead and die. Interesting. Okay, PARP. And niacinamide happens to be a very safe way to inhibit that enzyme. At the same time, it is the precursor for making NAD+ and NADH. So you're plugging the drain and filling up the pool at the same time when you have a good source of niacinamide. We can normally make that from proteins, the tryptophan converting it to niacin.
But if we're deficient in protein or have something blocking, a vitamin deficiency that blocks the conversion of tryptophan to niacin, then we can't keep the NAD supply adequate. Would this deficiency be pretty easily recognized? I mean it would be a typically known condition. The chronic extreme state was known as halagra. It occasionally turns up with a rough skin condition when a person reaches a great deficiency. But there are earlier signs such as mood disturbances and various energy related and many, many variations on symptoms. Okay.
Let me just, okay, so you're listening to Ask Your Ob-Doctor on KMED Gabavel, 91.1 FM from 7.30 till 8 o'clock, the end of the show. You're invited to call in with any questions either related or unrelated to this month's subject of longevity. Dr. Raymond Peat is joining us live. And so Dr. Peat, just to carry on the subject of longevity, an article also brought out the compounds called Sirtuins, SIRT1 and SIRT3. And they were also posited, you know, and I think it's a contradiction that the article
mentioned but they're posited as another factor to improve longevity and that NAD+ was a cofactor in their production. What was your opinion of calorie restriction as a way of activating the Sirtuins but not necessarily the Sirtuins are not necessarily positive, are they? They're more for hibernation or? Yeah, in calorie restriction, the organism has to do something to survive and so it starts shutting down, turning off the genes and the initial to stand for silent information regulators, the SIR and in yeast, starvation or stress will turn those on and turn off genes.
And in animal cells, they do the same thing but how they got to be so interesting is that a group at Harvard was arguing that longevity in yeast corresponded to long life in humans. In single-celled organisms, what they were saying was rapid and continued cell division, the equivalent would be cancer in a guy that is a long life and from the ability to stimulate rapid and prolonged cell division in yeast, they argued that resveratrol which is related chemically very closely to DES, diethylstilbestrol, a simple synthetic estrogen, resveratrol is
a natural still being type substance found in grape. It does have estrogenic activity and yeasts are especially sensitive. Yeast produced at estradiol just like humans and so yeast is being given basically an overdose of estrogen so it's more fertile and in humans, that same sort of overdose isn't desirable. In the process of turning off genes, when you do it in a human, you are moving towards the oral-like or hibernating state of not producing proteins and two of the very important proteins that get turned off by the sirtuins include clatho, the phosphate regulating
protein that when it's turned off, you get very rapid aging, a degeneration of all of the tissues and another protein or enzyme, a p53 protein is a tumor suppressor protein and so you definitely don't want to just blindly turn off proteins in defense. So you don't want to just shut down and turn your anti-tumor proteins off. Yes and your anti-aging clatho protein. Right, okay, getting on to this kind of, the article again was saying that the age-related decrease in NAD+ causes defects in energy and gene-related functions to accumulate.
Do you think age-related mitochondrial dysfunction can be reversed or merely protected for longer in the lifespan thereby gaining more time down the road? Yes, several years ago, the Harvard group, someone in that group said that we shouldn't supplement niacin or niacinamide because it suppresses sirtuins and they said that sirtuins are the long-life proteins, niacinamide will accelerate aging. Someone simply put human cells in a dish and gave them a supplement of niacinamide and they live 60% longer. So there are various treatments that can do the same thing, vitamin E for example, adjusting
amino acid balance and fats and so on, but simply the adequate or enriched supply of niacinamide is enough to greatly extend the growth ability of human cells. Okay, well we do have a couple of callers here already coming in, so let's take them a little bit early, but let's take the first caller. Caller, you're on the air? Hi. Hi, and where are you from, caller? Oh, I'm calling from New Jersey. New Jersey, okay. Hi, once again there's too many questions I want to ask, but I'll ask the question I originally called with.
I understand the importance, you've talked about it, others do talk about it, of consuming high-quality proteins if we want to maintain our systems and renew them. It seems to be good for just about every body system, but there is one exception and that's the kidneys. And you said, and I'm going to stress from your, I'm going to quote, pardon me, from your gelatin stress and longevity article, since glycine is non-toxic, if the kidneys are working, since any amino acid will contribute to the production of ammonia, this kind of chemotherapy can be pleasant.
