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or something else, I'm forgetting the card because I'm not reading it. Thank you for joining us and time is made for you to get your point across on our call-in talk shows. Although we won't necessarily let you ramble on for hours and hours. But anyway, I would like to thank our underwriter for the upcoming talk show, Ask Your Herb Doctor. KMUD thanks Jessica Baker of Jade Dragon Acupuncture for her support of Redwood Community Radio. Practicing traditional Chinese medicine, Jessica treats conditions ranging from psoriasis to post-traumatic stress. She's located at 607 F Street in Arcata.
Jade Dragon Acupuncture can be reached at 822-4300 or online at jadedragonacupuncture.com. [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] Well, 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 8pm, my wife and I are both licensed medical herbalists who train in England and graduated there with a degree in herbal medicine.
We run a clinic in Gartherville where we consult with clients about a wide range of conditions and recommend herbal medicines and dietary advice. So you're listening to Ask Your Herb Doctor on KMUD Gartherville 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 diabetes and Dr. Peat's latest research on diabetes.
The number here if you live in the area is 9233911 or if you live outside the area, there's a toll-free number which is 1800 KMUD RAD. So that's 1800 KMUD RAD if you live outside the area. We can also be reached toll-free on 1-888-WBM-HERB for consultations or further information Monday through Friday 9 to 5. Okay, so once again we're very pleased to welcome Dr. Peat on the show. Dr. Peat, are you there? Engineer, where's Dr. Peat? He was there. I'll try calling him back. Okay. Okay, until we get Dr. Peat back on the line here.
Basically, the continuation of this show is going to be on diabetes and Dr. Peat's research onto neuropathies and the classical diagnosis of diabetes and what we know in the light of current research to kind of make the notion of diabetes disappear in light of new findings. So Dr. Peat, if you're with us. Hello. Hi, Dr. Peat. Can you hear us okay? Yes.
Perfect. Okay. So as always, even though you're a pretty permanent fixture on the show and we're very happy to keep it that way, for those perhaps who've never listened to you or heard you, would you just give an outline of your academic professional background so people know more about you? Okay. I have been interested in biology for a long time but was doing other things, teaching English linguistics and such.
But in 1968, I decided to go back to graduate school to get a PhD at the University of Oregon. I graduated there in '72, having specialized in mostly physiology of reproduction biochemistry. Since then, I've been following up on the same subjects related to oxidative metabolism, progesterone, estrogen and thyroid. Okay. And I think also just for the people that are listening to the show, Dr. Peat, you've been pretty much altruistic in your attitude towards helping people. I know lots of people have consulted with you from all over the world for various metabolic disorders.
And you have a very, very alternative view. But in terms of the research, it's actually not that alternative. It's just that the research doesn't really surface anywhere near as quickly as we'd like it to, compared to what medicine and doctors are taught in terms of the cause of diseases, specifically metabolic disorders. And their treatment is often lagging behind or in fact contraindicated in some ways. So you've got a very extensive treatment background too, haven't you?
A big part of the problem is that medical journals are totally separate from science journals. Years ago, before the internet, Index Medicus was a list of medical journal articles similar to PubMed now. And I occasionally compared things that I would find in biological abstracts or chemical abstracts. And when I would look things up later in Index Medicus, I found that there was usually a delay of 20 or 30 years after the discovery of something absolutely essential, such as the role of coenzyme Q10 in metabolism.
Okay, well, onto this month's topic. I know you've recently been producing a newsletter. You haven't actually finished it yet. But the subject of the newsletter is going to be on diabetes and fats, and it has an interwoven component with all those protective elements of things that you are advocating fairly continuously for many different disorders.
Diabetes being one of those with things like progesterone and thyroid, adequate sugars. Can I just start off perhaps by just saying for our listeners perhaps, before we get into the actual causes of diabetes, would you just then outline the standard definition and cause of diabetes from the perspective of current medical understanding before we get into the research and what it is you understand it as? The medical understanding has changed very little in the last 200 years. It was called the sugar disease. And in ancient times, it was named because of the excess urination.
And the urine contained a lot of glucose, and people craved sugar. And then they discovered the blood was loaded with glucose. And so it began the medical concept that it was the glucose or the sugar disease. And the standard cure was to make them unable to eat sugar, imprison them if necessary.
