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transitional radio for planet Earth. You are tuned to KMUD Garberville 91.1 FM KMUE Eureka 88.1 FM KLAI Laytonville 90.3 FM FM translator K258BQ heard at 99.5 on your FM dial in Shelter Cove and worldwide we are everywhere on the world wide web the information super highway faster than the speed of sound at KMUD.org the time is seven o'clock you are tuned to ask your herb doctor support for KMUD comes from listeners like you and from Chautauqua Natural Foods locally owned for over 25 years they specialize in local and organic produce natural groceries nutritional
supplements and body care products Chautauqua Natural Foods is open Monday through Saturday from 9 to 7 Sunday from 10 to 5 just off the town square in Garberville and support for KMUD comes from Midnight Arrow Unlimited anything anywhere anytime Dave Sky A&P at Garberville Airfield the next voice you hear will be the herb doctor live from Studio B in Redway California [Music] [Music] Well good evening and welcome to this month's Ask Your Herb Doctor. My name is Andrew Murray. For those of you who perhaps have never listened to the shows
which run every third Friday of the month from 7 to 8 p.m. we're both licensed medical herbalists. We trained and graduated in England with a master's degree in herbal medicine and we run a clinic in Garboville here in California that has a wide range of conditions and recommend herbal medicine and dietary advice. So you're listening to Ask Your Herb Doctor on KMUD Garboville 91.1 FM and from 7.30 until the end of the show at 8 o'clock you're invited to call in with any questions either related or unrelated to this month's subject of
thinking outside the box and the relevance of thinking outside the box is novel and new approaches to cancer treatment. Definitely thinking outside the box rather than a deterministic viewpoint of killing cancer cells. So number here if you live in the area is 923 3911 or if you live outside the area toll free number is 1-800-KMUD-RAD. So people that listen to the show tonight who either have or know people who have diagnosis of cancer could be very relevant to those people listening and I'd encourage you to call in with any
questions that you might want to put to either myself or Dr. Peat about this month's show. So cancer then has traditionally been viewed as something to destroy and to this end the mainstream of treatment is either what's known as cytotoxic cell killing drugs which poison the body or this directed focused radiation which does no better. It's all sidle that is it kills the cells directly and with also the associated collateral damage and inflammation that comes from the treatment either widespread or localized. Now the evolution of thinkers who challenge dogma has always hailed new
breakthroughs in our understanding and novel approaches to cancer treatment are also making themselves known. The co-discoverer a Nobel Prize winner James Watson recently made some observations regarding cancer in its treatment and these have again been taken further and are very much outside the box theory has emerged and Dr. Peat then he joins us in a moment here will be asking him for his his viewpoint on it because he's very much an outside the box thinker as most of you perhaps have tuned into him of recognized. Now most people are under the
mistaken belief and myself included that antioxidants are always good for you in the diet the more the better. So but this is not true and sometimes these very antioxidants can fuel cancer metabolism. So again let's have some lateral thinking here and get our heads around some of that I know it's going to be a little bit heavy for some people perhaps if they're not really science minded but Dr. Peat will hopefully outline the questions that I put to him so far as the physiology and the chemistry of the what we call the radox
system in the body the reduction oxidation processes that are so important and necessary for regular cell functioning to to occur and then once we elucidate the radox activity within the body we can also understand better some of the novel approaches to cancer treatment. So what is it what rather what it is that we thought we understood about cancer and antioxidants for example and in what context then does the latest understanding shed new light on the subject. So firstly Dr. Peat thanks so much for joining us again. Hi Dr. Peat.
