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Okay. [music] Broadcasting from the beautiful Hill Country in Texas, this is OneRadioNetwork.com. Okay, we're calling Dr. Ray Peat now, and I think we're all connected with him, and we're going to do it. Patrick Timpone, OneRadioNetwork.com. Dr. Ray Peat is a PhD in biology, University of Oregon, specialization in physiology. He's taught schools all over the place, University of Oregon, Urbana College, Montana State University, National College, Naturopathic Medicine. He started years ago with progesterone-related hormones, 1968, and he's been working in both practical and theoretical aspects of all this work that he does, which has been
a very, very long time. I believe it's about 85 years around the sun. I believe that's what he said. Dr. Peat, good morning. Good morning. How are you doing? Very good. Are you really 85 revolutions around the sun? No, no. Yesterday I saw a thing on the internet saying I'm 83, but I'm really only 82. Oh, 82. Oh, gosh. You mean we can't believe everything that we read on the internet? One place said I was 114. That's right. This guy's been around so long, man. He's 114. He's 114.
Who are some of your real heroes in the field of health and nutrition and healing? Dr. Peat, the work that you do, some real heroes for you. Oh, I read lots of old books that the family had, early 20th century and mid-19th century even. Lots of the people were not very well known, but there was a lot of good information in the medical culture that was pushed aside starting around the Second World War. The pharmaceutical industry really took over medicine. For example, one of my early interests was a doctor who wrote columns in the newspapers
for many years, Walter C. Alvarez, a gastroenterologist. He was, in a way, pushing a conventional line. For example, in the 19th century, doctors believed in food digestion poisoning, bacterial poisoning in the intestine. He wanted to disprove that, showing that toxins didn't cause headaches. So to show that it was just a myth, nothing very subtle or chemical, he stuffed his medical students' rectums with cotton wads. All of those who were susceptible to headaches got a headache just from the cotton pressure. He said that this disproves the idea that headaches are caused by toxicity in the intestine.
But of course, that didn't logically prove anything, just that pressure is enough, and toxins often lead to pressure in the intestine. A lot of Russians were showing the interaction of the nervous system with the intestine around that same time. Nervism was a 19th century concentration or theory of medicine in Russia. They saw the nervous system as controlling sickness, and so the interaction of the digestive system and the brain was a big topic of research in Russia. They showed that if you put a balloon in an animal's intestine and inflated it, nothing
would happen if the animal's blood sugar was good. But if you lowered the blood sugar and inflated the intestine, then it would cause all kinds of things, like asthma, seizures, the equivalent of headache, vascular distortions all through the organism. So the combination of energy in the form of blood sugar and stress in the intestine will cause that whole range of so-called psychosomatic ailments. Some French Canadians following Hans Selye showed that the immune system similarly interacts with the intestine and the energy supply, that if you drop the blood glucose level,
the intestine becomes extremely sensitive to allergens that otherwise wouldn't be noticed. So the energy and the brain, which has the highest requirement for glucose as its energy source, these are behind the psychosomatic and allergic ailments. So it's fair to say then there's so many different components in the nervous system and everything, the way we think and all that, that are contributing to all the gut issues that are out there today. Blood sugar. Yeah, about 20, 30 years ago, some psychologists were demonstrating that helplessness, learned
helplessness, training the brain to believe that escape is impossible, made the whole organism shut down. The heart would stop beating in a few minutes rather than a few hours if the animal was convinced that escape was possible. So the whole organism is either energized or shut down by the perspective that's possible. So insight becomes a life-saving matter. So wow, you can extrapolate that out, Dr. Peat, and just think all the things physiologically going on with people who are feeling trapped in their life or trapped in their job or their
relationship or just trapped on planet Earth and don't have a good sense of why they're here, that kind of thing. What kind of factors that would play on their physical health? Yeah, I've seen that happen just with medical diagnosis. The doctor tells a person that they have an incurable disease and they pretty soon die. Is it any surprise to you after all these years that we're so inextricably connected with everything that we think and believe and feel along with all the other factors?
I mean, is it surprising to you that this thing was all wired up like this? No, no. It makes sense, really, I guess. I never was committed to any particular so-called scientific view of the world. And it all seemed perfectly reasonable to a perfectly ignorant kid looking at the world and hearing these different experiments. So, the so-called scientific medicine always seemed like a closed dogmatic way of seeing things. Were they just looking at things in parts or taking the brain apart and saying, "Well, this is how the brain works," that kind of thing? Yeah.
, and since about the 1940s, the pharmaceutical industry has shaped medical ideas so that it's really an outlet for their products. You get a diagnosis and then you can funnel the drugs in. And anything curative, like the old medical practice of giving people bran to cure constipation, like the Kellogg Institute, that isn't profitable to the pharmaceutical industry. Isn't that how the Kellogg's guy started? Didn't he had a whole thing about constipation? Yeah. What's the guy's name? I don't remember his first name, but Kellogg. Kellogg, yeah. Yeah. So, his whole thing was constipation, wasn't it? Yeah.
And in the mid-19th century in England and France, the autopsy cause of death was often given as inflammation of the intestine. But now, I think they see that just as often, but having an inflamed colon is a very common thing in a dying person, but they don't think of it as the cause of death. Oh, because everything begins to shut down and they don't go to the bathroom much at all? Yeah. There's people like Walter Alvarez who said, "See, it isn't toxins causing a headache. It's just the pressure."
And that took attention away from the intestine as a constant source of toxins and allergens, but it's really our most susceptible interface with the outside world. We're constantly putting these risky substances into our system. Risky substances, I like the way you say it. So that's why some folks, you've heard over the years, where they get constipated and they get a headache, and those two tend to go together. Oh, sure. And asthma attacks and seizures. When I was about 10, our dog found a coffee can full of bacon grease that had been saved to make soap.
The dog liked the taste and ate the whole quart of bacon grease and had a seizure. And that started me. I think that was what made Walter Alvarez's publication so interesting, to see a seizure brought on by eating fat. I saw that lots of people had experimented showing that the intestine could trigger a seizure or headache or runny nose, sore throat, just about any symptom you can think of can be triggered from the intestine. So the dog just had so much he just couldn't deal with all that fat. Yeah.
Because it was probably generally pretty good for him, but not that whole can, right? Yeah. Wow. Dr. Ray Peat is with us. If you have a question, comment, [email protected]. This is kind of an interesting one from Dennis. He said, "I've just heard so much about this classic quote-unquote autoimmune issue. Could Dr. Peat give us his theory on this autoimmune problem that people keep talking about?" For a long time, people noticed that women have far more autoimmune problems than men. We know about five times the incidence of thyroid disease and there's a very close connection.
Estrogen sensitizes your immune system. It acts on your brain and your glucose supply. For example, it activates insulin secretion, but it shifts your metabolism away from glucose towards fat oxidation and that makes you less able to oxidize glucose, turning it to carbon dioxide. In the absence of the high production of carbon dioxide, you produce lactic acid. Lactic acid promotes inflammation and starting with the fact that estrogen slows liver function by reducing the thyroid hormone, the slowed liver production shifts you into that lactate-favoring metabolism away from carbon dioxide and lactate causes inflammation of everything.