And they would just die anyway, but they kept them from satisfying their sugar hunger. And then insulin was discovered, which would for the people who were wasting away with what later was called type 1 diabetes, insulin would allow them to build muscle and put on fat instead of breaking tissues down. And excreting it in the urine. But the sugar disease concept stayed with the medical profession, even though insulin deficiency came to be the idea of its cause.
But then as they looked for more ways to sell insulin, they noticed that lots of people who weren't wasting away and dying at a young age also had very high blood sugar. Some of them had sugar in their urine. Yet when they tested their blood, they found it had a normal amount of insulin in it. But anyway, they were good candidates for treatment. So it came to be called type 2 diabetes, even though the original concept was that diabetes was a wasting disease in which you quickly died of tissue wasting.
But now fat people became something like 95% of the patients for treatment of their high blood glucose. So it definitely isn't a problem of insulin deficiency for the great majority of people who are diagnosed with diabetes. Okay, so you just mentioned what's currently being called type 1 and type 2. Type 1 is the insulin for want of a better explanation. Type 1 is insulin dependent diabetes mellitus and then type 2 is non-insulin dependent. So it's kind of a diet, what they call diet controlled or can be modulated by the diet.
So how does the model of diabetes, the current medical model of diabetes differ from the research perspective on the cause of diabetes before we get into articles and specifics? In the late 19th century, two doctors doubted the theory that it was from eating too much sugar because they died even faster when they made them not eat any sugar. So they began feeding first one patient with each doctor. They let them eat all the sugar they wanted, which was something like three quarters of a pound a day of pure sugar added.
And they very quickly recovered from the wasting disease and were able to go back to work after a few weeks of this super high sugar diet. And that gradually, their followers eventually saw that fructose was part of the sucrose standard sugar molecule, which got in the cells and was metabolized without needing insulin. So for 50 or 60 years, many diabetics were able to eat a normal amount of sweetener in the form of fructose.
But that never became the dominant treatment for diabetes, even though it is more or less as effective as the simply very high sucrose diet. But experiments looking for what was the cause of, in the case of young kids, the type 1 diabetes that was more common in girls than boys, it turned out to be sort of an autoimmune problem, inflammation, killing off the beta cells. And it happens that in vitro and in animal experiments, you can stimulate the growth of stem cells in the pancreas with glucose.
So it isn't glucose that's responsible for killing those cells. It's an inflammation reaction. And the inflammation causes breakdown of fatty acids, which cause pre-radical injury to the tissue. And because of that observation of the inflammation involving prostaglandins and unsaturated fatty acids, a few experimenters put lab animals on a totally fat-free diet, giving them only saturated fats or no fat at all, just carbohydrates and protein, vitamins and minerals, and then tried to give them diabetes by all of the standard methods of poisoning the beta cells of the pancreas in various ways so they couldn't make insulin.
And these fat-free animals didn't develop the experimental diabetes the way all other animals do. So experimentally, it's been pretty well demonstrated that unsaturated fatty acids breaking down produce inflammation, which activates many of the processes seen in diabetes, the degenerative processes in the retina and nerves, for example, are where the damage starts very often before the blood sugar increases at all.
So if you're getting retinal degeneration and have normal blood sugar, or if you're getting numb and tingly hands and feet and have normal blood sugar, it's clearly not the sugar which is responsible for the degenerative changes. Okay, so again, you're pointing the finger of blame, if you like, at the free fatty acid liberation and the oxidative damage that occurs from that.
Yeah, and the unsaturated fatty acids happen to create a vicious circle because they create stress and the stress activates the stress hormones which provide, in the normal process of providing fat from the tissues as emergency fuel, to liberate more of the unstable polyunsaturated fats, creating more free radical damage, creating more stress, liberating more fats and so on. Purely saturated fats, when liberated, tend to turn off those stress hormones.
Okay, so another good reason yet again to avoid the liquid oils and avoid the free fatty acids, the fish oils and all the other oils that basically are very unsaturated because they're unstable, promote oxidation and all the stress response and tissue damage therein. Yep. Okay, so perhaps I just wanted to mention that one of these drugs, medications that I know quite a few people have been on and are probably still using, amongst others, but metformin as a diabetes medication.