Hi I'm here. No problem okay so as always just to introduce yourself your professional academic background to give people who perhaps have never listened to you before an understanding of where your research merits are. Okay 1968 I had been studying more or less independently biology and a lot of related fields but 1968 I decided to go to graduate school for a PhD and graduated there in 1972 specializing in reproductive aging and oxidative changes and it was the oxidative metabolism that I saw changing with aging which was really against the grain already at that
time I saw an increase of reductive activity with aging for example you can put a dye in young tissue and old tissue and reductive enzymes fueled by the energy producing system and the internal antioxidant system is part of it. The older tissue reduced the dye much more energetically looking like it was more alive for example you can test the vitality of any tissue by the intensity of staining of this tetrazoleum chemical and I found that an overdose of estrogen or deficiency of vitamin E or any serious injury such as
x-rays will increase the ability of the tissue to stain this dye so aging and these various injuries all increased the reductive activity of the tissue which involves what are called the anti-oxidative enzyme defense systems and that was what got me interested in the fact that cancer is very rich in anti-oxidative defenses not only the enzymes with a lot of specific chemicals that will act as antioxidants at that time people were trying to identify the specific chemicals that cancers used to defend themselves against oxidative poisons the chemotherapy and and radiation oxidative damage but over the
last 40 years it has developed that it isn't just a simple chemical that they produce defensively but the very basic life processes are shifted in that direction which increases the reductive or anti-oxidative staining of this tetrazoleum and dye just as an indicator that's easy to see. Okay so what caught my attention reading some of these articles recently was that there there's definitely a new new novel way of looking at cells I know you've mentioned this in the past prior to doing this show which is kind of more based on the
new findings in the the extracellular matrix as they call it and the fluidity within which cells are mobile and constantly in motion I think it was always posited before that everything was fairly fixed and once some a cell had differentiated it couldn't do anything more its fate was sealed but actually the new start new theories and new studies are finding that there's much more of a kind of quantum quantum state going on where things are very fluid and cells very much communicate in two directions and are subject to and give instructions to other components
in the body so in terms of in terms of what they call this extracellular matrix in which this in which the cells kind of reside what it what implications does this has for understanding an approach to cancer treatment for example. Well the the rigid doctrine of the organism that governs current cancer therapy it really was imposed on a more basic biological view with it started around 1830 with Johannes Muller in Germany who described tumors as a problem of organization not of defective cells and that approach as it continued through embryology right through the 1930s and
1940s in which people could dissociate an embryo or a primitive organism and show that the cells themselves could reconstruct the organism after they had been entirely separated so the the environment that they live in is constantly being constructed to meet their needs the cells have particular needs and they will change the environment to meet those needs if they have the energy and the resources. If for some reason a cell or an organ becomes idle it loses its sense of direction if there's no stimulation and no energy flowing through the system
the cell doesn't have any particular occupation or knowledge of what it should be doing but ordinary cells everything else being ideal will if they see a defect in their environment they will reach out and correct the defect the extracellular matrix the main components are collagen for stiffness rigid linear molecules that surround each other and in between those stiff collagen molecules there are carbohydrate chains polysaccharides and some with with proteins attached with some just simple polysaccharides with amino groups on them that retain water and create an elastic or springy environment against the pure hard
environment of the pure collagen system and cells prefer a certain rigidity of environment when you take an isolated cell and put it on a surface that varies in stiffness the cells will creep towards the stiffer firmer footing they don't like squishy things to sit on and if you inject broken down collagen fibers into an organism or a developing embryo the cells will rearrange the disorganized collagen that you have given them they're sort of like bricklayers align it in the direction they want and tug on it and communicate partly
