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(upbeat music) - Well, welcome to the Get Fit with Jodel podcast. I'm Jodel and I have Dr. Ray Peat back with me again to answer your questions. And boy, did we get a slew of questions this time, Dr. Peat. I took a hiatus from podcasts for a while to do some reflection during all this public health issue. And I think the questions piled up, so I hope you are ready. May I ask how you've been since it's been a little bit since we've talked, how have you been doing?
- Very well, investigating as far as I can what's been going on. My first reaction was that I couldn't see any pandemic. And the last information I have, even looking at the figures at the CDC, even though they make this information something you have to add up for yourself, but their figures are now supporting the very earliest estimates of the professors at Stanford who are also saying nothing is happening. The mortality from this virus is right in the range of a traditional flu influence of mortality about one fourth of a percent.
- Wow, I mean, I've heard you talk on other podcasts with similar statistics, and it's just like, I see where the world is kind of in that fear monger state, but it really begs a lot of questions about the severity of it. We do have a question coming up later on from one of the listeners who was concerned about it, so I'm looking forward to getting to that with you. I do have to tell you that you inspired me during this reflection time, I call it,
like I took some time off when we were all stuck at home to work on a hiking trail on our property behind our home. So I was in the backyard chopping wood down and raking a trail, and I fell in love with it. And I thought of you a lot, how you talked about cultivating things with your hands. And I've always loved being outdoors, but during this time of cultivating the land and creating something, I realized that I wanted less time on social media outlets and more time
to give to my family and to creative processes, so to speak, so I decided to completely shut down my Get Fit with Jodell Facebook. I completely closed it down with over 4,000 followers, because I realized, Dr. Peat, that you are still able, you yourself are still able to help a lot of people, and you're not on social media, and you have a website, you have the ability to podcast with different people, you have your newsletter, that you reach out to a lot of hearts and minds, and you probably have no idea
how many lives you have affected just by answering people's questions. So in short, I'm commending you for that, but also I'm inspired to do the same thing. So I've resigned to be only, people will only find me on YouTube and not on Facebook, not on Instagram, not anywhere else, so that I'm not constantly having to devote my time, my precious time to the social media pressures of life, but rather to those who are truly seeking answers, like our listeners. So people that are coming to your podcast, Dr. Peat,
I've found that these are the ones really asking questions and seeking answers to their health, and I've found that social media is more geared for people to just numb out. It's not a place where people are seeking help, but rather they're just zoning out, they're just ready to not think, so let me just go through my feed. But I feel like honing in on one outlet of podcasting with you and other like-minded folks instead of so many other outlets, and really help our listeners and build the community too.
So long story short, here's my question to you, Dr. Peat. You discuss how powerful that stress is a negative in our life, like it's so powerful this stress in our lives, and I feel like social media outlets are one of the biggest stressors that people aren't really aware of. They're doing it every day, but I don't think they're aware of the pressures of social media. So I wanted your thoughts on social media and its pressures of posting and getting likes and approvals from others, and being on devices, which is a whole nother thing.
Do you think that this is one of the main concerns and causes of why people have a lot of health issues nowadays as opposed to 20, 30 years ago when we didn't have these social pressures of online presences? - I have never experienced Facebook or Twitter or any of those things myself, but I see people being deeply involved in their cell phone or their computers, and that's something that, oh, 50 years ago or more, there wasn't even that absorption in TV. TV was just starting to be an obsessive part of the culture.
But my family didn't even have a TV until I was long out of college. I think I had been out of college several years before we borrowed a TV to watch Kennedy's inauguration. But even TV, I'm sure it's damaging kids to sit around inertly watching stories which are very cleverly designed propagandistically. The Pentagon is now a part of the Hollywood industry. They even invested in the latest technology development for Hollywood to create realistic images that can be mistaken for the real thing. They can forge voices and personalities and the Pentagon can operate,
one person can operate many personalities on Facebook or the other social media, so people are interacting very often with computers that they think are human. And it's not only stressful, but it's creating a dream world and the dream world people can be manipulated to do what the Pentagon or the CDC or the giant corporations want them to do. Google, several years ago, sociologists demonstrated how by changing the definition of questions on a search engine, they could absolutely skew the way people voted in real elections. And Google is obviously doing that. They can control the elections.
