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[Music] Hello everyone, I'm Danny Roddy of DannyRoddy.com and today I'm talking with painter, philosopher, biologist, Raymond Peat. In this hour-long episode, we'll talk about Ray's interest in nutrition, the lead-up to writing his 1973 book, "Nutrition for Women," and his latest newsletter, "Mushrooms, Observations, and Interpretations." In addition to thanking Ray for talking with me today, I'd like to thank my patrons for making this show and all the content I produce possible. If you would like to become a patron, please go to patreon.com/dannyroutty. As always, please do your own research and come to your own conclusions.
And in the spirit of William Blake, the true method of knowledge is experiment. Without further ado, here is the show. [Music] I wanted to start somewhere with your interest in nutrition and then end up at recipes. So tell me how you feel about that. Okay. I was trying to like put a timeline together of when you graduated with your degree in linguistics and then Blake College. So if you wanted to talk about that, I think it'd be great. Okay. I got my bachelor's degree at Southern Oregon College, 1956.
And then I worked in the woods for a while and got a job teaching. I looked around for— First, I studied at the University of Oregon, 1957 and '58, starting in the English department, then switched to philosophy and psychology. After about one or two terms in each department, I decided I couldn't stay to finish a master's in that area. I even tried art history. And during this time, I was looking around for some program that would let me integrate all of these areas.
And it looked like linguistics would allow me to bring together what the brain is doing when it speaks and thinks. Every time you reach a word that seems appropriate, you're putting that word into a new context that never existed before. So really, every act of communication is a creative invention. And it seemed to me that the approach to how consciousness works would be possible through analyzing language. And I found that Ohio State University had a PhD program that they called the Interdepartmental Linguistics Committee that would grant a PhD on the basis of interdepartmental language studies.
So since that seemed just what I wanted to do, I applied there and looked for a job to support myself nearby. And a little Swedenborgian university or college, it was called Urbana University, founded in 1859 by Swedenborgians, a friend of Johnny Appleseed, I think it was. And they had a really good hundred-year-old library. And so the Ohio State library wasn't accessible. You had to put in an order and then wait for the book to come. So it was essentially useless. But I enrolled in English, Russian, and philosophy department courses there.
And meanwhile, did most of my studying and thinking at the Urbana College. And what I was teaching at Urbana was introduction to biology intended for physics majors. Maybe it was – yeah, I think that was how it was described. And the president of the college said he wanted a non-technical approach to the subject to let the students be able to understand current magazine and newspaper articles in their field. And at that time, 1959 and '60, the most interesting current science topics were in the radiation effects, biological effects of the radioactive fallout
from atmospheric bomb testing and the development of computers. So I built the course largely around how to interpret the biological effects of radiation in the most general sense and how information works in the organism analogous to how information is handled in computers. And because of the physics part of my courses, there was a conservative priest who was head of the board of directors, didn't like the students asking questions about how safe is atmospheric bomb testing. So they went looking for a new biology teacher.
And had Leo Cook come in from the University of Illinois as a prospective replacement for me. And he chose to give his lecture at Urbana on the dangers of radiation and the biological effects of atmospheric bomb testing. So he was discarded as a possible replacement. Within a week or two, he lost his job at the University of Illinois too. So I realized that even though they hadn't told me I wasn't going to have a job the next year, I realized when he wasn't hired and in fact got fired at Illinois,
I would have to look for another job. So that started me thinking about organizing a college that would be run by the students and teachers jointly without any priests or boards of directors and such. Sorry to interrupt you. To try to understand your orientation, have you already read St. Georgene and were familiar with Otto Warburg? What was the tip off that radiation was something that was really harmful? Oh, yeah. I had been reading for seven or eight years. Well, actually it started in 1948. People were circulating mimeographed pamphlets and such.
In 1947 or '48, people were pointing out the age acceleration of any kind of ionizing radiation. So that had been in my mind for a good 12 years or so. Linus Pauling was in the news as opposing the bomb testing. And that was why they took away his passport so he couldn't get outside the U.S. to talk to other people about it. He was strongly influenced by St. Georgene. I think it was through Linus Pauling's writings that got me interested in St. Georgene.
