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[Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] (music playing) (music playing) [Music] 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., my wife and I, who's normally with us on the show, are both licensed medical herbalists. We trained in England, graduated there with a master's degree in herbal medicine, and we now run a clinic in Garboville where we consult with clients about a wide range
of conditions and recommend herbal medicine and dietary advice. So you're listening to Ask Your Herb Doctor on KMED 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 how to restore and protect nerves. The number here if you live in the area is 923 3911, or if you live outside the area, there's whole free numbers 1-800-568-3723. And we can also be reached toll free on 1-888-WBM-HERB for consultations or further information Monday through Friday.
So once again, we're very, very privileged to have Dr. Peat and his expertise joining us again this evening. Are you there, Dr. Peat? Yes, hi. Okay, excellent. So once again, for those people who perhaps have never heard of you or heard you speak or heard of your areas of expertise, would you outline your academic and professional background before we get started on tonight's show? Relative to nerve biology, that was my intended major when I went to the University of Oregon as a graduate student in 1968 because I had been interested in linguistics and psychology.
But as soon as I got there, two or three months, I had decided to switch to aging and reproductive physiology because of the great dogmatism in the nerve biology field. And so I spent the four years working on reproductive aging, female reproductive aging in particular. So I concentrated on the effects of estrogen, progesterone, thyroid, oxygen, and antioxidants on the age-related changes in metabolism. Okay, great. And I know for probably the last 35 years, is it, or is it more, you've been doing your own research and you have been in private consulting capacity previously.
I guess it must be 40 years, I think. Sorry. 40 years, okay. Okay, good. Well, I know I've managed to speak to quite a few people over the years who've either come into contact with you or have been, yeah, been given good advice by you and have certainly making very good improvements in their health. So it's always good to be justified by people who are corroborating what you have told them and where they were when they met you and where they subsequently were afterwards. So it's always very heartening.
I know a lot of what you've spoken about in the past has been fairly controversial. I know for me when we first got introduced to you, I think in 2007 or 8, a lot of what you said was very controversial. And in my education in herbal medicine, again, the same dogmatic, what I now know is the same dogmatic and erroneous ideas in science was still perpetrated. And a lot of what you've been uncovering in the last six years or so has certainly got me thinking differently.
Although it's very difficult to unlearn, I know it's a little bit like the constant suggestion that sugar is bad for you. The general public seems to just have it as part of their fact that sugar is bad for you, the same with salt. So I know the last couple of shows we've been talking about diabetes in particular. And I know that your most recent newsletter was relating to nerve damage, and how to protect and nourish nerves and restore them. So I think I wanted to start by saying that the classical description of diabetes was,
or is, a wasting disease where the excess glucose is lost in the urine as a by-product of protein metabolism, and the patient simply wastes away, deprived of the needed energy production to sustain the cellular functions resulting in death. And obesity is now a universal disease recognized even here in the States. And obese diabetics are commonly presenting. So rather than the classic description of diabetes, medicine now erroneously classes diabetes as insulin resistance as well as insulin dependence, which is quite rare. But the truth is quite different mechanistically and more importantly from a treatment perspective.
Would you explain the processes that you understand diabetes to stem from, and outline your approach to its management? My father happened to be an example of the traditional, original type of diabetes. He wasted away to, I think it was under 100 pounds. It was just a few years after insulin had come into medical use. He didn't want to become dependent on it. So he and my mother looked through the old naturopathic medical literature and found that brewer's yeast had sometimes cured people.
And so he went on a brewer's yeast diet for several weeks and recovered his weight and lived the rest of his life with no sign of diabetes. Do you know how much brewer's yeast he was using? That was his only food basically for several weeks. Now just to refresh my memory, I know the B vitamins are the important part of brewer's yeast, but specifically? And there are steroids in it and potassium, a lot of potassium and phosphate, which is not for general health. You can very easily get phosphate poisoning.
But probably it's one of the factors that could be involved in that effect, maybe by having something to do with interfering with stress hormones. Okay, so your father recovered from 100 pounds wasting away using brewer's yeast as a fairly sole dietary constituent. Yeah, and the cause, I think there are probably many causes of the traditional wasting form of diabetes, but a virus is one of the plausible theories that can cause inflammation and killing off temporarily of the insulin producing cells.