just by the way they tug and the other cells sense the tugging and pull back and because they have an inherent knowledge of the structure in which they should be in yeah and they like a fairly solid but they can create more of the polysaccharide so that it holds more water and is open and able to diffuse things to feed them so it has to be just right and there are various specific proteins that they secrete to attach themselves to do that pulling and pushing but there are some proteins
at the surface which happen to be chemically connected and interactive with the very structure of the cell all the way through in a very coherent unifying way of the sulfur and sulfhydryl system of the cell is what gives it much of its toughness and it has to be constantly broken down and reformed because the cell inside is constantly in motion. You're saying there's a constant connection of sulfhydryl from the outside of the cell to the center of the cell? Yeah and about 40 years ago some experimenters found that if they blocked those surface
sulfur groups the cell couldn't stick to its environment so the degree of reduction and oxidation of the surface sulfur groups is a very big part of how it sticks to its environment and gets where it has to be and helps to shape its environment and that degree of oxidation is governed by what has been called the antioxidant defense system. Okay, all right. You're listening to Ask Your Ob Doctor on KMED Galbraith 91.1 FM and from 7.30 until the end of the show people are invited to call in with any questions they may have regarding this
month's subject of thinking outside the box for cancer therapy and Dr. Peat here in a bit here will get into the specifics of how reduction oxidation works in cells and how the new findings are showing that actually the concept of antioxidants are not necessarily positive and how perhaps we can influence that system to be more beneficial towards resolving cancers. Also going to be bringing up a article, a very interesting article that everyone can go to the internet and take a look at written by Mina Bissell on the programs called TED Talks. Basically
there's a 15-minute talk on the architecture and context the form and function of the organization of the cell and how cancers are viewed in a different light now and she has some pretty exciting pretty exciting results. So Dr. Peat in terms of the we've mentioned very briefly the reduction and oxidation of cells or components of cells or molecules that are part of say electron transport chain or modifying chemicals. Can you can you want to describe this how this potential works in the matrix and how this can determine the outcome of disease and health? I
guess from making the simplistic consumption of antioxidants for example a bad choice perhaps for cancer strategy. If you look at the balance between oxidants and antioxidants or reductants in the cell many people think of it as a reducing environment or an antioxidative environment but when you look at specific components such as the the molecule that transfers electrons from glucose for example to the mitochondrion to be oxidized. NAD is the coenzyme and it becomes reduced to NADH which is the source of the antioxidant electrons and if you look at the healthy
cell the ratio of the oxidized form is hundreds of times the reduced form is about 500 or more times the oxidized form is 500 times greater than the reduced form and so that that's the governing antioxidant. Is the oxidized form. A highly oxidized state and that is in balance with ascorbic acid and coenzyme Q10 and vitamin E and the sulfur system glutathione and glutathione disulfide. These are all energized by the electron from NADH which comes from glucose normally and so the cell normally is in this really highly oxidized state as determined by
the ratio of NAD to NADH and if the cell is sick for example a cancer cell the ratio approaches one to one. It's almost 50% in the reduced antioxidant state and if you injure a cell you turn on this signaling system that James Watson talked about as one of the problems that he says people are looking for some way to turn that off so you don't keep pushing the cell in the direction of too much reduction but in fact anything that irritates the cell is likely to turn on more of the reducing
system and push it in that direction of stress or cancer with a higher ratio of NADH to NAD approaching one to one. You're saying that you want it in a oxidized form you want the cell not to have access to antioxidant activity. Yeah the healthy active cell has about 500 times more oxidized NAD. When the people who are selling their very powerful antioxidants a lot of the advertisements say it's many times more powerful than vitamin C or than vitamin E but what they're doing is testing the antioxidants in vitro in a test tube and
they will attack and destroy the oxidizing fragments free radicals but it happens that just like the NAD, NADH couple which is highly oxidized the things in balance with that ascorbic acid and vitamin E for example inside the cell they become oxidized. The dehydroascorbic acid is an oxidant and it's eight times more concentrated in the cell than outside. It's relatively hydrophobic and it goes to the oily parts of the cell. So that will itself break down an antioxidant from on the outside of the cell. Irritating the cell and turning on the defensive antioxidant reductive systems