Yeah, fenformin was the first form of that that was used widely in the 50s and 60s, but it was killing a very high proportion of people. They were dying much earlier than they would have with no treatment at all. Oh my goodness. And it was causing lactic acidosis by causing the mitochondria to be unable to oxidize glucose, which was exactly the problem of diabetes. So that got a bad reputation and it was replaced by metformin, which was reputed to not cause lactic acidosis.
And there are articles on the warning about the production of lactic acidosis with this standard, very common treatment. It works where it works, partly by poisoning the mitochondria so that the cells are forced to produce lactic acid and so it lowers blood sugar by wasting the glucose, turning it into lactic acid. Wow. But it also has some other effects which account for why everyone doesn't die quickly of lactic acidosis. It apparently has some slightly protective anti-inflammatory effects. Wow. Okay, you're listening to Ask Your Ob-Doctor on KNUD Gallivoo, 91.1 FM.
And from 7.30 till the end of the show, 8 o'clock, you're invited to call in with any questions with our permanent speaker, Dr. Ray Peat, who's on the show discussing diabetes, the scientific approach and the research approach that's elucidating lots of different treatment strategies than you would otherwise expect to hear from your doctor. So the number here for living near is 923 3911 or if you're outside the area, the toll-free number is 1800 KNUD RAD. So any time from 7.30 to 8 o'clock.
Okay, so I wanted to also let you get into the benefits of sugar. I know we've done several radio shows on how good and how beneficial sugar is for the organism and it's the same with salt and keep getting validated slowly but surely with reports of that same thing in the press whereas before it was pretty well maligned. So we understand that there are a lot of protective effects that sugar confers to the organism from a cellular energy standpoint. What are the beneficial effects to sugar have when you look at it from a diabetic perspective?
I looked up what current journals and doctors are saying are the mechanisms that cause nerve damage in diabetes and they have a standard four or five chemical or functional changes of nerve cells that they say are caused by excess glucose. They occur in the presence of excess glucose in the diabetic but they also occur before or without the presence of glucose and the deficiency of glucose is one of the things that can induce these same defensive reactions that are blamed on sugar.
So you have to look at the evidence regarding the deficiency of glucose and compare it experiment by experiment with the kind of evidence they propose to explain glucose as the cause. When you look at all of the events associated with diabetes and the symptoms, you see that hormone changes typically go with it. Stress induces aromatase that increases estrogen production and also directly increases some of the pituitary hormones besides ACTH that drives the adrenals. Stress increases growth hormone which provides fuel in an emergency by increasing free fatty acids in circulation.
Estrogen also increases the ACTH and prolactin, several of the stress hormones in the pituitary but especially growth hormone is very closely connected with estrogen. So females have higher not only estrogen but growth hormone and free fatty acids in circulation and it happens that females have much more often problems with the nerve degenerative symptoms of diabetes as well as being the ones that have the majority of type 1 diabetes during childhood.
So the effect of the free fatty acids on stress and glucose or any sugars protection against those stress reactions is one of the basic things to look at in avoiding hypoglycemic stress long before the problem reaches the stage of producing hyperglycemia. In hyperglycemia, what you have is the body's adjustment to the inability of cells to get enough energy because they can't oxidize glucose because the fats are blocking it. That's been known since the 60s called the Randle Cycle in which free fatty acids block the use of glucose.
So the body tries to overcome that poisonous effect of the free fatty acids by increasing glucose production and so it can kind of get around the block just by stuffing more glucose into the blood. So to a great extent, the rising blood sugar shouldn't be fought in itself. So the body's adjustment to the inability of cells to get enough energy is one of the basic things to look at in avoiding hypoglycemic stress. So the liver becomes unable to activate the pre-thyroid hormone thyroxine turning it into the active T3.
So supplementing the active T3 thyroid hormone will cure lots of the so-called effects of diabetes. I had an old friend whose toes were basically rotting because of what was diagnosed as diabetes, degenerative nerve and circulation problems in the legs and feet. Two weeks after he started using Armour thyroid, his feet recovered completely. His toes had been black with ulcerated sores going right into the bones but they completely healed up on thyroid. We went through three cycles in which his doctor said the Armour thyroid was going to increase his blood sugar and make his diabetes worse.
So you would tell him to stop it, his feet would start rotting again. So it wasn't just a coincidence. We did it three times. On that note, Dr. Peat, we do have several callers waiting in the queue. Let's go ahead and take the first caller. Caller, you're on the air. Where are you from? Hold on, I'm dealing with something. Sir, wait a second. I have a question to ask the caller. I know that and we're talking on the air right now. You're next caller. I apologize. So what's going on?
