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The following episode of Politics and Science features an interview with Dr. Raymond Peat, endocrinologist and physiologist from Eugene, Oregon. It was recorded on July 24, 2008. At that time we were struggling with a, how shall I say, a not very well functioning phone interface machine at WMRWLP Warren. And so the sound is a little funky. I've put it through some sound modifying programs and it sounds a little echoey now, but the buzz is gone. And I hope it's listenable. More information about Dr. Raymond Peat can be found at RayPeat.com, that's spelled R-A-Y-P-E-A-T.com,
where you'll find many fascinating articles. And if you enjoyed the show or didn't catch all of it and wanted to hear the rest, you can browse your way on a computer to radionumerall4all.net. That's radionumerall4all.net. And once you get there, search for Politics and Science and you'll find a number of episodes ready to download to your computer to listen to at your convenience. All right, and now to the interview itself. Raymond, can you hear me? Okay. Let me hang up the phone. All right, thanks for joining us again.
Let's see if I can get my knobs adjusted here correctly. All right, you're on the air and we're speaking with Dr. Raymond Peat out in Eugene, Oregon. He's an endocrinologist and physiologist who's written a lot of books about health and nutrition and science and has a newsletter called Ray Peat's Newsletter and you can find him on the web at raypeat.com. Raymond, can you hear me? Oh, good. Okay. I thought I'd lost you for a minute. Just yesterday we were doing a sound check and we sort of picked up where we left off
last week talking about fats, fats in our diet and the use of fats by humans over the years and also as animal feed. And yesterday you were talking about cholesterol and you mentioned a fellow named Chris Masterjohn and I thought perhaps we could -- one of the things you said yesterday that kind of shocked me was that for years we've heard that cholesterol is something you get from fat, from butter, from especially beef fat, any of those meats that are full of supposedly saturated fats
and that's why we're being so poisoned by cholesterol and it turns out that perhaps cholesterol isn't the boogeyman we always thought it was. It's actually something we need to function. Yeah, but eating cholesterol, if you're healthy, you have to eat a tremendous amount like the experiment where they had healthy, I think they were young men, eat eggs until they could see an increase in blood cholesterol and that took 22 eggs before they saw a rise in the day's cholesterol and it does rise if you're very sick and can't compensate.
But in a practical situation where a person might want to raise their cholesterol, you can usually do it just by eating lots of fruit because for several reasons. The minerals and sugar in the fruit give the liver the energy it needs to make adequate cholesterol and there's, they call it a U-shaped curve of mortality. You have an ideal range of cholesterol for a given age and when you're below that range, your mortality increases. What are those ranges? Oh, the published, the people who talk about the curve usually put the bottom of the U
around 160 to 180, but when you look at the figures, the bottom really varies with age. Like one study looked at people in a nursing home situation and saw that the ones who had the highest cholesterol, I think in that group, those with 270 lived the longest. So you have to think about the relation of the cholesterol to the stress you're under and consider it an anti-stress hormone. My father recently was told that he has to start taking statins and a lot of people are on statins. What's your opinion?
Years ago, they started seeing increased mortality as they used drugs to lower cholesterol and there was one, I think it was Hungarian in the 1980s that showed a great increase in cancer mortality as they lowered cholesterol and that somewhat accorded with a Veterans Administration study in the 1960s that they stopped when they saw that people on the so-called heart protective low-fat diet were dying at a higher rate from cancer. But there are still some lingering data showing that the statins might increase total mortality,
but the marketing is so intense that they managed to place articles convincing people how good it is. A recent book by Melody Peterson, I think the title is Our Daily Meds, gives a lot of information about how the drug industry manipulates the culture, paying doctors, well, writing articles for doctors and just getting them to sign their names and then publishing them in prestigious journals promoting their products. It gives a little bit of the inside information about how they're actually buying the medical literature.
And Marcia Angel, seeing it from an editor's viewpoint at the New England Journal of Medicine, emphasized that the editorial decisions can completely bias the results of a topic if people choose not to even submit their data because it doesn't support the efficacy of a drug or the safety. A lot of studies will simply not get submitted, and then if the editors introduce more bias, you might have 50 studies showing a drug is harmful and useless and one that gets published showing that it's beneficial.
