Paused at 0:00.
Nothing is more expensive than bad information. Know the source. One Radio Network dot com. Okay, here we are. We're back with our second show this morning. And on the third Monday of the month, it is Dr. Ray Peat at 1030 Central Time. Dr. Peat is on the telephone here. He doesn't have the whole camera thing, so we'll just do the telephone, which is fine because the most important thing is what the gentleman has to say with all his massive amounts of research that he has done. He's a PhD.
He got the PhD long ago from the University of Oregon. He specialized in physiology and he started working with hormones back in '68. Dissertation on that in '72 and talked a lot about progesterone and hormones. His main thesis is that energy and structure are independent at every level. He's got a great website and we'll tell you about that. And he's here. Dr. Peat, good morning to you, sir. Good morning. How are you? What's going on in your life? Oh, I'm working on two or three new articles right now.
I learned that Gilbert Ling had died last summer and he's been such a big influence on my work for 50 years that I decided to write a little article introducing his ideas to people who don't get in the usual public media. And Gilbert Ling, what was his specialty? Cell physiology. He came over from China on a scholarship in the 1940s and very quickly developed a new kind of cell electrode, a very microscopically fine tip that will go into an individual cell to allow you to measure the voltage of just one tiny cell.
And that's named the Ling-Girard microelectrode, named after him and his thesis professor. And despite being the first person to have the technology for measuring the electronic condition of a single cell, his observations were contradictory to the dogma that had been established already in the 1930s. So ever since then, 70 years, his work was simply not recognized, even though he answered all of the objections that people could possibly make and showed that the whole picture of the cell that sixth graders get in their textbooks and the medical students get in their textbooks,
it's all a big fantasy. He disproved all of the parts of this picture of cell physiology. And how did his work then really affect, say, what you did or what we know then about health and how the body works? I mean, what was the big takeaway from that? I was starting out taking courses to work in nerve biology or brain physiology, and discovering his work within the first weeks of starting to read the history of cell physiology, I realized that my professor was basically talking about fantasies, and so I dropped
out of the brain end of the biology research and looked around for people who were closer to the actual facts. And I found that the extreme other end of the organism, the reproductive system, where you can look at one cell at a time, the fertilized ovum, the very beginning of the organism instead of the highest, most complicated organ, it was easier to talk objectively about the physiology of a single cell rather than the complexities of the mature brain. And it happened that the professor working on reproductive physiology wasn't a high-powered prestige seeker.
And so when I made observations that were contrary to textbook doctrine at the time, he said, "Well, is it reproducible? And if so, go ahead." And if I had chosen to work with the first professor on nerve biology, he would have, for example, in describing some of his research, he said, "Well, first we threw away the bad data, and data are data. You have to explain them away. You can't just throw them away." And what he meant was observations that didn't fit the dogma had to be discarded.
And when I was working in his lab, I had one of the microelectrodes inside the cell, and moving it around, I showed him that there were different electrical potentials within a single cell. And as soon as he saw it, it was like he had been electrocuted. He jerked away, and I never talked to him again. The visualization of what seemed impossible to him, he simply couldn't direct his eyes in that direction anymore. So I came to see the biological world from Ling's perspective, and from that perspective,
it's a giant business structure that doesn't care about the details of reality as long as it can be turned into profit. Kind of like modern life these days, huh? Yeah, the pharmaceutical industry really drives biological research and sets the rules. Do they do that, Dr. Peat, on a very deep level at the medical schools and in that area, right? Oh, yeah. And medical schools, universities in general, are depending on private funding more and more, and medical schools are hugely directed by the pharmaceutical industry.
About 50 years ago, I saw some horrible biased research coming out of Yale Medical School, and I wrote the dean and asked him how much research were they getting from the estrogen industry. And instead of answering me, the dean wrote a letter and said he was insulted that I would imply that money would influence their research, but he wouldn't tell me how much money was accounting for their very distorted picture of what estrogen does. Another school that I looked at, in this case Southern California University, USC, I was
able to get some idea of their funding, and it was about 99% estrogen and almost none supporting progesterone research. Everyone in the department, it looked like, was saying something favorable about estrogen and only unfavorable things about progesterone, because that's where the money was. Yeah, wow. Do you often see people that do well when they take a little extra progesterone? Yeah, both men and women equally depend on progesterone. It's a massively important brain hormone, 10 times as much in the brain as in the blood, and men's brains have just as much as women's.
So it's basically a pharmaceutical industry fraud to call it the pregnancy hormone. And we get too much estrogen just from modern lifestyle, the diet, and whatever? Yeah, and if you gain too much weight because you're eating the wrong foods that suppress your metabolism, or if you're injured or stressed, any tissue of your body can make estrogen. So even if your ovaries are taken out, for example, in rat studies, thousands of articles have been published saying you take out the rat's ovaries and you have a rat deficient in estrogen.
But no one measured it until finally a couple of groups decided to see what happens to the rat's blood estrogen when they take the ovaries out. Nothing happened. The estrogen went up slightly, because if you take out the ability to make a little more progesterone in the ovaries, that is a stress, and the body under stress makes more estrogen. So the whole dogma about what menopause consists of, it really is a failure of the ovaries to produce enough supportive progesterone to support the brain.
