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(upbeat music) - What's good everyone, welcome back to the Strong Sisters YouTube channel. In today's video, we have the pleasure and the honor of having Dr. Raymond Peat on our channel to discuss his views of nutrition and wellness. So Dr. Ray Peat got his PhD in biology from the University of Oregon. He specialized in physiology and he's interested in topics such as aging, nutrition and hormones. So Dr. Ray Peat is just a little ball of information. He has dedicated so many hours to independent research and he puts all of this information online for free
for our benefit. He's not backed by anything and he's not trying to sell you anything. - That's one of the main reasons why we appreciate Dr. Ray Peat, he's not backed by any funding agency, he's not trying to sell you any supplements or programs. Instead he's just really interested in this and his views are likely going to challenge many of your views and I think that that's a good practice, a good activity that we should all do every once in a while to really challenge our beliefs 'cause that way we can grow and evolve.
So we are not saying that his claims are 100% right, you're not going to agree with every individual on certain things. But Dr. Ray Peat discusses some nutritional strategies or like principles and many people have kind of taken these principles and formulated what's called like a Ray Peat diet. And so this diet can kind of be summarized by, he believes that we should be carb fueled with easy to digest carbs and that you will get your nutrients in from animal products. So we have definitely incorporated some of these principles
into our diet a few months ago when we started to add carbs back in and it has worked well for us. However, just a reminder, there are no absolutes in the nutrition world, we are all very different and so you have to experiment to find what works best for you. So this conversation is just presenting another unique perspective on nutrition and we hope you enjoy. So with all that said, Dr. Ray Peat, didn't zoom us. So we called his landline and therefore this video is an hour and a half of our video.
So like us, you get to see us reacting and typing and then just like a cute voice. And so we-- - We enjoy that. - Can only call his landline, he is 84 years old but can just bring up studies off the top of his head, which speaks of his intelligence. And we polled many people on Instagram and so these questions are just from the Instagram questions we did not get to all of them, but hopefully we can have him on our channel again. So if you guys have any more additional questions,
make sure you hit him in the comments below and hopefully we can get him on if he doesn't hate us too much I don't know, we'll see. - He's great you guys, he's seriously so nice. - So fun. All right, well hope you guys enjoy this video. We have polled our audience for some questions and then we also have some questions ourselves that are kind of divided into some different topics to just keep it organized. We're gonna talk about like nutrition stuff, weight loss, hormones, fertility, supplements
and we'll just kind of see where the conversation goes if that's okay with you. - That's fine. - Okay, cool. A lot of people are confused about what they should be eating these days. So we have all like keto, carnivore, different diets. If it were up to you, what are about five to 10 essential food items that you would recommend somebody includes in their diet? - Special food items? - Just like-- - Essential. - So kind of the most, the food that people should prioritize they eat regularly.
- It really depends a lot on your situation. But very, very safe and highly nutritious foods are convenient as well as safe in the long run. Those include milk, cheese without additives, eggs, low starch fruits, generally meat and fish that are not high in polyunsaturated fats. And depending on your ability to digest food well cooked vegetables are very good for most people. What I've left out are mostly grains, legumes and other seed related parts such as nuts. - Yeah, would you say that the nuts and the seeds and the legumes you're not incorporating
because of the PFAS? - Not just that but plants put, they create a storage form of nutrients to support the embryos development and those nutrients have to be in insoluble form so they don't wash away while the seed is waiting to germinate. They have to be mobilized in an organized way. And those preparations for the nutrients for the seed embryo go with specific defenses against those same nutrients being used by predators such as mammals that would eat their seeds or worms, insects, fungus and so on. So they have essentially pesticides or insecticides
incorporated into the seed chemistry. They put their most special blockers of digestion and basically neurotoxins and digestive toxins into the seed as self defense because the seed is the essential most important part of the plant. The plant can grow new leaves if a predator eats them but the seed is the long term existence of the plant. So the worst toxins as far as animals are concerned are in the seeds. - They gotta protect their babies. - Yeah. - So can you expand a little bit on PFAS?
So beyond nuts and seeds, just how you view PFAS influence cells and how they can cause insulin resistance? - Yeah, cold organisms have to, besides surviving the winter which cold storage is very good for a seed to survive and insects and fish and other cold blood organisms, frogs for example, can stand to be even frozen but they can live daily life at a very low temperature close to freezing. And so those organisms are seed when it is ready to germinate in the spring for example when it's still very cold in the northern climate.