But just very intense stress, there were experiments in which if part of the dog's pancreas was removed, so it had just a smaller reserve of insulin producing cells, then a single injection of a large dose of cortisol was enough to make the dog permanently diabetic. Wow, so that extreme stress caused by cortisol itself is an inflammatory mediator. Yeah, and then once the tissues are unable to get glucose just from that one episode of stress-induced lack of insulin, the cells are basically dying because they can't get the glucose they need,
so they call on fatty acids from stores and the fatty acid in turn kills the remaining or regenerating insulin producing cells, so it starts a vicious circle. Just in case people who are listening don't understand what a fatty acid is and a free fatty acid, would you just explain basically what they are and how they're used? Yeah, a fat such as butter or lard or corn oil, most of them consist of about 18 carbon atoms in a chain
with oxygens on one end making it acidic and the rest of it either just plain carbon and hydrogen or occasionally with the hydrogens removed, that's called an unsaturated fatty acid with a carbon chain interrupted by pure hydrogens. And those chains are attached to a glycerin molecule, three carbons, technically an alcohol that forms an ester with these free fatty acids blocking the acid group which makes the free fatty acid water soluble to some extent. And when the glycerin which is also very water soluble is combined with three fatty acids,
it becomes very water insoluble and that is the form in which it's stored in the fat cells because you just form a drop of pure fat in the cell and it's very reluctant to diffuse away because of its insolubility. So when you need energy, you have to activate enzymes that break the free fatty acids loose. When that happens from stress or hunger or fasting, these free fatty acids get into the bloodstream and enter cells and are available as energy production in the absence of glucose.
The problem is that that process also tends to keep the stress going. If the free fatty acids are unsaturated, those are more water soluble. And when they're polyunsaturated like from corn oil, safflower oil and so on, those have a further stress inducing action that tends to keep the breakdown of fat going and the stress reproducing itself. Normally, if somebody was on a, because I know people that are listening who've listened to you before know that you're a great advocate of saturated fats, butter and coconut oil in particular
and very much against the negative health impacts of the liquid oils and fish oil in particular. If somebody's consuming a lot of butter and milk, whether it's full fat or semi-fat and coconut oil, the fats therein, when they are stored as fat, they don't have the same destructive or oxidative effects when they're liberated. Yeah, if you store a very saturated fat like the Indians make ghee by removing the water soluble material, a pure fat oil or coconut oil, which is 98% saturated, those things keep for years without breaking down.
But if you leave a bottle of safflower or corn oil or linseed oil open within hours or days, you can detect spontaneous oxidation of it in the air. And that happens at body temperature with the high oxygen content of your blood. It happens very quickly with the polyunsaturated fats. But interestingly, the biological oxidation is pretty much the opposite because if you have two types of fats circulating in your bloodstream, one saturated fatty acid and one polyunsaturated, your muscles will be able to oxidize the saturated fat preferentially.
The polyunsaturated fat tends to go into storage if you eat more than you can oxidize. So it tends to be fattening if you eat a little extra of the polyunsaturated because it stores more easily. Your fat cells can also oxidize saturated fat. And so they live on the saturated fat that they have stored. So over the years, stress is more likely to release the polyunsaturated fats, making stress an increasing problem with age. Right. So that's the thing behind what you're describing now is the component free fatty acids.
If somebody is eating a lot of saturated fats like butter, ghee or coconut oil, then they're not going to liberate the same free fatty acid that they would if they were consuming polyunsaturated fats in their diet. Right. So don't mind me, but getting back to the classic description of diabetes as being a wasting disease, which actually we see very little of, as opposed to what now is generically termed as diabetes and is very largely linked to obesity in the general population. That obesity was probably directly linked to the polyunsaturated thyroid suppressive diets that people consume.
Yes, now increasingly seen as a fat inflammation condition, a mild chronic inflammation. And a major thing that causes that is the continual spontaneous release of small amounts of arachidonic acid, which is a highly unsaturated fatty acid that even if you don't eat it, linoleic acid, for example, will be turned into it by enzymes in the body. So it becomes one of the most toxic stored fats, both in phospholipids and in the triglyceride storage. And when that's released, that allows it to be turned into various things, but especially prostaglandins, which are probably our biggest inflammatory problem.