and producing a lot of the fragments that reduce glutathione, one of the sulfur molecules that exchanges throughout the system. When the cell is irritated that and the associated ascorbic acid which becomes reduced and the vitamin E which becomes reduced these will sop up the toxic fragments but the trouble is that the system which normally should be oxidized all the way through the ascorbic acid, the vitamin C, vitamin E coenzyme Q10 and so on. The whole system gets stuck in an over reduced, over electrified or not enough oxidation going on to pull it
back where it should be. Since the 1930s people have seen that any cell which is dividing goes into this highly reduced state in which everything shifts to the sulfhydryl rather than the disulfide form. Okay and this includes the cancer cells then? Yeah and normal cells go into this phase very quickly, divide and then return to their oxidized state and the vitamin E and vitamin C go back to becoming oxidants and keeping the system tightened up, helping to squeeze water out of the system and the balance where the membrane potential of a cell
is normally around 100 millivolts difference when you measure it with an electrode stuck into it. The redox difference is in a range of about 15 millivolts, a very small fraction of the energy which is available for induction. If you measure the voltage between glucose and oxygen it's over a volt so it's about 100 times more than the difference of 15 millivolts which governs practically all of the reactions in the cell. The enzymes which produce energy, synthesized protein which govern the economy of the cell, these are sensitive to being reduced or oxidized and so
this 15 millivolt difference can shift the whole economy of the cell. That's a pretty tight range within which normality exists. When you measure the products such as pyruvic acid versus lactic acid, these are an excreted or easily extracted index of the oxidative or reductive state of the cell. So when the cell is in trouble it turns pyruvic acid into lactic acid by reducing it. So that's a reflection of the highly reduced antioxidant state when the cell is distressed and making lactic acid. When oxygen is working properly it's not producing lactic acid,
it's using, consuming the pyruvic acid, turning it into carbon dioxide. So the ratio between not only pyruvic acid and lactic acid but overall it would be between lactic acid versus carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide is an acid and so in a sense it's an oxidant. It causes retraction of electrons. Because the fundamental here is basically mopping up electrons. Yeah. Yeah. So, okay, so let me ask you this. The reactive oxygen species, okay, so a group of molecules governed electrically, the antioxidant system versus the reactive oxygen species system, in terms of inflammation and
what free radicals, I think as I've understood free radical damage to be a result of free radical liberation that isn't mopped up by antioxidants, is it almost that free radicals are almost, I can almost think of free radicals now as being a little more beneficial than the antioxidants because they... That's Watson's interpretation but I think that's his 50 years as a reductionist when he comes out of the static mechanical view of genetics and looks at the metabolism of the cell, he tends to over concretize and the antioxidant system is doing good stuff
defending against toxic free radicals but the oxidative normal functions involving ascorbic acid or dehydroascorbate and vitamin E and the sulfhydryl balancing system, those are able to control the system that he suggests the toxic free radicals would be doing. So you can get both the good defensive process against free radicals and the limiting of the production of more free radicals without resorting to one of the toxic chemicals that he's suggesting. Because you're advocating and I know you have not just further subject in hand but in general as a good health practice from advocating plenty of fruit
consumption for example, you advocate vitamin C and vitamin E as very safe and gentle, relatively gentle in their antioxidant capacity to some of the products I know that have been mentioned. You talk about the super antioxidants that are touted on the supplement market that people may have consumed or may have thought were a good thing but in general vitamin C and vitamin E are very safe and they do the work very effectively. That's because they are electrically tuned to exactly a certain role or group of roles in the cell and if you put in
dynamite instead of alcohol you can have the same overall energy expense but it isn't under control and some of the antioxidants that they're selling are more like dynamite, don't fit into the system and so they aren't helpful at all. And when the good antioxidants are working properly the system can run as fast as it once practically oxidizing at full speed and there are examples of experiments in which as you add thyroid hormone or a chemical that uncouples the production of ATP from simply the burning of oxygen and fuel as you rev up
