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This is Garverville, this is Garverville. KMUE, Eureka, Arcade at Crescent City, 88.1 FM, KLAI, Laytonville, Willets, Fort Bragg, 90.3 FM on the web at kmoe.org and Shelter Cove is at 99.5. Hats off to our underwriting specialist. I think that's Patricia these days because we've got a nice full-fledged roster of underwriters for that last hour, hooray, hooray, but this is actually one of our most popular and listened to literally around the globe shows here on Redwood Community Radio. It is rebroadcast on other stations, it is on the web with thousands of views on YouTube.
Every single show now is the time you want your product or service to be in front of the KMA listening community because this one really reaches wide. So call up the office 93-2513 during business hours, ask for Patricia, and get your message out to the KMA listening community. [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] And we have the herb doctors. Well, welcome to this month's February 18th, 2022 edition of Ask Your Herb Doctor. My name is Andrew Murray. My name is Sarah Johannesen Murray.
For those of you who perhaps have never listened to the shows before, we run them every third Friday of the month from 7pm to 8pm with the chance to call in live to ask questions related to the show from 7.30 until 8 o'clock. The number 707-923-3911. And the shows, just so people know, they are recorded. KMA had hold the archives for two months now. It used to be longer, but two months is the main time that people can access the archives. Friday Night Talk is the name of the subject, the name of the show.
And if you look at the third Friday of any given month when you're looking on KMUD.org under the Audio Archive tab, the Friday Night Talk is the drop-down that you want to select and then choose the third Friday that's relevant. And then you can download or listen to the show. Our website, westernbotanicalmedicine.com, has the shows from 2008 through to 2019 or 20, I believe. Still have yet to put up at least another 15 shows. Most of which actually covered all of the Covid debacle. Which fortunately, as far as I'm concerned, Dr. Peat is concerned.
And we have unanimously been concerned about since February of 2020. There's a Nothing Burger and has now, I think, hopefully fizzled into the past. Anyway, so the website has plenty of the shows archived on our website from 2009 until 18 months ago or so. Hopefully we'll get the remaining shows put up. It's not lack of interest, it's just lack of time, so excuse me for that. Anyway, we can be reached anytime after the show. Either call 888-WBM-ERB or email myself or Sarah, Andrew or Sarah, at westernbotanicalmedicine.com for any questions related to anything we've discussed.
Or if you have any other questions related to anything that we've previously talked about. Or if you have questions about anything we haven't talked about and you're inquiring about alternatives for it. And that's the title of the show Ask Your Herb Doctor. Primarily, we are both licensed practitioners of herbal medicine. We qualified in England in 2019-99 and been practicing herbal medicine ever since. And been very pleased to discover Dr. Raymond Peat back in 2008. And very serendipitously through a, actually, as it were, cancer patient.
A breast cancer patient who was actually a survivor and was just lauding Dr. Peat, praising him and his protocols up one side and down the other. Certainly piqued my wife's interest and so she made contact and the rest is history. And Dr. Peat has been very kindly sharing his time, pretty much every third Friday of the month for about 11 years now. So Dr. Peat, perhaps if you could introduce yourself before we get into the subject of this evening,
which is going to be, hopefully the bulk of the show, is going to be on the science and the principles behind what has now been shown. To be a mechanistic determinant of cancer and it's described as mTOR, mTOR1 and mTOR2. And we'll get into all the biology of it, how it was discovered. And then from the early 90s, how it has been targeted and implicated in the suppression of cancer through its activities that Dr. Peat would totally outline very scientifically and very factually for us.
The show always wants to be factual and scientifically relevant and not just hearsay or opinions. So everything that we talk about is very much referenced and Dr. Peat's entire work in life is based on fully referenced articles and journals that he writes as well as the books. And everything we discuss is very much grounded in science as was, not to put too fine a point on it, the entire Covid debacle and its very questionable and dubious origins, background and modus operandi.
So without further ado, Dr. Peat, would you let people know who you are, what your academic and scientific background is and then I'd like to ask you some questions. Okay, after studying and teaching for about 10 years in the humanities, I decided to go back to graduate school at University of Oregon for a PhD in biology, reproductive physiology and biochemistry. And since 1972, I've been doing a lot of personal consulting and for 40 years since 1981, I've been doing a newsletter at first every month for about 20 years and now it's quarterly.