And I mean, I recommend the article because the article as a whole is wonderful and I hope you don't mind me taking this little piece out. But you're the first person that I've read who has actually said that any amount of amino acid will stress the kidneys. And so I guess what I'm wondering is, is there a simple and hopefully sort of more or less immediate way that we can judge that we are getting enough amino acids in a day to achieve
nitrogen balance or everything that we sort of need to accomplish for our bodies, but not so much that it's stressing the kidneys or some happy medium, perhaps using a reliable urine dipstick test or is there anything like that? Normal functioning kidneys aren't stressed by a high-protein diet, but when something is impairing kidney function such as hypothyroidism or other sickness, then with low kidney function and a lot of bacteria in your intestine breaking down amino acids, you can get accumulated ammonia. And that's where RLV and NIH, I think it was researcher, proposed using ketone, ketoacids
equivalent to the essential amino acids which will absorb the ammonia even when a person has no functioning kidney ability to secrete ammonia. So just by feeding ketoacids, if they're the equivalent of the essential amino acids, you create them in your body by absorbing the ammonia and then making your own protein. And that was where I got the idea that some foods would contain a natural ketoacid equivalent and we did chromatography on potato juice and found that they are rich in the ketoacids
which will function as amino acids even though they contain no ammonia because they can absorb ammonia from your blood. Absorb it from the blood, so the kidneys will not be as stressed? That was for use in people who were having essentially no kidney function and Avicha's research showed that these ketones or ketoacids are very helpful for failing kidneys. But ordinarily, there are many other things you need to do when you have kidney disease. You want to correctly all of the hormones that are involved in regulating kidney physiology,
especially thyroid, progesterone, estrogen, cortisol, and some of the pituitary stress related hormones. And I understand that of course this is a process and it's not something that I can just take a pill and everything's going to come right. And it would be very important again to keep eating the raw carrot daily, am I correct? I didn't understand the whole... I'm sorry, I mean I understand that this is a process and that it would be very important to continue to eat the raw carrot daily. Am I correct to keep the ammonia down?
Yes, that does help with the bacterial ammonia production. Okay. And how often do you think it would be wise to... I mean my kidneys, I'm not on dialysis, my kidneys are not failing to that degree, but they are sore upon if I press lightly or medium pressure. I can feel them and certain practitioners have told me that my kidneys are not strong. So I mean would you recommend that I... Well, that someone do potato... You said you use a centrifugal juicer, am I right?
Yeah, a few people who had ammonia coming out of their breast every time they ate just about any food containing protein. Just a couple of meals of potato juice and they started assimilating proteins. But in Vitra's research, he put them on a chronic diet of a keto acid supplement. Thank you so much. Thank you, thank you. I'm going to look further into that. I appreciate it. Okay, thanks for your call, Carla. Okay, we've got a steady stream of callers building up here. So let's take the next one and move through them one at a time.
You're on the air, Carla? Hi, you're on the air. Where are you from? I'm Chris from Colorado Springs. And I have two questions for Dr. Peat. One's on topic, the other one's completely off topic. First though, I wanted to say that to you, Andrew, that I and a lot of the listeners do miss Sarah and hope she'll return. But I just want to say you've been doing a great job doing the show by yourself. So keep up the good work.
Dr. Peat, in terms of longevity in reading your articles, I mean, one gets the idea of the importance of the saturated fats and the avoidance of the unsaturated fats. However, in terms of proper oxidative energy and the importance that sugars like sucrose and lactose play into that, how important is it to maybe keep the fats on the low side and focus more on the sugars? Or is there still a minimum of fat and saturated fat that's important in terms of longevity?
A certain small amount of fat helps to stimulate the intestine and activate absorption of the oily vitamins, vitamin K, D, A, and E. And about 30 or 40 years ago, I was looking at the association of various fats with the cancer, spontaneous cancer incidence. And I saw that coconut oil had the lowest of the natural oils. But someone found that hydrogenated coconut oil containing zero polyunsaturated or essential fatty acids had the lowest incidence of spontaneous cancer of all, essentially like a completely fat-free diet.