the oxidizing process you get fewer and fewer free radical productions. So, because you normally associate free radical production with that. Yeah and so the good antioxidants are working with the mitochondria and the faster that system runs the fewer electrons get away to cause the dangerous free radicals. So, this is a bit like the aerobic versus anaerobic glycolysis and its effects. Yeah, when the cell gets out of control oxygen is no longer able to suck up the electrons and so the cell has to expel the electrons in the form of lactic acid
and that's a survival mechanism but it happens that when you do that desperate production of lactic acid to draw off excess electrons it happens to raise the pH inside the cell and lower the pH outside the cell and I think it was the embryologist Holtfrater who demonstrated that if you put an embryo in a slightly acidified solution the cells simply leave the embryo and float off and do their own thing. So, the cancer or the stress metabolism acidifying outside the cell is tending to destroy the cell's connection to its
environment and at the same time raising the pH inside the cell makes it swell up, water and shifts the self-hydro balance into the reduced state and tends to turn on constant cell diffusion. Okay, well I guess before we get into the Danopoulos previous experiments and research with urea for the treatment of cancers including liver cancer, I know that from an oxidant versus antioxidant perspective that exercise in its own right then generates sufficient biological oxidants which could be perhaps used as a valid approach to diabetes, cardiovascular disease and some cancers and I've seen that there is
some research to support that they exercise especially for diabetes but in some instances for cardiovascular disease and cancer is actually fairly pertinent. Exercise will cause cells to take up glucose in the absence of insulin and will make them operate effectively but just like the uncoupling protein or the increased thyroid, these are the cells equivalent of exercise so that when everything is working in an organized way the cells are exercising by simply burning oxygen and fuel and warming themselves up so exercise should keep everything active but when it doesn't the organism can defend itself and
imitate exercise by running things at a higher speed. Okay, all right you're listening to Ask Your Ob Doctor on KMED Gallup 91.1 FM from now until the end of the show at 8 o'clock callers are invited to call in with any questions they have hopefully surrounding tonight's subject of novel approaches to cancer so like I said at the beginning of the show we're hopefully going to get into a little bit later on about liver cancer and some of the work done by a pioneering doctor back in the 80s which is still relevant
today concerning urea therapy. The number if you live in the area is 923 3911 or if you live outside the area there's an 800 number which is 1-800-KMUD-RAD. Okay so... Doc, can I just get in there quickly we got a call since the top of the hour someone called to say there are two loose friendly brown and white pitbulls running loose on Branscom Road between number 2015 and Laytonville and this phone call just came in so if those might be your dogs running loose on Branscom Road two brown and white
pitbulls folks want you to know they're out running loose. Thanks. So Dr. Peat I looked earlier on at that 15-minute, well it wasn't a podcast but it was a video basically the TED talks that Meena Bissel presented. It's a very interesting work that she was doing and quite amazing where she had shown that the context and the architecture of the cell was very much the governing force behind whether or not cancers were present and I know from your what you're mentioning earlier on about the extracellular matrix of the whole solution around the cell within the
cells all very fluid the cytoskeleton this all starts from the outside and works its way in its constant and the energy that should be present within a healthy cell gives the potential to signal and allow changes to happen so that everything's ordered. Now what she was what she was bringing up was I think she was specializing in breast cancer and she'd showed that clip during the 15-minute speech that she gave about the the duct cell one of the duct cells that secretes milk with a pre-cancerous stage and then the cancerous
stage and then she basically proved that it could be the cancerous cell could get turned back to its normal state not by poisoning it or radiating it but by allowing the extracellular matrix in which it was growing to be normalized and I know this is an approach that you're positing now as a novel way of approaching a disease in general and not just cancers but other diseases so that it's more of a functional disorganization of the environment in which the cells operate that is the cause rather than the cells themselves