These things are associated with inflammation, aren't they? When you damage your tissues, prostaglandins are the thing that most people might recognize as being liberated, causing swelling and edema. Their way, aspirin is so great. Yes. Okay, well for those people who perhaps have just tuned in, you're listening to Ask Your Ob-Doctor on KMUD Galliville 91.1 FM. We are very pleased and very lucky to have Dr. Raymond Peat sharing his expertise on the show tonight. And the subject of tonight's show is how to restore nerve tissue, prevent the damage and/or restore it.
Okay, so Dr. Peat, getting back again to diabetes, I guess I should mention the fact that we have a toll-free number, 1-800-KMUD-RAD, or the local number is 923-3911. So back to diabetes again, how do you approach it rather than the orthodoxy with metformin or insulin and/or avoidance of glucose even? It's contrary perhaps. If you focus on stopping the liberation of fatty acids from your tissues and inhibit their conversion to prostaglandins, you can usually very quickly lower your blood sugar quite a bit and feel better.
The two chemicals that are most practical for lowering free fatty acids and stopping the stress reaction are niacinamide, which has many effects, but the first one that it's commonly associated with is inhibiting the lipase that liberates fats from your fat stores. What do you say inhibits the? The enzyme which liberates the free fatty acids from the triglyceride storage. Okay. And aspirin also does that and several other things relating to liberation of free fatty acids and their conversion to the inflammatory mediators.
Okay, so both niacinamide and aspirin do that job of decreasing the liberation of free fatty acids. Do you know the mechanism by which that's working? In the case of aspirin, it's both indirect and direct actions on at least two different lipase enzymes, both phospholipase and the adipose hormone sensitive lipase that insulin controls. So insulin deficiency in itself liberates more of the free fatty acids. And so both of these are acting directly on the enzyme, which is caused to be overactive by an insulin deficiency.
Just for example, I know because most people are pretty frightened, I think, for want of a better word, of using aspirin. Whenever I mention aspirin to people, the first thing is they're always very shocked that I mention aspirin. It's almost a complete taboo. Obviously, when people start listening and reading the facts about it, they get a different opinion. And as time goes on, they begin to realize that perhaps there's actually something very good in it. I know that you've -- and I've read some recent articles about its antiviral activity,
and they're actually looking at it pretty intensively for other conditions surrounding potential virus problems. But its main anti-inflammatory effect is pretty useful widespread. So what would you suggest as a dose for aspirin? Because the other thing that people worry about is how much of the bleeding. They may get bleeding if they're using too much. And I know that you recommend using vitamin K as a one milligram per drop per 325 milligram tablet. Yeah, especially if a person has combined antibiotics with aspirin, they might have lost the intestinal bacteria that make vitamin K.
And eating lots of cooked greens such as kale and liver and some types of cheese are the best sources of vitamin K. Do you think most people produce enough vitamin K to offset any potential -- I don't think it's reliable to count on your intestinal bacteria because so many things can interfere. And we'll get into the subject of endotoxin a bit later, and that's also tied up with diabetes. So that's pretty interesting. Okay, so what do you think in terms of a dose of aspirin as a kind of realistic --
If your vitamin K is okay, I think it's fine to take two or 300 milligrams every day. And if it's to correct a problem such as diabetes or some chronic inflammatory problem, then up to -- I know people who have temporarily taken 6,000 or 7,000 milligrams a day, like 20 standard aspirin tablets, for example. A little bit off base, but I remember hearing about somebody who'd got a recovery from HIV from using high-dose aspirin.
Yeah, there was a study that the government, I think, canceled it when it looked like it was going to be too successful because it would be terrible for the drug industry. And very cheap. Okay. All right. Well, I don't want to get too much off the track here because I've got plenty of questions I wanted to ask you. We do actually have a couple of callers lined up, so perhaps we should take a couple of callers here and I'll carry on asking you about what you've recently found out. So, first caller, you're on the air.
And where are you calling from, caller? Hello. Hi. Yeah, you're on the air. This is Gina from Kansas City. Okay. Hi. Hi. I have a couple of questions. One is about a liver enzyme. I have an high ALT. Any suggestions? Yeah. Okay. What was the enzyme? ALT. Oh, okay. When anything is stressed, any cell, for example, just hypothyroidism, lowers the energy production of a cell, makes it tend to take up water, and when it takes up water, it becomes somewhat porous and its natural enzymes leak out into the bloodstream.