Autoimmune thyroid disease is just sort of the tip of the iceberg. Once the estrogen slows your thyroid down and starts inflammation there, then all of your other tissues are susceptible to chronic inflammation, ultimately leading to calcification or fibrosis, excess collagen production. All this is cascading starting from high estrogen levels? In a normal cycle of two or three days, there's a surge of estrogen around ovulation. Then if they're healthy, well-fed, the ovary shifts strongly to progesterone production. The diagrams in medical books often show estrogen and progesterone on the same chart and they use a different scale.
The production of progesterone is about a thousand times greater than production of estrogen in a healthy person, but they show them on the same graph misleadingly. This little moment of dominant estrogen should be suppressed by a massive pouring out of progesterone for the rest of the month. If anything interferes, like if they eat too much vegetable oil or too much starchy vegetables, things that are hard to digest, their energy level decreases so that they don't produce the normal amount of progesterone, it starts with a premenstrual syndrome where they don't
have the energy and sense of well-being of the progesterone-controlled condition. In the absence of progesterone, everything tends to shift in an inefficient direction towards oxidation of fat rather than of glucose, and that takes a lot more oxygen. Every carbon requires two oxygens if it's fat and only one oxygen if it's carbohydrate, which already comes with one oxygen. So you get a double supply of carbon dioxide in effect when you're using sugar as a fuel. The carbon dioxide has a stabilizing protective effect that suppresses inflammation and turns off lactate production. Wow.
So a lot of ladies could have a hard time going through their periods, and if they really could be eating some foods that are causing the things to be worse feeling, and if they maybe change their diet, if they could figure it out, they could feel better during this time. Is that what I heard you say? Yeah. In the short run, eating a lot of carbohydrate will make them feel better because it'll provide lots of glucose. Eating rice and bread and vegetables, for example, in the short run can make a person feel euphoric.
But at some point, their liver needs a good supply of protein to keep working. Women who have been on a diet for a long time, I've seen women eating 15 or 20 grams of protein a day where an army study found that even average or small women to work efficiently even at office work needed 100 grams of protein a day. And women often are told that 35 grams a day is fine, but all of the really competent studies show that 85 to 100 or more grams per day are needed for the liver to function well,
for the brain to work properly. So just a protein deficiency makes the liver underproduce. In the 1940s, some people did studies on the prisoners, war prisoners who were starved. They noticed that when they were let out of the prison camps and given some good food or at least more food, the men fairly often grew breasts in the first year after getting out of prison. And they found that that was because their liver had been damaged from the prolonged protein and vitamin deficiency.
And the liver normally destroys or it causes excretion of 100% of the estrogen reaching it. And so if you starve the liver for the B vitamins or protein in particular, the estrogen accumulates so a man will grow breasts just from a prolonged nutrient deficiency. And that happens in women and that's a basic cause of premenstrual syndrome. And the misinterpretation of what happens premenstrually, the estrogen industry starting in the 1940s when they had a product to sell, they convinced the government first of all
and the public that these PMS problems and menopausal problems were the result of deficiency of estrogen rather than an excess. At the very same time, the researchers were showing exactly how the liver keeps estrogen under control when your diet is good. But the estrogen industry totally reversed that situation. They even sold estrogen to prevent miscarriage all through the late 40s and 50s. Doctors at Harvard were convincing doctors throughout the country to prescribe estrogen to pregnant women. That created the DES syndrome, cancer in the next generation.
The babies who were exposed in utero to that estrogen supposedly to prevent miscarriage, they developed estrogen problems later in life. And wasn't that whole syndrome, wasn't it blamed on some drug or something? Yeah, diethylstilbestrol, synthetic estrogen. Oh, so that was the cause. Yeah, in the 1930s, my professor for example, Sodervall, was a student of one of the people who showed very early that estrogen causes miscarriage. My professor gave animals graded doses. One animal would get a small dose, another a bigger dose. He showed that the number of miscarriages exactly corresponded to the dose of estrogen
they were getting. So estrogen as a contraceptive or abortion producer was defined before 1940, but it was 1941 and '42 when the estrogen industry started promoting it to prevent miscarriage exactly 180 degrees opposite of what it does. And so that has created more than 50 years of total confusion about what estrogen does. For 50 years, they prescribed estrogen to men with prostate cancer. It turns out that it is a major cause of prostate cancer, but it was given to men to treat their prostate cancer and it would cause death from asthma, blood clotting, seizures, accelerated
cancer in other organs and so on. In fact, if you look at a man's testosterone, the high testosterone men in middle and old age are relatively free of prostate cancer. The ones who develop prostate cancer are the ones with lower testosterone and more effective of the estrogen. Dr. Rehbert: That is fascinating. Dr. Ray Peat, I'm going to do a little break here, but before that, on the protein, you talked about the ladies and the protein, the lack of. Does it matter to balance this out if they did animal protein or other forms of protein
like rice protein or whey protein or some of vegetable protein? Do you think that matters in what you're talking about the protein in the ladies and the PMS? Dr. Peat Yeah, it does, but I'm not sure how to rank those different proteins. Gelatin is one protein that is very safe because it lacks the three amino acids which can be very toxic if you're eating more than is needed. They happen to be used for growth, so they're needed until you're about 20 or 25 years old. They're used for expanding the body tissues.
After that, they're just needed for replacing skin and the cells that are turning over rapidly need cysteine, methionine, and tryptophan, but if you eat the young person's requirement of those amino acids when you're 40 or 50, they tend to promote overgrowth, promoting inflammation, excite a toxicity of the nerves, and promote tumor growth. So they're associated with shortening the lifespan. Gelatin lacks those, so it's a very safe protein that can be added to those other proteins to balance it out and give you a mature person's protein requirement.
Dr. Nelson Oh, you mean like the Great Lakes gelatin or that kind of product? Dr. Peat Yeah, that's a good one that I've used a lot. Dr. Nelson Okay, so they don't have the three that we don't need? Dr. Peat Yeah, gelatin is used as basically the stiffening glue that holds our other cells together, and it tends to increase with age. You won't increase your rate of collagen production by eating gelatin. It just serves to prevent the unnecessary stimulation of tissue growth. A lot of people are selling gelatin, calling it collagen.
Collagen is the raw form in your tissues. To buy actual collagen costs something like $10 a gram, because it can't be purified in a sterile form without great lab processing. Dr. Nelson I see. So if you're going to really want collagen, you should just get collagen from, I don't know, pig's feet and all the cam hocks and stuff like that, huh? Chicken? Dr. Peat Yeah, that's natural. Wait, wait a minute. Chicken backs and wings and feet, for example, are the traditional ways to, when a person
is sick, they found that giving them gelatinous chicken soup is therapeutic. Dr. Nelson And so one of the reasons is the collagen and all the good things, the amino acids and things that they have? Dr. Peat Yeah, and the absence of those excitatory amino acids is part of its benefit. Dr. Nelson And the excitatory again are what, glycine? Dr. Peat No, glycine is the quieting. It can be used in the brain as part of excitation, but its normal function, and proline, these are the two protective energy-providing and stabilizing amino acids.