So it's more or less developing themes that relate to health and aging, fertility and the nature of life. Okay, so very much the background of your life, from my understanding, was the scientific investigation into aging and reproduction with the biological reproduction faction or branch of university studies at that time being not so entrenched in dogma and repeating the same mistakes, but actually being inquiring in a very scientific way to try and find the answers to things.
But you obviously found opposition from entrenched dogmas and ideologies, especially, and it's come out time and time again, the estrogen industry and also the ubiquitous use of seed oils in foods, both for human and animal. But what I think is certainly most interesting is that you've always looked deeper into the cause and effect of what we are taught and the reason I waited until 1968 to do any academic study in biology was that already in the late 1940s and 50s. I had decided that it was based on fraudulent, make-believe science, genetics.
If you really read the classical papers that molecular biology is based on, there's just no real science to it. It's a belief attaching experiments to the belief, but it wouldn't convince anyone who wasn't already convinced that the organism is made up by a reductionist, unchanging units called genes.
I'd like to jump in for a second because I was so excited to extol how great it would be to underwrite on the show that I forgot to read the disclaimer, which states that the views and opinions expressed throughout the broadcast day are those of the speakers and not necessarily those of the station, its staff or underwriters. Time will be made available for other viewpoints. Thank you for joining us.
Okay, so Dr. P, I think just to clear up and finish up some of the articles that I pulled out for questioning you about actually in the last two months that I never got around to. Before we get into the topic of this evening and the discovery of rapamycin and how that has all unfolded into what is being termed a kind of novel discovery, whether or not it's that novel, I don't know.
But in terms of its discovery for using cancer and your very firmly held beliefs about estrogen and the unscrupulous estrogen industry pushing estrogen and how estrogen is very much in the scientific literature as the prime and causative factor behind many different cancers, not just reproductive cancers, but other cancers. And how the inflammatory effects of estrogen trigger excitotoxic states within cells, they disorganize their energy, they waste their energy and allow the spontaneous tumor to arise and propagate and proliferate.
And how I know that you've been a big advocate, obviously, for those reasons of the antithesis of estrogen, which is progesterone. And the female, obviously enjoying 14 days of progesterone exposure per month from beginning of menstrual cycle until the menopause, has a very good chance, perhaps, especially if they are breeding and have fairly successful and repeat pregnancies, by that exposure to all the progesterone of having a decreased chance of getting hormone dependent estrogen cancers. Yeah, or having a child fairly early in life, that's a huge protection against getting cancer.
And animal studies show that if a rabbit, for example, is bred starting early and as often as it can for the rest of its life, its tissues at any old age are much younger than if it had been a virgin all those years. And that was backed up by looking at the relation between the number of children up to 8 per woman in Hungary. And there was a straight increase in longevity with the number of babies up to 8.
The other thing I just want to remind people that are listening, I don't want to be too obvious, but I think most people's misconception surrounding estrogen is that it's a female hormone, which is completely untrue. And males are also subject to the effects of estrogen, especially with aging. And in England, obviously, from the kind of pub culture of drinking beer, being firmly entrenched socially, as males get older, you have this gynecomastia, which is a term given to male breast enlargement or male breast tissue enlargement, as well as the kind of belly fat,
which most people would look at as a "sign of poor health." But this is very much an outward expression in a male of estrogen dominance, and it's the testosterone that can get converted to estrogen. And old men typically have more estrogen than women, not just the ratio, but their testosterone is being massively converted to estrogen by the time they're 65 or 70. So the fact that this enzyme aromatase, which I know we studied when we were doing our degree in herbal medicine, this enzyme aromatase is actually expressed in many different cells in the body.
It's not just a central expression. It's within the liver, the placenta in female, in bones, and in breast tissue. But this itself can convert testosterone to an estrone and be part and parcel-wide blocking. This enzyme can be so important in reducing the potential of estrogen dominance or estrogen production beyond background physiological levels that would be good if you were healthy. In the early 1940s, one experimenter implanted a very, very small dose of estrogen in animals that had their ovaries removed, and the tiniest amount of uninterrupted estrogen produced cancer in every tissue.
But if you interrupted it periodically, even a large amount of estrogen didn't lead to cancer, the same as the aging rabbits or Hungarian women. The quantity and regularity of the progesterone interruption of estrogen just about completely protects the development of cancer. So this is precisely why if women have multiple pregnancies, they are statistically much less likely to present with estrogen-related cancers. Yeah, and all of their tissues are stronger. Yeah. Okay, you're listening to ask your herb doctor, KMUD Garberville, 91.1 FM. From 7.30 to 8 o'clock, you're invited to call in the questions.
