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Well, welcome to this month's Ask Your Herb Doctor. My name is Andrew Murray. Good evening. My name is Sarah Johanneson Murray. For those of you who perhaps have never listened to our shows, which run every third Friday of the month from 7 till 8 p.m., we're both licensed medical herbalists who trained in England and graduated there with a degree in herbal medicine. We run a clinic in Garboville where we consult with clients about a wide range of conditions,
and we manufacture all our own certified organic herbal extracts which are either grown on our CCUF certified herb farm or which are sourced from other U.S. certified organic suppliers. So you're listening to Ask Your Herb Doctor on KMUD Garboville 91.1 FM, and from 7.30 until the end of the show at 8 o'clock, you're invited to call in with any questions, either related or unrelated to this month's topic of "You are what you eat" or "absorb" for that matter.
The number here if you live in the area is 923-3911, or if you live outside the area, the toll-free number is 1-800-KMUD-RAD, and we can also be reached toll-free on 1-888-WBM-HERB for further questions during normal business hours Monday through Friday. So this month we are again very pleased and fortunate to welcome Dr. Ray Peat back to this show, and we'll be exploring how medical radiation can have deleterious effects on our living biological systems, and if time allows, a discussion of food safety in our world today.
I wanted to remind our listeners of the Hippocratic Oath which is undertaken by doctors, and they begin their practice. And first and foremost in the Hippocratic Oath it states "First do no harm". So this is the fundamental clause, if you like, of practicing medicine, "First do no harm". Okay, so I wanted to welcome Dr. Raymond Peat onto the show. Good evening, Dr. Peat. Hello. And perhaps for some of our listeners who may have heard the intro and maybe not heard you before,
I know a lot of people have heard you, but there's always some people who pick up a new thing and may not have heard of you before. Will you just very briefly give the people that are listening an outline of your academic background? I was a student of literature and linguistics for years before I decided to get a degree in biology. And in 1968 I went to the University of Oregon intending to get a Ph.D. concentrating in neurology or brain biology. But very quickly I saw that the nerve and brain people were extremely dogmatic,
not really interested in studying the way the organism works. And I found that reproductive physiology in that university had a really scientific orientation. And so I did my dissertation on the endocrine and metabolic changes in aging of the reproductive systems. Okay. And also know that you're an expert if you would like to call yourself that, so far as thyroid hormones are concerned. And they've done a lot of work on thyroid hormone and progesterone and related hormones.
I wanted to ask you to expand on a topic that perhaps many people that are listening to the show this evening have thought or suspected. And that is that x-radiation for those people that get in traffic accidents and have x-rays or people that are just exploratory x-rays being subjected to them, probably would think to themselves about the negative effects or the potential harm of x-rays. But yet obviously the medical establishment purports them to be very safe
and there's no, I don't know if there's any real exposure upper limit to which you're not allowed to have any more x-rays. But I've never heard of anybody being told they can't have any more x-rays because they've had their quota. And they don't keep a record of how much radiation they're giving patients. I've had many people who had obvious brain symptoms or spinal column symptoms of radiation poisoning and they asked the various doctors that had treated them what their exposure had been.
For example, radiation for prostate cancer and fluoroscope visualization during heart surgery and so on. And none of the doctors had the vaguest idea how much radiation they had, but it added up and caused classical degenerative symptoms. And isn't it also true that there's not really an organization that monitors the x-ray machines in hospitals as to how much radiation each machine is emitting? I think that has improved. They're supposed to calibrate them once a year I think generally. Would you like to describe the principle behind the x-radiation
and how it can have negative effects in terms of the breakdown of the particles? The harmful effects of the radiant type of energy, which there's a spectrum ranging from radio waves through infrared and ultraviolet and soft and hard x-rays and gamma rays and so on. The harmful effect is essentially from ionization of molecules in the body. And so they classify things from hard or C ultraviolet category through x-rays and gamma rays as ionizing radiation. But actually there are molecules in the body that ionize spontaneously.