They have to mobilize their enzymes. There has to be mobility in the seed cells and a fish or an insect naturally has to move even when it's very cold. And saturated fats harden at a very moderate temperature. If you put butter in the icebox it becomes very hard. Even olive oil solidifies in the refrigerator. And so an animal or a plant living in the north at a low temperature simply can't survive if it has saturated fats for its energy storage. And so in proportion to the coldness of the climate they remove hydrogens from the fats
making them liquid at cold temperature. But the degree of unsaturation or removal of hydrogens to make them liquid oils in the cold makes them highly oxidizable. And if you increase the temperature of a fish for example at human temperature 98 degrees a fish very quickly stinks. And if you put highly unsaturated seed oil or fish oil if you raise it to even room temperature or body temperature in the 90 degrees Fahrenheit range they will quickly start to harden. The oxidation spreads and hardens them into solid masses. So if an organism is going to live outside
of that cold environment they have to get rid of the polyunsaturated fats. And the warmer the environment is the more saturated their fat has to be to survive because the highly unsaturated fats simply turn to glue plastic like material that is totally incompatible with life. - So what does that do for metabolism? Like what part of the cellular metabolism does do PUFAs interfere with? Like for example along the electron transport chain? - As soon, when a person eats a seed oil for example the first thing a highly unsaturated seed oil does
if an animal chews up a flax seed for example the polyunsaturated fat blocks the digestion of proteolytic enzymes. And so it impairs protein digestion as the very first step in your stomach and intestine. And then when it gets into the blood if it reaches your thyroid gland it inhibits the proteolytic enzyme which is needed to form thyroid hormone. And then circulating in the blood if you ate enough that there's a measurable amount circulating it keeps the thyroid hormones from being transported on the blood proteins. And when it gets into the cells
it blocks the action of thyroid to stimulate respiration. And so the polyunsaturated fat inhibits respiration blocks the energy production and at the same time is starting to degrade and produce the reactive oxidative fragments that are toxic to cells. The circulating polyunsaturated fatty acids in the blood happen to intensify estrogen actions. It releases estrogen from binding proteins making it more active and activates the estrogen receptors and it imitates the actions of estrogen. So they are systematically impairing estrogen impairing the metabolism and shifting the direction of animal metabolism. Part of that is the plant's defensive reaction.
The rest of it is just in the nature of energy production and the fact that these random oxidative reactions are the opposite of what we need to produce energy. - From my understanding PUFAs cause our fat cells to become insulin sensitive and that's not what we want. We want our fat cells to become insulin resistant. - Yeah, that's just one of the... - Yeah, you listed off the many consequences. Some people have questioned where is the role of monounsaturated fats in the diet then? So something like olive oil or avocado.
How does that compare to the PUFAs versus the saturated fats that you often recommend such as coconut oil or animal fats? - When we eat carbohydrates in excess we make our own saturated fats. If we are free of the polyunsaturated fats we can modify a certain percentage of our saturated fats which we have made from carbohydrates or saturated fat from chocolate or beef for example. We can unsaturate midway down the fatty acid molecule at carbon number nine. We can start a desaturation process there. It's nine carbons away from the end
and it's closer to the acidic head end of the fat molecule. So the acid end makes it safer from oxidation. So the ones we produce from saturated fats or carbohydrates are called the omega minus nine series fatty acids and those happen to be anti-inflammatory and are protective against the plant derived omega minus three or omega minus six fatty acids. - So are you saying that the omega nines, that's oleic acid, is that right? - Yeah, that's the major fat I think in avocados. It's a major fat and in olive oil for example.
- So did you say that the omega nines that we get from avocado or olive oil, those are protective against omega sixes and omega threes or only the omega nines that we produce in our bodies? - The ones we produce in our bodies independently are purely protective and anti-inflammatory. The trouble with those, olive oil even, usually contains about 10% of the PUFA and if you eat more than maybe one or two teaspoons of olive oil per day, you're at risk of accumulating that 10% of the highly unsaturated, which will build up gradually over time
and offset the protective effect of the omega nine. But if your calorie intake is fairly low and you don't overeat on olive oil, then those will be disposed of safely and the omega nines can then be protective. - I think that that's a really important point that not many people talk about is there are different situations depending on whether you are eating in a caloric deficit or eating in a caloric surplus. It's almost like caloric surpluses can amplify some of these negative consequences. - What can amplify them? - Eating in a caloric surplus,
so eating more calories than what you are burning. - Yeah, eating excess calories. These go into storage and build up over time, remarkably medical literature, not so much the scientific, but a baby, now people are saying almost all newborn babies are deficient in the so-called essential fatty acids. In fact, the newborn babies oxidative metabolism and ability to produce energy quickly and to build tissue, it's at an extremely high rate, much higher than ever again in life, the first few months of a baby's life. It's consuming oxygen at an extremely high rate per unit of tissue