The ones that can be excitotoxic are tryptophan, cysteine, and methionine. Dr. Nelson And if we just eat animal products, we're getting those in there, Dr. Peat, right? They're already in there in the meats? Dr. Peat Yeah. Dr. Nelson Okay. But so if you take extra stuff, you don't want to take the ones that have those in there because you can get kind of too wound up? Dr. Peat Yeah. The different vegetable proteins vary quite a bit, so you could combine some of them with gelatin to get an optimal balance. Dr. Nelson Oh, I see.
You can add a little gelatin in there too. Cool. Stay right there. Dr. Ray Peat is with us. Patrick Timpani. We have a lot of good emails coming in, and we're going to get to them all, and he'll answer your questions the best he can. We appreciate him coming on from time to time. If you like him, he's one of your faves out there. [email protected], raypeat.com. You can sign up for a newsletter that Dr. Peat has. It's a very, very nominal fee for a couple of years.
I'll ask him what the price is again, but I know it's really, really, really low. It's raypeat.com, and that's where you can find him. Dr. Richard Ulrey, authority on minerals, talks about gut bacteria, making the vitamins, and absorbing the minerals, how it all works. We need vitamins from our gut bacteria so we can absorb minerals, and then minerals provide a resonant frequency. Those minerals carry these frequencies into the body, and multiple minerals will give you a frequency that allows all of our proteins to have individual distinct frequencies, giving that three-dimensional structure.
This is where Wayne's products, Living Stream, and that's the only primary products I carry. When you do a stool test and it says you don't have any bifalbacteria, well, if you don't have any bifalbacteria, you're not going to absorb certain minerals. If you don't have any lactobacillus, you're not going to absorb certain minerals. Here's an idea of a couple of the Living Streams you can take for what we're talking about here. The bifido, Living Streams Multi-Blend, and the living minerals, so you get the minerals, the bifido, and the lactobacillus.
These special probiotics and minerals are all in human DNA form, and they are living alive. In our store on OneRadioNetwork.com. Previously with Dr. Rue Lynn Chiu about her product called Pearlseum. Let's talk about the teeth first. Explain to me what's going on, because there's something magical when you dip your little toothbrush in water. Why do they look so sparkly and just, I don't know, something very energetically about the look of them. Yeah, it's very, very magical. So like a group of scientists in France discovered that when you put pearl next to the bones
or skins or other connective tissues, and they find it stimulates new growth of the bones and skins and connective tissues, and also to make existing bones and skins more healthy and stronger. So brush your teeth with the pearl, then your teeth will make your existing teeth stronger, and also it will fill up teeth with the pearlseum, and the pearl powder will stimulate the new bone growth and also make the existing teeth very strong. It's really a great product. You'll love it. Take it internally or on your teeth, and you can click and order.
See the ad right there. Pearlseum, in a nice green container. Pearlseum on OneRadioNetwork.com. If you're looking for a way to exercise and you just want to get something that's really easy, consider our rebounder. It's $3.39 delivered, the rebounder, lifetime warranty. Get one delivered in a few days, set it up, and you're good to go. You just jump up and down and have fun. You don't have to have special shoes. You generally can't hurt yourself unless you fall off. It's one of the coolest ways to exercise. I've been using it for 25 years or so.
You can use weights or just after a meal, just walk in place, rub your tummy. Rebounder or rebounder, and click and order, OneRadioNetwork.com. Ray Peat has come back a few times, and you like him. We appreciate Dr. Peat coming on from time to time and chatting with us. It's fun to talk to you. I love all the research. This is a great question from Jeremy. I just love eggs. I might eat maybe three, four a day. Is it okay? I mean, are these great food? What does Dr. Peat think? All right.
Well, they used to say it was a perfect food. Remember the commercials? Yeah, they used to be the perfect food. I've seen the cholesterol and polyunsaturated fatty acid content analyzed in the 30s, the 50s, the 70s, and then recently there has been a constant decrease in cholesterol content and a constant increase in polyunsaturated fat content. Because of the feed? The feed? Yeah, they're feeding them so efficiently in the energy sense. In the pork industry in the 40s, they found that the highly polyunsaturated fats made the pig gain fat faster with less food.
And so, they shifted from the higher protein and starch foods to the higher polyunsaturated fats. Saturated fats also wasted energy so the pigs stayed lean. That spread over to the other branches of agriculture and chicken feed has become more and more polyunsaturated. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, let's say though a lot of our listeners have access to really good eggs, the real good yard eggs and even feed that doesn't have soy and it's all organic at the farmers' markets. Now, if you're getting a really good egg like that, is it a perfect food then?
Yeah, when I'm in Mexico and know where the eggs come from, the chickens get tortillas and vegetables and lots of bugs and so on, then I'll eat four or five eggs a day and it's okay to eat more. One person was in the news, he's eaten a dozen eggs a day for 40 years or something like that. No kidding, yeah, yeah. The cholesterol myth was created by the seed oil industry, especially cottonseed people wanted to sell their product on the basis that it lowered cholesterol and things that lower cholesterol generally cause cancer and degenerative disease.
But in an experiment many years ago, medical students were fed, I think it was 22 eggs was the point at which they could show an increase in their serum cholesterol. At 15 eggs a day, there was no increase because their natural liver production of cholesterol was inhibited when they were eating it as if the body recognizes that it doesn't have to make cholesterol when it's getting the amount in 15 eggs. The studies that showed the increase of serum cholesterol from eggs, the first ones were done in diabetic, hospitalized, very sick patients.
But when you look at healthy young people, you need lots and lots of eggs with no change in your blood cholesterol level. There was a fellow that used to promote a kind of a live food diet, Agnes von der Planets, and he claimed that he worked with people over the years that they really had bad stomach problems that he would just have them do like a dozen raw eggs a day for a week and it usually straightened things out. It's pretty strange. Have you ever heard about that?
Yeah, I've seen several people, one a year and a half old kid, the second one was a man about 70 years old. Both of them had a diagnosis of leukemia and somewhere I had heard about the effect of egg on the leukemia virus or something related to leukemia. So I suggested an eggnog, sort of an Orange Julius formula, egg, milk, sugar, orange juice or vanilla. And both of these first two people who tried it had a recovery, no more leukemia symptoms. So over the years, I've suggested that several times for lymphoma and leukemia in particular,
but in general, it's just you don't have to make it your exclusive diet, but having an Orange Julius once in a while is very good for your health. Yeah, yeah. A big difference between raw or cooking the eggs, do we think? Oh, yeah, there have been experiments that show that something in the raw egg yolk is germicidal and helps to disinfect the intestine, which somewhat is decreased by cooking it, but still you get almost all the benefit from a cooked egg.
But it's better to cook it as little as possible so that the yolk is still runny because the presence of the polyunsaturated fat makes it very easily oxidized and damaged by heat. You mentioned pigs and when we speak about these, let's say we're talking about really well tended, well fed, well cared for pigs and not just commercial, right? Big difference. So if we can get this kind of a product, any issues in your mind with pork? Yeah, but for about 50 years, the Department of Agriculture called lard a saturated fat.