And so the fact that even 2% or 3% of polyunsaturated fats in butter and coconut oil, the fact that that accumulates because our muscles, for example, quickly oxidize the saturated fats and preferentially we store the more water-soluble polyunsaturated fats. And so over time, even eating a moderate amount of butter and coconut oil, our tissues will become increasingly saturated with the polyunsaturated. And the fat cells which store little droplets of fat, they, for their own energy, prefer like the muscles, they prefer to oxidize the safe saturated fats.
So our fat tissues with age become more and more concentrated with a relatively pure polyunsaturated store of fat. And under stress, the fat is released and especially the polyunsaturated which is more accessible to the stress activation. So with age, stress becomes more harmful because you've stored up more of the polyunsaturated fats. So since we can make all of the saturated fats, palm, palmitate, stearate, and we can desaturate stearic acid to make oleic acid and our own series of polyunsaturates, I think
it's best to get as much sugar and starch in your diet, preferably sugars from fruit and milk, and minimize the exposure to the unstable N-6 and N-3 fatty acids. Okay, yeah, that makes sense. It's more of trying to displace some of the fat with more of the good sugars like you mentioned orange juice and the lactose in milk. If you are going to get a little bit of fat, probably focus more on the saturated, but it sounds like sugars are probably more important.
So you're probably more of not really a proponent just because you like saturated fats, you're probably still not a proponent of a high fat diet and say because you're more of sugars and importance of keeping the metabolism high and all that. If I could ask you just a really quick question, I know, Andrew, we got other people on this, so just the one that's off topic and I'm just really curious about. My girlfriend's been dealing with this now for quite a few months, almost a year now,
Dr. Peat. And I was wondering if you had any ideas on what the cause is for people that grind their teeth at night, throughout the night without really even noticing. She has no idea she's doing it, but then she wakes up and she has her jaw sore and the dentist told her that she's grinding down her teeth. And I was wondering if you know what the possible cause is and maybe any quick solutions. I mean, obviously focusing on the thyroid in the long term, but just maybe something in the short term that might help.
There are several publications showing that high serotonin is probably the major thing in tooth grinding and probably also in restless leg syndrome where the legs turn during the night. And to lower high serotonin, what would be the most straightforward way of lowering serotonin in someone? Reducing intestinal inflammation is the quickest way. Low thyroid is probably a factor in high serotonin, but simply avoiding slowly digested foods like resistant starches, undercooked vegetables, salads are very bad for irritating the intestine and producing… So, cascara would be pretty beneficial for improving bowel motility and excretion?
Yeah, and some of the so-called soluble fibers, even pectin, for example, fruit, can greatly increase the production of serotonin and disturb the sleep. Okay, good. All right, well, we do have several more callers on the air, so let's take the next one. Hi, you're on the air. Where are you from? Yes, my name is Graham. I'm from Los Angeles. My wife has chronic fatigue and I'm wondering whether Dr. Peat has any insights or thoughts on how to deal with chronic fatigue and in particular mitochondrial dysfunction? Dr. Peat?
Oh, yeah, basically the same stress syndrome, low thyroid, excess production of lactic acid and all of the stress mediators, the serotonin and histamine are usually high with prolactin shows up generally very closely associated with chronic fatigue and prolactin rises generally when your thyroid goes down and serotonin goes up. Okay, so what would be your suggestion in terms of let's say just sort of a dietary approach then? Things that are quickly digested and raw carrot contains anti-inflammatory chemicals as well as some antibiotics and they suppress irritating bacteria as well as binding some of the toxins
and so they have an anti-inflammatory effect that can seriously adjust your hormones in a good direction just having a raw carrot every day. Dr. Peat, my wife has been a keen listener of a lot of your programs and she has been trying the raw carrot. She finds that very hard to digest and basically consume. Is there any... The good point is that they are indigestible. Dr. Peat, go ahead. The point of eating the carrot is that they can't be digested and so they release some
of the antiseptic chemicals but help to stimulate the intestine and carry out material because they don't break down and produce bacterial growth the way other starchy vegetables do. You can think of the raw carrot material, grated raw carrot as a kind of bottle brush effectively I think within the lumen of the gut. And if you shred them with a fine food processor so that they're almost like hair, that's the most effective kind of fiber because you get a lot of surface. Right, surface area. And find irritants. And doctor, one final question. Metabolic syndrome.