I think it was about 1950 that St. Georgene was traveling around the country doing his demonstrations. He had what's called a stroboscopic arrangement in which he could flash an ultraviolet light and with a stroboscopic cutting off the flash and revealing the fluorescent delay. He was demonstrating the effect of the living state and the frozen state on electronic behavior. He was trying to popularize it by traveling around and talking to high schools and such around 1949 or '50. So that was my orientation towards St. Georgene.
Between 1959 and '60, Linus Pauling started talking about explaining anesthesia on the basis of structuring water. Under pressure, even nitrogen causes anesthesia but the heavy noble gases at moderate pressure will cause shutting off of nerve activity without harming the cell. There's no chemical reaction involved. St. Georgene was saying that this probably explains all anesthetics. The hydrophobic molecules that aren't noble gases are likewise not chemically interacting with the cells or the water. He was simply offering a surface changing the crystalline properties of the water. A clathrate analogy was what he gave.
He mentioned that for example, ice could form on the leaves of corn plants above the freezing temperature of water because of a stabilizing effect. Slush could form in natural gas pipelines above the freezing temperature because of a stabilizing crystal supporting effect of hydrophobic molecules. That was part of how I was interpreting the toxic effects of radiation by affecting this interaction between the electron state of molecules and the water structure. Linus Pauling was talking about the dangers of high energy radiation going directly into the chemical bond of DNA.
I was thinking about it in terms of St. Georgene's very subtle effects on the electronic state that you can see in the fluorescence behavior of the lay of the movement of the electrons to a lower energy state stabilizing a higher energy state of electrons when the water is organized. I was more extreme in my concerns about radiation even than Linus Pauling was. When you taught at Urbana College, you were already into nutrition giving them, I don't know if you wrote it, wheat germ cookies before the test? No, that was at Blake College.
Blake College. I interrupted you when you were going to start talking about that. When I left Ohio with the idea of starting Blake College, since Leo Koch didn't have a job either, he was on a lecture tour about academic freedom. In his talks, he would say, "We're starting a college that won't be susceptible to censorship." He gathered up some interested students. Basically, he and I were the only staff at that time.
I was bringing up brochures and things to try to find more students. Then I found that California would let us grant transcripts or degrees if we had $50,000. We could teach anything we wanted and give a degree for it as long as we had money invested in it. But they wouldn't let us even acknowledge that a student had studied with us if we didn't have the money put up. I found that that was the rule in all of the states that I contacted. You were like 30 at this time?
25, 26. The Assistant Secretary of Public Instruction at Oregon said, "It doesn't matter what students know." I said we would require that they pass the graduate record exam at the 87th percentile or above, ranked with US graduates, and that we would give them an oral exam equivalent to a graduate degree oral. She finally said, "It doesn't matter what students know." I decided to set it up in Mexico City because of the peso difference and the political difference. They actually had a still secular government at that time.
They would approve of any science-based curriculum as long as you kept the church out of it because of their history. Just as I was getting things set up in Mexico City, Leo Koch got a job with a soup company as a mycologist. I was the only one at that point carrying it on. My parents got interested and helped me get things set up. Is that when Madeline Murray was involved in the blood? Yeah, they had sent me an article about her being persecuted by the Maryland police.
They said that she and her old mother had assaulted a group of cops and caused one to have a heart attack. It sounded so ridiculous that she could beat up the cops that had come to arrest her. Everyone assumed that she was being persecuted. She fled to Hawaii and avoided extradition for a long time. They sent me this article and my girlfriend at Blake College took pity on her. I wrote to her and said, "Why doesn't she come to be a teacher at Blake College?" Madeline said, "Yes, could she help with transportation?"
Cheryl went to San Francisco, bought an old car, and Madeline put on a nun's habit and got out of Hawaii dressed as a nun. She and her son got in the group and Cheryl drove them to Mexico. The car broke down so they ended up coming the rest of the way on the train. The nutrition cookie stuff was while the school was in Mexico City the first year. But by that time you're totally into nutrition? I mean, I guess you have been for quite a long time, as long as you can remember.
Reading Adele Davis, I guess, in the 50s was what really influenced me. A friend of mine in Mexico City said that his niece, 18 months old, was in the hospital with intractable diarrhea. Every day he would come by for two or three days saying that she was losing weight and they couldn't stop the dysentery. I told him about Adele Davis' experience with vitamin B6 and I happened to have a bottle with me and gave him a 10 milligram tablet.