People love Dr. Peat. I know. I know. I know the flashing lights. The lights are flashing. Dr. Peat, people are calling. I'll take this. And also you should ask them if they want to talk off the air, ask them where they're calling from. It's always good to get an idea of demographics. Yeah, I know that. So first I will... we have so many callers, listeners from all over the country who listen on the internet for this show. And people need to understand that the KMUD system can only handle 25 people at a time.
We need to change that. I got an email from a person in England who listens to the show, Dr. Peat. And I'm going to be talking with them at some point here in the future. Yeah, and so it costs us money to have more than 25 at a time and that is something we need to do. But this is a plea to Dr. Peat's international listeners to please support KMUD so that you will always be able to listen to them over the internet. And so I have a question.
Well, one person wanted you to speak more in layman terms in general. You're so eloquent and full of Latin that it's tough for you, I'm sure. But so in general, that is a general idea. And someone from Legit has a friend with suspected CO2 poisoning and possible brain damage and was interested in nutritional ideas to address that. CO2 poisoning? Oh, I'm sorry, carbon monoxide. Carbon monoxide. Yeah, my bad. Okay. CO2 is one of the things that helps to restore the cells that are damaged by carbon monoxide. Okay, good. Good vitamin nutrition is helpful. Okay.
All right, there you go. So carbon dioxide and obviously nutritional support. And thyroid hormone is the main thing we need to produce all the carbon dioxide. It is protective. The diabetic or hypothyroid person is not producing enough energy from oxygen and glucose. And so they very easily or even at rest turn some of the glucose into lactic acid. And lactic acid displaces carbon dioxide from the blood. And that has a stress producing effect throughout the body. And by simply breathing less rapidly or breathing in a bag occasionally to re-breathe and save your carbon dioxide,
you can increase the CO2 in tissues, which activates the Krebs cycle, stabilizes cells, and shuts down the production of lactic acid. So it has a direct connection to the things that go wrong in diabetes as well as hypothyroidism to simply increase your CO2. And living at a very high altitude, the body naturally does that because it isn't being overwhelmed with high pressure oxygen like at sea level. Okay, let's take the next caller. Caller, you're on the air. Where are you from? This is David from Missouri. Hi, David. Hello, Andrew. Hello, Dr. Peat.
This is off the subject a little bit, but I've heard Dr. Peat in other podcasts refer to starch molecules as -- I think we call those molecules -- maybe they're like a crystal-like structure, but they actually block capillaries if they somehow get into the bloodstream. I was just wanting him to elaborate on that a little bit more possibly on maybe what other research. He had mentioned one piece of research, and I don't remember who that was specifically, but I'm wondering if this is something that's fairly well-known in the scientific community.
No, it was something discovered 100 years ago, but in the '70s, German immunologist Gerhard Volkheimer wrote some papers on it. It's called persorption, and I think there's an article of his on the Internet called Persorption, and it has illustrations of some of the junk that can simply get squeezed right through the lining of the intestine. It isn't being squeezed between cells necessarily. It can go right into the cytoplasm on one side and out the cytoplasm on the other side. These cells are much more flexible than people imagine.
Particles as big as 100 microns -- potato starch particles, for example -- if you eat a slurry of corn starch or potato starch or whatever on an empty stomach, much later you can draw blood and find these particles, which some of them are just the size of a red blood cell, but others are as much as 10 times the diameter of a red blood cell. Red blood cells are very flexible, so they can squeeze through capillaries with an opening that's only maybe 5 microns across, and their diameter is 10 microns.
Even a 10-micron particle of starch will plug up an arteriole and shut down circulation to a whole block of capillaries fed by that arteriole. The bigger the particle, the bigger the small artery is that gets plugged up. So, a Alzheimer's would feed mice a high content of free starch in their diet, and he found that they aged prematurely, and when he sliced them up, he found that all of their organs contained little nests of dead, deteriorating cells downstream from the plug of one of these starch molecules. Dr. Peat, would these starch materials actually resist?