I've been having trouble with that. What would you suggest from a dietary position there? What syndrome? Metabolic syndrome. I find it hard to remove fat despite exercise or dietary approaches to get the fat off my belly. The polyunsaturated fats are probably what set up that inability to oxidize sugar efficiently and it keeps the pre-fatty acids in circulation and pre-fatty acids block your metabolism in general. So you can break the cycle in various ways but probably an active form of thyroid containing
T3 is the basic way to get the metabolism going so that you can oxidize glucose and turn off the pre-fatty acids. Any suggestions on there that I could consider? The important thing is to keep track of your metabolic rate, how many calories you need, how much water you're able to evaporate. Thyroid people find that a lot of the water they drink comes back as urine or you should be able to evaporate a couple of quarts of water a day. That means that if you drink three quarts, you get one quart of urine back per day.
And other indicators of metabolic rate are heart rate at rest and temperature cycle. Temperature should rise to around 98.6 right after breakfast and stay there until close to sunset. Thank you doctor, very much appreciated. Okay, thank you for your call caller. Okay, so the number if you live in the area is 923 3911 and if you're outside the area the 800 number is 1800 KMUD RAD. So we've got Dr. Raymond Peat sharing his wisdom here and the subject for this evening's longevity.
Okay, so Dr. Peat, I wanted to carry on asking you some more questions about the B vitamins. I know that they're intrinsically involved in energy generation and its transfer. What would you suggest as a good strategy to ensure adequate levels of B vitamins? A good diet that includes liver once in a while, milk regularly, and/or cheese, eggs regularly, seafood or meat fairly regularly, at least once a week for some kind of seafood is good for the trace minerals that you might not get in some of the land foods.
Given that it's water soluble, how realistic do you think it is for people actually to be low in B vitamins that may otherwise make a difference? Because I know you've mentioned B1 and B3 as being something that has been intrinsically important in people's memory, their retention of information and how quickly it can make a difference just by supplementing with it. And if they're supplementing, I presume that they were low in it and so taking a supplement, raised their B levels, their 1 and their 3, and corrected their mental state, I think.
B vitamins act very quickly. So you can usually see an effect sometimes like with vitamin B1, you can often feel an effect in the first hour. With vitamin B6, you generally feel an effect in the first day. And with vitamin B6, sometimes 10 milligrams is all it needs and one dose will often take care of a problem that has lingered for a long time. And it's good if you can use a few doses of the supplements because most of the supplements have impurities and excipients that aren't good in the long run.
I know you're a proponent of very modest doses too. So what would you, because I know a lot of companies sell B vitamins and they use 500 milligrams or ridiculous amounts, especially of B6 or B3. What would you recommend? If a person has diabetes or cancer or something and has very high lactic acid production, 300 milligrams in divided doses can help to normalize sugar metabolism and lactic acid. But ordinarily, 10 or 20 milligrams, plenty. Is this B3 we're talking about now? No, that was vitamin B1.
And B3 for major problems, including diabetes, probably arthritis, a lot of degenerative problems, taking 50 or 100 milligrams several times a day of niacinamide can control the symptoms, reduce inflammation, protect the nerves and accelerate glucose oxidation and so on. And I should mention that for some reason, I think doctors liked nicotinic acid because it had such visible effects of making you turn red. But people generally don't like the feeling of flushing and it isn't good for your health because it releases serotonin, histamine and toxic prostaglandins. So it's actually causing damage when it flushes you.
And in recent years, the market has been flooded with something they call no-flush niacin. But if you look at the label, you'll see that it's inositol hexanicotinate and that means that each molecule has six nicotinic acids and it's a little slower to release. That's why it doesn't cause the sudden intense flushing, but it's the same substance that's releasing those inflammatory toxic substances. So it has to be either niacinamide or the new niacinamide or nicotinamide riboside, which is just a variation on niacinamide.
And it's a lot more expensive, but if you have an allergic reaction to one, you can try the other. All right. I very quickly want to just ask you to remind listeners, the dose, and you mentioned specifically for cancers even, B1 of 200 to 300 milligrams in divided doses? Yeah, it's safe to take as much as 300 milligrams. And again, what would the benefits of that be? Lowering lactic acid. Lowering lactic acid, yeah. Reducing the oxidation of it so you produce more carbon dioxide and less lactic acid. That shift away from inflammation.