And just by looking at the type of enzyme, you can't be sure whether it's coming from a leg muscle that you strained or overstressed or a heart muscle that is being stressed or the liver. The liver is usually the place that you look for enzymes that are concentrated in the liver. So, ALT is one of those. Okay. And what was your other question? The other one is about greens. What is a good amount to have? I cannot digest vegetables.
I eat leafy greens, a broth, and I do raw juice, which is the only things I can digest. How much would you suggest I have per week? What's to meet my nutritional needs? How much of which? I think the lady was trying to describe greens as in broths, as in -- The cooked green, if you eat it by the cups and the quarts, it's an adequate source of protein. But if you aren't eating it as your main food for protein, then half a cup to a cup a day will provide your vitamin K
and a generous amount of magnesium and calcium. Those are the nutrients that quickly cook out of it into the broth. And so if you drink only the water that you cooked a cup or so of leaves in, then you get a little supplement of magnesium and calcium. Okay. What about raw juicing? It's pretty irritating to the intestine. Plants put their most intense defensive toxins into their seeds, but their next most intense irritants and toxins are in the leaves because they don't want to be grazed.
So they put chemicals in that tend to block your digestive enzymes. And cooking destroys most of those toxins or reduces them. And so if you eat them raw and if you aren't a ruminant that has evolved a stomach to handle raw leaves, then you're most likely to have some digestive problems. Okay. Thank you very much. Okay. Thanks for your questions. Let's take the next caller. Caller, where are you from? This is David in Missouri. Oh, hi, David. Hello. I wanted to come back to aspirin real quick if that's okay.
Dr. Peat, I've heard you in a podcast before, I'm pretty sure, mention that aspirin is helpful in reducing tumor growth. And I was just wondering about that. And then the other thing is, I don't know if you're familiar with an aspirin powder. It's called BC, and it actually has caffeine in it. And what I've been doing, just because I have a knee that hurts me off and on, you know, have quite a bit of pain in it, especially depending on what I'm doing.
But I actually have been putting baking soda and magnesium sulfate or epsom salt in. Sometimes I'll even put some magnesium chloride in and then these aspirin with this caffeine. Caffeine. And the baking soda, which I've heard you say about the baking soda. I think I understood this correctly, that it creates a gradient that pulls those things into the body. Is that also correct? It has diuretic effects and some anti-inflammatory effects from the carbon dioxide itself. And the caffeine acts on some of the same enzymes that aspirin does with an anti-inflammatory effect.
They both increase your cell respiration and they both suppress nitric oxide, which is one of our central risky pro-inflammatory mediators, which happens to poison the mitochondrial respiration, blocking it directly. So caffeine and aspirin have multi-levels of defense of the mitochondria. And will that be pulled in through the skin effectively more than likely? Caffeine goes in through the skin more easily than aspirin, but, yes, some aspirin is absorbed. Okay. And then so everything that you just said, I guess, applies to tumor growth to a certain degree as well? Yes.
Inflammation and respiratory defect is the motor for cancer growth. And it happens that if you restore energy production in the mitochondria, you're also lowering the inflammatory stimulants that activate cell division and spreading. Okay. Well, thank you. Okay. I appreciate your call. We have a couple more on the line already, so let's just make sure everyone gets a chance here. So thanks for your call. Next caller, where are you from? I'm calling from Sacramento. Okay. Hi, you're on the air.
I had a couple of questions for Dr. Peat about substances that induce the process of what's called mitochondrial uncoupling, which I believe reduces ATP production and generates body heat instead. And some of these substances have generated a fair amount of controversy in the past. So my first question is, if this reduced ATP production is in any way harmful to the body? Yes, actually. The uncouplers, when it's a mild degree of uncoupling, it prevents some of the stray free radical products that happens in the more relaxed, lower intensity mitochondrion.