and that's exactly because of the absence of the polyunsaturated fats and if it eats a so-called formula containing the so-called essential fatty acids, it very quickly starts to suppress its cellular metabolism using oxygen. The accumulation of polyunsaturated fats goes on steadily from, as soon as it's exposed to them, especially with a synthetic formula containing PUFA, that goes on steadily and slows the metabolic rate progressively. If you look at a chart graphing the consumption of oxygen per tissue, it's at a very high point at the beginning and an extremely low point
at reaching zero at old age and death. So it's a progressive aging process and energy losing process of the tissue exactly in proportion to the accumulation of polyunsaturated fats with time. - Thinking of the way that we grew up and the way that we ate growing up, I can't even imagine how many PUFAs we've accumulated throughout the years. One of the essential foods or the foods that you would recommend for somebody to consume, you mentioned fish. So were you talking about like white fish or do you have any role in your diet
for fish that are high in the essential fatty acids such as something like salmon or salmon roe? So maybe cold water versus warm water fish as well. - Salmon is terrible because of its high content of polyunsaturated fats. The desirable ones, if you can't eat tropical fish, like in the Amazon River where the water is very warm, fish fat is just about as saturated as butter fat. So it's much safer, but in the cold water fish, you can select those with a very low body fat content. And so cod and sole, for example,
are much better than salmon. - So I know a lot of people question then like how did the Inuits get by with very little health problems when they were eating a diet high in cold water fish? Do you have any insight on this point? - It's a very harmful diet. If you have a high metabolic rate and are able to oxidize the fats as fast as you eat them, they won't accumulate at a dangerous rate. But if you're fairly sedentary and are intending to add a little fat every day,
you're going to run into all of the accumulated pro-inflammatory oxidative conditions with time and the accumulation of these in your tissues. There are many people claiming that since the brain contains a high level of the omega minus three polyunsaturated fats, that they are necessary for the brain. Somehow the baby at birth doesn't contain them. And supposedly, if they're necessary for the brain, the baby would develop a fully normal, extremely functional brain without them. And in fact, if you look at the brain in dementia, these polyunsaturated fats are accumulating in a form bound to cholesterol.
So that in proportion to dementia, the brain contains the omega minus three fatty acids. The whole story to promote their sale of fish oil is basically cricket. It's advertising without science or with the reverse upside down science. They are immunosuppressive. They knock out your white blood cell function. And the oxidative breakdown products are what is causing the damage. And that suppression of the immune system, if you're killing your white blood cells during several months period, they can have an anti-inflammatory function. But eventually you're going to want to have some living white blood cells,
even at the expense of having inflammation. And the long range effect is that you've weakened your immune system. And it happens that the oxidative breakdown products are supportive to the formation of antibodies, but not to the function of thymus cells and the other necessary components of the immune system. And it happens that estrogen excess biases the immune system in the same way, leading towards emphasis on antibodies, but not on the basic white blood cell based part of the immune system. - Interesting. So to be honest, like a few years ago,
we certainly thought that these were essential fatty acids. Do you have any resources that you would suggest someone to read through to kind of maybe get them thinking that maybe these aren't essential fatty acids? There's been so much propaganda for the benefits of these and that we need to consume them in a diet. What resources would you point people to to show that, hey, there's actually potential downsides to consuming these? - Someone recently sent me their draft of an extremely good, very readable book on the polyunsaturated fats. And it has, I think, a thousand references,
so it can function as a textbook, but it's also just entertaining and readable. And it's going to be published imminently, but it isn't available right now. And I can tell you later where to find it. I don't have the information right now. - Okay, you'll have to send it, or we'll come back and talk about that. - Yeah, so stay tuned. That book will be coming soon. - Okay, so moving on to a slightly controversial topic in the keto and carnivore community. Can you make the case for sugar?
So not saying that sugar is going to provide you with a ton of nutrients, but what role do you see sugar playing in someone's diet? - If you have a highly digestible starch, it quickly breaks down into glucose, and then it can provide very safe energy and can make saturated fats as needed. But many starches are hard to digest, and for someone with sluggish digestion, starches tend to support bacterial overgrowth in the intestine. So a person has to take into account the quality of their digestion when they're considering what to eat. So vegetables are fine
when your digestive system is working well. But if you have digestive limitations and a tendency to bacterial overgrowth or slow peristalsis or nocturnal reflux, lots of the common symptoms are made worse by starches. And in that case, a low-starch fruit, such as the citrus fruit, can be a perfect source of carbohydrates. And you need some kind of carbohydrate to safely metabolize fats and proteins. And any cooked vegetable will work for most people, but some people have to be very selective and pick out certain vegetables that they're sure are going to produce inflammation and bacterial overgrowth.