becoming mutant or aberrant or just losing their program or whatever is popular vogue theory for health. The exercise idea is very relevant to a breast cancer you've probably heard the statistics that women who are constantly having babies and nursing through their whole fertile years have a very low risk of breast cancer and so what is working keeps working and the cells which are have a load and a job to do are keeping their extracellular matrix organized to support what they're doing. We do have a call in I want to
get this call in very quickly but I do also want to ask you whether or not how much credence do you think the high exposure to progesterone during pregnancy has on the fact that they have very low incidence of breast cancer to do how much of that part do you think it plays? I think that's the main thing it erases for example looking at the connective tissue like like the tendons which are almost pure connective tissue if you expose a rabbit for example to estrogen the connective tissue such as the tendon
becomes stiff and hardened and every time it becomes pregnant and the estrogen goes up you see a shift momentarily towards hardening but after each pregnancy it's less hardened than before and it's the progesterone which reverses those changes even in the connective tissue the extracellular matrix and it's also erasing the intracellular estrogen functions the synthesis of estrogen the failure to detoxify it and the tendency to bind it all of these are regulated by progesterone as an anti-estrogen. Good okay well let's get this caller then and see see where this callers questions
going. Hi caller you're on the air and where you from? Hi Dr. Peat and Andrew you and I have spoken over computer stuff and my question is I was born with some interesting genetics and I've always wondered how it happened that I was born from two eggs and I have lots of things because of that both genders because of that and I I wondered how did that happen? Dr. Peat I think I think your well one moment caller I think your condition is chimerism isn't it? You are a chimera as far as I
remember I don't know I think the caller might have hung up actually but Dr. Peat chimeras I think they're extremely rare in the population. You know the embryologists have made them and you can that's one of the early demonstrations that mutations aren't the cause of cancer somatic mutation theory was made defunct 40 years ago when someone took a cell from a tumor and stuck it in an early embryo the tumor came from I think it was a black hamster and they put it in the embryo from a white hamster both
of its parents were white and the developing organism had four parents it was a mixture of white and black inheritance showing that what had been a cancer cell developed into an ordinary part of the organism and that's the sort of thing that on a more highly differentiated tissue that mean abyssal is demonstrating that it's the environment not the genes which make a cancer. So what do you do you have any do you have anything to say about chimeras in the human population and how how they how they come about or how how yeah how
rare we know that rare. I think they're probably not as extremely rare as one would suppose because the the early embryos if they happen to get too close it's very easy for them to mix and form one one organism. Because people can have two two or more blood types their red blood cells can express the the markers for you know O positive and rhesus rhesus groups or B that could be B rhesus negative in the same person. Yeah I found that quite fascinating. Okay well let's let's move on then so
oh look out I think there's another caller let's take this next caller before we move on. Hi caller you're on the air where you from? Yeah I can barely hear you for some reason. Can you hear me? Yeah yeah I can hear you fine but you know yeah I can hear you fine you're saying that you can't. Hello. Hello I can hear you but can't yeah I can hear you. Oh well maybe that caller should call back in again if they've hung up yeah okay I think this is some part of what
would hopefully get resolved. We did have another caller who really wanted to ask Dr. Peat something if I could use this opportunity. He wanted to know about low carb diets the fat-burning ketone diet and specifically he said it's helped him quite a bit he wants to know what Dr. Peat thought about that the ketone diet. Yeah what do you think of that Dr. Peat? Um you don't produce the ketones unless you're raising your cortisol enough to activate the conversion of protein into the ketones to activate the conversion of protein into glucose at the same time
you're turning some of the fat into ketones. So it's a pretty stressful. Yeah and I think the problem occurs over a few years of exposure to that increased breakdown of protein. The cortisol is affecting your connective tissues and the Explorer I don't remember his name at the moment but Arctic Explorer who advocated the meat diet he noticed that the Eskimos were very prematurely aged in appearance their skin became very wrinkled and I think that's what you would expect from being exposed to very high cortisol constantly. So the ketone diet is a pretty stressful way to