And Congress worries about Russians or Trump or Ukrainians or whatever interfering with US elections, but the very powerful demonstrated effect of Google on elections is ignored, apparently because Congress is bought off by the people who control the elections and are pleased with how they're turning out. - There are so many rabbit holes. I wanna go down with that, but I do remember, somebody recently told me that television actually stems from the kind of phrase, tell a vision. So like you said, a dream world where they're kind of programming us to not think for ourselves,
but here, let me tell you a vision that you need to believe in and be a part of, yeah. No, so yeah, so I can definitely see your point about how it is a stressor and even television, not just social media, but just the idea of not being able to think for ourselves. That's kind of something to be concerned about and how we might wanna dial back on our social media outlets and really focus on where is my time devoted to? How much time am I spending bettering myself versus lessening myself with the energy suck
that is a lot of device time and social media time? Yeah, okay, well, I love that. And before time gets away from us, I guess we should jump into everyone else's questions. So I have a slew of questions. If we don't get to all of you guys' questions today, then I'll put them in the next one that we do. But I wanted to give a big shout out to a guy named Matt. He's a researcher at Harvard and he asked a question a while back, Dr. Peat, and I never got to ask you this,
but it's just an interesting question about adaptogen. So Matt would like to know your thoughts on adaptogen herbs such as ashwagandha and rhodiola for helping with cortisol. Oh, there are several levels that they work at. Some of them are boosting the steroids. Like ginseng has androgenic steroid materials in it that actually support, but our natural hormones like pregnenolone and DHEA are the body's adaptogens. And so things that work with them are simply supporting our body's stabilizing effect. There are two kinds of adaptation. One, the emergency system that pours out cortisol
and all of the stress-related steroids and other hormones. These powerfully help you survive an immediate matter of minutes, seconds, and hours. But then they become counterproductive and reduce your adaptability if they aren't backed up by increased energy production, which means anything that supports mitochondrial stability and health and good thyroid function and the ability to produce increased amounts of the stabilizing DHEA, pregnenolone and progesterone. And the basic long range adaptogen is this stable energy production, keeping your mitochondria producing energy at a high rate and without producing toxic side effects. An emergency activation with adrenaline
tends to produce lots of free radical side effects, but the proper high energy production running on the basis of thyroid activity, you are actually wasting energy in the sense that you're producing a tremendous amount of heat, but that use of oxygen to produce energy is actually reducing the toxic side effects. So becoming an inefficient machine that operates at a high temperature and seeming to waste energy, that's actually the proper route to long range adaptability. You assimilate and overcome by changing the nature of the threat and the stress,
rather than being forced to change your body's structure or behavior by the cortisol acute stress route. - Okay. - And probably the single most important factor in staying on this route of long range protective adaptability is the production of carbon dioxide and the ability to suppress lactic acid formation. That the acute stress, if you lack adaptability, pours out a lot of lactic acid with lots of bad consequences in the long run. The ability to make carbon dioxide by running your mitochondria at high energy, why that is protected is that they are generating
carbon dioxide which suppresses the free radicals and keeps lactic acid under control, keeps the whole system in an oxidizing state. The reducing or pseudo hypoxic state is the destructive stress state that everything should be geared towards getting over. - Okay, that's good. I like your thought. I've never thought of it in that terms of adaptogens. I mean, I know we want long-term adaptability, but no, I never thought of it like that, so. Michael asks, now this is an interesting question, Dr. Peat. What are Dr. Peat's existential fears? - Currently, the insanity of the ruling class
has been long range at things since I was three or four years old. I started seeing sadism and cruelty in everyone in power, but the long range trend over all these years is that the ruling class is becoming more confident of its ability to go right to the final state. This pandemic and the behavior of the CDC and all of its supporting agencies. I think this is a threatening existence of life itself. - Yeah, I would second those fears. I'm with you. Okay, M. Anderson asks, please ask Dr. Peat about caffeine and coffee addiction.