- So to summarize, basically, you're kind of saying that sugar is just easy, fast energy, and so it doesn't cause negative effects of, for example, digestion problems that maybe it would cause if someone had to break down, like what's an example, like sweet potato. Some people may have a problem breaking that sweet potato or other vegetables to get their energy. And so sugar can play a role in just providing fast energy that can access the cells quickly. Is that right? - Yeah, and it doesn't require digestion, so it can start absorbing right in your stomach
and immediately in your upper intestine. And even if you have a perfectly digestible starch, the starch has the same quick reaction that pure glucose does, and so it's a powerful stimulant to insulin. And so if you eat a little too much glucose or starch, it activates insulin secretion and will turn the excess sugar into fat. And the insulin can then, if you have other nutritional limitations, the sudden surge of insulin from glucose or starch, after turning on fat production, it lowers your blood sugar, and that can cause stress reactions. And the difference between sucrose,
the common sugar in fruits, is that it's only 50% glucose, so it doesn't have the isomeric reaction that a digestible starch has. It's only half as able to stimulate insulin because it's only half glucose. And then the fructose component of the molecule actually has a mild insulin inhibiting effect. So it provides the sugar energy much more gradually than starch does. And it tends to avoid the glucose, insulin, hypoglycemia stress reaction that a highly digestible starch doesn't cause. - So a lot of the anti-fructose arguments bring up the point that fructose consumption doesn't spike insulin,
and so therefore you should stay below a certain threshold or else it will automatically lead to fat gain, for example. So where are a lot of these anti-fructose arguments coming from? Is it some relation to PUFAs? Where is that argument of it automatically leads to fat storage? - Naturally, if you overeat on fat, or protein, or starch, or sucrose, you're gonna get fat. (laughing) The anti-sugar argument really started back in the '50s. And they were having the idea of overeating sugar would stimulate first hypoglycemia and then adrenaline. All of the typical hypoglycemia arguments
which simply are making extreme conclusions from a few experiments. But when you have sucrose with a mixed diet, it's actually a stabilizing effect rather than a destabilizing effect, which the early arguments were making. But then an English doctor, John Yitken, wrote a book and said, "Wait, sugar, if you eat an excess of sugar, "it turns to saturated fat." And the anti-cholesterol, anti-fat argument that was promoted to sell vegetable oil had sold the idea of saturated fat as the cause of heart disease. And John Yitken said, "Wait, sugar causes saturated fat to rise,
"and so sugar is the cause of heart disease." So he had a doubly wrong argument. But that book was very popular starting in the 1970s, and persisted, and then I think it was largely, I think his name is Robert Lustig, a professor of pediatrics in San Francisco, made some even stranger arguments, saying that fructose is like, it's as toxic as alcohol. And that he, in his famous video, showed a lot of references on the blue screen in the background. And I looked up some of his references, and once I looked up,
it didn't support his argument at all. In fact, fructose is a very powerful, specific antidote to ethanol poisoning. Absolutely to reverse what he says. And the reason is, ethanol, like a high-fat diet, shifts the electronic balance of the cell metabolism in the direction of too many electrons, a reducing state. It's an antidote to fat metabolism poisoning, and starvation. The extreme of the ketogenic principle, when you form ketone bodies, by starving yourself for sugar, you're mobilizing fat metabolism, and putting yourself in a high-reducing state. The opposite of what fructose does to the cell.
- That is a very interesting argument that our audience will not like, but we like to challenge our views and challenge everyone's views. So, appreciate you sharing. Now we have a follow-up on the sugar. - Yeah, so considering we came from a keto and then carnivore, zero-carb diet, what is the best way for somebody to start incorporating sugar after they have starved for their bodies from it for quite some time? - Or carbs, yeah. I don't think it's a matter of having to work gradually into it.
A dose of sugar, as long as it isn't grossly excessive, will be the first best antidote to the poisoning that you have been experiencing. In an extreme state of the reducing diet or the starvation condition, the ketones derived from outside your body are actually a good, safe energy source. So if you get ketones from fruits and vegetables, those are just like sugar, they're protective and start the repair process of lowering the stress hormones, getting you out of the reducing stress condition, starting up the cellular oxidation again. And either the ketones from the outside,
found in vegetables and fruits or sugars, are the essential thing for getting your oxidative metabolism going again. - So what do you say to someone who says, well, in the past, like our ancestors, they didn't have access to carbohydrates, and so they were certainly fat-fueled, like they relied on animal meat and animal fats. - Well, if you look at primates, fruits, it happens that the longest-lived in proportion to body size primate is the squirrel monkey. They have a pure fruit diet, and they're the size of a squirrel, but they live an average of 30 years,
which for their body sizes is a very long time. And brain development is in proportion to the amount of sugar that can be provided to the developing nerve tissue. It requires sugar energy. It's a very high oxidizing tissue, and that oxidation has to be based on sugar, on glucose specifically. And to develop a brain, the primates have to have a relatively high carbohydrate diet. Chimpanzees don't get as much carbohydrate as the fruit-eating monkeys, and for their body size, they aren't especially either long-lived or intelligent. The squirrel monkey has a huge brain
in proportion to its body size. Chimpanzees and gorillas have relatively small brains. - So someone would then make the argument that homo sapiens are quite different than chimpanzees. So for example, vitamin B12 in the gut digestive tract, so just example of some of the differences. So someone could argue that we are drastically different from them. And so is there any evidence from our early lineage that carbohydrates were beneficial as opposed to ketosis? - There is fossil evidence that the isotopes can be interpreted to show the importance of carbohydrate in brain development.