And so anything from the weakest energy can increase the degree of ionization in the body. And it's a very misleading idea that only the ionizing radiation so-called is harmful. But it's the amount of ionization that is produced that causes the damage. And the radiation has to interact and in effect has to resonate with some atom or molecule in the tissues to cause the harm. So that if it passes through without being absorbed, there's not any particular harm done.
But if it ends up in your tissue and doesn't come out the other side, then that does the harm. So red light can pass through your body harmlessly. Blue and ultraviolet light will give you a sunburn. And with soft, lower energy x-rays, you can get a sunburn on one side while you're barely exposing film on the other side of your body. So they've tended to use higher energy hard x-rays so that you don't fry one side of your body to get a picture of something inside.
But still with any, like a chest x-ray, the side that's facing the emitter is going to get a higher dose than the other side. So that's showing that something is getting stuck in the body. It's not going all the way through. It's the same principle that you get sunburned on the side facing the sun. And you can see if you hold your hand up against the sun, you can see red coming through. But the side facing the sun is what gets sunburned.
And so if you are facing the x-ray emitter with the detector on to your back, your breasts are going to be at greater risk than if you were turned the other way. But since your heart is right in the middle, your heart gets it either way and your lungs. OK, Howard, in terms of the exposure to the negative effects of radiation, how would you compare the sun's radiation and although the sun will provide vitamin D for us... And red light. Yeah, and red light.
How do you see the damaging effects of the sun compared to radiation, for example, from MRIs or from... Well, the atmosphere filters out the harder, higher energy x-rays and ultraviolet C. And so the kind of ultraviolet that burns us is ultraviolet A and B. And to some extent, the blue light can cause a sunburn. And the slight burning effect is very superficial. It goes just a couple of millimeters or three into your skin and is absorbed. But the damage that it causes there, a sunburn can poison you systemically.
So that even though it's all absorbed at the surface, you can suffer general systemic sickness from getting sunburned. And it's the same if you're burned with a hot iron. It'll make you sick all through your body because of material absorbed. And the things in your skin that absorb the radiation from ultraviolet are the first things are the colored vitamins, folic acid, vitamin B2 and carotene or vitamin A. And the polyunsaturated fatty acids spread the energy absorbed by these colored substances.
And then the excited or oxidized fatty acids in your skin can travel and cause the release of inflammatory mediators all the way from your skin into your bloodstream and throughout your body. So even the superficial burn has systemic effects. But really, it's just the superficial injury that you get from sunlight. Cosmic rays are particles moving at extremely high speed. Some of them go deeply into the earth, but they pass through our bodies constantly. A cloud chamber will create a mist. Every time a particle goes through, it leaves a trail.
And so in a second, many particles will be passing through our bodies. These primary particles, the particles coming directly out of the cosmos, are traveling at such high speed that our particles, our molecules, don't resonate with them. And pretty much the electrons that are released go back to where they were knocked loose from and don't cause much damage. There is a little chronic damage from cosmic rays. But if you put animals under about a half an inch of lead, these cosmic primary rays hit a nucleus in the lead.
Instead of being shielded, they cause a fission reaction in the lead nucleus. And then there's an intense shower of secondary, they're called secondary cosmic rays. And if you're in a building with a very thick roof, especially with metal things over your head, you get some of that same effect that would be produced by a lead shielding over your head. So how did... So cosmic rays, the higher you go, the less probability there is that a secondary radiation will be produced because the atmosphere is so thin. More of them will pass through harmlessly.
Because they're traveling faster? Yeah, essentially they're traveling faster. And some of the particles that are produced in the secondary or tertiary reactions, those are lower energy particles. And many of them, you can follow the tracks they leave in a chemical substance just to see what happens to them. But they increase their ionization of the tissue as they slow down. And so it's like if you're skiing at high speed and you fall off your skis and hit the snow, you slow down. If it's very fluffy snow, you slow down gradually.