And in that situation, you're deficient in progesterone, leaving the body in stress, and in stress it makes more estrogen. And since estrogen under stress tends to deposit inside cells, measuring it in the blood is useless because the body has to have progesterone to release estrogen from inside the cells. And researchers in Sweden, Batra was the man's name, who did some of the first research showing that when an animal seems to be deficient in estrogen, if you give it progesterone, suddenly the enzymes that allow the estrogen to be released from cells will cause it to
appear in the blood and be able to leave the body through the kidneys. So the details of how stress increases estrogen and decreases progesterone have been known now for about 85 years. Hans Selye was one of the first persons who started trying to define what estrogen is. He said a big dose of estrogen imitates the shock phase of the stress reaction. Shock turns off your ability to make energy and weakens, gives you a fast, weak heartbeat, and all of the main functions fail.
That was what he saw as an effect of estrogen already in the 1940s. Well, now with the lifestyles people have and everything going on with the internet and the world, you can see why there's so many problems with the ladies going through menopause. Unbelievable. Dr. Ray Peat is with us, a great researcher, as you can hear, he digs deep. He's a PhD. We're going to jump right in. We have lots of emails and don't have an unlimited amount of time. Dr. Peat, here's an ANIA. She wants to know about endometrial cyst.
Can that be helped with thyroid medication? Thyroid and good nutrition will activate your liver to do what it should be doing, which is to excrete every bit of estrogen arriving in the bloodstream to the liver so that whatever level comes in, the liver should be able to excrete it, some into the bile and some soluble into the bloodstream to leave via the kidneys. Being either malnourished or low in thyroid means that estrogen accumulates in the body. The tissues that primarily accumulate estrogen at the highest concentration are the uterus, the breast and the pituitary gland.
The chronically overstimulated endometrium of the uterus, it thickens and various things go wrong with it. If you can establish a proper monthly cycle, then that should take care of it. The cyst along with the rest of the endometrium should be sloughed off and start a new endometrium. So the body just will let go of it. This is from Jeff. He's in Thar, Texas. Dr. Peat said that he recommends drinking orange juice and milk. Edgar Cayce said not to combine citrus with other foods. Is he suggesting that he has orange juice and milk together?
Well, you shouldn't combine it with meat or an iron-rich food because it will make you absorb too much of the iron and it can react with the iron to produce free radicals. But I don't know of any harm it does with milk, but still milk by itself is safe and orange juice by itself is safe. But not necessarily together. No, they don't have to be combined. Mr. Kahn says, "Dr. Peat is recommend boiling greens and drinking the water for getting calcium and magnesium.
I would like to know how much I should have and how often, maybe in a week or so." That's a good supplement, but milk for example will normally provide enough magnesium in balance with calcium. And if for example you're getting cramps or have some evidence that you aren't retaining your magnesium, then just an ounce or so of that concentrated water from boiling greens is enough to relax a cramp. And again, thyroid is the regulating hormone. If you need that magnesium supplement occasionally, that probably means that your thyroid function
is low because thyroid is what makes your cells able to hang on to magnesium. It helps you pull magnesium out of your food. So if your thyroid is low, you have a very, very high requirement for magnesium to stay healthy and functioning. But as your thyroid function gets normal, you can pull your magnesium out of foods like milk and fruit and meat and seafood and so on. Lynn writes in, she's in Australia, "Could you please ask Dr. Pede if protein and sugar is best not eaten with starch?
What amount should be left between starch and protein meals? Does this recommendation mean that marmalade for example with tortillas or eggs with rice is best avoided and what foods would actually be considered to be protein or sugar like for this?" Marmalade is good with anything. But the starches that can cause problems are combined starches of beans and overripe peas for example are starches that are hard to digest because they come with so many other compounds. Grains that haven't been sprouted or turned into sourdough bread are harder to digest.
Those complex starches can feed bacteria and cause gas and bowel inflammation. But starches as a pure substance, for example corn starch is relatively pure and if it's cooked it isn't so likely to cause bowel inflammation but still starches, they amount to pure glucose if they can be digested. So the so-called glycemic index of a starch is the very highest thing just like pure glucose solution and that means that per calorie it's more fattening than sucrose, the sugar of fruit.
That's one of the reasons that I say it's good to emphasize fruit and the sugar in fruit rather than grains and their starches because those starches not only are fattening but they're tending to feed bacteria in the intestine. She was wondering about, she thought she heard you say that you like cheese maybe with tortillas and she said what is it about cheese that makes it okay with starch since it's pretty high in protein? Well it's the tortilla which is a modified starch. The Chinese and Central and South Americans many years ago, the Chinese probably 3,000
years ago discovered that if you cook a grain in lime oxidized calcium compound or potassium hydroxide from ashes of vegetation, those caustic alkalis digest the grain, destroy the things that make it indigestible, turn the potentially toxic balance of amino acids that could create pellagra if you have the corn-based diet for example, convert those into vitamins so that tortillas are very rich as a source of calcium and niacin and very easy to digest because the corn and the proteins have been partially digested already.