I mean, does the body see this as an irritant and try to somehow expel it, or is it just something that just stays there for long periods of time? The body can produce the enzymes pretty much anywhere it needs to. It can break down starch. It isn't just saliva and the intestine that has those enzymes, but they can stay in place long enough, as he demonstrated, for the tissue to die. The bigger they are, I suppose, the longer they stay put, killing tissue. So when we're eating a potato, and as you've mentioned before,
you know, using like coconut oil or butter or some kind of saturated fat, that's allowing that to basically, I guess the word would be like slide through the intestine rather than getting off to the side and going into the bloodstream? Yeah, if it's very well cooked, it makes the starch particle easier to break down in the intestine, and the fat delays the absorption, so it has time to break down more before it's absorbed. So when you said the word--I forgot the scientist's name, but he found all sorts of junk.
Junk would be like all those things that they're putting into our food, too, or like the silicates that you mentioned that they use to make a viscosity for the machinery to like vitamins and minerals and different things, supplements that they produce. So those silicates would be one of those junk elements that probably lodge in different vessels in the body, too, right? And I think the chemically modified cellulose molecules that are in practically everything, some of those are toxic in themselves, seem to have a catalytic effect,
and so they might be degrading the supplement right in the tablet. That has hardly been studied. I've seen a couple of papers on it, and the silica particles not only get into the tissue, but they have a toxic and allergenic or immunological effect. Gerhard Volkheimer, being an immunologist, was especially concerned about their role in degenerative and immune diseases, but people specializing in the silica or silicone reactions, they found that supposedly amorphous silica glass-like particles, that they in themselves have some of the silicone-like effects
and even overlap with the crystalline effects that produce cancer in silicosis from asbestos crystals. But it seems to be an activation of inflammation reactions. The inflammasome particle responds to a certain shape of particle. So if it has a given shape, it doesn't matter too much whether it's asbestos or carbon or silicone or wood. I think Volkheimer mentioned feathers and wood particles, sawdust, can get through the intestine. He showed that not only plugging up the blood vessels,
about 15 minutes after they can be detected in the blood, they can be found in the liver, in the bile, having crossed another set of cell barriers, and in the cerebrospinal fluid right into the brain. And eventually some of them show up in the urine. You would think that maybe that would be contributing to psoriasis and different skin disorders too, because of its maybe reaching the surface capillaries. Is that possible? I mean, you know, it's especially theorized at least to contribute to the various things like scleroderma.
Silicone from breast implants has been connected to the generalized scleroderma, but even the silica particles used as food additives are suspected as activating the inflammatory skin hardening diseases. Once you see these different things happening in the body, it really informs you on what you eat, I think, don't you? Of course you do. I mean, it just really kind of guides you about being careful about what you put in your mouth, because there's just so many things. I'm going to have to stop you there, David. I don't mean to be rude.
Oh, no, no, no. I'm sorry. No, thank you. That was great. Thank you very much. We really appreciate your calls. We do have three more callers at least. Okay. Sorry about that. I'd like to get other people to get a chance here. Okay. Let's take the next caller. Caller, you're on the air. Where are you from? It's just me. Yes. Where are you from, caller? Oh, please. I'm from here in Garboville. Okay. Go ahead. Well, one thing real quick. Way back when we were talking about diabetes and insulin,
you mentioned a few things that really seem to drive home the point that for pregnant women, the best thing you can possibly do for them is keep them unstressed. Like for the baby, for the future, I've got a son myself. He turned out pretty good, but I'm thinking a lot of that was how much focus and attention there was on keeping the mother happy and unstressed. Yes. One of the essential things of stress is falling blood sugar. So if mama craves whatever, chocolate, peanut butter, ice cream, pickles, it's probably a good thing, right? Yes.
Glucose is essential for the baby's brain development. Many older gynecologists and obstetricians knew that diabetic women had the brightest babies. Even hugely fat women who had diabetes and were not in good health themselves often produced extremely healthy babies. You mentioned that intelligence was also higher in diabetic women because specifically because of the increased blood sugar. Yes, and not to dwell on that too much because that was actually a secondary point. My main point was into the diabetes thing and hypoglycemia specifically.
When I was younger, a teenager, I was diagnosed with hypoglycemia along with having really bad acne. Through this conversation, I realized a couple of things. One, it could all be tied back to the amount of unsaturated fat I may have consumed as a child. If all that was blocking up my ability to even process the glucose, I may have had some hypoglycemic symptoms at the same time as my body is trying to syst up and coagulate around every obstacle. Does that make sense? Yes.