For example, one of the African precursors of homo sapiens lived on a type of giant grass, sort of like sugar cane. They had specially developed molars for mashing the sugary juice out of this reed along the Nile River. And they had very well-developed brains. So many of the arguments are extremely ideological. They have an idea of what they think human beings should be. And so they have shaped their evidence basically to fit the argument. - And I've heard you say many times that our environment right now is very different than environment of early homo sapiens,
where we face a lot more stress from, for example, like 5G and other sorts of life stresses like pollution, et cetera. So I think that that's something to think about for the audience as well, is like potentially our needs as human species now is different than it was X years ago. Is that true of what you kind of believe? - Yeah, in just the last 50 years in the United States in particular, but all around the Northern Hemisphere, conditions have radically changed. For example, in 1963, there was a competitive hydrogen bomb testing spree
in both Soviet Union and the United States that loaded the whole atmosphere of the Northern Hemisphere with immense amounts of radioactive isotopes. So starting in 1963, babies were exposed to brain damaging amounts of radiation concentrated in the uterus and affecting brain development. And roughly in the same generation, the vaccination mania was instituted, especially in the United States, rising to a horrible peak of something like 60 vaccinations per child in recent decades. So these terrible environmental influences have become universal and have to be taken into account. And radiation damage, for example, is amplified by polyunsaturated fats
and by estrogens. In fact, estrogen and polyunsaturated fats synergize in tissue damage with ionizing radiation. Their effects are essentially similar and overlapping and synergistic. - So there's just some things we cannot control in our environment, but we can control our diet. So I just have one more follow-up question on the sugar and the carbs. What would you say to somebody who has type 1 or type 2 diabetes? 'Cause I know that you definitely do prefer our main fuel source, tuby carbs, but so many people seem to be going
to a low-carb diet to manage these conditions. - The first thing to consider is what do they mean that they have type 1 or type 2 diabetes? For 50 years or more, I've been talking to people who've had that diagnosis and I asked them how it was diagnosed. You, in principle, can't diagnose type 1 without actually doing a blood test for insulin. But out of hundreds of people I've talked to, only half a dozen or so actually had their insulin measured, but they were immediately treated for diabetes without a rational diagnosis.
For cancer or diabetes or anything, first step is to understand what was meant. Was the blood glucose the basis for the diagnosis? In kids, that's often all that's measured. The most common cause for high glucose is stress causing unopposed cortisol secretion. So if you don't measure for either insulin or cortisol, you might be doing exactly the wrong treatment to lower cortisol. Sugar is the most powerful treatment. And two doctors in France and England in the late 19th century were curing terminal diabetic patients that they would eat a normal meal, lots of protein, for example,
but their muscles were wasting away even when they didn't eat sugar. They would eat steak, for example. It would show up in their urine as very high glucose and their body was disappearing week by week but when they fed them 12 ounces a day of ordinary white sugar as well as a standard meat and potatoes diet, they recovered. - Wow. I heard Matt Blackburn talking about these studies and how they were removed from scientific literature, like access to them, but he said he just bought a book on Amazon from the British literature of medicine,
I don't know, some year, 1860 something, and he now has access to those studies. So it'll be interesting for him to post those. So you have seen those studies? - So I haven't seen that book. - Okay. But it's interesting 'cause that's just not talked about anymore. So I think it's an interesting perspective that maybe someone should consider. But moving on to the final nutrition question that we have, and this was a very popular question from our audience. So Dr. Peat, let's say that you were about 50 or 60 pounds overweight,
what would you do to lose weight? - First, stop eating for a while and then go on a low-fat milk and cheese diet with a little bit of orange juice and an occasional egg and oyster. Calcium and vitamin D are supportive of the thyroid hormone. It's good to check your thyroid hormone and vitamin D if you're at all overweight because a deficiency of those is extremely common and slows the metabolism. A high PUFA intake will suppress your vitamin D metabolism as well as your thyroid metabolism. So making sure those are good.