They hadn't checked their figures since the 1930s, but a more recent study showed that it's, I think it was 32 or 33% polyunsaturated fats in lard. So it ranks up with the worst of the liquid oils for oxidizability. When I was a kid, grocery stores would have blocks of lard sitting out at room temperature just like a lump of butter. But recently I saw lard in a plastic bag looking like a liquid fat. Oh boy. And what was that made out of, that stuff? That shows the change of diet on the fat.
When the source of energy is mostly starch and protein, the animal turns it into mostly saturated fat. Oh, real good stuff. It's good stuff. Yeah, solid lard, which stimulates your metabolism rather than poisoning it. I see, I see. If you are eating a vegetable fat, if it grows in the tropics, it'll be more saturated because the temperature of the organism governs the saturation of the fats that it makes. So chocolate, for example, cocoa butter grown in the tropics is highly saturated. Liquid oil is highly saturated because the polyunsaturated fats are extremely unstable
at 90 degrees or 100 degrees Fahrenheit, which is our body temperature. So the plants that produce those fats would die if they were producing polyunsaturated fats because they would simply die of oxygen reaction poisoning. Oh wow. Patrick Timpone, Ray Peat, it's April 29, 2019. Here's an email. Can Mr. Peat recommend any kind of foods or supplements that could help someone recovering from long-term inflammatory bowel disease, cause hair loss, sharp drop in lean body mass, skin that doesn't seem to heal, and for minor cuts, scrapes, and bruises?
The avoiding the things that produce inflammation and those are the basic thing that amplifies and sustains inflammation are the polyunsaturated fats and the bacteria that feed on indigestible plant matter. We don't have enzymes to break down cellulose and lignin and the woody fibers in plants. And so if starches and fats are associated with those indigestible polysaccharides, then they will be protected against our digestive system and feed bacteria in the lower intestine and cause the absorption of bacterial toxins, endotoxin and others.
And so for example, lettuce, if you eat it in a salad, it's going to be an ideal bacteria food. So if you have a tough intestine, you can stand the growth of the bacteria, but if you're at all prone to inflammation, then lettuce or other undercooked vegetables are going to feed the bacteria that produce bowel inflammation. And so overcooked vegetables are actually more nutritious than raw or partly cooked vegetables. An experiment with rats showed that even rats can't live on raw vegetables as an exclusive diet, but they thrived on canned vegetables that are overcooked.
So this could be the reason why some people just don't do that well on raw foods. Yeah. And especially if you have colitis, a milk and egg diet, for example, is often therapeutic for colitis. Very interesting. Here's a fellow, "Mom recently underwent mastectomy to remove a lump and they prescribed an anti-estrogen medication. It caused a severe reaction. A lot of muscle pain, bone pain, nausea, dizziness." Can Mr. Peek give his opinion of what could be going on here with mom? The anti-estrogen drugs have many effects other than suppressing estrogen.
You can powerfully decrease estrogen production, inhibiting aromatase. If you thoroughly cut out polyunsaturated fats and use aspirin and other natural substances are the things that block the production of estrogen. Aspirin is just one of the natural substances blocking aromatase and it's very safe to use in breast cancer. Progesterone is another. There are several plant-derived substances that are inhibitors of aromatase, but cutting out the polyunsaturated fats, they produce prostaglandins and the prostaglandins are the main force activating aromatase and estrogen production. Excellent. This is a fellow in Switzerland. His father had cancer in the oral tissues.
Now he's free from cancer, but the x-rays have caused bone necrosis in his jaw. Anything that he could do from this x-ray damage? Can x-ray damage actually cause bone necrosis? Yeah. About 30 or 40 years ago, I noticed that I was getting a circle of white whiskers and I realized that that circle represented where the x-ray gun had been used to make dental x-rays. Wow. Right after that, each time I had dental x-rays, I would get leukoplasia on the inside of my cheek that would swell up and get bitten accidentally.
That would clear up when I eventually got enough vitamin A, but the x-ray destroys first the vitamin A and E and vitamin B2, the things that are light sensitive are the first to be destroyed by even low dose x-ray or ultraviolet light. These essential growth factors, regulatory factors, are destroyed in the bone because the x-ray penetrates pretty well even into the bone. Getting your essential nutrients up would be the first defense. Vitamin D and calcium are the first anti-inflammatory and restorative things, especially for the bone and keeping the cortisol and prolactin down.
Besides the vitamin D and calcium effect, which tend to lower prolactin and cortisol, having your energy coming from carbohydrates rather than fats is protective. Again, the aspirin effect keeps the prostaglandin production down. An anti-inflammatory program protects against bone loss as well as cancer. Excellent. I know that Dr. Peat considers estrogen kind of pro-aging. If high testosterone, for example, gives a man attractive traits like strong, muscular, deep voice, and courage and all of that, then high estrogen woman is usually the one with attractive broad hips, large breasts, and narrow waist.
Being an artist, what does Dr. Peat think about estrogen as a factor in female physical attractiveness? That's an interesting question. It does increase the fat on the thighs and hips when everything else is in good balance, and it's one of the essential things for breast growth. But if it comes at the wrong time and in the wrong place, it's also a masculinizing factor. It will shift the balance in an embryo towards male development rather than female. It's progesterone which protects the female against the masculinizing effects of estrogen.
You have to have a generous supply of progesterone to keep down the cortisol, which is promoted by estrogen. If you give an animal a large dose of estrogen, the first thing you're likely to see is bleeding adrenal glands because they're so overstimulated trying to make more cortisol to balance the estrogen that it will destroy the adrenals if the estrogen is very high. But short of that, it raises your cortisol and related stress hormones, and the circulating free fatty acids are increased by estrogen.
So when the estrogen isn't blocked by progesterone, you get these stress syndromes, including belly fat. Dr. Ray Peat's with us. Here's an interesting question. I have a 10-year-old daughter, very close to entering puberty, poor appetite, skinny, has some dental issues, tendency to be tired and cold, very emotionally sensitive for any drama, watching movies. Apart from general love and support, could Dr. Peat offer any kind of ideas, could be a good strategy to help to get her going? And should we have our thyroid or steroid hormones measured?
Yeah, it's good to check her temperature and pulse rate and see how they compare with kids of that age. But as the estrogen starts rising after the age of six, especially nine, 10, and 11, the estrogen is blocking the thyroid gland. In teenage girls, you often see a puffiness at the bottom of the neck, which indicates that the thyroid gland is producing something, but it isn't secreting the active hormone. So the gland enlarges under the influence of estrogen. And girls often have a crease above and below where the thyroid is because of that puffing effect.