A man named Adam Kiewicz about 30 or 40 years ago showed that lowering blood sugar activates the inflammatory process. Doubling the blood sugar will stop allergies to almost everything. Every episode of hypoglycemia is stressing your immune system as well as activating the stress hormones that compensate by turning protein into sugar. Do you expect that was at all related to my intense craving during those years for lots of sugar like donuts and cold cola for lunch? Yes, that's the natural thing like in pregnancy when a woman needs sugar or premenstrually, same thing happens.
When your blood sugar falls, you crave sugar. If your thyroid is just temporarily depressed by stress, eating a pound of sugar over a period of three days will sometimes replenish the glycogen stores in all of your tissues including the liver where the liver uses it to activate the thyroid hormone. To get back to the original point, the stress then besides being an adolescent, I mean I'm now almost 35 and I've still got the acne. The stress then does that come from the unsaturated fat?
That's probably the most common reason for it but many kinds of stress can bring it on. But I think that's the most common cause currently. There's a really great book by Broda Barnes called Hypoglycemia, It's Your Liver Not Your Mind. He was one of the first people to point out that the liver provides three quarters of our active thyroid hormone. To do that, it needs glucose and without the active thyroid hormone, you tend to get hypoglycemia. I assume alcohol in that factor would be a downer. Yes, it interferes with the provision of glucose.
Thank you very much, Dr. Peat. Thank you for your call, Caller. We've still got several more callers on the line. Let's take this next caller. Caller, where are you from? Who's this? I'm from Vancouver, Washington. Oh, hi. You're on the air. Go ahead. I'm from Vancouver, Washington. Thank you. I did hear that. Go ahead with your questions. I have two cysts growing on each of my hormones. Whatever. I'm nervous. Go ahead. No, it's okay. Anyway, right now they're at 6.9 centimeters. I'm 79 years old and my question is, do I have them removed?
Now, where were these cysts again? On my... Ovaries? Yes, thank you. Go ahead, Dr. Peat. That's the age thing. No problem. So, Dr. Peat. I think you should have your blood hormones measured. The cysts could be producing a lot of estrogen. Have you had ultrasounds? Yes, I have an ultrasound every six months. And are they enlarging? Yes, slowly. The blood test might show what's needed to break them. Sometimes just one dose of progesterone is all that's needed for the cyst to break in the way it should during a normal menstrual cycle.
So, my real question is, do I do this at my age? I mean, is there a chance that I may not come out of it? Oh, sure. Surgery is, if you're underweight especially and over 70, then any surgery tends, in the six months following the surgery, it increases all kinds of risk of dying. Well, gosh, it's a hard thing to decide to do. Progesterone is a very safe compound and it's certainly far safer than surgery, so that would be a very good start. Yes.
And progesterone should be something that would easily be prescribed by your doctor. I have an appointment, so I'll certainly bring this up. There are, of course, other sources of progesterone that you can purchase also, just so that the doctor, if they refuse to do that, it is always possible to go elsewhere. What would I, can you get it over the counter? In California here, there's several health stores. I mean, I think there's very many health stores, but I don't get around the country too much, but I've seen it certainly in health stores.
So, there's a product called Progest-E, which is a natural progesterone, and there are several other types of product that contain progesterone. That would be the thing that Dr. Peat's mentioning would be useful for you. Okay. Like I said, I'm at 6.9 centimeters, and listening to Dr. Ottis one day, he said if you get to 8, you've got to have them taken out. Is that...
I've known quite a few younger women with big cysts that were causing pain, at least, and they were, with just one or two doses of progesterone, the cyst simply broke and they had no more problem. So, is that the same as twisting, if it twists itself? No. I think you're, I think it's probably getting confused with two different things. Number one is a kind of natural and spontaneous dissolution or breaking down, and the other thing I think you might be confusing with twisted ovaries, but not too sure.
But yeah, pregnenolone is one of those things you should definitely first ask your doctor for, and if you can't get them from your doctor, you can always find them online. So, progesterone is the thing you want to try. Okay. Well, I appreciate it. Thank you very much. You're very welcome. Thank you for your call. Okay, we still have three more callers, so let's take this next caller. Where are you from, caller? I'm from Kansas City. Kansas City. Hi. Okay.