Increasingly, Melody Peterson shows how the drug industry is not only modifying the research that gets done and how the universities treat their research, but how the journals publish it and then finally how the doctors use it. So the system is pretty well sewed up. Now, anything relating to drug therapy, you just simply can't trust the Anglo-American literature, and increasingly it has spread into Italy, Chile, France, Japan, as the industries become influential in those countries. India and Russia were relatively outside the commercial pharmaceutical influence, but now they're moving in that direction, too.
So it's an effect of globalization, I suppose, is it? Yeah. Same corporate policies. Yeah, still some of the more backward economies still manage to do some real research. So yeah, I've heard it said that we have one of the most effective propaganda systems in world history, basically, in this country at this time, with access to the media pretty much sewn up by the corporations and alternative voices only heard on stations like ours, which are community stations, which there's quite a few of them around the country, but there's a lot of space in between them.
So how's the media situation out in Oregon? Oh, well, in my lifetime, the Pacific stations have been the outstanding exceptions, but the university public radio station, about, I guess, 10 years, 15 years ago, it changed its format so that students don't have the access they used to, and now it sounds like one of those big city furniture advertising classical music stations. It used to be more of a community station? Yeah, it used to be a really good station, but the donors made it sound like one of those upper class, nothing but classic music stations.
Yeah, that's, we're having, we tried to, we have a pretty small range here, but we do have an affiliation with Pacifica and with other community stations around the country, so we try to network our programming and share it between us all. Well, getting back to cholesterol, and there was a guy, you said the last time you were on the air, you spoke about somebody named Chris Masterjohn. Yeah, I've read several of his articles that are very good. My only disagreement with him is that he persists in believing in essential fatty acids.
Yeah, that's something a lot of alternative, quote, alternative health people believe in. And what's, in a nutshell, what's your view on the essential fatty acids, just so everybody knows? Well, the first claim was that it was linoleic acid, then maybe linoleic was added, but already after the Burr's studies of the late '20s and early '30s, by the 1940s, their disease was shown to be nothing but a vitamin B6 deficiency. And at just about the same time, the agricultural researchers were showing that linoleic and
linoleic acid were the causes of brain degeneration, testicular degeneration and infertility, and muscle degeneration, and fish oils, about the same time, were causing mink degenerative disease. And then the yellow fat disease was showing up in more and more animals as they were fed fish waste because of an excess of the polyunsaturated fats in the fish fats. And so the linoleic acid finally was recognized to be essential for cancer, but not at all essential for nutrition. And the publicity coming out that the original essential fatty acids were essential for cancer
kind of discouraged the marketing in that direction, and that's when it shifted to marketing fish oil as the new version of the essential fatty acids. And that's where we are now at pretty much the peak of the fish oil promotion as the new fatty acids that are being recommended at higher intake levels to actually function as drugs to supposedly cure a lot of diseases. But in fact, the old research going back 40, 50 years shows that it is simply a temporary suppression of inflammatory symptoms while in the long run increasing the inflammatory degenerative processes.
So the reason people have a subsiding of their symptoms is just their immune system has been knocked down? Yeah. David Horobin, who was a big promoter of polyunsaturated fats and who died of brain cancer and was trying to treat himself with his own fats, he published work showing that fish oil is very immune suppressive. And others looking at why fish oil is anti-inflammatory found that it wasn't the original long chain polyunsaturated fats that are found in the fish, but when they are processed and hit
the hot organs of a mammal, they break down and it's the breakdown products, the aldehydes and free radicals that are decomposed from the fish oils, which are actually the anti-inflammatory substances. So it's the deterioration of the material that produces temporary relief, but it's also those things which contribute to the serious long range problems such as brain damage and vascular damage and so on. And you were saying last week that fish oil does have some good properties about it. It has lots of vitamin A and D.
Yeah, it depends on how it's made, but in its crude form, it does come with a lot of vitamin D and A. I see. So if there was some way to get those vitamins out without... Yeah, there have been a lot of products on the market extracted from fish liver oil in which they concentrate the vitamin D and A a lot so that you can get your daily dose in a couple of drops of the oil. And some people are taking fish oil for anti-depression. I think they're called omega brights or something, some such.