So they know that you reduce free radical damage a little by increasing uncoupling. But another substance which uncouples mitochondria also lowers ATP a little bit and greatly protects the mitochondrion from free radicals. That's fructose. Fructose absorbs excess phosphate ions. Probably that's related to why it lowers the ATP. But the absorption of the phosphate ions by fructose is, in a way, a direct defensive system of the oxidative system because the pyruvate dehydrogenase enzyme, which is suppressed in cancer, it's why dichloroacetate is gaining so much interest because it's a chemical that reactivates pyruvate dehydrogenase
and improves the cancer metabolism in a great variety of tumors. But simply lowering the free phosphate in the cell tends to reactivate this crucial enzyme at the top of the energy producing chain. And when you are supplied with aspirin, caffeine, and fructose, for example, you are not calling on free fatty acids. If you load up the cell with excess free fatty acids, for example, from some stress, the free fatty acids reverse all of those processes. They block pyruvate dehydrogenase by making more phosphate ions available
where the sugars bind them and lower the free phosphate fatty acids, increase them, and tend to poison the crucial enzyme. Okay. I guess I'll listen to that one more time on the radio. So basically this process of producing heat, does that in any way negatively affect the thyroid? Because, you know, isn't that what's supposed to kind of generate heat in the body? Does this uncoupling generate heat? Does that, you know, downgrade the thyroid? It increases heat, among other things, and keeping your body temperature up to an efficient high level
makes all of your tissues more stable. Okay. So it doesn't harm the thyroid in any way, this process of uncoupling? Oh, no. The thyroid is very compatible with that. Keeping yourself slightly hyperthyroid doesn't stress anything. In fact, it keeps down those stress signals. Okay. Great. Thank you, Dr. Peat. Okay. Well, thank you for your call. I think we have another caller on the end. We have another caller, and we've got a couple of questions. I just want to let people know that there is a vigil going on for Tim Olson at the Bryson Fire Department,
and the folks there asked if you wanted to bring anything, flowers would be great. So there are folks having a candlelight vigil for Tim Olson out at the Bryson--just a vigil in general. I don't know if it's candlelight, but there are lights there, and people are bringing flowers. And if you'd like to bring flowers, there is a vigil at the Bryson Fire Department for Tim Olson, who passed away today. We do have more callers, and let's go to one of those callers right now. Okay. Caller, you're on the air, and where are you from?
Good evening, Andrew and Dr. Peat. This is Mike from New York. New York. All right. Dr. Peat, you mentioned earlier about using niacinamide, and I was wondering if there is a minimal dose, a range, and an upper limit for people to try it. I've seen really great results from something in the range of 150 to 300 milligrams per day divided into three smaller doses. But I also know people who have taken over 1,000, 1,500 milligrams for a very long time and haven't had problems,
mainly because all of the manufactured supplements are going to have trace allergenic impurities. I think it's best to find the smallest amount that works for you. Does niacinamide need to be balanced out with any other B vitamin or other supplements? Thiamine, vitamin B1, works with the respiratory enzymes, and of course you need all of them. B12 and B1 and biotin are very closely involved with the respiratory apparatus. And you've discussed many times in your articles and in interviews about the benefits of vitamin B6,
and some people have found that they do better with the active form, P5P or PLP. I was wondering, aside from trial and error, if there's any other indicators or history that a person might find that they need the active form as opposed to the typical form. With either form of vitamin B6, it's possible to overdose. And I think people are finding that the active form is easier to overdose with. It used to take several hundred milligrams several months to produce toxic effects on the nerves,
but some people are seeing it with as little as 50 milligrams over a prolonged time with the active form. And I think it's good to start with 10 milligrams, which is far beyond the normal day's requirement. Ten to 20 milligrams is almost always all a person needs therapeutically of B6. And you've discussed using the carrot salad to lower the intestinal load of bacteria. And I was wondering if after some months' time a person doing that has not found relief,
or their symptoms haven't relieved, if they were to try the -- if you're familiar with it -- the drug metronidazole, and also goes by the name of Flagel, as treatment for small intestinal bacterial overgrowth. Would that be perhaps a safe drug for a person to try after some time? That happens to be a pretty toxic antibiotic. So I think it's good to try a lot of other things first. There are some bacterial products that are more actively germicidal in the intestine. There's one that comes from Ukraine called Biosporin that has very germicidal bacteria in it.
And I think there are some intestinal detoxifying or disinfecting antibiotics that are a lot safer than metronidazole. I understand that there's a link with a SIBO with the several conditions, but one of them is rosacea, for example. And there's a connection with hydrogen-producing bacteria and/or methane-producing bacteria, and therefore that Flagel or Rifaximin is another antibiotic that it's gone to. But if it is not safe, is there one that you would recommend before that? Maybe you -- No, I haven't had experience with those. Okay. And this is going back quite a ways, I think six months.