The number is 707-923-3911. So we take calls from 7.30 to 8 o'clock. I think without going too much more into a few of the things that we hadn't mentioned, I just wanted to reiterate again that it's not just females that produce estrogen. It's very much a male thing as well. And estrogen in males very much, again, is a trigger and a promoter of cancer. So getting on to what I think will take more than this month's discussion and probably roll over into next month is the activity of this enzyme, mTOR.
And this was described both two ways, either the mammalian target of rapamycin, and I'll ask you to describe the antibiotic effect of rapamycin and its anti-cancer activity. And others have described it as the mechanistic target of rapamycin. And very briefly, there are two subclades of mTOR, mTOR1 and mTOR2. And I think really what I'd like to get into after you've described the activity of mTOR and/or its discovery is basically what you have said for a long, long time now in terms of dietary advice,
especially with emphasis on very small amounts of muscle meat and preferably not in isolation and being a big advocate of orange juice, which is extremely low in the two amino acids implicated in this process that you will describe. How dietarily, as well as I want to bring out a lot of different herb components which block mTOR, as well as some drugs that have been used now and produced by pharmaceutical companies to block mTOR,
and how this anti-cancer activity of blocking this particular process is very much rooted in science and is a very plausible way of blocking cancers' reproduction and the kind of autophagy that would happen under normal circumstances. So would you like to just describe mTOR, its discovery, and/or what's happened since 1990, 1993? This particular antibiotic was used as a fungus killer. It's a broad spectrum, but especially effective against fungus.
And it happens to be in the same family of antibiotics as erythromycin and erythromycin and so on. It's a ring structure, and those are known to have a very amazing spectrum of activity. When people reported that COVID was being cured with a combination of hydroxychloroquine, I think it was, with erythromycin, they were ridiculed because everyone said antibiotics only kill bacteria. In fact, this class of antibiotics happens to kill viruses as well as fungus, and so the actual knowledge about antibiotics and fungus and viruses was actively suppressed
in favor of pharmaceutical special antiviral drugs, which happen to be mutagens in general. After it was discovered to be a great treatment for fungus infections, it was found to have many other anti-inflammatory effects, which are very typical effects of that family, erythromycin, for example. And in exploring how the anti-inflammatory effect works, they found that it was acting on a particular kinase, an enzyme that attaches phosphate groups to particular enzymes and functional proteins.
And the phosphorylation directs it towards growth and inflammation, and they found that the antibiotic inhibiting this particular kind of phosphorylating enzyme extended lifespan drastically and reduced cancer and inflammatory diseases. The wastage of energy is one of the things in common with the inflammatory diseases, aging, diabetes, and cancer. And the target of this antibiotic, rapamycin, which is also called sirolimus, in activating growth, it's controlling the energy flow and an abundance of energy intake in general, especially fats and proteins, are the normal activators of mTOR complex number one.
Growth hormone is a major activator of mTOR complex two, which is insensitive to the antibiotics. So for matters of diet and treatment, the attention is mostly on mTOR complex one, because there are so many foods and substances that activate it and others that inactivate it that support the rapamycin inhibitor. It turns out that not only methionine and some other essential amino acids, methionine is probably the main activator of the mTOR.
But meat, for example, besides being a major source of methionine, it's also a major source of iron and phosphate, and it happens that both iron and phosphate are activators of mTOR complex number one. And milk, although it contains a lot of methionine, it happens that parathyroid hormone is an activator of mTOR, and milk, high calcium content working with vitamin D, is the main thing that lowers parathyroid hormone. And so milk contains its own antidote working against the toxic effects of methionine in the great concentration of calcium and the very low concentration of phosphate and iron.
Hi, can I interrupt for a second? Yeah, go ahead. So, Dr. Peat and Andrew, are you suggesting that mTOR is a trigger for cancer? Yeah. Cancer, inflammation, and aging. Degeneration. Like arthritis and diabetes and osteoporosis. And autoimmune diseases. It's also, and I was going to get this question out a little bit later on, Dr. P, but also noted in Alzheimer's and Parkinson's from the amyloid and the neurofibrillary tangles that ensue. But I'd like to ask you that a bit later.