Yeah, there have been studies even in the published literature. The ones I've seen were just about an equal number saying it isn't effective as say it is effective. Same with using it as a supplement to baby food. There are studies that show that it retards iron brain development even though they don't get discussed very much. Is that the DHA? Yeah. And they've started adding that to baby food? Yeah. Oh dear. How did we get on fish oil, Raymond? Do you remember? Well it's being promoted as an essential. Oh, that's right. Thank you.
And so flaxseed oil has gone out of fashion. I didn't realize that. And now they're promoting mostly fish oil in the alternative medicine field? I think so, yeah. The literature in the 1980s just became overwhelming showing that linoleic acid in particular is really the basic motor for pushing cancer excess. And linoleic isn't quite as bad. So flax isn't as bad as some of the others. We're talking to Dr. Raymond Peat. If anybody would like to ask Dr. Peat a question, there's no other phone line here, but I can receive emails at [email protected].
So if essential oils are only essential for creating disease, how is it that they're so heavily promoted by the government? Well, several years ago the FDA had a warning not to use more than, I think it was three grams a day of those one chain unsaturated fats from fish oil. And I think they've dropped that warning. At least it isn't prominent like it used to be. And I think right from its very beginning the FDA was captured by the food industry and then the drug industry.
And now they really are working primarily as a corporate defense system. Yeah, it always seems like they absorb the liability for the corporations by if they approve it, then you can't sue the corporation. Yeah, the same thing as government protecting the nuclear industry by saying you can't collect more than a certain amount of damage if you have a reactor explode in your neighborhood. Right, so basically the oil industry is underwritten by the government. Yeah, the public health service has a worse record than the FDA itself.
The FDA interfaces with the consumers and tries to keep them happy. But at higher levels the agencies of the government have been more defensive of the power structure and pretty much ignoring the consumer level. Like in the years of the fallout from atmospheric bomb testing, the public health service was destroying data and putting out false data about the safety of radiation. Yeah, that is very telling of how the government can work at its worst. Maybe you could talk about radiation for a minute and how the government's bias towards that has made it more widespread.
Well for 50, I guess 60 years I've been hearing from dentists and doctors that the dose we give you in examining you is very small and harmless. And then they reduce it tenfold and they say exactly the same thing. And the words are the same in 1940 and 1950 right down to the current. They claim they have digitalized machines. People think it's just bits of information coming through their bodies, but it's still the same old x-rays. They're exciting their cells. And even Linus Pauling took a less than adequate biological view.
He was the one warning about the dangers, but he was looking only at the DNA damage. But the damage is much subtler than breaking strands of DNA. The excited electrons cause chemical and physiological changes that linger completely distinct from the immediate reaction of radiation with the DNA. So that for example, you can give a dose of radiation to cells in a dish and then add new cells that weren't exposed to radiation to that dish and the new cells will start mutating a day or more later from something emitted by the exposed cells.
And that process lingers in the tissues and the blood serum and it's called the bystander effect that you can demonstrate in the lab. Cells that weren't exposed start behaving as if they were exposed by contact with the damaged cells. And people exposed from the Hiroshima bomb have been studied 60 years later and they still showed essentially excited electronic states in their tissues. And the same with people, I guess about 20 years after the Chernobyl exposure, their serum is still toxic.
It can be removed from their blood and added to healthy cells and the healthy cells begin mutating. So it's the bystander effect which lingers and might continue causing mutations but it's a completely separate process from mutation. And so the safety assumptions were based on the model of how a beam of radiation will affect a molecule. And so it was worked out in terms of direct interaction between a molecule and radiation but in the organism that simply isn't how it works. And the Russians way back in the 60s were showing that where the Western paradigm was
that if you irradiated an animal's brain it would go into estrus causing supposedly something was altered in the pituitary causing the ovaries to produce more estrogen. The Russians did a control experiment in which they irradiated the animal's foot instead of its brain and it went into estrus. And so they called them some kind of radiation toxin that was emitted by the exposed tissue but it's the same thing that happens in the bystander effect. There's some physiological biochemical change that is started by the radiation but then
spreads and continues and the increased estrogen happens to imitate these processes started by the radiation. So there are probably many levels from the single cell which emits the bystander acting substances to the whole organism in which estrogen becomes one of the bystander activating substances. So you're saying a little bit of radiation causes this cascading effect throughout the body? Yeah. Two or three years ago in Seattle they were using low level fancy latest well calibrated x-ray equipment and covering the patients with lead aprons and so on.