If it's very dense snow, you come to a very sudden damaging stop and all the energy is absorbed by your tissue suddenly. That's what happens with these lower energy particles. And if you eat an isotope which emits particles, such as the radioactive isotopes they give you to scan your thyroid or to treat thyroid cancer or to do the PET scans, those emit isotopes which are largely absorbed right in the tissue in the local area. And so those are extremely carcinogenic. So not only are you exposed to the carcinogenic effect of the actual PET scan,
but then the substance you take in order to show up on the PET scan is also radioactive. Yeah, and they often do it to find a tumor that concentrates radioactive substance. But if you look at the whole body, the brightest spots are usually the brain, the kidneys and the thyroid gland. They don't mention that those are highly metabolic areas that release, metabolize, concentrate the radioactive substance. Wow. So you're talking about radiation in terms of sunshine, cosmic rays and these x-ray machines. So are you saying that a sunburn is essentially as bad as x-rays or?
No, it's very bad for your skin, but it only has a little systemic lingering damage. But the body absorption when it's systemic, there's a great mass involved. So a fairly low intensity that goes through your body and produces reactions can leave a sort of inflammatory reaction that can linger. For example, in Japan, they have done blood tests that show that people who were exposed 60 years earlier to the atomic bomb still have a lingering inflammatory reaction in which their blood is still emitting excited photons. So they still basically have radioactive particles inside their body?
Well, not exactly radioactive, but it started a process sort of like rancidity in oil. If you want to start the process, then it continues. And if you start an inflammatory reaction with radiation and don't stop it somehow, it can continue for the rest of your life. It's just getting worse. So when doctors say or dentists say that, well, this one x-ray is just equivalent to spending all day in the sun.
I mean, how untrue is that? Well, totally untrue, because the sun is it might stress you if you get really fried in the sun so that your skin blisters and peels off and so on. That can kill you if you do overdo it. But the ordinary sunburn is actually slightly good for you, probably by making vitamin D. But there's no good produced by the type of radiation from an x-ray. And what about all those people that work in buildings that are constantly like spending 12 hour days or eight to 12 hour days?
Above the 25th parallel of latitude, the cosmic rays are intense enough that that probably increases your cancer risk. They used to believe that it was only the direct action of of an x-ray or gamma ray or isotope on your genetic material that caused cancer and mutations and so on. But if you irradiate cells in a dish and cause the mutations in those exposed dishes, but then you add fresh cells to the dish, the fresh cells which weren't exposed to radiation will begin to mutate. So it's like analogous to the starting the rancidity process in oil.
It starts an inflammatory process in the exposed cells and they it's called the bystander effect. They spread the damage to the innocent, unexposed bystander cells. OK, so you had two dishes together. One dish is radioactive. The other one. Well, no, one dish you put under the x-ray and give it a dose that will cause those cells damage. OK, and then the dish next to it is completely untouched, has not been exposed. And then you mix the cells so that they can get near each other.
Wow. The damaged cells send the signal to the new cells in their environment that causes the same kind of damage to the new cells exactly as if they had been irradiated. Is this difference or this trait, is it heritable? Yeah. People are trying to identify the nature of the chemical signal. Some people think it's it's a photo photo electric or photo chemical reaction. And that's possible because the the inflammatory mediating chemicals do stimulate photo chemical reactions when they affect the cell. So it's undoubtedly a mixture of excitation and chemical signaling.
In dentists will often put a lead apron over a person and say if a woman is pregnant, she will cover her abdomen with the lead apron and they were just going to x-ray your head. So the baby isn't affected. But there was a study in Seattle a few years ago in which they looked at a large group of people who got different amounts of x-rays to their mouth. And pregnant women who had a full set of dental x-rays when their babies were later born had been present under the lead apron.
They were underdeveloped, a small further developmental stage showing that something had happened systemically to the mother's physiology that affected the nutrition and growth of the developing fetus. And this in animal experiments in the 1950s, this was already clearly established that x-rays act like estrogen. It will even cause rodents to go into heat to be x-rayed because it is so similar to estrogen. And for several years, people thought that was because it excited the pituitary to turn on the ovaries.
But other experiments showed they would just x-ray the animal's foot and the ovaries or the whole physiology would behave as if they had been given estrogen. Good grief. Okay, well, for those of you listening, this is Ask Your Web Doctor on KMUD Garboville 91.1 FM. And from 7.30 until the end of the show at 8 o'clock, you're invited to call in with any questions either related or unrelated to this month's topic of medical irradiation. Our guest speaker is Dr. Raymond Peat. He's a PhD in physiology and hormone chemistry.