Lactic acid is keeping the cancer developing by creating inflammation and disturbing the pH balance. Good. Okay, well, we do have a couple more callers, so we should probably take this next caller and see where this takes us. So caller, you're on the air? Hi, you're on the air and where are you from? I'm from Laytonville. Hi, what's your question, caller? I have a question. You mentioned the body temp, a low body temp, like 97.4 is normal or? No. So what are some things like hot foods, ginger, what are some things?
Well, no, not particularly because they just cause peripheral vasodilation which might give you a feeling of warmth but might actually cool you down even. But Dr. Peat, when he mentions temperature and pulses as a measure or a good gauge for assessing thyroid function that you should reach 98.6 during the daytime and preferably after breakfast in the morning and you should stay at that kind of temperature pretty much all through the day until the evening. If you have consistently low body temperatures that do not seem to rise after food, then
that would be fairly suggestive of metabolic deficiency and particularly that you'd benefit from using thyroid hormone. And protein deficiency is a possible cause of low body temperature. I've seen people who couldn't respond to thyroid or other metabolic activators and it turned out they were eating something like 20 grams of protein a day. The requirement is closer to 80. That makes sense. I have a blood type, I like high cortisol, I'm active, I need protein, that makes sense. My other question is what are your thoughts on dilation like the heavy metal cleanse?
Good foods will safely activate the process of mobilizing heavy metals from the tissues and passing them out through the kidneys. Coffee drinkers are known to have a lower load of most of the heavy metals such as cadmium and lead. Do you think that foods, a healthy diet would like naturally take care of all of the heavy metals we accumulate daily? One of the advantages of having orange juice and milk in your diet constantly is that they provide materials that help to inactivate the toxic effect of heavy metals while mobilizing
them and washing them out through the kidneys. Thank you, gentlemen. Thank you for your call. Dr. Peat, I've got to ask a personal question. I think perhaps a lot of people might like to hear your thoughts on this because they're always very different and I'm always very, very happy to hear what you say because it's always illuminating. Ebola virus is becoming a very careful watch word right now. I'm not being flippant at all but what would you do? What are your thoughts and your suggestions on Ebola virus and how best to protect yourself from it?
The effects of it are basically like flu and many other viral or even bacterial infections that activate the inflammatory processes and inactivate our immune defenses. If you look at the research, the first thing that happens is the inhibition of interferon, the antiviral, one of the defenses and activation of nitric oxide production which opens up blood vessels, makes them leaky and lowers energy production. And so whether it's flu or Ebola or poisoning by chemicals, the method of defending yourself is pretty much the same to lower anything irritating that you're doing such as eating
foods that are hard to digest and doing anything you can to lower inflammation and nitric oxide production. Aspirin? Aspirin and coffee and niacinamide are all defenses against nitric oxide and I think nitric oxide is central to all of those when they get to the point of causing degenerative bleeding processes. What about interferon? Is there anything that you would suggest that would be useful for raising your interferon or protecting or preventing the blockage of it? You know, I think that'll take care of itself if you just keep your energy up and hold the
inflammatory things such as nitric oxide as low as you can. Okay. All right. Good. Well, I had to ask you. I thought you'd have some suggestions for it and thank you very much again, Dr. Peat, for joining us on the show and thank you callers for calling in. I know it's always very useful when people call in with lots of different questions even if they're not related to the subject and just from where the callers come from just shows how wide an audience that you have, Dr. Peat. Thanks so much for your time. Okay.
Thank you. Okay. For those people who have listened to the show, if you want any more information outside of the show time, we can be reached on 1-888-WBM-ERB for consultations or further information. So Dr. Raymond Peat's website has got a wealth of articles fully referenced. They're not just made up stories or unsubstantiated claims. They're actually very well written and very scientifically based and science is there really to point the way forward and anybody who does want to disbelieve the science perhaps
would be a little bit rash because science does have a good place and a very important tool for finding out the truth behind the questions that plague us. And so there's lots of lies out there and the internet unfortunately is one of the wealthiest places but also has lots of answers too. So it's just sorting out the information and Dr. Peat's always got a very different perspective. So I'm very happy that he spends the time that he does joining us on the show. So his website is www.raypeate.com.
Lots of articles on his website that you can look at. And again, until the third Friday of next month, have a good night. All right. Okay. Well, thanks Jessica Baker of Jade Dragon Acupuncture for her support of Redwood Community Radio practicing and teaching Chinese medicine, herbalism and aromatherapy. Jessica is available for conferences, workshops and private consultations located at 607 F Street Arcata.