Boys of the same age don't have creases in those areas because it's very common for the pubescent girl to have the bulging thyroid gland because the gland is trying to produce the hormone, but it isn't able to release it into the bloodstream. And that will be detectable in the blood if the doctor knows how to recognize the indicators. Vitamin D and calcium work closely with the thyroid and sugar metabolism. It's been pretty much ignored that vitamin D is connected to energy and sugar metabolism,
but your thyroid can't work properly if you're low in vitamin D and calcium. And so getting lots of milk and cheese and eggs is important. But a lot of the high phosphate foods like nuts, beans, and meats, a moderate amount of those, but plenty of leafy vegetables, well-cooked cheese, eggs, and milk, and probably a supplement of vitamin D unless you're able to get hours of sunlight on a lot of your skin every day. Those are some good ideas. On the 29th of April, I would like to know Dr. Peat's opinion on using the pure pine
gum spirits or turpentine internally. Does he have any opinion about the good, bad, or the ugly with using that? I've known lots of people who used it, and it isn't as dangerous as a lot of doctors will lead you to believe, but you do have to be careful with it because it can in itself be irritating. I always painted with it, enjoyed the smell of it, and felt it was very harmless, maybe beneficial, but the research has been biased against it by the funding from the pharmaceutical industry that has something fancier to sell.
Here's an email. Is it okay to take bioidentical hormones as long as they are balanced if one has breast cancer, ER plus PRH is HER2 plus? I don't know what that means. They test for the receptors. The ER plus. Yeah, estrogen receptor positive, but the receptors just mean that the cell is able to produce and respond to hormones, and when it lacks those receptors, it's usually the most dangerous type of cancer, but the presence of those receptors is almost always misinterpreted by doctors.
The presence of estrogen, instead of depending on the ovaries as the source, once you get an irritation, the breast itself begins producing estrogen internally, and what you need to do is first find a way to reduce that by reducing the polyunsaturated fats and prostaglandins inhibiting it with things such as aspirin. The function of progesterone is on all of the cells where they have a progesterone receptor, progesterone inhibits cell division and knocks out the estrogen receptor and can inhibit the aromatase that produces estrogen.
So where they tell you to avoid progesterone because it has the receptors for it, the receptor means it's able to be inhibited by progesterone, but bioidentical estrogen is just as harmful as a synthetic estrogen. They're all doing the same thing, activating the cell, shifting the metabolism away from glucose towards fat and towards the inflammatory intrinsic production of estrogen, so it becomes self-amplifying. Dr. Ray Peat, Patrick Timpone, OneRadioNetwork.com. Good morning. Great stuff. What would Dr. Peat recommend for rheumatoid arthritis in both knees and wrists?
I do not eat junk food, lots of vegetables, some fruits, bone broths, organic, everything organic, grass-fed. I do some milk. I do like cottage cheese, Nancy's brand organic, and butter, but just have these kind of things going on in the knees. With cottage cheese, you want to make sure it doesn't have added lactic acid because bacterial lactic acid is pro-inflammatory. Cottage cheese is very good if it doesn't contain added things. It'll say lactic acid right on the label if you don't want that.
In general, you want the anti-inflammatory foods, but when you say bone broth, the collagen, which is the main benefit of good bone broth, it is around the knobby end bones, the joints, more than the long bones. The long bone contains marrow, which is very rich in iron, and you don't want an excess of iron when you have arthritis. I ran across a woman who was convinced that her doctor knew what he was doing in prescribing estrogen for her rheumatoid arthritis, but when I talked to her, she couldn't get off the couch.
Her husband helped her from the bed to the couch, but I talked to her two or three times for an hour explaining what estrogen does to the inflammatory systems, and she was convinced that her doctor knew that estrogen should be helping. But when she finally tried giving up her estrogen pills, immediately she recovered from her rheumatoid arthritis. A woman was visiting Eugene from Sweden. She had had, I think it was three joint replacements and was going to have all of her other main joints replaced with ball and socket mechanisms. She gave her some progesterone.
She oiled herself all over with progesterone, and she immediately had no more symptoms of rheumatoid arthritis. She spent her time in Eugene walking around, enjoying the parks, and said she was going to not have any more joints replaced. When you get the estrogen down and the progesterone up, whether you do it with diet or supplements, one of the reasons aspirin is helpful for rheumatoid arthritis is that it turns your estrogen production down and progesterone up. An Italian researcher named Cutolo has shown that estrogen is being produced in the arthritic
joint, and that the problem is to reduce the estrogen, not to increase it. Then if you're doing bone broth for it, you said, "Get some of these, I think you can find pig joints and these knuckles and things like that, not necessarily the long bones where you get marrow and then too much iron, and that's bad for..." Yeah, the joint is full of tendons and ligaments. Yeah, that's what you want, all the gooey stuff in there. Dr. Ray P. Patrick Timpone, Dr. David Jebb will be here tomorrow, and we'll stick around
for a few more minutes here and wrap up all these emails. Patrick at OneRadioNetwork.com. Previously, Peter from Rhode Island called and talked a bit about his experience with Living Streams probes. In general, what I've noticed is digestion so much better. I've actually lost weight in places where it's like around the middle a little bit where I've been trying for years to lose weight, and I don't know why. I could make up some good reasons. Maybe I'm digesting my food better. Maybe some of these probes are digesting the stuff that's there.
I don't, you know, it's like, who knows, but it's working. Good for you. Good for you. Yeah, I think you're onto something. I mean, who knows? Maybe the buggies are eating some stuff that should not be there, and that's why you're losing some weight. Maybe you're digesting your food better. Maybe all of the above. Maybe you're getting more minerals, which makes everything work better. It could be all of the above, you know, and multiple choice quiz. Thanks for calling, Peter.
This builds on the argument that when we get the gut biome more in balance, good things happen on all different levels. So yeah, a lot of good things can happen with these probiotics in there. And of course, the immune system is right there in the gut. There's a great variety of them. You can call Maryland for more information on what each one of them are kind of pointed towards, 360-912-2981. That number is 360-912-2981. Call me or email me, and I know a lot about the products. Living Streams Probiotics in our store, oneradionetwork.com.
Years ago, I recall David Wolf suggesting that all foods, superfoods, actually just gives our body information. And this came out the last time we talked with Daniel Vitalis about colostrum. I imagine people being born with an unformatted immune system, and colostrum helps to format that. It helps to recognize viral and bacterial invaders early, and it also helps to restore and heal the lining of the gut that's damaged in so many people, and one of the sources of inflammation and low immunity.
So it restores that gut lining at the same time that it educates the immune system on how to better fight off pathogens that get into our bodies. - And it's pretty cool too, I think, because moms can put it in the smoothies quite easily for the kids. And it's yummy, and they get some good stuff. - Yeah, it's really great to blend into smoothies. You can make chocolates with it. You can put it into anything that you're cooking, and so it's easy to get into your kids and into other family members.
It tastes great, and it's actually very versatile in the kitchen, so you can use it in place of a lot of other products. - Yes, and it's very tasty and fun and easy to use. Sometimes just late at night, you can take warm water with colostrum in there before bed, and hmm, it's a great product, a lot of benefits. - Click on any Surthrival link, colostrum1radionetwork.com. - Yeah, it's good, and you can get two kilo, one kilo, whatever you want there.