Okay, so I'm just trying to understand this myself and also hopefully help the listeners a little bit. Basically what you're saying is this rapamycin that was discovered, and that's spelled R-A-P-O-M-Y-C-I-N, is an antifungal antibiotic that blocks mTOR. Is that what you're saying? Right, yeah. And so therefore they're finding anti-cancer benefits of the rapamycin because it's blocking mTOR. Yeah, it's now used, or derivatives similar things are used in treating various cancers, breast cancer, pancreas cancer, and so on. And prostate cancer, yeah. Wonderful. And is it true that they found it on Rapa Nui? Yeah.
In a soil sample? Easter Island. Yep. Yeah, in Easter Island, they found the rapamycin in a soil sample? Yep. Okay, sorry to interrupt there, but I was just trying to follow along here and make sure I'm understanding properly. Yeah, they used the first part of the name Rapa Nui. They used the Rapa and then Mycin, the suffix for those antibiotics like erythromycin and azithromycin, which Dr. Peat mentioned beginningly. Both of those two are very safe. I know you recommend erythromycin as a very well-tried and true antibiotic with a very good safety profile.
How do you feel about azithromycin just out of clearance? Everything. I've never used it myself, but it seems to be pretty much equivalent to erythromycin. Right. I mean, I don't believe that hardly anybody has prescribed erythromycin. I think azithro is still fairly widely used. azithromax, I think, is one of the -- Yeah, it's a matter of patent and profit. Okay. And then, so what are they -- are they using rapamycin as an antibiotic, as an antifungal, as well as an anti-cancer treatment? Oh, yeah, it's still widely used for treating fungus.
Do you know if it's actually used in targeting prostate cancer and/or kidney cancer? Yeah, prostate and breast, I think, are the main things it's used for, but a variety of cancers seem to respond just as well. Right. But the main thrust of this discussion really is about the potential use of substances, whether they're drugs or phytochemicals, that would actually block the production or the use of mTOR and how that could be used in a dietary perspective as a treatment rationale to live by, to increase your chances of not producing cancers
and having an immune system that was actively seeking out and destroying aberrant cells. Coffee as a source of flavonoids, like quercetin, it also has caffeine. Both of those are anti-mTOR agents. Orange juice and other fruits are very effective flavonoid sources for reducing mTOR. Okay, you're listening to Ask Your Doctor, KMD Garberville, 91.1 FM from now until 8 o'clock. You're invited to call in your questions. The number is 707-923-3911, and we'll take callers from now until 8 o'clock, or 5 to 8. You're waving your hand. What's going on?
I have a question as a caller. My 8-second lag before everyone else. Thank you so much for covering this subject because this is something I'm actually very interested in on my own. And you started giving a list of foods that both support more bad mTOR and reduced it, so I'd love more of a list of those foods and neutral foods.
But also, I learned a bunch about the metabolism of estrogen in different foods that switch your metabolism, so the byproduct is I believe it was 16-delta estrone, and that was protective or maybe just not as bad, and there's other pathways that have very bad ones, and the only one I remembered was broccoli extract or the broccoli sprout extract.
I was curious for foods that would help men if they are converting their testosterone to estrogen so that are the same foods going to make the same less bad byproducts from the estrones, and also are there any foods that could get men to convert their testosterone to progesterone or also women to move it back to progesterone? How about that back conversion then, Dr. Peat? I don't think it can happen. Progesterone is a precursor to the glucocorticoids, like cortisol, but it doesn't go down the pathway towards either testosterone or estrogen. The precursor to those is DHEA.
So how about the aromatase inhibitors or anything that you have as a kind of favorite in terms of potentially blocking estrogen production from? Just about everything that's good for you tends to inhibit the aromatase because it's activated by stress, cortisol, prostaglandins, for example, and inhibited by progesterone. All of the things associated with inflammation and degeneration, for example, angiotensin, which contributes to aneurysms, for example, and all of the degenerative diseases, it's working through mTOR.
And so if you block angiotensin, you're helping to lower mTOR. And all of the estrogens and estrogenic substances promote mTOR, progesterone inhibits it. So do you think that even, like Michael was mentioning, or Engineer, the estrone and the... because estradiol is the very strong one, so the estrone is weaker than estradiol? Yeah, progesterone... Do you think that they all stimulate mTOR? Is that what you're saying, even the weaker estrogens? Yeah, they all end up to the same estrogen effect, but estradiol is at least ten times stronger than the next estriol, for example.