So nixtamalized corn, the kind used in hominy, tamales and tortillas is not like any of the other grain starches. Dr. Ray Peat is with us, he's here on the third Monday of the month, Patrick Timpone on Radionetwork.com. We're going to do a little show on money with Fred Dashefsky on Wednesday. We have a couple of other things in the works. Dr. Peat, before our first break here, I thought I'd ask you about your personal theory or take or do you think this coronavirus thing, have you looked at it?
Do you think it's going to get bigger and bigger here or do you think it's going to fade out? Do you have any opinions on that? If the CDC and the pharmaceutical industry and the World Health Organization have their way, it'll get really big business. But so far, it looks like it's very similar to the old coronaviruses, possibly as much as 50%, maybe twice as virulent as the average, but every variety of flu is a little different. The average flu, about 1% of the people who catch it are already very sick and so it will
kill about 1% of the infected people. This one is killing 1.5% or 2% of the infected people, so it is a little worse than the average, but still nothing very worrisome. It should be contained, but the World Health Organization and CDC use these, blow them up as gigantic world-ending dangers to sell more vaccines. So they'll come out in a year from now and say, "Well, we have a vaccine for this or that now so you can get..." Yeah, and the trouble is that those vaccines won't have been tested for safety.
Going back to the 1970s and the swine flu vaccine, those vaccines weren't tested and in fact, they caused vastly more deaths than the swine flu, many times more deadly and thousands of people were paralyzed. Hundreds, I don't remember the exact number of deaths, but it was, there were only, in the United States, there was one death blamed on the swine flu and basically it was an epidemic of virulent vaccine vendors. My goodness. Stay right there, sir. Patrick Timpone, OneRadioNetwork.com with Dr. Ray Peat.
Hope you enjoy the show that we have Dr. Peat and we have people on all the time. Every day we have something on. Sometimes we're beginning to do archive shows on Tuesdays and Thursdays now. Give me a little rest on Tuesdays and Thursdays to do some other things and then we're doing stacking up more shows. Sometimes we'll do three shows, Monday and Wednesday, just to bring as many people as we can to you. We always welcome your suggestions. We get them all the time.
If there's somebody you'd like us to have on the show, just email me, [email protected]. Patrick, OneRadioNetwork.com. Previously with Brandon Amelani of Shen Blossom talking about our very special ginseng. And you don't want something that's been corrupted coming into your body, like the ginseng is a super important example of that. You know, when you're using aggressive alcohols and solvents, it has a strange effect with ginseng in the sense that when you're not only over processing it, but putting it in really aggressive alcohols, what's going to happen is that you're going to flip the chemistry
on some of the androgenic. Naturally it's androgenic. It's going to basically protect the telomeres and add life to the body and protect the genetic replication of the cells, but it's also going to boost the androgens and boost the male hormones in the body. But if you incubate it in a really aggressive alcohol, it flips those to become estrogenic. Now estrogens, phytoestrogens are not necessarily bad in balance, but you really don't want that with your ginseng, especially if you're getting like a really high quality, a really old root, something that's very special.
You want to like treat it with care and make sure it's delivering what ginseng has to offer. Just a short clip from Brandon talking about the way they do the ginseng, just to give you a better idea of where this company is coming from, the quality and the ethics. Brandon and the Shen Blossom link on OneRadioNetwork.com. You've heard us talk about this really terrific sauna that we have. Just a relaxed far-infrared sauna. The more I think about it and I look at the ones out there, and I've looked at a few of
them, I think this is one of the best choices ever that you could make for a sauna because of its effectiveness and the cost and the ease of use that you get with this sauna. Very quiet, low EMFs around your feet. You know, it has some magnetic energy in your feet and your calves and things like that. But no RF, no real electromagnetic fields to speak of, anything, nothing to really concern yourself about. They get very, very hot.
You'll sweat a lot and you can use only one of the units if you like at the bottom, the right and the left side. And then just get like half the heat and even do it for a longer period of time. It's very good for the sympathetic, parasympathetic balance. With my little kind of things I've been going on with my sleep, it's really been helping me a lot sometimes just to get more relaxed, something is going on subconsciously or in the tummy or something. But it's a very powerful unit.
If you'd like to get one, you just give me an email, [email protected], [email protected], and they're $1,150, $1,150, and I think you'll enjoy it. Good people, great product that's made in Taiwan, a medical university in Taiwan, and they've won several awards as well. So no plumbing or anything like that. You just got this silver material, which is antibacterial. You can see on that picture there that I showed you. They're really nice units. I think you'll enjoy it. If you got it in your budget to get one, just email me and we'll hook you up. [email protected].