And the show is based on the supposition that x-rays and other medical radiation for examination purposes is safe is actually not true. I just wanted to perhaps, Dr. Peat, if you would, if you know any figures of quantification of damage that can be done to people or to cells in measurable ways that maybe people will identify with perhaps. The studies looking at large populations see from animal studies, they see that the babies are underdeveloped and their brains in particular grow more slowly.
And in human studies, they can see that just a few rads or rems of radiation, like several times the background radiation intensity, that that's enough to increase some cancers of the brain and eyeball, for example, and thyroid. When they're just getting dental x-rays, the radiation bounces off the teeth and exposes the eyes, brain, and thyroid more than other parts of the body. But now that the bystander effect is known and the estrogenic effect,
I think there will be more studies looking at the subsequent pregnancies of women who have been irradiated because of the lingering bystander effect. The fetuses are going to be basically estrogenized if the woman had a significant amount of radiation even before getting pregnant. So would it be worse or better to have the lead shield on the body? In the case of x-rays, lead is very protective. But the trouble is that they don't protect your mouth and the mouth sends the estrogen-like signals all through the body.
So the baby's damage was because of the radiation on the brain, the mother's brain, and her thyroid gland and eyeballs or whatever cells that touch there, and that then had a systemic effect on her child. Yeah. We have a caller. I think we have a caller, yeah. A caller, you're on the air? I am. Yeah, go ahead. Hi, I had a question regarding microwave radiation. And as it's related to telephone and several other technologies, also if anything to do with cell phones would be damaging that Dr. Peat knows about.
And I'll take my answer off the air. Okay, thank you. Okay. So did you get that question? It was sort of skipping. I couldn't hear. The caller asked if you knew anything about cell phone radiation. And she mentioned microwave radiation. So anything that you know about cell phone radiation that would be --? Oh, well, yeah, I think the studies that are showing brain cancer from use of cell phones, way back 35 years ago or so, there were two or three laboratories or factories working with that frequency of energy.
And there were clusters of brain cancers on the staff. Like within a year or two, there would be two or three people developing brain cancer, working around those very high-intensity fields. And in that context, the studies that suggest that the cell phones are causing brain tumors, I think it's very believable. How about the acoustic neuromas? Because I know when the cell phones started becoming very popular maybe 10 years ago, there were people purporting to demonstrate acoustic neuromas. And so these are cancers associated with the ear? Well, yeah. How do you --?
All kinds of brain tumors. Astrocytomas were the ones that they saw in the laboratory workers. Okay. But whatever is close to a field is going to be affected. Because of the industrial commitments to exposing the population to high energy, everything from radar, airports, and microwaves around the downtown region, the government and industry have both put pressure on the researchers not to see any harm. But from the '50s on, several researchers were showing that nerves are seriously disturbed even by very low levels of microwave and radio frequency.
Are you at all familiar with the Bluetooth, the kind of wireless headset that most people now, because of the ban on driving and talking on your cell phone, are switching to? Do you have any facts or any information about Bluetooth and how they might be? No, I don't know what that is. Okay. Okay. Yeah, I think there's another caller on the line, Dr. Peat. So, caller, you're on the air. Oh, hi, good evening. Well, the program is freaking me out. I need some dental work doing,
because I realize that as soon as I go to the dentist, he's going to do a huge dental x-ray. What I'm listening to you telling me on the radio is that it's probably better for me to let my teeth rot rather than have a dental x-ray. At least my brain will remain intact. I know dentists in Mexico who have gone against the pressure to do x-rays for everything, but I know endodontists who very reliably do root canals without x-ray. It can be done if the doctor is skilled enough.
If the doctor is not primarily interested in getting the patient in and out and getting their money. Right. Right. So, it's not necessary to have an x-ray? Well, almost never. You can probe if a dentist really believes that there might be a crack in the tooth that he can't see. Drilling a small hole to explore is-- Right, there are other ways. Right. Yeah, and the Japanese in particular, but in other industries, ultrasound imagery has been proven to work beautifully for teeth. Right.