And it happens that progesterone activates the conversion of estradiol if it exists and hasn't had the aromatase blocked by progesterone. The existing estradiol is prevented from being replaced. Progesterone activates the detoxifying enzyme as a whole system that adds either gluturonic acid or sulfuric acid to the estrogen so that it can be excreted. And it blocks the enzyme that would turn estrone into estradiol and favors the conversion of estradiol to estrone, the inactive form. So it's working on three different pathways to help block the estradiol, which is the most toxic carcinogenic inflammatory estrogen.
There are several separate pathways that all coincide with an anti-estrogen effect of progesterone. Another mechanism is that progesterone breaks down the so-called estrogen receptor. And so do you recommend, sorry to interrupt again here, but do you recommend for men who are converting their testosterone into estradiol to use progesterone? A coffee and progesterone and flavonoids and aspirin is a major mTOR inhibitor, aromatase inhibitor, and so on.
So you're just saying essentially that most of what we would understand as anti-inflammatories will have that same blocking activity because it interrupts that cell cycle which leads to the inflammation and the promotion and/or increase conversion to those inflammatory estrone products. Not everything, for example, Tylenol, that doctors have been taught to prescribe instead of aspirin. Aspirin has been demonized so that they can sell more Tylenol, but in fact, Tylenol activates mTOR, increases all of those inflammatory degenerative processes. And its antagonist is the antidote for Tylenol is aspirin.
I should have couched that sentence prior to saying anti-inflammatories with the anti-inflammatories that we recommend. Thank you. I just want to mention that with these anti-inflammatories like ibuprofen and Tylenol, they actually increase your risk of stroke. They do not decrease it like aspirin does. Because it's working at such a basic level, you really can't count the beneficial effects of aspirin. And so would glutathione be as bad as methanone? Yeah, too much glutathione activates mTOR.
I think I'd like to get into a discussion then perhaps about calorie restriction and methionine restriction and how we could potentially achieve that with a good diet. But I also wanted to make sure that people that were listening understood that the term flavonoids is a very round term for a lot of pigmented agents that color fruits and vegetables and how supreme these flavonoids are at fighting cancers and being anti-inflammatory and directly blocking mTOR activity.
So I wanted just to mention and we've mentioned this before in context to COVID and the anti-inflammatory effects of some of these herbs in terms of the treatment of COVID and its anti-inflammatory activity. Things like epigalic, catechin galley from green tea, EGCG is one of those common things you'll find in powders or you can just do it directly from green tea. And then caffeine, as Dr. Peat's mentioned, another flavonoid that is useful for blocking mTOR as well as being generally anti-inflammatory. Curcuma and the curcumin from curcuma, also another excellent blocker of both those two pathways.
And then... Sorry, can I just interrupt you real quickly, Andrew? Just for our listeners, we're talking about the flavonoids that are going to be blocking this carcinogenic substance called mTOR. And if you haven't heard of mTOR, it's a lowercase M and an uppercase T-O-R. Okay. Okay, sorry, carry on, Andrew. Yeah, so then the two other berberine-rich herbs are Goldenseal and Oregon grapefruit. And then quercetin itself, actually one of the main sources is from onions.
And that's probably why the onion syrup recipe is such a successful treatment for colds and coughs of mucus production as for being an antibacterial. The quercetin is the flavonoid that's extracted by the sugars. If you slice your onion up into slices and put each layer of sugar on each slice and let the osmotic potential of the sugar pull out the liquids from the onion, we'll actually remove most of the quercetin and make a syrup. And then nettles and pomegranate are both good sources of quercetin, orange juice, obviously.
And then resveratrol has received a lot of attention, certainly in the alternative world as a dietary supplement, from Japanese knotweed of all plants and grape skins, both of those two high sources of this compound, resveratrol. And the Japanese pagoda tree that people know is Sophora, SofraSophorajaponica, both the flowers and the fruits are very high in resveratrol. And then there was a compound called pterostilbene, which has been reported to inhibit mTOR when applied to isolated cells in culture.
And the tenet was that this stilbenoid chemical related to resveratrol found in almonds, blueberries, huckleberries, cranberries, red grapes, grape, red grapes mainly, and cocoa. And then the last thing I wanted to mention from a herbal medicine perspective is a compound called fisetin. And this, again, another flavonoid found in very good concentrations in apples, strawberries and persimmons, of all things, is used and has been used successfully in the treatment of melanoma and non-melanoma skin cancers by its regulation of sirtuin.