do anything like lose weight and losing weight in general is not a very good idea unless it's done slowly especially in people that have lots of stored polyunsaturates in their fat makeup which is most people unless they're really watching what they eat and avoiding polyunsaturates and making sure they consume lots of saturated fats. Actually it's a very I want to make a very quick point here I was back in England three weeks ago for a couple of weeks and on my way out of the airport I grabbed a couple of periodicals to read
while I was on the plane. I got a new scientific and I got the Daily Telegraph and on the cover of the new scientist it had a picture of a frying pan and the word FACT the C was a piece of carbonized bacon and the F and the A and the T of the word FACT was still intact and it's a what you saw was fat with a carbonized piece of bacon forming the C but it's blackened against the black background of the frying pan and it said have we really got 40 years of
dietary advice wrong and it was actually a good breath of fresh air another one of the breaths that hopefully wake people up enough when they get enough these fresh breaths coming in that to say that they were very much behind especially dairy saturated fat and that all saturated fat in general was very good for you and that the polyunsaturates and the margarines and the fish oils actually being shown now to turn be turned on their head and they were actually saying yep we think we've got 40 years of dietary advice wrong so
that was good to see and then the other sad point I did see in the Daily Telegraph was that in England they're now running GM crops and I when I left England in 2001 they were actually Europe was all GMO free so now in England they're actually making a GMO crop to express omega-3 oils so that they can feed this crop to GM salmon that are grown in the environment that doesn't allow them to pick up the polyunsaturate from the algae and the microorganisms that they eat so they're
now going to feed them a GM crop expressing omega-3s I couldn't believe it so not too sure what's happening folks but I know California is still on the cutting edge I think of trying to see sideways here with our food and environment and everything else that's going on so hopefully between the West Coast and the East Coast of the States we can keep this kind of thing going and alive. So anyway Dr. Peat I wanted to bring up Dr. Danopoulos' work with urea therapy from the 80s I know I had a
caller some time ago that I got personally who was looking for some help and information regarding liver cancer and I know Danopoulos had done quite a bit of work in 1980 publishing clinical oncology about an 11-year experience using oral urea treatment in liver malignancies. How much, how familiar are you with urea as a compound for the treatment of carcinomas or other cancers? In the First World War it was used as an emergency treatment to stimulate healing in wounds and hold down infections and around the time 1920s I think it was
often used for inoperable cancer to pack it with urea to it actually was not only keeping down infection but I think it was actually having a healing influence and the effect of forming lactic acid that I mentioned which causes the pH of the cell to become more alkaline inside that causes swelling and swelling promotes replication proliferation and simply an osmotic environment which could be very concentrated sodium chloride or urea happens to be a very innocuous substance it doesn't exactly have an osmotic effect like sodium chloride because the sodium is kept out of the
cell but the urea acts somewhat like an osmotic dehydrator it helps to prevent excess swelling and water retention. You think that is one of its main effects and that's how it's keeping swelling down? I think so. Okay. And the dehydrated cell becomes more oxidatively active and catabolic burning fuel faster where the swollen cell is anabolic and simply growing and dividing so many things can help to reduce that water retention. I think urea would work well with a good thyroid program which helps you to retain the normal amount of sodium chloride.
Hypothyroid people not only produce the matrix which is over hydrated it shifts the cells so that they produce molecules that hold water outside of cells but the low thyroid function lets your kidneys lose sodium while retaining water and so any of the osmotic therapies such as urea I think would work nicely with supplementing thyroid to normalize the sodium retention. Good. I think we have a couple of callers on the air so I should start by taking one of these first caller. You're on the air caller, where are you from?
This is David Back, the caller we had earlier who's having trouble. Okay. Hey David, go ahead. Hello. Hi. Hello. Hello. Look out. Engineering, what's going on? I don't understand, he can hear me when I talk to him, we can hear him. Can you hear me now? I can hear you. We can hear you fine David. Okay. So I guess I can hear you now. Hopefully. Are we okay? Can you hear me David or not? Okay, sorry about that. He can't hear me so you're going to have to say this I think. Dr. Peat? Yes.