We are listener supported. One Radio Network. Well, it's February 17th, and I hope you had a good weekend. Dr. Ray Peat is here on the third Monday of the month, and that's at 10, what do we do? 1030 Central Time. I'm getting my times messed up. Your main website is, I don't have it up right now, so it's drpeat.com. Is that correct? Drpeat.com. Hold on. I'm sorry. I had the wrong, it's drpeat.com? Oh, just raypeat.com. Raypeat.com. Yeah. You're doing the newsletter. You do that every couple months, right? People want to get on your newsletter list?
Yeah. A subscription is for two years, 12 issues every other month. Every other month for two years. They can do that right on your website. Okay. Not on the website. You can do it on the website. Okay. I'm sorry. I have a question. Dr. Ray Peat, I'm not sure if you can hear me. I'm sorry. I'm not sure if you can hear me. I'm sorry. I'm not sure if you can hear me. I can't hear you. Okay. I'm sorry. I'm not sure if you can hear me. I'm sorry. It's a... Email for that is [email protected].
Oh, that's right. Yeah, sorry. [email protected]. Sorry. Wow. Does Dr. Peat have any ideas on what I could do for narrow, closed-angle glaucoma? Is making a hole that is commonly recommended in the iris a safe thing to do? And is it possible to reverse some of the damage from glaucoma? Yes. Your physiology is... This physiology increases the pressure in your eye somewhat like the blood pressure. And some of the same things that will lower your blood pressure will correct the glaucoma symptoms, redistributing, improving the circulation to your interior of your eye.
Thyroid and progesterone are the main hormones balancing the fluids. The angiotensin system, you've heard of the ACE inhibitors? Angiotensin-converting enzyme inhibitors. That system will, if you correct that, you don't have to use the drugs specifically, although those drugs do affect the pressure in your eye. But improving the balance of your thyroid and progesterone to the stress hormones, estrogen, and serotonin will improve the pressure in your eye and the function of the nerves. Some of the articles on my website relate to that, but it's something that takes some
attention and frequent measurements of the pressure to see how it's changing. The surgery to punch a hole in the iris, the use of a laser is considered the best technology, but any injury to tissues in the eye has the risk of increasing the pressure in your eye with potential harm. It's good to investigate the known side effects of laser operation in the eye. Do you think it's possible that we have some kind of infections going on with the glaucoma and cataracts, some people are suggesting that?
Yeah, there's always a change in your bacteria load, but that interacts with your whole physiology and your hormone balance. So very simple things like avoiding the indigestible foods, irritating and allergenic foods that cause inflammation, those cause a bad balance of bacteria and the bacteria that normally live in other compartments such as the lungs receive signals from the bacteria in your intestine and so they aren't just harming your intestine, but they're sending signals doing things such as increasing your eye pressure. And if some of those inflammatory signals, if they're active inside your eye, the lens
depends for its nutrition on the constant flow of liquid through the substance of the lens, it's permeable and it's constantly pumping nutrition and oxygen through itself. And so the same factors that can raise the pressure inside your eyeball can also decrease the flow of nutrition into your lens leading to the development of a swollen area that becomes opaque because it doesn't get enough energy, it can't keep regulating its water and salts and so it simply swells creating a blockage of the light. You've done so much work with hormones and talk about it.
I wondered, is there a simple kind of a test that men and women can take to really get a good overview of their hormones, their balance? Life Extension Foundation now has some hormone panels for a very good price. You can get maybe a dozen hormones special for men and women in different situations. They have sales on usually in the spring where you get extremely good prices, just a fraction of what you would pay if you went to your doctor. That's pretty good company, right, Life Extension? Pretty good organization? Yeah, pretty good.
And you do, is it a saliva? Is it a what? Saliva test? Oh, no, blood test. Oh, it's a blood test. Yeah, the saliva tests for certain things are very good but I don't think you can rely on the steroid hormone test like progesterone. Saliva changes its composition, they're different emotional or even appetite conditions. So blood test is the most reliable. Here is a man in his mid-40s struggling for about 15 years with depression, sometimes using SSRIs but in later years they don't seem to do much for me anymore. I hate taking those things anyway.
Now I understand that Dr. Peat is no fan of serotonin. I would love to hear his general view on the cause of depression and at least in my case related issues like fatigue, stress sensitivity and memory problems. I appreciate your opinion. The body temperature is very important and doctors instead of thinking about why it's changing, there have been publications in recent years saying the human body temperature that had been recorded as normal for more than 100 years, suddenly in recent years it's no longer normal. Body temperature averages now well below 98.6 or 37 Celsius.
What's happening is the population is on average becoming sicker and hypothyroid. The figures are showing that inflammatory diseases are increasing like an epidemic among young people. The premature death incidence is increasing in young people just since the turn of the century. Many things increased 40 years ago. Those things seem to be contributing to increased incidence of all of the slowdown in function including depression and inflammatory diseases. The first thing to check really is your temperature and heart rate and see if you're burning too few calories.
You should be able to at rest burn something like 2,000 to 2,400 calories. Just your basal metabolic activity should be producing a lot of heat. If your adrenal hormones and thyroid hormones are lower than average, your energy is going to be lower and that makes everything stressful. Serotonin is one of the fairly extreme indicators of a stress state, but serotonin is a universal indicator of stress. It will turn on all of your pituitary hormones, for example. Those hormones, serotonin and estrogen, are sort of like beating a tired horse.