On about the third or fourth day when the doctor said that she wouldn't last more than another day, he gave her 10 milligrams of vitamin B6 and within an hour or so the dysentery stopped and she completely recovered. So that was my first experience with Adele Davis' suggestions and it impressed me. After a few years teaching in Mexico, I realized that my English vocabulary was shrinking. It just made me uneasy that although there were American students there, my brain was turning Spanish and the English part, I could just feel it shrinking.
So I wanted to go restore my English for a while. I was on a linguistics teacher's job at Montana State University and my intention was to just go and renew my English for a year. I was also very fortunate that Madeline Murray was working with the U.S. Embassy. The U.S. was basically occupying Mexico during this period and I guess continuing all of the intelligence agencies known to the U.S. Naval intelligence, military intelligence, CIA, FBI, all kinds of organizations were just swarming around Mexico City.
Did they get tipped off because of Blake College or because of Madeline or both? Well, a year or two years before she arrived or was even thought of, just within a few weeks of opening up the school in Mexico City, the cultural attaché of the embassy came to visit. I thought that was good because students inquiring what is this American school might contact the embassy. So I gave him our brochure and told him the history and what we had in mind.
He said, "Since you're a graduate student in linguistics, why aren't you with the Summer Institute of Linguistics?" I said, "Well, I'm not interested in Bible translations." That's what they do. But I could see that he was that observation that I knew the SIL existed and didn't want to be connected with it. The Summer Institute for Linguistics was basically a CIA, French, and imperialist thing to teach the Indians how to take orders, how to basically subdue the native populations of all the countries of Central and South America.
So just a couple of weeks after that, I heard from a girl who had written the embassy that she had been told that the school didn't exist. But she came anyway and found that we did. So I took some more papers over and left them at the embassy and said that here's stuff they could inform students. But the next thing I heard from a student was that the school was in a mud hut, two or three days' burrow ride, and there was only one instructor and one student.
But then just two or three months, what year was the Tolkien Gulf incident? 1964? I just set it up. I can bring it up. 1964. That was around the time Madeline Murray came. Just about a week before that incident, a uniformed American uniform, which was illegal in Mexico at that time, this guy came to our new location, Valle de Bravo, which is a fancy resort area for Mexico City people. But we had a very nice ancient hotel building, which was bigger and more comfortable than the one in Mexico City and cheaper.
This guy identified himself as the military attaché of the embassy, and he had private interviews with me and each of the students asking us what our opinion was about the war in Vietnam. Yes, what my theory explaining the war, why the US would be at war with Vietnam. That was before the Gulf of Tonkin. Were you freaked out at all the attention that you were getting with the college, or did you just expect it to happen? No, I wasn't aware of how totally covered with US intelligence agents Mexico was at that time.
Very shortly after the Mexico City visit from the cultural attaché, a guy turned up looking for a job as an English teacher. I said we had enough, but he enjoyed conversing about psychology and movies and such. So he would come back about every two or three days, he would just drop in to visit. All the time the school was there, this American guy was very friendly and just enjoyed socializing.
Years and years later, his wife was on a visit to the US and was drunk and phoned me from New Orleans and asked if I wanted a girlfriend. She had someone traveling with her, and I said no I had one, but how was Joe, what's he doing now? She said, "Oh the same as always." I said, "What's that?" She said, "Surveillance." I think he sort of became a double agent and kept me informed of what the government was doing and steered me away from some things that could have been dangerous.
But looking at it from a distance, it's hard to decide which of the people I knew there weren't government agents. Madeline Murray had a very organized thing working with the embassy to time the takeover for when I was going to be on the road driving to the US to the job in Montana. She was having a report given to the embassy, to the federal police of Mexico, and to the English speaking newspapers about what was going on at Lake College.
It didn't appear in the newspapers until I was on the road, and I had left a Mexican professor who he had offered to help get Madeline political asylum in Mexico. He was called Lombardo Toledano's left hand. He was the secretary of the popular socialist party of Mexico, and so he had connections to the government for such things as getting political asylum. So he was starting the machinery to let Madeline have residency in Mexico.
Knowing that he was influential in the government, I went to him and asked his participation with the embassy and federal police and all of those to help her take over Lake College. So he came and told me what she was doing, and so I had various sources keeping me informed of what was going on, but it didn't stop it from going on. They basically framed the college to look like some kind of drug lab?