You can see everything in a tooth with fine detail with microwaves, but dentists are invested in the x-ray technology. Okay, thank you. Well, great, thank you so much. I'm sorry we can't offer you the name of a dentist you can call who can help. Well, I feel so much better, thank you. Thank you, Fukuo. Okay, so Dr. Peat, do you think that there are more and more-- well, maybe not more and more, but there are definitely some skilled physicians and/or dentists
who are switching to alternative techniques, perhaps in-- as you mentioned, Japan and maybe in Europe? Yeah, they haven't really become commercial with these ultrasound or even MRI techniques, but they've been perfected scientifically, and it just needs an industry to grow up to displace the x-ray. Right. So MRI and ultrasound are radiation-free diagnostic investigative techniques? Well, the kind of radiation they use is less harmful than the x-ray and MRIs. Okay, there are several other callers dying to get on the air, Dr. Peat, so let's take the next caller. You're on the air? Hello?
Hello, you're on the air. Yeah, hi. I just wanted a quick comment on what you think of-- since anyone that flies these days gets exposed to some kind of scattering from the x-raying of their luggage, I wonder if you'd comment on what kind of exposure levels they're getting from that. I'll take my answer off here. Thank you. Okay, thank you, Fukuo. Dr. Peat? Yeah, I haven't seen the exposure doses from being near those machines, but if you look at the history of x-ray technologists in medical fields,
the history isn't very encouraging for how careful they are. Dentists always assured patients that stuff was very harmless, but there was an epidemic of dentists losing their index finger to cancer, and now they make the patient hold the x-ray film. Wow, interesting, very interesting. Well, we've got two more callers on the line, Dr. Peat, so let's take the next caller. Caller, you're on the air? Hello, thank you. There is a dentist a couple of hours south of here who does natural practices dentistry. I don't know the name right now. I could find out.
I eventually want to go there, but it's sort of a dream to be able to afford to be able to do that, but I could find that out. What I was initially going to mention was that the new scanning at the airport, the one that shows basically your naked body, now that's radiation that you're getting from that, so it's something to consider, the cumulative effects. Also, you were talking about the inflammation, and although I have daily herbs and nutrition that would be very anti-inflammatory,
the last time that I was checked, I have a lot of inflammation in lab tests and also conditions that are inflammation conditions, and I had a lot of radiation when I was a child, both the liquid isotope kind of a thing that you swallow. I was a kid, so it was hard for me to understand, but I would lay on a table and have something pointed at me, and then everybody would hide in a little room. I had a lot of those treatments, and as a teenager,
the doctor was really excited about the new mammogram machine, so those had a lot of radiation initially, and there was really no reason to be giving that to a teenager. So I hope you're going to tell us some things we can do to help us counteract all of that, the cumulative effects. Okay, Dr. Peat, what tips do you have? If you know you're going to be exposed, you can protect yourself in advance to some extent by making sure your thyroid function is good, maybe taking a supplement of magnesium.
Magnesium is the single most protective substance against radiation damage. Vitamin E, vitamin A, all of the antioxidants are protective. Progesterone and some of the protective stabilizing hormones, pregnenolone, will reduce the inflammation. Probably coffee and vitamin E would be the simplest things to... Is that because of the antioxidants in coffee? Yes, caffeine itself has an anti-inflammatory, anti-oxidant. Okay, good. Would you know perhaps what the function of magnesium would be in that context? It helps to heal genetic breaks. DNA repair enzymes are activated by magnesium. And coffee is high in magnesium and other B vitamins.
Okay, there's another caller waiting on the air. So, caller, you're on the air? Yes. You're on the air, go ahead. Okay, I have a question. One of my questions was sort of just addressed, isotope scan I had for kidney stones about 40 years ago. And I'm trying to think with your lecture what can be done now. The same things that protect preemptively also help to repair the damage. One thing I didn't mention was niacinamide, which protects against DNA injury.