And you want to lower the phosphate in your diet relative to calcium. And so milk and cheese as a staple of your diet will tremendously increase your heat production and energy metabolism, oxygen consumption, and make it much easier to lose weight. And then the foods, moderate amounts of egg, shellfish such as oysters, and some orange juice will provide essential nutrients and anti-inflammatory things that support your background metabolism. - I think that's great. That's like the first time I've heard somebody describe a weight loss diet that isn't purely focused on calories,
but instead focused on still getting the necessary nutrients that your organs need to function optimally. But would you still say that calories still do matter? He said, yeah, like so eat less. - Yeah, but the difference is that a person who has been dieting very often will be burning calories at a rate of seven or 800 calories per day. And so they get fat on just a few snacks. But when you shift over, making sure your vitamin D and thyroid are okay, but shift over to a high calcium to phosphate ratio
in your diet, not much meat, not much ordinary fish, but enough shellfish for the trace minerals. The high calcium phosphate ratio and high protein relative to fat with the rest of it carbohydrate enough so that you handle the protein and fat metabolism without stress. That will very quickly increase your calorie consumption from seven or 800 a day up to the normal 2000 per day, making it tremendously easier to lose weight. And as you stay out of the stress condition, your muscles are going to recover. You'll put on weight in the form of muscle
as part of your ability to burn 1000 or 1500 calories per day. So your muscles are then going to take over to continuing weight regulation. - So in terms of increasing the metabolic rate, can we cover potentially some supplements that would be able to help that? What supplements do you think are beneficial that we still can get in foods, but we may benefit from having more, supplementing more? - You get all of your trace minerals from the seafoods, especially shellfish. And if eggs and milk aren't producing enough vitamins,
you can occasionally add a little bit of liver into your diet, which will have both trace minerals and vitamins in abundance. So liver and oysters, you can think of them as your supplements. Have one serving of those per week. And it's much better than a hundred hours a month spent on supplements and much safer because there is no supplement on the market that isn't contaminated with manufacturing debris, basically stuff that can't be kept out of the chemical processes. - So you emphasized vitamin D earlier in this conversation.
So what about somebody who maybe in their winter months can't get as much sun? Would you still advise against supplementing with vitamin D? - Yeah, but only in a proper safe vehicle. It's available in pure olive oil, sulfate capsules and drops both. - One other question about supplements. I know you recommend aspirin a lot, and I know there's a lot of information out there on how you feel about aspirin. Could you just clarify who you think should be taking aspirin, if it's for everybody or a certain condition? - Everyone, even on a good diet,
milk for example, 1% milk has still a small amount of PUFA. 3% of the fat roughly is highly unsaturated. And we're all tending at different rates to accumulate polyunsaturated fats in our tissues. And so with aging, aspirin becomes a defensive material. Since we have the PUFA in our tissues, any little stress is going to lead it to break down into these inflammatory things such as prostaglandins. And so in proportion to your tissue load, which varies with your diet and age, aspirin can be very protective. Vitamin E has similar anti-inflammatory aspirin-like actions.
- Okay, yeah, we just added in some vitamin E to protect against some of these things. - I haven't done the aspirin yet. - Yeah. - So when you do the aspirin, you just take like one pill a day, or is it a certain dose per week that you would recommend? - I think once a person is over 50 or 60, a standard pill per day is fine as long as they are sure to keep their vitamin K level up. If your vitamin K level is low, you'll bleed very easily and aspirin will intensify that.
But if you have a good vitamin K intake from liver and aged cheese, for example, then the aspirin is not going to increase your bleeding risk. - Okay, that's an important note. So we kind of wanted to dive in a little bit more about some underlying questions we still have about female hormones in fertility, because I know you put so much work into this topic, which I think is just incredible. So first question, it kind of goes along the lines of our journey. What is your opinion on a low carb diet
or fasting for female hormones? - For what? - For female hormones, like the implications that following a prolonged low carb diet or doing prolonged fasts could have on female hormones in fertility. - Very harmful. Fasting increases your free fatty acids going too long without food. And if you're in very good health, you can stand at least eight hours without stress. But the lower your reserves are, more often you should replenish your carbohydrates. Going for a long time without carbohydrates or total fasting, your free fatty acids will increase in your blood.