Yeah, exactly. For example, the landlady of the hotel where the college was had a nice old German shepherd dog that had an ear infection, whoopie tear. One of the students who had been a druggie in the US knew about injecting things, so he went and got a shot of penicillin, gave the dog a shot, and cured his infected ear. But the students who were organized under Madeline told her that story, and she turned it into having drug orgies, giving morphine even to the dog.
And another one of the stories that she fed to the newspaper and police was the Alejandro Hodorowski, a Mayan theater person, made some famous movies. The Holy Mountain? What? Yeah, the Holy Mountain. Okay, awesome. Yeah, a friend of his was teaching there, and so he came to visit. He organized the maids' children and such into sort of a panic theater thing where they played their clay flutes and put on paper hats.
He was at home with little kids, and so combined with the dog penicillin and Hodorowski's flute music, there was actually, I had a tape recorder, and some of his flute playing was on the tape recorder, which the police confiscated and said they had in their drug and dog orgies, they had – I forgot what the adjective was for the music.
Just before I reached the Mexican border, about five or six hours from the US border, an old unshaven guy with a striped shopping bag, typical country person, just really imposed himself on me when I stopped for gas. I was very tired and didn't want to hit a tiger, but he just insisted. So as we drove towards the border, we talked about politics, and we were just absolutely sympathetic politically.
When we came to the border checkpoint, the soldier looked at my tourist card and asked for his, and he said, "I'm just an ignorant peasant. I don't know anything about the ID." The soldier said, "Okay, go on." My passenger, as we pulled away, said, "That guy ought to be fired," and reached in the shopping bag and pulled out his ID. It showed he was a federal police agent, and he invited me to come to his house for a beer at the border, but I was too tired and declined.
I wondered why this federal police guy had been so intent on accompanying me to the border, but when I got to California, I found that the federal police had arrested all of the students and teachers, and so he was there just to make sure I got out of the country. Do you have any understanding of why they let you go? One of the teachers was a friend of a daughter of the Mayo Clinic people. The Mayo Clinic had a team of lawyers arriving on their own private jet to talk to the president.
My friend the teacher talked to his friend, the daughter, who talked to her father at the clinic, who talked to his lawyers, who talked to the president, and the students were immediately let out, sent to the border. I'd read a little bit about your own health journey, and I don't know how accurate it is, but the small snippet I was reading was talking about a major discovery of yours allegedly was pregnenolone and vitamin E. Was that before you wrote Nutrition for Women? No, that was after.
Okay. I guess, what was the lead up to writing Nutrition for Women? Was that in 1973 or '75? '73, yeah. I had just been talking to a girlfriend who was a student at the university about the things I was thinking about and learning how the hormones interact with nutrients, and she said this ought to be more widely available, so I started writing up little short bits, and that was what became Nutrition for Women.
It's amazing to me that your work is so consistent over such a long period of time, and even though I know you wrote the forward to the 1993 version where you're making small corrections, the idea of oxidative metabolism reinforcing structure and vice versa, that was something that was really obvious to you really early on? Was that just like, I guess I'm trying to like, unpack that idea.
Well, when I was nine years old, nine and ten, in the sixth grade, I had been having periodic migraines for several years, once or twice a year, and then I became nearsighted when I was nine, and I noticed that some of my classmates, girls who were nearsighted also had migraines, and that got me interested in whether it was a gender-related thing, because there were, I think, three nearsighted girls in my classroom.
Then I saw that it was not only myopia and migraines, but that these girls were often hypothyroid, and so for many years I was considering whether I was hypothyroid. But, for example, when I was 16 and first worked in the woods, we would make our lunch up at breakfast, put it in a cloth bag to tie to our belts, and within two or three weeks, people were joking that my lunch probably weighed five pounds or something, and it hung down to my knee.
That led me to calculate what my calorie consumption was, because at breakfast and dinner, the cook would just love to pile on the food, and then I would build these huge lunches. I figured that I was eating something like 10,000 calories a day and weighing 160 pounds. So from that time on, I was really convinced that I couldn't be hypothyroid. But your energy requirements being that high and suspecting that you're hypothyroid, did you think the hyperthyroid state was the result of adrenaline? Is that the right line of thinking?