Yes, I have, you know, and this is I guess a little off topic but in a way it's not. When you're describing these processes, I mean you do it so beautifully and it seems very complicated but are you actually seeing images? Like do you actually see these processes? And I know of course a lot of this probably has not been photographed through microscopic techniques and different things. So are you just in a way integrating all this information and seeing things? I see little models. Not that I've seen anything exactly like it
but I have mental models for example of the extension of the sulfhydryl groups under the surface of a cell. I have very concrete pictures of how that works and so it helps me when I'm looking for information to check against the published research facts to have a concrete mental image. And the reason I'm asking that question is you were explaining like the collagen lining up and a lot of times when I'm reading your work I find myself trying to imagine these things and then I'm thinking that's got to be an important part
of your process in trying to imagine since you're a painter visual images of how this actually might look. Is that true? Oh sure. Yeah. I've always been aware of having a map of where I'm going and I was surprised in graduate school when a psychology professor was surprised at my description and I asked him how he found his way from his home to his office and he said go out the front door, turn left, turn left again, turn right. It was all a set of rules and I think some professorial types actually think in terms
of words and rules. Yeah, definitely. You know and the other thing I thought about in line with you know like almost visualization of how this works is you know through the years I've heard of different healers and people that you know are more new agey kind of things where they try to get people to imagine certain things and then try to heal it but then I started thinking if you were really seeing this like you're seeing it you really could in a way be a part of the healing process in that you're
seeing what's wrong and you're seeing what you need to do to fix it. Yeah, we were talking about the different theories of what a cancer is. The new theory it's called TOFT, tissue organization field theory and I think that needs another adjective, organismic. It isn't just the local tissue organization but it's also the way that tissue fits into the whole organism and how the activity of the organism keeps everything working, loading all of its parts so that they know what they're doing. It's very much the, and I don't want to make a
quip here, but it's very much the holistic way of looking at it and that's what I found was so interesting with even though it may not have been totally accurate, Dr. Watson's comments that we made earlier and also this kind of novel approach to cancer treatment through the looking at the extracellular matrix as very much a holistic environment upon which every cell is in communication with every other cell. Stem cells are arising all the time and actually nothing is fixed. Everything is very fluid and dynamic and very much able to change very quickly.
Individual cells, for example, pigment cells, you can sometimes see them migrating through the tissue and they move at the same rate that cells have been found to be able to crawl on a glass slide and that at body temperature that can be something like a centimeter and a half per day. A very tiny cell really zips along through the solid tissue. Far out. >> Thank you. >> I think we better wrap up. There are two callers on the air but we are not going to be able to take them unfortunately.
It is three minutes to the top of the hour. Once again, we have run out of time. Let me let people know how to find out more about you, Dr. Peat. Thank you for joining. >> Thank you. >> Once again, unfortunately, sorry for those callers who perhaps wanted to ask something. I want to thank Dr. Peat for his work. His articles are available and freely shared on the Internet. His website is www.rayPeat.com. Most of his, well, all of his articles, not most, but all of his articles are referenced.
So it is not just his opinion, what he has read, what he thinks. There is lots of references to the work that has been done, pioneering work by people that unfortunately we don't hear often enough that don't make the mainstream. But there are times when people like Mina Bissell and all the other people that Dr. Peat just brings to the show in terms of the pioneers that have done the work that we are talking about very much make the contributions that are thinking outside the box. It is that thinking outside the box
that really fundamentally changes everything from what we do to what we eat. The whole quantum mechanics thing is also another very exciting field that is making the seemingly impossible possible. So, yeah, go take a look at his website. There are lots of articles ranging from diabetes to saturated fats versus polyunsaturated, cancer, dementia, inflammation, thyroid. His specialties are hormones, reproductive hormones, and ageing hormones. So very interesting work. Lots of it is very scientific but it is also very readable. And he has a lot of articles that are very interesting. He has a lot of
articles that are very interesting. It is also very readable. For those of you who have joined us this evening, thanks so much for listening. Until the third Friday of next month, we can be reached toll-free 1888 WBMERB for any questions, regular business hours, 9 to 5. Until September, the third September of next month, good night. (Music plays) (Music plays) (Music plays) (Music plays) (Music plays) (Music plays) (Music plays) (Music plays) (soft music) You