How can caffeine be good if it is habit-forming? Caffeine triggers cortisol release. How can this be good? What about acrylamide in carcinogen? I'm sorry, what about acrylamide, the carcinogen chemical that's released when organic matter is half burned like roasted coffee beans? Many people get problems with insomnia. Anxiety become edgy due to coffee. Quitting coffee, old turkey. I think she means cold turkey. Gives me terrible withdrawal. Why bother with coffee, Dr. Peat? - A part of that type of reaction is because the lack of a properly coffee-consuming technology like the Japanese have their tea ceremony.
We need a better coffee-consuming technique which involves good, thick cream because cream slows the absorption of the caffeine. The people who have the terrible reactions are usually hypothyroid and have a blood sugar problem. They take black coffee off and on an empty stomach instead of eating and it drives their adrenaline and cortisol into a frenzy of tissue-damaging stress. using coffee only with food, never on an empty stomach unless there's plenty of cream or milk with it. Coffee con leche is a good method of taking it.
But heavy cream, if you like the flavor of rich coffee, cream improves the flavor while slowing the absorption. And if you look at the effects of caffeine, for more than 50 years, studies in animals of all sorts have demonstrated that caffeine is so powerfully carcinogenic that it can be given with concentrated cigarette smoke, a very powerful carcinogen. And just a little caffeine added prevents the carcinogenicity of topically applied cigarette smoke. And that observation led people to test them against other carcinogens. Even viral carcinogenesis is inhibited by caffeine, even radiation carcinogenesis,
the most absolute form is suppressed by caffeine. And so it would be good if we didn't burn the coffee, that technology comes from partly the fact that people like the taste of a smoky burn things. And partly because it softens the bean and makes it easier to grind to get the caffeine out. Like the technology of fermenting tea, making black tea releases lots more caffeine than green tea. So black tea is really biologically much more effective as an anti-stress, anti-cancer agent. So the present way of preparing coffee
isn't the ideal, it's just part of the tradition and it turns out that the more coffee people drink, five cups and up, for example, are the healthiest in general, even a lower rate of Alzheimer's disease, of cancer, heart disease, kidney disease, liver disease even. So empirically, even though coffee is full of all of that smoky junk, which would be best to eliminate the caffeine override so powerfully. - I love that you said five cups or more 'cause I'm sitting here going, "Okay, then I'm gonna live a nice long life."
My grandma was a big coffee drinker and she lived to be 94. So I believe that there's something to the health effects of it. To unpack her question a little bit more, like what about the habit forming aspect? Maybe it is something that because it's so medicinal, it's okay to have a little habit forming with it. - Yeah but part of that is really what you need. Before I took any thyroid supplement for many years, I recognized my symptoms as being typical of people who were hypothyroid. For example, being nearsighted and having migraine headaches
are classical low thyroid signs. But for various reasons, just didn't get around to trying a supplement. And in that period, I would drink often 50 cups of coffee a day. And I would stave off the stresses and the migraines and such. But I was pouring a huge amount of coffee through my system just to feel functional, keep my energy up so I could work efficiently. First thing I thought of waking up in the morning was a cup of coffee. And then I would just constantly have a cup of coffee in my hand all day.