Well, I think of it as metabolic inefficiency. I could tell that I evaporated water many times faster than other people. When I worked on a surveying crew, the crazy surveyor wanted us to work about 12 to 14 hours a day to catch up stuff that he had failed to do the previous summer. He just had this working furiously, clearing a path right through the trees. I would refill two canteens every hour during the day.
I found that I couldn't urinate from breakfast time until after supper, even though I had drunk typically 12 liters of water during the day. I couldn't form any urine. During that time, I was easily metabolizing 10,000 or 12,000 calories per day. The inefficient, wasteful youth metabolism, rather. When I first tried thyroid, for some odd reasoning, made me want to try it in spite of being so hypermetabolic, suddenly my metabolism slowed down, became more efficient, and I could be comfortable on 3,000 or 4,000 calories a day.
Was that in between nutrition for women and then generative energy? Did you experience health problems in between that? No, nothing serious, occasional migraines. 1976 was when I first took thyroid and slowed my metabolism down and stopped having migraines. Then it was 1983, I had started having not only migraines but variations with artery inflammation and throbbing things equivalent to migraine, but they could appear inside my mouth or nose or right beside my eye. Very strange things. You could see them throbbing from the outside and they were extremely painful. The thyroid wasn't enough to do anything.
I was thinking that I was just using a vitamin E supplement, but it was a bottle of E I had experimented trying it as a solvent for different steroids. It didn't seem to dissolve a significant amount of pregnenolone, so I had this bottle with the powder sitting in the bottom. When I was taking that thinking it was just vitamin E, I was in perfect health, but I came back, changed my luggage and happened to take a different vitamin E supply on another trip.
That whole trip I was sick with the migraine equivalent. When I got back, I was so sick I was spending most of my time in bed. It dawned on me that there might have been something different about the different bottle of vitamin E since that was the only change I had made. I took a dab of that. I guess I took plain pregnenolone just on the thought that the vitamin E contained some.
The pain completely stopped within several minutes. That was 1984. The only time it recurred was ten days later when I hadn't taken any more pregnenolone. I immediately began taking pregnenolone and the symptoms never recurred. You have a famous picture in Generative Energy of a before and after. That's around the same time, right? Yeah. Were you always thinking about unsaturated fats and their connection with pregnenolone and thyroid? Has that been in the back of your head or did you start taking it more seriously after Nutrition for Women and in between Generative Energy, writing those books?
Yeah. I think in nutrition reviews, there was this article about probably in the early 70s, the experiment feeding rats different quantities and different proportions of saturated and fatty acids. The fatty acids produced obesity over a lifetime regardless of the quantity and the saturated fats produced leanness regardless of the quantity. So a low fat unsaturated diet made fat rats and a high fat saturated diet made lean rats. That convinced me that it was probably acting on the oxidative system, same thing thyroid works on. In my estrogen research for my dissertation, I had seen the 1940s.
They saw that polyunsaturated fats were causing both testicular and brain degeneration and that vitamin E was an anti-estrogen as well as protecting against brain and testicular degeneration. So I had already been thinking of the toxic anti-metabolic effects of the unsaturated fats, but I hadn't really thought about putting it into practice until I saw that nutrition review article. The foods you originally thought of as constructing a good diet, that was originally for low-income people to have a good diet? Is that right?
When I was in Mexico for myself as well as other people, I saw the effects of extreme malnutrition and for living at times on $15 or $20 a month for food. One American outdid me. He would spend a week at a time I think on $1.50 or $2 per week for food. But I found that eggs and milk and wheat germ were a good way to get the protein and vitamins, but then the wheat germ I found gave me a terrific calcium deficiency and got extreme temperature sensitivity of my teeth,
which went away within an hour when I took a huge calcium supplement. But it started in 1962 thinking on how to economize on food, how to get a survival diet for maybe $15 a month, and potatoes turned out to be one of the best answers, potatoes and milk. And then when did orange juice come into play and liver? Did you figure those out along the way?
Adele Davis and the liver I guess was what directed me towards liver, but orange juice I saw that if you combined orange juice with eggs in sufficient quantity, you could get both your calories and all of the essential nutrients just from those two foods. And they were more expensive than potatoes, but I was thinking of degrees of economic survivability. One of the things I love about your most recent newsletter is, correct me if I'm wrong, but you didn't usually recommend mushrooms and then you, speaking to your empiricism, basically changed your mind. Is that right?