And also, that's the place you get pine pollen and elk velvet antler, and the shaga and the reishi, all in my ring glass. Excellent website, Surthrival. Through our website, if you would, click away and see if they might have some products there that you'd like to play around with. - No, the source on One Radio Network. - You can learn more about Dr. Ray Peat through his website, it's rayPeat.com, and sign up for his newsletter. Lots and lots of stuff on his website, some cool articles, and he really kind of digs deep down in there.
Patrick Timpone, April 29th. We appreciate Dr. Peat coming on from time to time, thank you. Dr. Peat, it's so cool that you connect volatile organic compounds to nanoparticles. Can you please explain more about this? I didn't know you did that, and when did you do that? - My most recent newsletter was about particles, especially nanoparticles, but larger particles are harmful too. They do different things in different ways. The nanoparticles happen to be more efficient at activating inflammation, but the larger
particles, as much as 10 times the diameter of a red blood cell, can pass through the wall of the intestine into the blood vessels, and those particles can obstruct arterioles and kill a whole region of cells. So the plastic particles are getting into our food supply, all different sizes, from a hundredth as big as a bacterium to 10 times as big as a red blood cell, a great range of particle sizes all have their different toxic effects, and the larger particles in particular can be coated with these volatile organic, especially polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons,
which are carcinogenic in themselves. They tend to stick to the surface of some of these particles and get carried into the bloodstream by passing through the wall of the intestine. The process is called persortrum, and it's been observed for about almost 200 years, and over 100 years ago, the second major study was done. Then starting in the '60s, a German researcher has published many, many studies on it, and it's a very common process. It happens whenever you eat undercooked starch, for example, starch particles pass through
into the bloodstream unless they're in the presence of enough food to energize the intestine cells to keep them from being leaky. The leaky intestine isn't just a matter of having holes between cells, but the individual cell is weak because it doesn't have enough energy to maintain its internal structure. It becomes slightly more tolerant of particles and fluids passing through unchanged. A particle will just press its way into the substance of a cell and pop out the other side into a blood vessel. That has been overlooked intentionally because a doctrine taught to all biologists, practically,
that a cell has a barrier membrane and that it has to deliberately ingest a particle. The only barrier is that the cell is energized to maintain a water repellent effect. When it loses energy, it becomes more tolerant to watery substances and particles. They can pass right into the substance of the cell. Wow, that's pretty geeky. So what's the takeaway for our listeners as far as avoiding nanoparticles? What's the takeaway from what you said? Clothes are being treated with particles that have a deodorant action, silver particles, for example.
When these contact your sweaty skin, the silver particles can actually pass through your skin into your bloodstream. Toothpaste is often massively containing nanoparticles or larger particles just because they assure you that they aren't intended to be nanoparticles. Still the microparticles, once they're in contact with your mouth membranes or if they're swallowed, they can pass into your bloodstream. Salad dressings are often thickened with nanoparticles or close to nanoparticles. Fumed silica is particles of glass basically so fine that they will float in the air.
These are used as a thickening substance in foods and you notice lots of supplements contain silica and titanium dioxide, silicon dioxide. These are often designed to be larger particles but even the apparently not nano, only microparticles, these still can contain the nanoparticles that are most pro-inflammatory resembling asbestos for their effects on cells. So obviously the more natural state we can eat our foods, the better we're going to stay away from these guys. Yeah, processed foods are increasingly being contaminated. You never know either, right? I mean, they have an ingredient.
For example, there are things called food-grade lubricants to use on your machinery containing Teflon microparticles as a lubricant but they're food-grade because they know they're going to contaminate the food but they don't show up on the label because they're just a processing aid. So when a food is processed, if it comes in contact with machinery, it might be contaminated with food-grade Teflon lubricant. Yeah, wow. Dr. Ray Peat, another little plug then for our sulfur. A lot of the sulfur out there, almost all of it has silicon dioxide because they put
it into capsules and they use it to make the machine work. Another reason why you just want to get the pure stuff like we sell. If you want sulfur, don't mess around with all these different excipients. They call them excipients. Let's go to a phone for Dr. Ray Peat. Good morning. Who's this? On the telephone? Hello? Well, we lost them. We'll go right back to the email here. Okay. Would Dr. Ray Peat recommend having the mercury amalgams removed in people with neurodegenerative issues? Oh, he's got some mercury.
You want to get those out if somebody's got some neuro things going on? No, if they're old, they probably have released almost all of the mobile mercury and an old filling, I think it's better to not mess with it. You're going to damage the tooth more taking it out. Yeah, a lot of dentists recommend with you there. If it's really old, you can mess things up more than... Animal experiments, in rats, they would pull a molar and test it, its mental abilities. They found that its memory was impaired with each molar extraction.
That is just because the mouth nerves are closely related to the brain function. So the more toxic or traumatic experience your jawbone has, the more it's going to affect your nerve stability. Interesting. Let's try the phone again. This morning on the phone, who's this? Yes, this is Brenda. Hi, Brenda, you're on the air with Dr. Ray Peat. Okay. I just heard a little bit earlier him talking about estrogen and all, and I just had a question. I've been doing the bioidentical estrogen testosterone pellets for over four years.
And I mean, I'm like 65, so I'm post-menopausal, and then I take progesterone supplements also, but I feel really great. But I was thinking, but he's saying, you know, taking estrogen of any kind, although I had never done just the synthetic. That's why I wanted to do these pellets since they say they're supposed to be like 98% natural as much as our body produces. So I just wondered. Testosterone makes everyone feel good, male or female, but the women get the same effect pretty much from DHEA, which is the precursor of testosterone, and pregnenolone and DHEA
both will optimize your progesterone and testosterone without as much risk of excess estrogen. After the age of about 35, the fat tissues in particular, the more fat there is in the body, the more likely it is to produce estrogen, and that becomes a continuous rather than a cyclic production of the estrogen. Normally in a cycling woman, you have about two or three days of strong effective estrogen, then it's knocked out by progesterone. The cyclic effect is if it's knocked out thoroughly by cyclic progesterone two or three weeks
of every month, then the estrogen is not carcinogenic. But if it's not interrupted, it becomes even a small amount of uninterrupted estrogen as a higher degree of cancer producing. And progesterone, it's normally produced cyclically and the liver throws off the excess when it's been present for more than two weeks. And so you start losing the effectiveness of progesterone if you don't interrupt it and let the liver reset itself so it doesn't throw the progesterone off. Did that help you, Brenda, or are you confused? Yeah, well, a little. I'm still confused.
It's like, oh, trying to figure out what would be the better thing to do. But you're feeling good now, though? Feeling good now? Uh-huh. Okay. Well. Yeah. But I've just wondered, like, for how many years it's supposed to be good to keep doing it. Yeah, sure. I have wondered about that. Yeah. There's really no need to supplement estrogen because all of the tissues as they age start to produce estrogen. The skin, uterus, breast, even the liver cells can start producing estrogen rather than excreting it. Testosterone has protective effects like progesterone.