They will increase some functions and make you feel better temporarily, but they're doing it at the risk of harming various vital functions. Estrogen acts on the brain somewhat like cocaine to keep things excited all the way up to creating a seizure if it's too excited. As the fever, as the energy production decreases, the brain shifts over to those emergency things to try to keep going. Adrenaline, serotonin and estrogen rise as your thyroid and metabolic rate decrease. Those can either create mania, overactivity or depression and underactivity. Keeping your thyroid up is the essential basic thing.
There have been experiments in recent years repairing the energy system without attending properly to thyroid using chemicals such as methylene blue, which will carry the electrons that the thyroid hormone should be carrying. People have seen very great improvements, for example, in both depression and dementia, correcting the energy deficiencies that were causing the problems. Methylene blue is just a poor chemical substitute for the active thyroid hormone, supported by things like DHEA, progesterone and pregnenolone. All of those three steroids are brain hormones. Here's an interesting one for you.
Does Dr. Peat know how to tell if a memory is a false memory? No. All of our memories, we remember and put things together every time we remember. The past is always with us as a potential and we have to put it together as a picture that represents what we have experienced. So if you learn a new situation that you weren't aware of before, then you can create a story that explains what you now know to have been the situation. So for example, if people thought they were growing up happy but then learned that their
parents were doing something wrong, then they can create memories that explain what they now know to be true but that they didn't necessarily experience as they were going through it. Interesting. Now here's an eclectic email for you. I'll see if I can read this properly so you can understand. It's a little convoluted, but we'll get to it. Let's see here. "In past shows, Dr. Peat has suggested thinking of ourselves as autonomous creators. However, since mitochondria seem to have a will of their own, which is for us to always
be happy, as evident by how it is mainly cellular hypoxia which seems to be analogous to a lack of contentment, unhappiness, interacting with Poufers and iron to cause free radical damage, loss of cytochrome c, degeneration, then does it mean that being a creator would mean that we are imposing personal will upon the will of the mitochondria? And if the will of the mitochondria is analogous to the will of God, then imposing personal will on God instead of doing God's will." Will. Okay. Well, I don't think of mitochondria as separate at all.
They're reflecting the happy, active, energized state of the cell which we are experiencing when we're feeling happy and creative. When we feel ourselves as whole and complete, that's because our body actually is functioning. The nerves that are part of our present consciousness and feelings, those nerves are all the way through the body. They're contacting individual cells. There are these very fine filaments lying next to the individual metabolizing cells, and the nerves are interacting with those mitochondria and their energy metabolism electronically and oxidatively interacting so that every mitochondrion is in close communication with
our central nervous system. So we're an energetic, oxidizing whole with purpose and perspective on the universe. So would you agree that it wouldn't be a stretch to conjecture that our state of consciousness, what we believe and what we think is real, and our state of consciousness is totally intertwined with every part of the body at any given moment? Is that fair, do you think? Exactly, yeah. The picture of little compartments and machines, all of that, that's this medical, pharmaceutical myth that has created this machine-like picture of the body.
Really, it's a continuous functioning, smooth unit all the way from bottom to top. Everything participates in our meaning and purpose. So I wonder, just to take a hypothetical situation, Dr. Peat, if somebody has one, two, three, four, whatever, things going on that possibly just resting for a long time, believing that the body can heal and just watching that process, there'd be a pretty good chance the body could heal, couldn't it? Oh yeah, yeah. It will, won't it? I mean, that's what it does. And the things that happen around us can help us heal.
I remember once, years ago, when I had the TB, I was watching some Supreme Court judges talk, and I immediately went to measure my blood pressure within a minute of listening to them, and I think it was 168 over 110. That's right. I don't need to be watching it. You'll get rid of your TB real quick with that. And seeing possibilities open up can have the opposite effect of helping everything to heal, to come together in a functional way. You read stories about instantaneous healing. I think that's what happens.
The body suddenly sees a perspective in which it can realize itself and stop being sick. Stop being sick. I guess there must have been times in the past where this idea of resting to heal was taken more seriously than it is today? Oh, yeah. That used to be the basic thing. To heal. Yeah, to lie down and stop eating the stuff that was making you sick. And rest. Yeah, rest lets you redistribute your energy. Mental rest is part of it, but then mental activity becomes part of the healing and recovering process too.
And I guess in many years gone by, even with having a baby, they would have the mom rest a lot longer than they do today? Oh, yeah. And just recently, someone was having a tendency to miscarry, and they said, "Wouldn't bed rest help?" It always did. Like I think Sophia Loren was said to have spent six months in bed to make sure she had her baby. But recently, this person was told, "No, there are no controlled studies showing that it helps. Therefore, don't do it."
You know, I don't know if any of the historical movies and plays and books are accurate at all, but I'm just curious. You know, two, three, four, five hundred years ago, when you just had, I guess just natural food, there were no chemicals, we had no pollution, we had no cell phones. But it doesn't seem, if you go by the literature, that people lived all that long. We suppose that's about it, that's true. Is it true? No. There have been areas and times when people had harder, shorter lives.