And they found that a full set of dental x-rays if the woman was pregnant at the time even though her body was shielded thoroughly her baby turned out underweight showing that basically the same effect as taking a dose of estrogen while pregnant. It spreads a stress influence that malnourishes the developing fetus and causes its brain to develop less fully than an unexposed fetus. Now the method you used to describe how the government assessed the dangers of radiation poisoning where they just sort of had a hypothetical theory that one molecule being affected by
ionizing radiation but they didn't take into account the living being. I think you've said before that that's common in how science is conducted in the West. They do a lot of experiments in test tubes basically. Yeah and worse than that rather than if you look through PubMed you see lots of abstracts described as in vitro but now they have the concept in silico. What does that mean? It means they didn't have anything living at all it was all done in a computer.
But people read the article and they're used to seeing in vitro and they think real cells were involved but in silico means in the computer. I've never heard that before in silico. So what's wrong with that Ray? What's wrong with doing I guess that's modeling basically isn't it? Yeah it's like the medieval arguments about angels. How much force base does an angel need to dance and how many can get on the head of a pin. You mean it's meaningless unless it's... Worse than meaningless. It is a way of amplifying your favorite hypothesis or assumption.
It'll actually promote some absolutely wrong theory if you do your modeling right. So in studying science I think a lot of people are a little bit confused that we just figure it's empirical and they're testing theories all the time and of course the best theory will end up on top because it'll get the most positive results. How come that isn't the way it works? Lots of reasons but probably the basic thing is that it's all filtered through the culture and the system of assumptions and the assumptions if you look at different cultures the whole
background of philosophy and religion influences what you think can be taken seriously as an assumption and because in the medieval times people believed in alchemy and the influence of the planets and astrology ordinary chemists and physiologists think it's absurd to consider the phase of the moon when you're doing a chemical or biological study but several people have looked at lab results done over a period of time and have seen that the phase of the moon does influence many experiments in the lab and for example I worked in the hamster
lab at the university where the indoor temperature was kept constant and the light was artificially controlled so a person would not have any cues indoors whether it was winter or summer but somehow the hamsters knew what was going on outside the walls because their thymuses would atrophy in the winter season and come back in the spring just like they do when they're exposed to changing day length and that was investigated. Professor Brown in Indiana did many tests with potatoes, oysters and flowering plants
and he had noticed that his experiments varied with the moon and he got some oysters from the east coast and studied their metabolism in Indiana and if it had been genetically determined the way the paradigm said it must be because hamsters can't know when it's winter if you're controlling their life cycle so it must be some kind of a genetically operated clock in their brains. Brown took his oysters to Indiana and they were still metabolically cycling as if the tides were coming into Indiana and he did the same thing with potatoes which aren't
susceptible to tides and so no one knew about monthly cycles in potatoes but he saw a similar metabolic moon cycle in potato metabolism and flowering plants that he saw that he could take one of these plants that opens its petals at dawn and closes them at sunset taking it indoors they still kept up the same cycle and so he took it into a big building where no cues from the outside apparently reached and they still did it so he took his plants
into a mine shaft and they kept cycling until they got down I forget I think it was hundreds of feet below the surface the plants finally didn't receive a cue and no longer cycled. So he demonstrated that something lunar or planetary influence was able to penetrate hundreds of feet of shielding and his plant showed that when properly shielded they no longer cycled disproving the idea that it's a genetic clock and other people were able to train plants to move their leaves at different times of day by giving them cues that over
rode the environmental cues again disproving that it's all controlled by an abstract genetic clock. I see so you're saying that genetics is a dogma that's been pretty much accepted by the culture as the. Yeah it really is primarily a kind of religious belief that remember the Lamarck Cuvier controversy the person who took over the museum that Lamarck had been the director of for years when Lamarck was doing his work showing the inheritance of acquired traits the man that took over was a Christian catastrophist who basically said there was no evolution it was accounted
for by a flood destroying the ancient species and so on. So in history the genetics as an anti-environmental approach was strictly a biblical orientation against the whatever the Lamarckian environmentalist orientation was. Yeah I always thought the genetic orientation always is very convenient for liability in terms of you know anybody causing environmental damage whether it be you know to your own body in terms of pollution or to the environment in general they can always if you can't directly link them you know in a simple cause and effect they can always just say it's genetics and
you were genetic. It's been very convenient for the medical profession for the last 50 or 60 years if it's either genetic or it's a virus and there's nothing you can do to expect a cure and especially with cancer the government was very influential in reinforcing that interpretation and that's closely related to military medical research. The germ warfare people were getting government subsidies and they were inclined to the it's your own fault for having bad genes theory and much of the research was done to say that the military didn't cause the problems.