I think the reason women live on average longer than men is because they have more progesterone where a man's progesterone production is very low in relation to testosterone. And progesterone can't be converted to estrogen where testosterone can. So progesterone is more protective in aging than testosterone is. Well, I hope this helps with you, Brenda. Okay. All right. Thank you so much. Bye. Bye. Jeanette says, "I've enjoyed your show with Dr. Peat. Thank you for having him on. I hope he keeps coming back regularly.
I started eating chicken necks, carrot salad, oranges to help my thyroid with great results. I feel warmer, have more energy." And would you please ask him this? Okay. So far, so good. "How does canned milk compare to fresh milk in terms of nutritional value?" Canned milk. I don't know what they mean, canned milk. You mean like... Oh, concentrated. Concentrated. Yeah. It used to be very popular for... Sure. Maybe for... Yeah. And coffee additive. But there was a discovery in the 1970s that they were soldering the cans with lead and
milk contained much too high a lead concentration. But I think they've revised the manufacture of cans. I haven't checked recently, but I think canned milk is now prepared in a way that doesn't contain high amounts of lead. And all you lose is a little bit of the vitamin quality and you have a little bit of oxidized fatty material from the heat process. It is not as good as fresh milk, but you have a gradient from fresh raw milk to pasteurized milk to ultra-pasteurized to canned milk. And each time it loses a little value.
But I use pasteurized milk almost always. You don't have a problem with pasteurized. She wants to know, "Is goat milk, kefir, and goat cheese good sources for calcium and protein?" Very good. Good. All right. Let's move on to another one. Patrick Timpani, oneradionetwork.com. I believe Ray Peat mentioned on a past show, taking supplemental iodine does not do anything for the thyroid in his last show with you. I've taken some iodine and it virtually gives me wonderful energy, which I'm loving because I often have no energy.
So I'm kind of confused on what could be going on. I wonder if it's safe to take iodine every day. Iodine can interact with the polyunsaturated fats in your body, producing an antithyroid substance. And I've got a file of about 70 articles showing that the increased iodine in the diet as a result of iodized salt, it has produced a thyroid disease increase and that's correlated with increased thyroid cancer as well as various degrees of thyroiditis and nodules of the thyroid, probably because of its interaction with the polyunsaturated fats in the diet.
And in some people, at least, iodine in excess has an anti-inflammatory value. So it has been used therapeutically to reduce inflammation and can, for example, help polycystic breasts. But when it's taken chronically in large amounts, its tendency is to have an antithyroid effect. So if you took too much, you could actually cause a Hashimoto's? Yeah. This person says, "I also read somewhere that iodine helps to control estrogen. Does Mr. Peat agree with this?" That's the anti-inflammatory effect. You can demonstrate that a very high amount of iodine reduces inflammation and counteracts that inflammatory effect of estrogen.
But some people have the reverse effect, they get an inflammatory reaction to even small amounts of iodine. So you have to be very careful if you're experimenting with it. Dr. Ray Peat, Patrick D'Emponi, we'll do a few more. I don't know if you can do this one, but you tell me, Dr. Peat. I never really heard a clear explanation of how the male hormone system works. Would it be possible for Dr. Peat to give us this on a show? Well, it's infinitely complicated, but it's a lot simpler than female hormones because
there isn't that powerful cyclic effect. A woman goes through two distinct phases. The estrogen is knocked out by the progesterone, where a man constantly has to deal with those same effects. If you think of it in terms of a long-range stress effect, testosterone for most of your lifespan is having an anti-stress effect, but if your thyroid is interfered with in any way, radiation or too much of certain amino acids or not enough nutrients, a slow thyroid will shift you over to the conversion of testosterone to estrogen. That's where the degenerative problems start.
Testosterone should protect your nervous system just like progesterone and protects against cancer, but when your energy is reduced by a falling thyroid function, then it becomes analogous to the female's problem. I see. Do you ever recommend to folks to take the actual supplemental testosterone, the pellets and that kind of stuff? Well, a pellet is probably better than an oily injection. I would recommend it if it was available as pure testosterone, but it's typically sold as testosterone esters, a completely chemically different substance that's dissolved in vegetable
oil, often with a solvent, a benzoyl alcohol, which is in itself toxic, neurotoxic, but the vegetable oil has its toxic effect in the muscle if it's injected IM, so it's a matter of how it is available. So I don't often recommend it because usually an injection will contain 50 or 100 milligrams of this testosterone ester and a young man might produce four or five milligrams a day of the actual testosterone, so you get these huge excesses as well as the toxic breakdown products of the solvent that are real drawbacks to the use of pharmaceutical supplements.
So if you can get a real pure testosterone, it might be okay to use? Yeah, and it produces great physical, mental effects. DHEA as a precursor to testosterone is very easily available, and again, you don't want to take unphysiologically huge amounts. I've known men who developed an enlarged liver with estrogen as high as a young woman's when they were taking 25 milligrams a day of DHEA. A full replacement dose is around 15 milligrams, which an 80 or 90-year-old man might need. I see, 15 milligrams. Anything with the DHEA for the T or just by itself?
Just by itself is fine. Just a little bit, though, just a little bit. Many plant toxins, writes an email, or antibiotics, for example, chlorellin, C-H-L-O-R-E-L-L-I-N, and allopathy is the science devoted to it. Can you recommend any effective natural antibiotics to folks who don't want to go to medical doctors? Yeah, the two that I think are safest for actually killing organisms are flowers of sulfur for use on the skin and intestine. Two hundred milligrams orally in two or three days, it can kill off the most toxic of the intestinal bacteria and fungus. No kidding.
On the skin, it has been used not only for fungus infections of the skin, just dusting on flowers of sulfur or using 10% sulfur soap to wash with, leaves a residue of sulfur on the skin, but it can be used for scabies even. A salve made of mixing butter with flowers of sulfur was tested and found just as effective as the brain toxic insecticides or scabicides that are used medically. But this flowers of sulfur, you do take it internally, two hundred milligrams? Yeah. And it works on intestinal bacteria, the bad guys?
Yeah, the fungus has been the best studied. Candida, for example, secretes enzymes that convert the yellow crystalline sulfur, convert it to sulfuric acid and poison themselves or hydrogen sulfide. So they locally create a toxic condition that kills them, but it is very, very harmless to the intestine if you take a very small amount like 200 milligrams. Flowers of sulfur. So that's very different from the sulfur we promote, the pure sulfur, right? This is a whole other product that's created from sulfur called flowers of sulfur?
It's the very fine particles of sulfur, but they're quickly dissolved and metabolized by the organisms. So I've never heard of a problem with... I'll be darned. I've never even heard of that idea of flowers of sulfur, but that's a good antibiotic. And aspirin, when it's used with the standard antibiotics, it can greatly increase their effectiveness. But all by itself, it has antibiotic antiviral as well as antibacterial and antifungal effects. It's too cheap to be of interest pharmaceutically. There was a study treating AIDS patients with just aspirin, large doses, and the results
seemed very favorable, but no one promoted it. Okay, it was too cheap, right? What about some folks who take aspirin preventive-wise or just in general? I mean, is it okay? Yeah, it's something I do just from the known protective effects of it. I'll be darned. Just a little bare aspirin? Yeah, anywhere from 100 to 300 milligrams. I think one of the regular... Aren't the regular pills about 300, something like that? It's hard to even find a pure bare aspirin. They want to do all kinds of weird things to it. Oh, yeah.