Yeah, this Bela Tov person in the 1970s, I had been a mushroom lover. When I could afford them, I would eat mushrooms. But then I saw his articles that there were liver toxins in all of the mushrooms, and he didn't mention that it was destroyed by heat, but I was so impressed by the ubiquity of liver toxicity and carcinogenicity in the mushrooms that I just stopped eating them.
And you've said before, like you think about things for a long time before you incorporate them into your own life. Has mushrooms been on your mind for a long time? Yeah. I think the immune function of the mushrooms that drew me back to them after all those years, that they were like an animal turned inside out as far as immunity goes.
We live with rotten stuff on the inside, and they live embedded in rotting stuff. So they have to have mechanisms that allow them to not be destroyed by all of these toxins and pathogens in their environment. And what they live in is essentially what we have to deal with in our intestine. And for many years, as long as anything, I've been interested in endotoxin.
Walter C. Alvarez was a newspaper columnist when I was little, and so I read his books later. And he was a gastroenterologist who did experiments intending to debunk the idea that the intestine produces toxins that affect the health. But his arguments against them as a cause of migraine, for example, I was always aware that something was happening in the intestine. And he showed that pressure was enough to trigger a migraine in some people. But the pressure works in an environment already destabilized by endotoxin.
So the same destabilizing effect of endotoxin lowers blood sugar, which is another factor in making you susceptible to other harmful influences, whether pressure in the intestine or allergens in the environment. The combination of low blood sugar and endotoxin predisposes you to any kind of other stress. And since the mushroom develops essentially in a bath of endotoxins, they are an inspiration to think about how our immune system works. And they're very anti-estrogenic, is that right?
Yeah. The things I wrote about in the newsletter were the anti-aromatase ingredients and some of the direct stabilizing effects. But one thing I didn't talk about was their anti-nitric oxide activity, paralleling the anti-aromatase. But I'll be writing more about the anti-nitric oxide effects later. Is there an amount of mushrooms that you need to get those effects? Yeah, I think it's probably around a cup a day.
You suggested in the newsletter to cook them for three hours and probably a good time to go over any recipes you had. I don't think you've ever talked about that in any interviews, so that'd be fun. No. The study I saw in China in which it was really just a very small amount of mushroom was enough to, if they combined it with green tea, I think their breast cancer rate was 87% lower than otherwise. That was a very small amount, but I think half a cup to a cup is a good quantity.
And when I'm going to eat a large amount, like a cup, I like to put cheddar cheese or something meltable on it, melt it in the microwave. It makes a really scrumptious dish. Do you try to get a certain amount of calcium per day? What are you thinking when you're going through your food for a day or something like that? I'm sure people would be interested.
I think over the years I've averaged 2,500 milligrams of calcium at least and around 100, 120 grams of protein. Milk and cheese and eggs are my staples and all the good tropical fruits that I can manage. I don't get it from any of your writing that everybody has to eat some kind of specialized diet and this is an idea for the US and our poor food supply coupled with the rampant amount of problems people experience. Is that right?
There are so many things contributing to health problems. Vaccinations, for example, make the immune system less stable and all of the junk added to foods. That's one of the things that directed me personally to eggs and oranges and milk was that these have less opportunity for adulteration. Awesome. That's pretty much all of my notes on this. Did we talk about something you want to go into more that you didn't get to cover?
What we started with, the water issue of St. George and Lange's Pollen, that's really what the mushrooms are working on, how the immune system works. The change in thinking about the immune system from the early 20th century idea of antibodies and such, Jamie Cunliffe and Polly Mattsinger 20 years ago started rethinking the immune system. Rather than fighting what is not self, they are concentrating on protecting the self, really fairly not directing their attention to killing invaders but to stabilizing and restoring the integrity of the self.
The integrity of the self is based on keeping the cytoplasm in its well-energized state in which the water has a relatively hydrophobic quality so that the proteins stay in solution and they exclude toxins based on the solvent properties of the cytoplasm rather than particular defenses against them. There are at least three classes of things in mushrooms that I think we should concentrate on. The steroids, lanosterol in mushrooms, cholesterol and maybe lanosterol in ourselves and progesterone are things that stabilize the cytoplasm so proteins stay in solution and do what they are supposed to.