Within a couple of days, after I began using a thyroid supplement, I woke up one morning and noticed something was very different and I wasn't craving coffee. And I looked at my coffee drinking behavior and I was only drinking about five cups a day, four to five, and that happens spontaneously over a period of just a few days. So it wasn't that I was addicted to 50 cups a day. It was that my system recognized that as part of its homeostasis. That could be called an addiction, but if it's repairing you and preventing disease
and making you live longer, it's not proper to classify it with addictive things such as morphine. Everything about morphine and the opiates, everything known about it is destructive, creates inflammation, promotes cancer growth, degenerative diseases and so on. It's the basic archetype of a destructive drug and its addictiveness is just a part of that. The reason people feel addicted to coffee and caffeine is mostly that it's filling in for something they need. There is obviously no need for the opiates. - I would agree with that because I feel like I'm the same way.
First thing in the morning I wake up, I think of coffee and I know-- - The body takes all of those things into account. Someone did an analysis of the English diet and even though nutritionists say that coffee and tea are nutrition free, this analysis showed that looking at the English diet as a whole, coffee and tea together provide 20% of several of the essential nutrients including some of the B vitamins. - Yeah, okay, I love that. There's another reason I need to keep drinking it. Okay, well, okay, here's one question.
What's your favorite brand of coffee? What do you drink? What's your favorite go-to cup of coffee? - Oh, I don't know. I usually like, but for taste, a fairly dark roast or French roast, but just because of the recognition that it's got a lot of smoke in it, I sometimes alternate by drinking a light roast. If you can find a variety of coffee that's low in acid, then the light roasts are really very rich tasting. - Okay, okay, Brandon asks, okay, he must be dealing with gut dysbiosis 'cause he says, I have SIBO gut dysbiosis
and the foods don't seem to be cutting it that are carrot salad, bamboo shoots, et cetera, which, and if they're not working, which antibiotics might Dr. Peat recommend? What doses, frequency, and where to locate them online, if possible, as well can one expect some symptoms with use of these, thanks as always, Brandon. - I think the first things are to make sure that your whole digestive system is working optimally and your inflammatory reactions are minimal. And that, two of the most important things are getting enough thyroid so that you have quick peristalsis,
quick transit through the intestine. That simply can keep the bacteria from having the time necessary to develop in the upper part of your intestine. And intense digestive fluids are toxic to bacteria, helping to keep the intestine clean. And quick digestion makes you absorb the food, basically tending to starve the bacteria by getting it all yourself. And vitamin D and calcium, the ratio of calcium to phosphate, keep your immune system from being oversensitive. And an inflamed reaction of the immune system creates an interactive, supportive environment for the bacteria, for example, pouring out inflammation, fluids,
containing lactic acid will support bacteria that produce irritants that create more inflammation and more lactic acid. So making sure your calcium, vitamin D and thyroid are optimized is the first thing. And then the two types of antibiotic which have many therapeutic effects besides killing germs are the tetracycline class and the erythromycin or azithromycin type. You've probably heard azithromycin being recommended for treating the coronavirus. That fits into the whole picture that the problem with the virus is the inflammation, not the presence of replicating viruses. But the inflammation predisposes you to support the viruses.
It's the same with bacteria in intestine. The erythromycin category and the tetracyclines lower the inflammation directly apart from killing the bacteria. So they have several therapeutic functions and the erythromycin category has the extra property of stimulating peristalsis. So it's germicidal, anti-inflammatory and pro-propulsory propulsion activating effect. - I'm so glad you answered that the way you did, like how you gave the recommendation for like what else could be going on before you just jump right into antibiotics. Like you said, what about your thyroid? Like have they addressed the fact that they could need more thyroid support?