The environmentalism in cancer research simply couldn't get funding after about 1945. Is that right? Since 1945? Has all been genetic? It was persisting into the early 50s but it's pretty much at the end of the second world war that the whole school of biology simply was defunded and put out of existence. The idea that embryos develop according to a field, developmental field and gradient was that was the dominant theory along with the idea that cancer is a metabolic physiological field distortion. So embryology and cancer were related to these metabolic and pattern based ideas.
The genetics and militaristic approach simply cut those off and the best research was done through the 30s and the war itself interrupted a lot of the research. When the government came out of the war having funded the Manhattan Project, that sort of money was then directed into germ warfare research and that gradually shifted to so-called cancer research. The Fort Detrick germ warfare lab simply changed its name while not doing very different research when it shifted over to the war against cancer. So these cultural beliefs that seem to be directing research and taking some theories
for the truth and rejecting other theories regardless of the empirical evidence, they basically are also responsible for the misinformation we've heard about cholesterol? Yeah, in different ways. They talk about genetically determined tendencies towards high cholesterol that you can see in the form of cholesterol receptors. The whole idea of receptor is a genetic pharmacological idea. It's very much like the ads you see on TV where a drug zooms around in your body and goes right to the place where it's needed.
The receptor idea is like a switch that turns on a gene and there are molecules that drugs and substances stick to and if they have any involvement in physiology, those are called the receptor. But that is promoted as a genetically determined thing. So one drug company was collecting genes from a village in the Mediterranean area where people didn't have heart disease and trying to promote a gene change as a drug product. But the environmental influences simply weren't of interest because if you can identify a
problem as a permanent genetic feature of the patient and then work on that gene receptor with a drug, then you've got a product. But the cholesterol receptors are regulated by hormones such as the thyroid. So if a person doesn't have enough of the receptor so-called that takes cholesterol out of your blood, you can take thyroid and increase the amount of that receptor. But that doesn't please anyone but the thyroid industry. They haven't really taken advantage of it. In the 1930s, the main product was made by the Armor Meat Company which became the Armor Pharmaceutical
Company because they had a lot of beef and pork thyroids that they didn't know what to do with. So they would sell those or the ovaries or adrenals or whatever wasn't popular as meat. They would dehydrate and sell as a drug product. In the '30s, that was the standard treatment and the symptoms of hypothyroidism were identified and when they would give them the armor thyroid containing both T4 and T3, the symptoms would be alleviated. But after the war, a company came on the market with purified thyroxine which is only a fraction
of a fraction of the armor thyroid. The thyroid contains a protein which is ejected and then it liberates the two thyroid substances T4 and T3. T4 is released by the gland about four times as much as the active T3 and the liver then when conditions are right, when the environment is right, the liver completes the activation so that most of your thyroid function is really coming from the liver which the liver is an interface with the environment so when your nutrition calls for it, then your liver produces
70 or 80 percent of the active thyroid hormone. But after the war, the drug company had an interest in promoting a product and so they said the main substance and the easiest to make was thyroxine and they gave it to 25 year old male medical students, very healthy people and said it works just like real thyroid in these healthy young men but they didn't test it in sick people or in women. Women's livers are much less active than men because of the effect of estrogen.