So, do you want me to -- caller, I can repeat that list back that Dr. Peat listed as well. No, I wrote it down. Okay, good for you. But I did have another question. Go ahead. What about a full-body scan like a CAT scan where they have these full-body scans now? A CAT scan typically gives you about 200 times the radiation dose that a single picture does. 200 times, oh my gosh. Wow. And then people are getting them for their whole body? Yeah, it's a big business, but -- Expensive. -- a very bad business.
John Goffman, who died just a few years ago, discussed that in his newsletters and books. You can find a lot of his information on the Internet. John Goffman with one F. Oh, one F, okay. Okay, and then I also wanted to bring up one more thing, and that is I'm a midwife, and I was going by several years ago a microwave tower out where I lived on 40 acres in the countryside. And I noticed that all around the microwave tower, every time I'd drive there, I'd see three- and four-eared rabbits.
What do you think of that? Well, they've known for a long time that telephone or power line workers, that men have mostly female offspring and birds that live near power lines have nearly all female offspring. Wow. So it's increasing estrogen. Apparently, yeah. Reproductive disruption. Well, okay, I appreciate all your questions answered, and I just wanted to tell you that I've read your books and I love them. They're great. Thank you. Thank you for your call, listener. Okay, was there another caller on the line? Yeah, there is. Okay, so go ahead, caller. You're on the air.
Yes, I actually wanted to add something to the list of things that are very effective at diminishing the effects of radiation, and it also actually contains many of the supplements you named, and that's seaweed. It's actually an amazing, amazing detoxer of heavy metals and radioactivity, so much to the effect that they believe the Japanese suffered less damages because of how much seaweed they had in their diet prior to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Okay, Dr. Peat, what have you done?
Well, there have been advocates of distributing potassium iodide tablets to people who live around nuclear power reactors in case there's a leak of iodine, and seaweed is even better than potassium iodide tablets, but it only protects you against radioactive iodine, which is the first and worst radiation injury from, for example, a three-mile island. A year after the leaks, there was an epidemic of babies born without thyroid glands. So you're saying it wouldn't help the radiation from a cat scan or an X-ray, but it would help from, like, a nuclear facility.
Yes, it protects you against radioactive iodine, but iodine itself is slightly antioxidant, but it's also risky to use chronically because if you get just two or three times more than the minimum requirement, it can increase the risk of goiter and thyroiditis and thyroid cancer over a long period of time. Interesting. Well, I just want to let everybody know that powdered seaweed in your diet is very helpful for the thyroid, which, as you said, is great for reactivity and stuff like that. So thanks. Thanks for your talk. Okay, thanks for your talk.
I think there's another caller. There isn't. Okay. All right. Well, let's get back to the medical establishment in terms of what I believe they would use as reasonable justification for these investigative techniques. What do you know that's happening that perhaps isn't being pushed commercially because of vested interests in existing techniques, but what are the upcoming, perhaps, techniques that are much safer for visualizing? Well, for mammograms, for example, there is now good evidence that MRI and ultrasound will give you even better information than x-rays. Okay. Good. They just haven't been as developed commercially or industrially, correct?
Yeah. So basically, you're suggesting that under no circumstance would an x-ray be warranted, and perhaps an MRI and ultrasound would be even better. Yeah. I have avoided x-rays for, I guess, 15 or 20 years now. What would you -- okay. So I think the thing that is probably difficult to get over to people who are listening is that if they are, for example, involved in a road traffic accident and they seem to have a broken limb or pelvis or something like that.
I was actually involved in an accident a few years ago, and unfortunately, I think, because of the need for proof, I had to have a CAT scan on my head. I think it was completely unnecessary, by the way. There was absolutely nothing showing from it. But if somebody is involved in a road traffic accident and they may or may not have broken bones, and the physician is obviously saying, "Well, we need to x-ray you, sir. We need to x-ray your chest or your arm or your leg."
Well, except for broken bones, if you have a splinter of a bone in your brain or lung or something, I guess it's a quick way to locate it. But you can't really see very much about the soft tissue with an x-ray, where ultrasound and MRI -- MRI was essentially invented to look at soft tissue and to chemically identify what it is. With an x-ray, you can't tell what is tumor and what isn't. But with an MRI, you can detect the type of chemicals, type of physiology in the soft tissue.