In an interview, Dr. Peat, you mentioned anecdotally about people with leukemia treating it with raw eggnog, and I was wondering if you could elaborate on that. It's very interesting. Well, they were using a whole eggnog. I don't think it was just the white. Oh, yes, the yolk primarily. Yes, and the fresh egg lecithin itself has been shown to have antiviral activities, antibacterial too, but I think the white of the egg is peculiar for its ability to bind minerals, and the combination of the lecithin and raw egg white probably has some special germicidal effect.
Okay, thank you very much, and I'll let another caller on. Okay. Thanks very much. Thanks for your call. Well, we do have another caller on the air, so let's take this next caller. Caller, you're on air. Where are you from? Dr. Peat, this is the herb doctor's engineer, and two callers asked me to ask you a question. I'm going to ask them in the order they came in, but you might want to answer the second one first because it's something you addressed already tonight. The two questions are the first caller wanted to know,
would like the good doctor to talk about dehydration and what are the water requirements of the body. The other question was could you give a brief explanation of the difference between nutritional yeast and brewer's yeast? The two types of yeast, there are actually many strains, and they taste different. The brewer's yeast that actually comes from a brewery generally has hops flavor in it, and so it's very bitter. Yeasts have been grown specially for making nutritional supplements, and so some of them have added chemical substances such as I think selenium is one that they commonly add.
Basically, the yeast chemistry in itself is always rich in B vitamins. Hydration, keeping your cell energy up I think is the basic thing. You want to keep the cell water under control and neither too hydrated nor too dehydrated. The regulating minerals, sodium, potassium, magnesium, and calcium is part of that, keeping the balance between intracellular water and extracellular water. The thing about drinking extra water when you're not thirsty, I think thirst is almost always a good indicator of how much you need.
If you're drinking, for example, milk and fruit juice, that can provide all the water you need. Try to add extra water. It can disturb your mineral balance and hormone balance. For example, too much water in relation to the minerals tends to increase your prolactin because prolactin is a water and salt regulating hormone among other things. So it's probably more important to emphasize not to push excess water rather than to remind people to drink because usually thirst tells them when. Now, Doc, I know you had some other questions for Dr. Peat tonight.
Are you still going to take calls? There's one caller on the line. Yes, we are. I wanted to engineer. If you take any calls from people and they want to have it off the air, would you just find out where they're from because I'm just trying to build some demographics of who's using it. Okay, I will be glad to do that. Thank you. I mean, if they want to do it off air, otherwise we'll be asking them. Okay. Okay, great. So next caller, you're on the air. Where are you from? Hello?
Hello, you're on the air. Where are you calling from? You need to turn your radio off. Did you hear that? You need to turn your radio off first, otherwise we'll get a lot of feedback. Hello. Hi. So if you've turned your radio off, where are you from? Hi. Oklahoma City. Oklahoma City. Okay, great. So what was your question? Okay, I just wanted to know what would you apply on your face to get rid of age spots, please? Okay. Dr. Peat, age spots.
Well, it depends on what they're made of. Sometimes high estrogen or high polyunsaturated fats can cause a fairly sudden appearance of age spots at an area that's irritated or sun exposed. And changing your diet away from the polyunsaturated fats and adding a little vitamin E, rubbing some vitamin E into those spots can help to remove them. There are enzymes that can break down even fairly old, longstanding lipofuscin pigment, and vitamin E is an activator of that. Okay.
If it's largely a sun-induced spot, you might try rubbing some niacinamide, a dissolved high-potency niacinamide tablet, in just a tiny amount of water and apply that to the spot every day for a week or two. It fades a lot of the pigments. Dr. Pitt, I think this is because of estrogen and PUFAs over a long period of time. And also, the vitamin E you get in capsules, it always has some -- it's soy-derived. Is that okay, or should I go for a purer form of vitamin E?
I think a purer high-potency vitamin E is good. 100 or 200 milligrams orally is probably enough, but you can put a little on a spot and sometimes that helps the enzymes to clear it out. Okay. Thank you so much, Dr. Pitt. I'll be talking to you soon. Okay. Well, thanks so much for your call, Carla. I don't know, engineers anymore? Okay. So we have no more callers. But anyway, let's give out the number again, but I've only just started asking you, Dr. Pitt, what I wanted to ask you about your newsletter.
So the number here, if people are listening, they want to call Dr. Pitt about anything either related or unrelated to this night's show on nerve, how to restore nerves and protect them. The number is 9233911 if you live in the area, or there is a 1-800 number, which is 1-800-KMUD-RAD if you live outside the area. So, Dr. Pitt, getting back to the topic of tonight, I know actually about the treatment with aspirin. You mentioned niacinamide as very good modifiers or regulators of free fatty acid expression.