A certain amount of alcohol takes longer for a woman to eliminate from the body than a man so the liver in general is less active than females but the drug product thyroxine was sold across the board even though it had only been tested in young men and it was more than 10 years later that the real active hormone T3 came on the market. It wasn't even known at the time that the thyroid supplement was being marketed as thyroxine and the tests that determined whether you were hypothyroid or not disregarded all of
the symptoms that had been associated with hypothyroidism up until about 1945 and the tests at first measured only the iodine bound to protein which has very little to do with your thyroid function and according to those tests the thyroxine product would raise your protein bound iodine and so that was compatible with marketing the synthetic drug but after about 20 years they saw that the protein bound iodine test had almost nothing to do with your thyroid function. If you ate seaweed you would get a lot of protein bound iodine but your thyroid function
would go down and so they started looking for new ways to test the thyroid but they had established over those 20 years that instead of half of the population benefiting from thyroid the tests suggested that only 5% of the people would benefit from thyroid so whatever new tests came on the market the assumption had been established in the culture that only about 5% would need thyroid and so any new test has been standardized to that paradigm of looking at a percentage of the population rather than whether the substance cured the
symptoms and so now they are treating the thyroid stimulating hormone level and disregarding the actual effect of the hormone on the person's health and physiology. So they are basically treating one of the markers instead of the actual symptoms. Yeah. Yeah, that seems to happen a lot in medicine. They start mistaking the marker for the actual problem. Yeah, and they call it subclinical and don't even make it explicit what they mean by clinical. The AIDS test I think is something like that isn't it? Yeah.
There have been several traditional drugs that alleviate symptoms but those tend to be suppressed or forgotten but the so-called virus has attracted very little attention. What they are doing now is using a lab process to amplify a substance that relates to the virus it isn't the actual virus but they call it the viral load but it is something they create in the laboratory and meanwhile they ignore the use or consider them simply additional therapies that could be added to the valuable and profitable drugs that they use to treat the AIDS people.
I was going to talk to you about Chris Masterjohn's experience in cholesterol today but maybe we'll save that for another day. You were going to say something else about the AIDS drugs? Oh, there are a couple of very good books. One is "Impending the AIDS Virus" by Peter Guzburg and the other one is by Harvey Bialy about Peter Guzburg and the virus and disease. I've been following it now for I guess 20 years and the establishment people just don't want to talk about it.
They won't let these people publish responses to articles in the major journals so the average doctor reading it thinks they have no answer but it's just that the editors don't want to hear their answer and the mainline virus theory of AIDS people have never answered the criticism of Peter Guzburg who basically says the virus is harmless. And that begs the question what's causing the harm? Yes, he thinks it's a drug. I'm inclined to the idea that it's the interaction of drugs, polyunpatriated fats, radiation exposure and other toxins in the environment.
So that would be another case of an environmental problem. When you graph the incidence over the last 60 years of acquired immunodeficiency syndrome, it's a straight progressive increase since the bomb tests began after the Second World War and there was no sudden jump at the time AIDS became official as a disease. It's a steady increase going back 60 years. Well that's very interesting. Well we're just about out of time. We've been talking to Dr. Raymond Peat from Eugene, Oregon. He's a physiologist and an endocrinologist and puts out a newsletter called Ray Peat's
Newsletter and you can find him on the web at raypeat.com where you have a lot of excellent articles. You're getting more and more articles up there I've noticed too. Yeah, I have another 10 or 15 that will go up in a couple of weeks I hope. Great. Well they're very interesting and even if you don't necessarily agree with everything that's said there, plenty of food for thought and a lot of medical history and scientific history that I certainly have never heard about before so I find it all fascinating. Thanks Ray for your work. Okay.
And we'll talk to you soon. Bye bye. And that concludes today's broadcast of Politics and Science. I hope you enjoyed it. Other Politics and Science shows can be found at radionumeralforall.net. That's radio and then the number four, all, A-L-L dot net. And once you get there type in Politics and Science. I've been your host today, John Barkhausen and please tune in again next week for another edition of Politics and Science.