And I think that's so spot on because with gut issues you have to make sure that you're weeding out the bad stuff before you just bring in all the good stuff like carrot salad and bamboo shoots. Those are great. That's your seed, like weed, seed and feed. You wanna bring those into like good plants that you're gonna plant in a garden but they also have to weed out all the weeds that could be potentially the cause for why the gut dyspiosis happened in the first place. - Yeah, just intensifying the vitality of your organism
that the bacteria can stay there and no one minds them. So they might be there, you might be eating a lot of turds but that doesn't do any harm because the bacteria aren't being stimulated and fed by the metabolic defects of a sick organism. - Yeah, and even the commensals, like the good bacteria, the nice little commensal communities can actually overgrow and become pathobions or pathogens. So it's like you really have to look at what is the major cause behind the dysbiosis and then address that before you just add all these other things in
or before you just annihilate the whole gut with an antibiotic. Okay, good. All right, somebody with the title I Love Sugar says, "Please ask Dr. Peat what causes stretch marks? "Is it possible to reverse or improve them?" - One interesting experience that I saw with stretch marks was a young cousin of mine who was about probably six or seven months pregnant. She had these, they looked like bodice broadness, old-fashioned suspenders and zigzags of purple and red, shiny, silvery, scar tissue-like material all across her abdomen. She said they had just developed in a few days
and I asked about her diet, which wasn't terribly bad, but not very good. But I mentioned oysters and eggs as having all of the nutrients needed, especially copper and selenium, zinc and so on. She came back just, I think it was two or three days later that said she had eaten a lot of oysters and eggs and she showed me her belly. It was absolutely perfect, no stretch marks. - Wow. Well, oysters are high in zinc, right? And I've heard that zinc really can help those and that some of them with stretch marks
may have a zinc deficiency as well? - Oh yeah, multiple deficiencies. Copper is part of the elastin molecule, so it's a essential factor in keeping your tissue elastic. It works in blood vessels too for protecting them. - Okay, so along with your sugar, I love sugar, you wanna eat some oysters and some eggs too. (laughing) Okay, Ebony Gordon says, can Dr. Peat give advice about treating resistance to thyroid hormone? Is it safe to take high dose of T3 for prolonged periods? Thanks. - It depends exactly on your need.
For example, I've known people who have had terrible life-long hypothyroid symptoms, extreme unopposed estrogen affecting her lung function, poor oxygenation, very high cortisol, just extremely fat hips in size and so on. And basically crippled by her hormone imbalances. She felt a little better when she had what her doctor considered the maximum prescription of armored thyroid, five grains, which the natural thyroid consists of about 1/4 T3 and the rest T4 when it's broken down by digestion. But recognizing that she was recovered partly, but still crippled, she found another doctor to prescribe another five grains
and where a normal person at four or five grains would be a total full replacement that could make up for total removal of the thyroid gland. That five grains had only a small effect, maybe a fourth of what was needed, indicating that only the T3 in the glandular thyroid was having a therapeutic effect. On the second five-grain dose that she added, she felt basically twice as good. She found a third doctor over a period of just a few months, so she was taking 15 grains of armored thyroid.
And if you look at the 1/4 T3 content, that added up to the equivalent of four grains or a total whole gland replacement in the form of only T3. - Wow. - She didn't have any hypothyroid symptoms, but on that dose, it was only a few weeks and she totally recovered her health and went down to 10 grains and then five grains. Her body was simply unable to respond to anything but T3. But given that therapeutic dose, it was only a few weeks before she didn't need that much
and could reduce the dose to a third. And what happens is that in the absence of thyroid function, you shift over into all of these maladaptive things such as high cortisol and estrogen and serotonin and nitric oxide production, things that all interfere with your mitochondrial energy production. So your body is blocked from responding to the T3. So you can use pure T3 therapeutically but when you have used it to help to assimilate the nutrients, then having assimilated the nutrients, you are now able to convert T4 to T3 as needed.