So I wanted to ask you, even in the presence of supplemented insulin, to say, for people that are truly insulin diabetic, the nerve damages or the neuropathies, as they call them, these processes that diabetics still get, even in the presence of insulin, and those sensation loss that they get, particularly in the feet or the soles of the feet, which are the kind of initial symptoms of so-called sugar excess syndrome. How is the process at odds with excess sugar when sugar is a vital energy producing currency?
I've gone through many articles. Recently, I watched a video by Gershom Zaytchek, who is a very amazing biology and medical professor in Israel. He has a very good understanding of physiology, and he has a video on diabetes and explains how the increased blood glucose is called for by the brain to make up for its needs. But after explaining the compensatory effect of high glucose for the brain, he uses the term glycotoxic for the harmful effects, supposedly, of glucose. Basically, he just resorted to a word to explain how glucose affects the other organs.
And looking through the literature, I see that people do that without really explaining what's happening, why extra glucose would be harmful. If it's within a moderate osmolarity, the mechanism just isn't explained, even though they say that it's doing the harm. The changes in the nerves include everything that is failing because of lack of energy. When the cells are known to be living on fatty acids, and the fatty acids are intrinsically disturbing the metabolism of phosphate, turning off glucose energy production, slowing down,
and even activating nitric oxide, the respiratory inhibitor, you know that the energy of the cell being reduced is going to slow all kinds of repairing processes. Incidentally, in the pancreas, glucose stimulates regeneration of new insulin-producing cells. And it's the bad balance, too much free fatty acids and not enough glucose to defend the cells that causes them to die. Anywhere that a cell is being deprived of energy and forced to eat fatty acids instead, that's now well recognized in heart failure.
A simple treatment such as niacinamide can restore great amounts of heart energy production and improve the failure. Drugs are being developed to do the same as aspirin and niacinamide. In nerves, one of the effects of failing energy is the inability to make cholesterol and to convert cholesterol into the neurosteroids. In a nerve or its supporting cells, the glial cells, when they're injured by anything, including lack of glucose or a lack of oxygen, they not only stop producing the defensive steroids from cholesterol, but they begin producing estrogen.
The nerves and all of the diabetic tissues have more aromatase than a normal person of the same age. The estrogen in a healthy person, when the nerve is stressed, the activation of this enzyme, which is normally inactive in a nerve, activates the production of a little estrogen, which sends out signals to the surrounding cells to cause them to produce pregnenolone, progesterone, allopregnenolone, and a whole range of protective nerve steroids. But if you don't have the energy, you get stuck in producing just the estrogen, which keeps things excited and stressed.
I'm sorry, but I do actually need to pause it right there and just give out some of your information before the top of the hour to let people know how to reach more of your information, Dr. Peat. Thanks so much for joining us again on the show tonight. And potentially next month, can we carry on? Because I didn't hardly ask you anything about the subject. Okay. Okay, thanks so much for joining us. Thanks.
Okay, so for those people who've listened to Dr. Peat tonight and know him, and for those people who've just heard him and are interested to find out more about him, his website, www.rayPeat.com, R-A-Y P-E-E-T.com, he's not selling anything. He's just doing pure research. And what really bears out the fruit of his research is the stunning amount of people who've commented on how much better they've gotten after taking his advice, doing the seemingly controversial or contraindicated. And that's often the way. There's lots of research out there.
And unfortunately, it takes a very long time to get to mainstream medicine. Unfortunately, mainstream medicine is driven by a very, very well-oiled machine. And that very well-oiled machine has some huge resources behind it to keep drugs going and to keep patients using drugs. Not to say that everything is bad. It's not. It's just to say that there's a lot of hidden truth out there, which unfortunately takes a long time to come to the surface. But Dr. Peat's articles are fully referenced and it's very scientific information. So it's just common sense.
And fortunately, we are seeing some of this common sense come to bear in terms of the polyunsaturated oils now being condemned. So anyway, www.rayPeat.com. And we can be reached after all Monday through Friday, 9 to 5, 1-888-WBM-ERB for further questions. So it's the Spring Bernal Equinox. And yeah, all the best. I'll speak to you next month. [End of Audio] www.rayPeat.com