I know Dr. Peat's talked previously in several shows about sirtuin, how this can improve your cell health and counteract the effects of aging. So, yeah, those particular compounds, flavonoids, certainly the thing where I think the tenet of your five servings of fruit and vegetables comes from is very much based in very good science. And principally for the reason of the substances known as flavonoids that are found richly in them. Dr. Peat, from a calorie restriction perspective and a dietary perspective, that would be useful in being a low mTOR diet that would still allow growth.
I know you say that when you're young, you need all these calories, you need the fats, you need lots of protein because you're differentiating and you're growing, but you don't need it and it's actually counterproductive when you get older. But how do you not turn into a walking skeleton, as it were, by having what would be fairly appealing to some groups of people with a very low calorie restriction fasting mentality,
looking at Hindu barbers and eating very little food and living to supposedly old age, a great old age, as a result of what seems to be a direct impact on mTOR. And that's something I'd like you to discuss, especially with relation. I know you mentioned that the milk contains parathyroid hormone blocking elements and calcium that support milk's use even though it is fairly high in methionine. But what do you think about calorie restriction and fasting and a diet that would be conducive for suppressing mTOR? I don't think calorie restriction is necessary.
What slows down the metabolic rate after 20, the rate of metabolism is only a fraction of what it was in childhood and then it continues falling with age, especially after the mid-40s. It's all down hill in metabolic rate. But the reason for that is the accumulation of polyunsaturated fats, primarily, that shift our metabolism to prefer the oxidation of fat rather than sugar rather than glucose. And if you are oxidizing glucose at a high rate, the resulting carbon dioxide is our basic anti-inflammatory substance.
So the aim of all of this is to prevent the shift towards oxidizing fatty acids away from oxidizing glucose. If you look at the metabolism of the degenerative diseases, especially diabetes, for example, the essence of diabetes is that you can't oxidize glucose. And so you oxidize fat instead, resulting in the breakdown of glucose to lactic acid instead of carbon dioxide.
And whole coordinated change, lactic acid, for example, activates mTOR. And so the shift to oxidizing fat, which lots of people have been trying to achieve with the idea that you can prevent aging, obesity, and so on. It happens that fat people tend to be oxidizing a higher proportion of fatty acids than glucose. So you want to do the opposite of diabetes. Cancer is the same. You fail to oxidize glucose and instead oxidize fatty acids, leading to inflammation. And instead of inhibiting mTOR with carbon dioxide, you activate it with lactic acid.
And so if you can keep away from the stress that causes you to oxidize the fatty acids preferentially, when you're oxidizing the alternatives to glucose, you are tending to support the secretion of growth hormone and the mTOR complex one, which is responsive to all of the rapamycin type inhibitors. The complex two is insensitive to rapamycin and is under the influence of growth hormone primarily. And so increasing your growth hormone as a result of stress or inability to oxidize glucose is turning on the other half of the mTOR complex.
I want to think about the phone number again. I'm amazed we don't have callers because this is truly fascinating 9233911. And since you're not calling in, how much glutathione would be too much in a day? And could you please list some protein sources similar to milk so that you could get a good dose of protein that you need without it pushing your mTOR up too much? I think calcium is what makes the big difference between milk and other proteins. So a bone broth sort of thing would be a better --
Yeah, gelatin, naturally extracted gelatin like chicken skin and bone broth with fat skimmed off. That contains a very low level of methionine. And it contains the amino acid glycine, which has lots of other health benefits. So not only is it deficient in the mTOR stimulating amino acid glutathione and methionine, it's also pure glycine practically. And how much glutathione, because I know some people including myself actually take some supplemental glutathione as a liver antioxidant, is not a bad idea. It's a reductant and any of the reduced intracellular materials, partly on the way to reaching the cell,
they are likely to be oxidized by stray iron or copper atoms and so produce toxic things in the bloodstream before they ever get to the cell. But if you increase the reductive balance of cells, you're putting them in the worst kind of stress, the aging degenerative condition. Glutathione is the cell's major anti-free radical detoxifying agent, but to add it as a food is very risky. I think almost 100% likely to be harmful rather than helpful. Okay, well thank you for that. I think the engineer saying what he said has prompted people to call in.
I think they really do want to just listen and not be spending time. But hey, we've got a caller on the air. Let's take a call away from him. What's your question? Hi, I'm from Queens, New York. I have an off-topic question. Okay. I would like to know, Dr. Peat, is your opinion on wisdom tooth extractions and root canals? Okay, Dr. Peat, did you hear that okay? No, what was your question? He was questioning what your opinion on wisdom tooth extraction and root canals was.