And the presence of free fatty acids, as the glucose decreases, the balance of free fatty acid turns off the ability to oxidize glucose, blocks the ability to process pyruvic acid. to process pyruvic acid to carbon dioxide production. And instead of turning the carbon dioxide, the pyruvic acid turns into lactic acid. And the lactic acid is responsible for shifting the electron balance of the whole system. So once your blood balance between free fatty acids and glucose reaches a dominance of fat, your lactic acid level automatically goes up and that shifts your whole body
into the stress, reducing stress condition. And that means that you have an instantly diabetic or cancer-like metabolism. Diabetes metabolism is just a way of describing the long range effect of not enough sugar being metabolized because we mobilize fat in proportion to a loss of glucose. Mobilizing fat blocks the use of pyruvic acid, therefore increases lactic acid. Lactic acid turns on that whole system known as the cancer metabolism or the diabetes metabolism or the inflammatory metabolism. All of those conditions are really instantaneous expressions of the absence of glucose. And when they become a disease,
it's because that process has been continued too long. - So it's hard to deny some of the success stories that you have heard from some people coming from, I don't know if it was more of a carb-based or just more standard American diet that was higher in PUFA. A lot of people have, some women have regained their period and have lost weight and have felt better by going to a lower carb or zero carb diet. Can you explain potentially what would happen? - What that usually means, they'll sometimes cure insomnia or epilepsy
or lots of things. Now what it usually means is they've been eating the standard Western diet, bread, legumes, processed foods, of various starchy and oily composition. And very often they'll increase their consumption of meat and fish and eggs and cheese, for example. They see it as a decrease of carbohydrate, but what it usually amounts to in the United States is a reduction of toxic foods. - A reduction of PUFAs and then they're increasing the amount of nutrients they're getting from things like meat and eggs and dairy. - Yeah, meat and cheese and eggs, for example,
don't contain inflammatory materials, such as the average pasta and bread-containing diet. - A large reason some people do lose their periods is PCOS. What do you recommend for somebody with PCOS? - Vitamin D and calcium would be the first thing, and then checking thyroid function. - Okay, so similar to the losing of the weight. - Yeah, and vitamin D deficiency is now a very commonly recognized cause. But experimentally, 50 years ago, they could produce it in animals by making them hypothyroid and giving them a glenadal stimulation to increase their estrogen.
So the estrogen, if they're low thyroid, they can turn cholesterol into progesterone. And if they're at the same time stimulated with estrogen, the adrenal glands become overactive and start producing the androgens and the whole system shifts, but increasing the metabolic rate, the ability to use oxygen by increasing vitamin D and calcium along with thyroid can break you out of that cycle. - Cool, so why do you recommend females and also males to monitor their temperature and pulse? So what is your goal tracking those? What do those markers say
and what should we look for for those values? - If you take your temperature and pulse rate when you first wake up and then sometime later in the day, you'll learn many, many things. A very hypothyroid or nutrient deficient person will have extreme stress hormones during the night, but not enough thyroid hormone and calcium and vitamin D to maintain their metabolic rate. And so what happens is high cortisol will turn your protein, good tissues into the essential glucose that you need. It's like starvation or a ketogenic diet. The high cortisol takes over
to provide the essential amount of glucose. And so high cortisol becomes extreme around dawn and your waking temperature will be abnormally high even though your metabolic rate oxidatively is low. And then if you eat breakfast, have some orange juice for example, and your pulse slows and your temperature falls, that shows that it was cortisol causing the high market temperature. So a falling pulse with food is an anti-stress sign. And when you get your night stress hormones down by eating a more balanced diet with adequate carbohydrate, then if you have a very low morning temperature
and you're slow to rise to 98.6 or 37 Celsius, if you don't quickly get up to the functional temperature, that's a typical low thyroid sign. In the absence of extreme night stress, your waking temperature might be 95 or 96 degrees Fahrenheit or it should be not far below 98 degrees at waking. - So it's a good way to measure the functioning of your thyroid. - Yeah, and also very often of your cortisol. - Okay, what about somebody who is waking up very frequently throughout the night to go pee? Is that a sign of high cortisol?
- Yeah, sometimes just increased calcium and vitamin D will take care of that. Other times thyroid is responsible. - Okay, great. So if someone has a lot of thyroid problems, do you ever recommend specific thyroid tests or potentially thyroid supplementation? - Yeah, the morning temperature and pulse rate check is extremely effective, but it's good to have a backup blood test. Healthy people, I've never seen anyone without some of the hypothyroid signs and symptoms. If their TSH was very much above 1.0, where the normal range goes all the way up to 4 or 5.0.
And they say it's abnormal to be below 0.4 at the low end of the range on the TSH. But when people have looked at a big population and the frequency of thyroid problems, such as especially thyroid cancer, they found that areas where people have no higher than 0.4, where everyone was below normal on their TSH, meaning by the medical definition that they would be hyperthyroid. Those people were free of thyroid cancer. And what that means is that the chronic cumulative exposure of the thyroid gland to the TSH pituitary hormone, that is carcinogenic, leads to decomposition,
formation of nodules in the gland, and ultimately a risk of thyroid cancer. So it's very good to know what your TSH is, even though the doctor's going to tell you it's perfectly normal to have 2 or 3 or 4.0 on the test. If you also had your cholesterol measured, in a large population, the cholesterol rises exactly as TSH rises. And so as you improve your diet or supplement thyroid to reduce other symptoms, such as ovarian reproductive problems, as your TSH goes down, your cholesterol approaches normal, decreases along with the TSH. - Okay.