But the Roman Empire kept very good vital statistics. So we know that during the age of 20 to 30, men had a fairly short lifespan because they were always at war. But the people who survived their 20s and the women, their lifespan, life expectancy was almost identical to 20th century Europe and America. Into their 70s was the standard life expectancy. Is it true that the Roman soldiers, they used to just, what did they do? Did I read where they knocked their teeth out because they always got their teeth knocked
out in war and that would be terrible out in the... Is that true? And then how did they live? What did they eat? Some cultures have, for example, sharpened their front teeth to make them better warriors. But I imagine sometimes they thought it made them, like the Germans used to put a sword cut scar on their cheek. I imagine knocking out the front teeth could make them look heroic. What are some things that Dr. Peat might recommend to help detoxify the body of a chronic
mold infection and then get after the hormone imbalances that it has caused? For an internal fungus infection, for example, a little bit of flowers of sulfur, just a pinch, two or three hundred milligrams, taken orally for two or three days will suppress the candida type fungus and some of the bacteria too and even some parasites. What happens is a fungus secretes enzymes that convert the inert yellow sulfur to hydrogen sulfide locally, which is toxic and poisons the yeast. But in the concentration that just diffuses into the intestine, that small amount is an
antioxidant, so it's very safe to the intestine but toxic to the fungus. The sulfur soap or dusting of yellow flowers of sulfur can be used on the skin as an antifungal. Very effective. Just about 200 milligrams for two or three days and that's it? Yeah. That's flowers of sulfur. That's different from the sulfur that we promote, right? This is yellow flowers of sulfur, right? Yeah. It's a very fine powder because it's made by precipitating it, not by grinding it. Ground milled sulfur doesn't work.
Please ask Dr. Peat, this is from Amy in San Diego, if it is important only to eat organic grass-fed beef liver or is it okay to buy regular beef liver? And his feedback on anything he may have to say about that. I never worry about organic liver because partly it's hard to find. You can get it by mail order frozen, for example, but the liver, there were experiments years ago in which they analyzed commercial animals before they were slaughtered and then they
looked at the urine, the blood, the steaks and the liver and all of the animals were contaminated with agricultural chemicals coming in, in their urine and blood and they found that in the muscles, it was coming out of the muscles even 24 hours in isolation. It was still coming out of the muscles and showing up in the blood and urine, but when they checked the liver, if there had been 24 hours isolation from those chemicals, the liver was able to capture and destroy them so the liver was the cleanest organ in the whole animal.
That's interesting. Wow. Amy goes on to say, "I urinate every couple of hours, almost all the time and a full bladder and can this be a thyroid issue?" When your thyroid is active, you're burning calories, maybe 2,500 to 3,000 calories a day if you're active. If you're burning, say, 3,000 calories a day, you will be breathing out about three quarts of water every day and that means that if you eat moist food and drink three quarts of water, you won't have much left over to eliminate as urine.
But if your thyroid is very low and you're burning only 1,000 calories a day and you drink two quarts of water, then you're going to form more than a quart of urine because your metabolism is not vaporizing the water and blowing it out in your exhaled air or evaporating from your skin. From Michael, he says, "How does Dr. Peat keep his skin moisturized during the dry winter? What topical substances could be used to prevent dryness?" For one thing, in the winter, you shouldn't bathe excessively. Soap will dry your skin.
In the winter, indoors in a cold climate, the air is very dry and so you want to, as much as possible, preserve the oils formed in the skin protectively. Too much washing is simply damaging the skin. Second part, he says, "What are the safest antihistamines to take for seasonal allergies? I have arrhythmia and a lot of first-generation antihistamines can induce long QT syndrome and increase the risk for cardiac events." Yeah, Benadryl, if you don't take it in excess, Benadryl is safe, especially if you're having itchiness on the skin.
You can use it topically and not absorb very much. The herb, the name doesn't come to me, but it's a stimulating herb, mawang. Desert tea, ephedra. The ephedra, I think, doesn't have that effect of creating a risk of heart stopping. I think cyproheptadine, which reduces not only the histamine effect but the serotonin effect, I think that's safe for the heart. E-mailer wants to know, "Is it okay to supplement with taurine?" With what? Taurine. Oh, yeah, it's safe. "You've spoken about various needs of the lungs. Can you please suggest ways to help pulmonary fibrosis?