The anti-estrogens are defending against the low-level defense system which is in a crisis, you turn on the production of estrogen and nitric oxide to stimulate cell renewal, de-differentiation and cell renewal and if you can keep your cytoplasm in a good condition with the water in a fairly hydrophobic state, you won't activate those processes. If you have specific mechanisms that prevent the formation of estrogen and nitric oxide, you will remove two of the forces that tend to disrupt the cytoplasm and put it into the primitive replicating state.
So if you can keep those at the edges of your system so that they will let you keep making stem cells but not try to turn everything into a stem cell, I think that's what happens with aging and inflammation. We're getting signals that are trying to renew everything and in the process, they're degrading everything. And does the mushroom sugar, was it called trehalose, does that contribute to the functioning of the organism? Yeah, that's a stabilizing thing that opposes endotoxin.
There's been good research showing that there seems to be a direct structural effect of trehalose defending the cytoplasm against the disorganizing action of endotoxin. And that's kind of a metaphor for everything that's happening, stressful in the organism. And trehalose is one of the stabilizers that the progesterone, cholesterol, lanosterol, steroids are another level or type of stabilizer. Besides just eating fructose to increase cholesterol, would lanosterol be a similar protective mechanism just from increasing cholesterol or is it different? Each one is a little different.
A group at San Diego cured animals, lands, cataracts in just a few days, actually reversed existing cataracts in rabbits and dogs. And lanosterol was simply added to the eyeball by injection or even by diet or eye drops. It has that stabilizing effect that apparently puts the lens proteins back into their proper balance with water. They seem to precipitate, leaving water in its bulk disorganized condition when the cataract forms. And just getting the lanosterol into the eye system apparently brings the proteins back into their proper state of solubility, which is transparent.
About a couple of mushrooms you said, do you know, is that equivalent to any kind of protein? Could it replace meat? Yeah, I think they would completely replace meat. The typical dietician chart shows potatoes and mushrooms as having insignificant amounts of proteins. I once mentioned at a conference where there were dieticians and they were just shocked that I would mention potatoes and mushrooms.
But when you look at their charts with beans and wheat and rice, what they're doing is comparing the dry state, no water, to the wet state of the mushroom and potato, which are 80 or 90 percent water. So if you multiply by five or ten times the protein, then you get something that you could compare to the bean protein. And so if you divide the amount of protein in a bean by 10, which represents the living wet state, it becomes insignificant as well as being very low quality.
Could you cover the equivalency? Like if 100 grams of mushrooms, would that be equivalent to any amount of meat or anything like that? I would compare it to milk. They aren't as wet as milk, but they're down in the range of three percent like milk. Before I let you go, do you want to quickly tell everybody about the new availability of your newsletter? Oh, yeah. There's a special email address for it, raypeat's Newsletter at gmail.com. And they can send, what was it, $28 to that and get 12 issues? Yeah, 12 issues over two years.
Awesome. And are you working on anything else right now? More on the nitric oxide stuff. It's really a huge topic. I've been following it now for 30 years at least from the 1980s when they discovered that it was actually produced in the body. At that time, I was most interested in carbon monoxide as an endogenous toxicant. It turns out that even carbon monoxide is protective sometimes against nitric oxide. So I see nitric oxide as one of the few things worse than carbon monoxide.
Awesome, Ray. I cannot thank you enough for doing this. Thank you so much for giving me an hour of your time. I'll probably edit this and it'll probably be out not this week, but next week. And again, thank you so much. Okay. Thank you. Okay, I'll talk to you soon. Bye, Ray. Bye. That is going to conclude this week's episode. I'd like to send a huge thank you to Ray for talking with me today, along with my patrons for their support of the show and all the content I produce.
Next week, I'm going to be back with Georgie talking about dementia and Alzheimer's. So you can actually, if you have any specific questions, please leave them in the comments. We'll probably try to get to them on the show. Thank you for listening. As always, we have an amazing listenership and I appreciate every single one of you. Thank you so much for taking the time to rate the show and listen to the show.
The show is available in multiple formats. If you didn't know, if you click on the show more icon on YouTube, you can always do a direct download or you can get it through iTunes or you can go to generivenergy.com and also download it. So thanks again for listening. This was a really special episode for me. And I'd like to thank Ray again for even talking with me, which was really cool of him. So thanks again for listening. I'll talk to you guys soon. [Music] [end]