So if you happen to be conscious during your accident and subsequent operation, then you can request and deny x-rays and suggest that you want ultrasounds. But I guess after you sign that statement of informed consent, they basically do whatever they deem necessary. So I think it's a bit difficult. When someone's in the hospital, they practically don't have any choice except to get up and run. So what about when you want to fly? I mean, can you tell the guy at the airport, "Oh, sorry, I don't do x-rays"?
Well, so far, that's optional, but they do the body scan. They take you into a separate booth if you're willing to do it. Otherwise, they have to search you by hand, I guess. Okay. So it does seem then that the x-rays and the other medical radiation is not harmless, but there are vested interests in the financial side of it that are very slow to adopt new techniques. Okay. So I know it's about eight minutes to eight o'clock now. I don't think there's any other cause in the line.
We were going to get into the food safety side of things. I know plenty of foods that have added ingredients that people would probably rather not recognize for fear of having to do something about it. But I know the food industry is, again, very much corporate-driven, and there are vested interests who would be much happier if you didn't know what was going on. Even people who read labels are not going to get all the information because the FDA allows things that are known to be in the materials you make the food out of.
They allow them to go into the food but not show up on the label. Right. I was actually thinking as we were getting callers and you were going over the subject in the early part of the show, what do you think, if nothing really changes in terms of what we're exposed to and/or increases the way it is, what do you think is going to be the long-term effects of that? I think it's already showing up. I'm getting really just a huge number of e-mails from young women all the way from teens into their 40s
who have a problem with fat around their waist. You can see it in the summer when they're wearing fewer clothes. You can see that teenage girls are getting fat around the middle. Obesity is epidemic and degenerative diseases, allergies and asthma are increasing tremendously as well as the death rate from them. Just briefly explain the links between the allergies and obesity, fat deposition, etc. How that actually works? Well, it hasn't entirely been clarified, but the things that cause obesity also cause inflammation.
Asthma is an inflammatory disease and some people see obesity as in some ways an inflammatory condition. The cytokines that regulate metabolism, once you start down the inflammatory pathway, you trigger cortisone production. Cortisone directs fat to your face and abdomen and shoulders. Cortisone exposure increases and causes degenerative diseases such as osteoporosis and obesity and heart disease. The inflammation or allergic reaction is really prior to the chronic overproduction of cortisone. Okay, well I tell you what, there is another caller on the line, so let's get the caller on the air
and then that's probably going to be as much time as we have. So caller, you're on the air. Yes, good afternoon, good evening, rather. With all of this, what did he call it, back age or second stage radiation thing going on, cumulative from all the x-rays and stuff you've taken in your life, have there been an increase in the number of cases of SEL, systemic erythematosus? SLE you mean? SLE, yeah, lupus. And is there any way to treat lupus successfully?
Yes, I've seen basically all of the lupus people that I've seen over the last 30 years with thyroid, progesterone and avoiding the polyunsaturated fats, they all either recover completely or at least don't die of their kidney failure and so on. Has it been increasing over the years since we started even far back as the atmosphere testing that we did? That's my impression, but I don't have the figures. Okay, thank you very much. Thank you for your call.
Well, it is coming up for 7.58, so no more questions and we should probably wrap up the evening show. I will say that there's definitely a subject that is coming up more and more and that is food ingredients. I know that the FDA are allowing manufacturers to exempt themselves, if you like, from a certain percentage of ingredients on the labels and that's how some ingredients can slip into foods without you even knowing it. But there are some very obvious food ingredients that have very negative health effects and I believe that certainly warrants a program.
So hopefully, Dr. Peat will join us for an expose of food ingredients, some of which you may not even heard of, but which are pretty ubiquitous. So thank you very much for joining us again, Dr. Peat. Okay, thank you. Thank you. Okay, so for those who've listened to our show, thanks for listening and we do appreciate your feedback and your calls. And until the third Friday of next month, have a very good night. Have a very good night!