Hi. I have a question about niacinamide. Dr. Peat, in one of your articles, you said that it can cause tumor cells to either mature or disintegrate, but it prolongs the replicative life of culture cells. Could you explain that a little bit more to me, please? It's needed to produce energy efficiently, and it lowers stress. So, the increased energy and reduced stress simply stops the processes that tend to promote cancer. But its main effect is protective for nerve cells, for example. Almost anything that injures a nerve cell is protected against by niacinamide.
Okay. Thank you very much. That explains it. Excellent. I do have another question. In one of your interviews, you said that a way of helping with extreme vaginal dryness is to use a suppository with a fairly high dose of vitamin A and a little vitamin E in a cocoa butter. How much would be a safe high dose of vitamin A and how much E?
To make a suppository, it depends on whether you're using pure cocoa butter. With that, you can get probably a thousand milligrams of vitamin E and maybe 20,000 international units of vitamin A to dissolve in one suppository. Okay. And how often should one use this? The people who have told me about it did it every day. Okay. If I were to take vitamin A internally to help with other issues, how much is a safe dose? To help with what?
Well, with other issues. I have liver issues. I have a problem with my thyroid, I mean with my esophagus and several other problems. So vitamin A would be helpful, but how much would be a safe dose taken internally? It depends on the status of your thyroid exactly because the thyroid hormone and vitamin A are carried on the same protein in the blood. And if you take too much vitamin A, it can act as an antagonist to thyroid.
It acts like polyunsaturated fat in competing against the thyroid hormone and can also block the production of adrenal and ovarian steroids if you get too much. But 10,000 units a day, if your thyroid is okay, people with very high thyroid activity sometimes need more like 50,000 international units of vitamin A because the increased thyroid raises your requirement for vitamin A. So it's important to adjust the dose to the thyroid function. I see. I have Hashimoto's so I am actually taking thyroid hormones. So would 10,000 be too much for someone like me?
Yeah, unless you're sure that your metabolic rate is up, it's good to limit it to about 10,000 units a day. Okay, well thank you so much. I appreciate it. Thank you for your call. Okay, it is actually 5 to 8 now and I know we have one more caller so I'm itching to find out where they come from. But if you can be really quick caller with your question and Dr. Peat, if you could sum it up in a sentence, if that's possible, that will still leave me time to give people more information about you.
So next caller, you're on the air, where are you from? Hi there. Yes, where are you from? Hi, my name is Mike and I'm calling from New York. New York, cool. Okay, we've got four minutes or less, Mike, so be quick with your question. Okay, well good evening, Andrew and Dr. Peat. I guess my very first question would be with regard to diabetes. What would you recommend, Dr. Peat, that someone with diabetes who's been, is given all this propaganda about avoiding sugar and such,
that you would recommend to them to get a start and that they could see benefit from and perhaps open up to trying more sugar and things like that? Well, fruit is the best way to get your sugar. Orange juice in the United States is the most reliable way to get sugar with every meal. Milk is very important for several reasons as a source of protein. The high calcium has an anti-stress effect. So emphasizing everyday milk, cheese, protein and some eggs and other fruits, avoiding the starchy fruits like bananas.
Then if you actually have a problem with high blood sugar, which if it's only like 130 milligrams per cent, that wouldn't be a reason for working on the blood sugar. But supplementing brewers yeast and aspirin are things that can help to actually lower the blood sugar and a thyroid supplement sometimes will help. Okay, I think we're going to have to hold it there, I'm afraid. Okay, let me just tell everybody who's listening where you can be contacted, Dr. Peat.
Thanks so much for your time and thank you callers. Okay, so Dr. Peat can be found online www.raypeat.com. Plenty of scholarly articles fully referenced, quite a few different subjects, but his specialty is metabolic disorders, thyroid disorders and hormones and aging. So thank you so much again, Dr. Peat. We can also be reached toll free at 1-888-WBMERB for further questions Monday through Friday. And for all of those who have called in, thank you so much for making the show what's becoming a very universal show.
Like I said, I've had callers from England and this month we've had callers from New York, Washington, Kansas and Missouri. So I think that speaks for itself. Thanks so much for listening and until next March, it's the third Friday of every month from 7 to 8 p.m. The show is pretty much exclusively given over to Dr. Peat's wisdom at this point in time. Okay, thanks so much. [Music] Redwood Community Radio, KMUD is listener supported and we are here because people help with their time, energy and money.
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