All inhalers and meds have no effect so far. I've looked at red lamps, MSM, and homeopathics." Yeah, fibrosis anywhere is something that can be prevented and to some extent remedied. Fibrosis of the heart, for example, leads to heart failure. Fibrosis of the liver and kidneys, those all have a common hormonal cause and the lungs are just an area that fibrosis is very noticeable because you have less and less ability to move the lungs and to have the oxygen diffuse through them. In animal experiments, one dose of estrogen was enough to eliminate 95% of the oxygen
getting through the lungs. Estrogen creates a condition of effective oxygen deficiency by wasting oxygen and it's the oxygen deficiency that leads to the collagen formation and the development of fibrosis in any tissue. The same hypoxia leads to the angiotensin which tightens blood vessels. It will create the pulmonary hypertension. It's very similar physiology to the fibrosis of the lungs. The tightening of the blood vessels stresses the right side of the heart and leads to one-sided heart failure. The drugs that have been found to specifically interfere with that angiotensin tightening
and fibrosis process, they are approved as a treatment for high blood pressure but they are extremely variable. There are probably 20 different drugs and you have to find out about the side effects of each of the drugs. They're widely prescribed but lots of doctors don't realize that they are protecting against fibrosis as well as hypertension. Excellent. Amanda writes in that she has poor circulation in her hands and feet are often cold and I'm tall and thin, my hands are veiny and I'm wondering if this is a result of poor blood
supply perhaps thyroid and deep tissue massage might help? Thyroid and progesterone can have a big effect. The estrogen besides creating the shock syndrome that weakens the way your heart beats and it activates the angiotensin that I was just mentioning in connection to the lungs. It acts everywhere in the body and progesterone and thyroid are the main things protecting against angiotensin, fibrosis and vascular deterioration. The bulging of veins on the back of the hands even though the fingers will be cold because
they aren't getting enough blood, often the veins will bulge on the back and that's because they aren't getting enough energy. They're in a shock-like state and I've seen progesterone make those veins disappear in less than an hour. Really? Wow. This is an interesting one. Is it possible for stress or trauma to transform saturated fat into polyunsaturated fat? To a slight degree, those enzymes that desaturate saturated fats are responsive to stress, but I don't think it's anything harmful because if you start with a saturated fat, the polyunsaturated
natural fats aren't nearly as toxic as the polyunsaturated fats that we get from the environment. I think you've had Adam Bergstrom talking about the fats we make with our own enzymes don't go down that route to yellow fat disease or any of the PUFA diseases. That's what this second part is about. Very timely. After four years of reducing our polyunsaturated fat supply, what about lipofuscin? Are we stuck with this muck or can we get rid of our cells or at least some of it?
Progesterone is a big help by blocking the estrogen that interacts with the PUFA to make that pigment. Just by blocking those estrogen-dependent enzymes, like on a spot on the skin, I've applied progesterone and completely eliminated some of those typically senile brown spots on the skin. Just progesterone. Could you please ask Dr. Peat about potatoes? I know he's recommended to eat them with plenty of butter or cream to slow starch absorption. How much butter? Are you talking about a lot of butter? Do you eat potatoes? She wants to know.
No, I haven't eaten potatoes for a long time. I did thoroughly experiment with the things that make them harmful. If they're very, very well cooked, they're somewhat less allergenic if you happen to have an allergy to that family of potatoes, eggplant, peppers and potatoes. But when they're very well cooked, it just takes a little, like a pat of butter to a potato will protect against the preserption. So these allergies, are they a lifelong thing or do we grow out of some of these and they're centered in the gut?
A lot of allergies nowadays, I recently saw on Robert Kennedy Jr.'s website, he mentioned that childhood allergies before the 1970s were less than 3% of kids had serious allergies. After 1989, I think he said it was about half of all kids have allergies. He was saying that vaccines are a major known cause of allergies. I think there are many, many things that the culture and especially medicine are doing to pregnant women and kids that create the allergies. We've had several vets on over the years, Doc, that conjecture that that's the same
as well for the dogs and the cats. The vaccines and the allergies they have to certain foods. Couple more here. Does Dr. Peat aware of a good source of pregnenolone? I know that there's been issues in the past with many sources of causing poor side effects sometimes due to EXCIPEIENTA. Excipient? Excipient. Oh, excipient. Okay. Excipient. I should have known that word. Yeah. I think some of it has just been bad manufacturing impurities, not deliberate excipients, but just careless, incompetent manufacturing, I think, has left estrogenic materials in
it because I've heard so many women saying that repeatedly every time they try several different brands of pregnenolone, they get swollen breasts, uterine cramps, and PMS symptoms. There shouldn't be any symptoms at all from good pregnenolone. Simply in animal experiments over the years, it reduces any hormonal imbalance even in very large amounts. It doesn't have any intrinsic hormone effects at all, but it will prevent cortisol excess, for example. Here's an email, Doc, with venous insufficiency, also known as venous reflux, enters the 60s.
Would this condition be related to an imbalance or deficiency of progesterone or estrogen? The wall of the vein consists partly of smooth muscle, and when your energy is low, for example, low blood sugar or hypothyroid as the root cause with low progesterone, the muscle is simply too weak to keep its normal diameter, and there are valves, flaps of tissue from the inside wall on each side of the vein, and so when the vein gets too big, those flaps don't meet each other.