So considering this is all about the thyroid, what would be the number one thing you'd recommend for somebody to start improving the function of their thyroid if that TSH-- - Cutting out all the unfeterated fats. - Right on. Okay, that seems to be the general theme with your nutrition. Okay, let's see here. One final question about the hormones. Should women approach nutrition differently from their fertile years to post-menopausal years? - Recognizing that the menopause is reflecting primarily a failure in your ability to make progesterone, and that that leaves all of the cells of your body
under increased stress, tending to cause them to begin producing estrogen. So menopause is a condition of increased estrogen exposure and symptoms. And for example, post-menopausal women are the ones who are susceptible to sickness from the coronavirus. Menstruating women are much, much less likely to have any symptoms from the virus. - And would you say that's because of progesterone? - Progesterone can be supplemented, but the important thing is to watch your thyroid function and your nutrition, and use your cholesterol levels, for example, as one of the indicators of what's going on with your progesterone and estrogen.
- So if we connect all these dots, the best thing you could do for all of this, including coronavirus, is to significantly reduce your intake of PUFAS. - Oh, yeah. - The cholesterol connection is very interesting because I have had high cholesterol for quite a long time now, and I also have amenorrhea, and I kind of never made that connection that I have a lot of extra cholesterol in my body because my body is not properly converting it into hormones. You kind of forget that cholesterol, I sometimes forget that cholesterol
is used to produce these hormones. And so it's interesting that cholesterol will drop as your hormone-producing capabilities improve. And so I'm curious when I test my cholesterol again, once I get my period back, I'm curious what the level will be then. - In an experiment, someone isolated an ovary and measured in the vein coming out the amount of progesterone, and then they varied the amount of cholesterol in the artery going into the ovary. And as they increased the amount of cholesterol in the blood, the amount of progesterone coming out of the ovary directly increased.
- Very interesting. - An increase of cholesterol in hypothyroidism is exactly because your body needs it to make up for the fact that progesterone, thyroid is the essential factor for making the conversion of cholesterol to progesterone. - Okay, and typically will carb diets increase your cholesterol? - Yeah, I certainly, my cholesterol was a lot higher when I was on zero carb, got up to like 490. And I don't know, a lot of people in the keto carnivore space, I even said this, ketone production and cholesterol production, LDL cholesterol production are on the same pathway.
And so if you increase your ketone production, you will automatically increase your LDL production as well. So it's just interesting that you see higher cholesterol in some of these individuals who are low carb, zero carb. I was certainly one of those, what was it called? - Hyper- - Lean mass hyper-responder. - If your liver is under extreme stress, its ability to make cholesterol can begin to fail. And so it's much worse to be deficient in blood cholesterol than to be excessive in it. The increase in cholesterol shows that you're adapting,
your liver is able to help your ovaries and adrenals make the steroids. - That's really interesting. - If your liver is in trouble, then you can't make enough cholesterol. - That's really interesting 'cause it seems like there's a group of individuals who have normal cholesterol levels and then a group of individuals who have higher cholesterol levels. And like I said, this was called like the lean mass hyper-responder group. And so potentially the difference between those two groups is potentially the liver functionality. - If someone is deficient, for sure it's the liver that's the main problem.
- Over the age of 50, a big study in aging people found that if you didn't have well over 200 level of cholesterol in your older years, your likelihood of being dependent was greatly increased because the anti-stress progesterone and so on is essential for protecting the brain. And if you're under 200 cholesterol and in your 50s, then you're in serious trouble. - Yeah, there seems to be some sort of like, the argument is there's a like a protective effect for LDL cholesterol, it's wrongly demonized. - Right, right. And estrogen and many toxic substances
are known to lower the good LDL cholesterol and increase the HDL. So poisoning can cause what the doctors consider a healthy shift. - So we're at an hour and a half now. And so we don't wanna take up more of your time. We'll have to get you back on another time. We've really enjoyed discussing with you and kind of digging into some of these topics. What are the best resources people can go to to learn the basics of your approach, such as like a website or a newsletter? - Yeah, my website is raypeat.com.
- And can people subscribe to your newsletter on your website? - No, but you can get the information about subscribing at [email protected]. - Okay. - So if you made it this far, thank you for hanging out with us and watching this video of us. I hope that you had some takeaways and challenged some of your beliefs. Many of you all likely disagreed with some of his things and that is okay. We all agree to disagree. So like we said, if you have any more questions
for Dr. Ray P, make sure you hit him in the comments below and we hope to be able to have him on again for another great discussion where you can just stare at us while he talks. It's great. But until next time, you guys, make sure you are behaving like an angel. Make sure you are behaving like an angel