Oh, I don't have anything about root canals. If the pulp is infected, it's probably good to put in a safe filling material like calcium hydroxide and then let the immune system take over when you've cleaned out the infection. But I don't think it's good to pull any tooth that isn't ongoing. I guess there's an infection that you can't clear up with root canal. I think a good model of why it's something to avoid is if you pull a molar of a rat,
giving it cognitive tests before the extraction and after, they lose cognitive ability just from the extraction of one molar because the brain is participating everywhere in the body. If you knock out muscle tension with Botox, for example, you've altered the brain and affected cognitive abilities. You can't really separate the body metabolism from brain metabolism and so the brain is involved in everything that goes on and the more you can let the brain be responsible for governing the immune system, controlling the balance of inflammation and anti-inflammation, the better it is for the brain.
I was going to ask, well, I currently have a wisdom tooth that has a really big cavity in it and I don't know if the dentist will let me. Dentists just don't like to fill cavities in wisdom teeth. It's so easy to extract them, but if you can control the pain by scraping out the decayed material and just sticking in a temporary so-called filling, for example, zinc and eugenol makes a plastic that hardens and is very easy to handle and reduces pain and stops infection.
So your wisdom tooth probably isn't doing any biting work and the temporary filling probably would take care of it. How do you clean it out? A dental tool to break off any helping brown material, scrape it until it's hard. A drill can be used, but just a steel probe to scrape the tooth. In the case of doing a wisdom tooth that you aren't going to be using for chewing, then you can put the eugenol zinc filling in to control the pain and infection.
Out of interest, we found a very good holistic dentist in Oregon, who we've been seeing for a while now, who doesn't use injections. Folks, I've had a lot of dental work, unfortunately, so there's one area in my life where I've had a lot of weakness. Fortunately, the only area. He doesn't use injections to numb anything before he does a cavity, and I've had two dental cavities done with him without injection,
and I'm amazed that all these years I've been subjected to probably brutal, brutal, ignorant dentists who just want to cover their backs by not having the skill to gently work on a patient's mouth. Anyway, so I think I need to wrap up the show. I would encourage you to find a good holistic or naturopathic dentist, because they will take you on board as a patient and deal respectfully and kindly with you and not in a brutal, mechanistic way that all doctors,
I think, no, not all, I can't say that. Some doctors and some dentists go for as a badge of honor and brutally work on you because you can't feel a thing. So I'd encourage you to find a naturopathic dentist in New York, just an aside there that we found a very good one in Oregon. Dr. Tanner is his name, and he's in Medford, Oregon, folks, if any of you listening and you're in the Medford area, Dr. Tanner, excellent, excellent guy, a very, very spiritually minded, holistic dentist. Maybe he'd like to be an underwriter on chemo.
Maybe. So thank you so much for your time, Dr. P. I'll just put out, add somebody else call it, wanted to contact information, so let me get that to them. Thank you. Okay, so for people who've listened to the show and not called in, Dr. Peat can be reached at www.raypeat.com, has a website full of articles about many different subjects and, as I mentioned, fully referenced scientific articles based in science. Not, you know, it's not opinion, it's science.
So he's a good source of information there in the website, and he's written articles and does do a newsletter. We can both be reached at www.westerandbotanicalmedicine.com. And for the last 12 years, 13 years now, Dr. Peat's been kindly giving his time on the third Friday of each month on kmud.org in Garberville, California. So until the third Friday of March, wish you all the very best and we'll be beginning the March Equinox again at that time.
So until the third Friday of next month, wish you all the very best and the audio archive, like I said, on kmud.org under Friday Night Talk is where you could access this evening's show and download it. It also has a January show, I don't think it has December, so I think they're just two months. And I think we should be lobbying the management to keep them on a little longer because they used to be there for two years.
Well, more than that even. And I don't know why. I mean, doesn't the computer have a big enough brain to store 10,000 years worth of shows? I don't get it. Anyway, to all those who've listened, I hope that you are able to do your own research and to follow up what we talked about with mTOR and understand where Dr. Peat comes from. He comes from a very innocuous, harmless, first-do-no-harm background, very talented, very capable, and a lot of people have had a lot of success following his advice.
So until the third Friday of next month, good night. Thank you for listening. Good night. [Music] [Music]