When you constrict it to a certain point, the flap on each side of the wall meets the flap on the other side, and you have a valve that prevents the blood from going back where it came from. When you get, for example, enough progesterone in relation to the anti-progesterone effects, which can be anything blocking energy use, including estrogen excess, then the pressure allows the vein to swell up so the valves don't meet, and just by getting your energy level back up with thyroid and progesterone, these veins will close up enough that the
valves begin to function. Here's one for you. I have read that some people seem to shed more hair, scalp hair, while taking thyroid supplements. Could you please ask Dr. Peat, is there any truth or science to this, and what would cause this to occur? There was a study in the 1970s in which someone had the antibodies needed to identify a real thyroid glandular substance, and they bought 10 different brands from pharmacies in the United States that were sold as thyroid glandular USP supplements, and they found that of those
10, only two of them contained thyroid substance, and eight of them were sold as thyroid but contained no thyroid. I got one of those sold as thyroid and found that it contained only casein and iodine, an attempt to fool the USP testing because it contained protein and iodine, and that is all the USP requirement tested for. They assumed that the supplier was providing an actual glandular material, and they used the iodine measure to indicate how much of the gland there was, but when there's no gland
at all, the test can't detect that because it's looking only at the iodine and the protein. My decision, without having to get antibodies and very expensive testing, I found that cats could tell the difference, and my cat loved real thyroid and would eat any quantity. When I gave him other brands that were sold as thyroid, the cat looked offended and tried to bury them. That's hilarious. But that's not good for the cat to eat those, right? It didn't bother the cat eating those? Oh, no.
I gave a friend a baggie with about probably 30 or more grains of thyroid in it, and her cat found it and ate the whole bag. I said, "How is he? Does he look sick?" And she said, "No, he's just sitting there purring and smiling." Hello, thyroid man. Can a 66-year-old woman take progesterone every day, without a break, every day of the month? The liver adapts to a constant supply, and so usually the effect of a given dose is going to get weaker after using it for a month or more.
And so just to keep the potency of it, it's good to stop it for a week every month. A week every month. Okay. You've mentioned thyroid protects against androtension, writes another emailer. So can we help our thyroid? Can you help your thyroid? I don't know what they're asking here. So can we help our thyroid? By keeping your meat intake lower and your milk, egg, and cheese intake as a higher proportion of your protein for the day, that is less thyroid suppressive than too much meat or fish.
But often the trend, because of the polyunsaturated fats we've been exposed to increasingly in the last 50 years, the proportion of the population who is hypothyroid has increased tremendously. So the average person at the age of 35 or 40 will benefit from at least some thyroid in the diet. When people before 1940, people who ate sausages or chicken or fish, for example, were always getting some thyroid in their diet. The fish head was used for soup, chicken necks were put in the stew, beef and pork thyroid glands were put into sausages.
And so people were eating thyroid regularly until the US Department of Agriculture said it had to be sold to the drug companies to dispense under prescription. So we all got a little thyroid. Here's a final email for Dr. Ray Peat this morning, February 17, 2020. He'll be back a month from now. Hi, what does Dr. Peat think about drinking food grade hydrogen peroxide? It can cause serious burns. Yeah, you've got to be real careful with that too. Yeah, I did enzyme experiments measuring the ability of a particular tissue or blood, for
example, to oxidize, to dispose of hydrogen peroxide. And every time I did the enzyme activity curve, they would always, after usually about two or three minutes, the enzyme would be killed by the peroxide. So even the enzymes like catalase that are normally disposing of hydrogen peroxide, when you get just a little too much, the enzyme itself is destroyed and can no longer detoxify it, then it starts destroying other types of protein and tissue. Dr. Peat, do you have any experience over the years with using a nebulizer? You breathe? Oh, yeah.
As a kid, that was a common thing. A little tent and a vaporizer. Oh, it's a vaporizer, not nebulizer? Yeah, the nebulizer is just a fancier way to do it. Yeah, yeah. Well, sir, thank you so much for being here today. Once again, I thought that email, isn't that email link on your website for your newsletter or that's just people have to know what that is? I don't think it's mentioned on the website, but it's [email protected]. Right, and we always put that on the show page for you, [email protected]. All right, Dr. Peat, thanks a lot.
Happy February, and we'll see you next month. We appreciate your time this morning as always. Thank you. Yes, sir. Bye-bye. Dr. Ray Peat, oneradionetwork.com. Really fun guy, man. Remember all that stuff, all that research? Man, oh, man. Well, I'm going to take a nap. I tell you what. It was just -- well, I won't go into that, but I had a very difficult, very difficult night last night. Nothing was happening, boy, especially in the sleep department. Well, we're cracking the code on whatever is going on, but, you know, we'll see. Appreciate your ongoing support.
Oh, doodle. All right, that's cool. Appreciate your ongoing support. Thank you so much for being there. We're going to take a day off tomorrow, and we'll have a nice show for you, an archive show in the back, do some things on money tomorrow and our Wednesday, and a couple other things are in the works that we'll have for you. So that's our show for today. Thank you for being here, and I love you all very much. You're doing great, and may the blessings be. Take care. [music] Nothing is more expensive than bad information.
Know the source. OneRadioNetwork.com [music] [end] 1 1 1 1 1 [BLANK_AUDIO]