You can buy a pound of aspirin for about $10 or $15. Oh, you mean just pure aspirin, like chemical stores, something like that? It should be USP grade. USP aspirin. Is Dr. Peat familiar with NR? Have you heard of that? For improving our lifespan? Yeah, NR. Just the letters NR. Correct. The only product I know is Nature's Remedy. I'm not sure what they have in mind. That's okay. What does Dr. Peat recommend eating for balancing progesterone? Is it only an orange if progesterone supplementation is required? Do you recommend a drop of the cream nowadays?
How does one know when supplementation is required? My wife said that she feels like a million bucks when she was pregnant and her progesterone levels were somewhat normal. The pregnancy effect is anti-aging. There were studies in rabbits that showed that each pregnancy, the estrogen aged the connective tissues, but the pregnancy left the rabbit younger than it had been during and before the pregnancy. So they looked at longevity figures for I think it was in the hundreds of thousands of women in Hungary and they saw a very neat relationship.
Lifespan increased in proportion to the number of babies they had had up to eight babies per woman, they had the longest life expectancy, showing apparently the same pregnancy effect, leaving a residually higher progesterone level in the body, reversing the pro-aging effects of estrogen. Very interesting. Here's an email. "I went through menopause 13 years ago and I'm no estrogen or progesterone from any urine test I've done. My doctor wants to put me on a compound hormone replacement therapy, but people have said no don't do it.
My question is, would just taking progesterone help me with dryness, painful intercourse, and the feeling of learned helplessness?" Typically it does. If you create learned helplessness in animals, their estrogen goes up and progesterone goes down and you can reverse it with either progesterone or active thyroid hormone. And when you give animals an entertaining, free environment, lots of things to do, their progesterone goes up and their estrogen goes down. And with aging, the serum estrogen goes down along with the serum progesterone, but that
doesn't reflect the actual biological situation because estrogen is formed in any kind of cell that's under stress, but it is bound by the so-called estrogen receptor or estrogen binding proteins inside cells. It's produced there and retained inside cells and can't get into the bloodstream in the absence of progesterone. Progesterone's function is to knock out not only the aromatase that makes estrogen, but to knock out the estrogen receptor that binds it and keeps it in cells. So when you give someone postmenopausal who has very low blood or serum estrogen, you
give them progesterone, suddenly the cells expel their estrogen. The liver detoxifies it, makes it water-soluble to leave in the kidneys. So the woman who is most under the influence of estrogen because of having no progesterone will show almost zero estrogen in the serum because it's all inside cells. I see. The fellow wrote back, "The NR was nicodiamide riboside precursor to NAD, supposed to be key to longevity and regeneration." Those already reduced substances, I'm skeptical that they're even making it into the cells without being oxidized en route unless you inject them intravenously.
Even then, the blood contains things that can oxidize them. But just taking niacinamide will increase your intracellular NAD. That's very simple to do and economical and harmless. And it's harmless and that could increase strength and longevity. Yeah, the NAD is very important and is increased by supplementing niacinamide. Finally here, then we'll let you go. And I wanted to just get your opinion from me. What's your make of this, your take on this whole big gluten thing that we've experienced in what, the last 15 years? And of course now they have gluten-free aisles at the store.
Give me your perspective on what went on here and what is going on with gluten sensitivity here with all your research. There's an article on my website about gluten. It happens to interact with stress and estrogen. The gluten molecule oddly has a stretch of amino acids that resembles proteins that are involved with stress, inflammation and estrogen. And so if you're stressed and tending to have high estrogen, you're creating a molecular antigen surface that responds to gluten in your diet. But if you're in very good condition, have your estrogen under control, the gluten is
digested properly without presenting that antigenic toxic effect. So a lot of this gluten stuff is tied in with stress? Yeah. Wow. Just like everything, huh? Yeah, it's a hormonal, immunological process that gluten just happens to be a molecule that has this stretch of amino acids that gives us a signal that amplifies our own stress inflammatory reactions. Looking back, do you have a good sense of how this whole gluten sensitivity, gluten-free thing started? Yeah, I think a bad diet that creates inflammation by not enough protein, having unsaturated
rather than saturated fats and generally poor nutrition and having improperly leavened bread, blowing up the bread quickly rather than soaking it for 12 hours in the old-fashioned leavening machine, the soaking to let it leaven naturally with yeast, in those 12 hours at approximately room temperature, the gluten was digested by the enzymes in the wheat germ and the pre-digestion kept us from being exposed to gluten. So when they make the bread economically and quickly, the gluten stays there and gives the bread a rubbery, elastic texture that is pleasant to eat because it tends to be
moist and soft. But that gluten which makes the bread economical and pleasant to eat happens to be endogenic and allergenic. So there's a lot going on in the gluten world with doctors and stuff and healing that's maybe just not right. Yeah, many years ago I was interested in baking bread and made very tasty bread with a 12-hour leavening process. I had previously noticed that eating a slice of standard grocery store bread would make me have bad sleep, digestive discomfort that woke me up repeatedly.
When I baked my own bread that was leavened, I could eat a whole loaf of it at bedtime and sleep perfectly. Oh, you mean because you were using yeast and you just leavened it and you did... Or was it a sourdough thing, sourdough culture? Yeah, it was soaked for 12 hours. That destroys almost all the gluten, converts it to nutritious protein. So it's not only less pro-inflammatory but more nutritious. It actually has more protein. Ah, the wonders of the body in science and research. You just keep on digging.
Well, Dr. Peat, thanks for coming back and being with us. Okay, thank you. Yeah, I really enjoyed having you on. Your website, how do folks get your newsletter? The email address is [email protected]. That's $28 for 12 issues over two years. That's great. [email protected]. We'll put that on the show page if folks want to click. Good job. Well, Dr. Peat, have a pleasant day there. And again, our appreciation for your time. Okay, thank you. Thank you, sir. Bye. Dr. Ray Peat comes on from time to time.
Been pretty regular and we'll just keep asking him because we love listening to all this cool stuff. Okay, kids, we're going to do Dr. David Jupp tomorrow. Can you believe it? Yeah, he's a handful. He's going to be fun. He's written like 10 books since we've last talked to him, which I don't know how long ago it's been. I'll have to look on our website. But he's going to be fun. He'll be here tomorrow. So thanks for your ongoing support.
We appreciate you going to our website when you want to see some products here and there that you want to try because we've got some good stuff. And we're here for you if we can help in any way. [email protected]. [email protected]. Let me know if I can help with anything. I'm not too far from my computer and in and out of the house and go to the store and whatever we play here. Go to the creek and throw the ball and I'll check the computer every few hours and see
if anything important needs to be dealt with. And I appreciate it. So we'll see you tomorrow. And may the blessings be with you. Broadcasting from the beautiful hill country in Texas, this is Juan, RadioNetwork.com. [MUSIC PLAYING] (upbeat music) [BLANK_AUDIO]