And so you can get the full dose out of glandular thyroid or even a pure thyroxine compound. What most doctors prescribe. And in women, the natural predominance of estrogen compared to men in women is limiting their liver's ability to convert T4 to T3. And so women almost always have a very limited inadequate reaction to T4. And increasing the dose can interfere when it reaches a certain excess, it can begin to displace T3 and have a suppressive effect. - Okay, and for clarification, can you tell everybody like, when you say a grain of thyroid,
can you explain how many milligrams, like let's say they're on eye armor or whatever like you mentioned this lady was, how much would that be with one grain of, is that like 16 milligrams? - The traditional grain weight was a little over 60 milligrams and a five grain tablet, I think their definition was around 300 milligrams by weight, maybe a little over 300 milligrams. - Wow, so she was taking like, oh my goodness, so many, like 15 grains you said, so that's like 900 milligrams of thyroid. Wow, okay, so bottom line is,
sometimes we don't know how much our body actually needs when it comes to thyroid supplementation, like you really have to kind of just keep bumping it up until you feel like you're seeing the results of an improved thyroid. - Yeah, it's very important to go, not only by your symptoms, but by your waking temperature and pulse rate, and then the effect of food on your temperature and pulse rate and your stable daytime resting temperature and pulse rate. - And so symptoms even like Raynod's, like if someone has Raynod's and they're taking thyroid supplement,
but that's still a symptom that's there, that's an indication that they're not getting enough, correct? - Yeah, the temperature of a person's tip of nose, hands and feet, especially the fingers and toes, that those can be shut down in order to keep your core temperature up to the function, your brain and lungs and heart have to keep their energy going to maintain the organism, but under stress, you can cut off the circulation to the extremities, including your tip of your nose. So checking the temperature of those, for example, putting your fingers in your armpit,
if they feel unnaturally cold, that's a sign of low thyroid. - Okay, very good. Lynn Marie asks, I just purchased all of Dr. Peat's books and some of his newsletters and I'm learning so much, so that's good. What are Dr. Peat's thoughts on using a quality negative ion generator while sleeping? I've read so many positive things about them. - For many years, I've kept one operating by my bed. If I could get more of them at a good price, I would probably have more of them running,
but if you, for example, if the weather is bad, you can often notice the effect that a series of studies in Poland very well, good experiments, measurements showed that the action on the lung is to provide the active electrons reducing electrically the enzymes, mono-amino oxidase, supporting that enzyme's function in the lung, which is mainly to destroy circulating serotonin and serotonin in proportion of your general stress, but especially of intestinal inflammation. The intestine pours out a huge amount of serotonin into the bloodstream and the lungs are the main site
of destroying that serotonin and these studies in Poland showed clearly that negative ions in the atmosphere accelerate the detoxing of serotonin. - Wow, okay, so I guess I need to look into these 'cause I've always heard about them, but I've never got one, but you make a powerful statement. Is there a particular brand that you like? - Yeah, the person who was making the one I got, which is very good, decided it wasn't profitable enough and he showed a lot of them and said that the work was too much for the income, so I don't,
it's a matter of first looking at to make sure they don't put out a measurable amount of ozone. That's toxic to the lungs, but you should be able to feel a cold wind effect when you hold upon your hand in front of them because there's a stream of negatively ionized air being driven away from the electrode that you can feel as an actual streaming. - All right, well, that's good to know and I'm sure Lynn appreciates that, too, 'cause she was thinking about it. So, got a question from Turkish Postman.
How to improve hearing, Dr. Peat, how do we improve our hearing? - Classically, thyroid is the most important thing. Reduces stress and maintains circulation and so on. But something I noticed when I was on the way to Mexico, I had a big clock on the wall and I noticed on route to Mexico I, at a certain distance across the room, couldn't hear the clock ticking and after just a few weeks in Mexico, coming back to the same room, that same clock was loud and clear at the same distance
and the same with eyesight after spending several weeks at 6600 feet, altitude or higher, myopia increased by close to two diopters correction. I went from 11 and 12 down to nine and 10 diopter correction after just a season at high altitude. But for the hearing, clearing up took just probably three weeks or so. - Oh, that is so cool because I actually, since improving my thyroid and eating less pufa and stuff like that after years of researching this stuff is like, my diopter went from negative 6.75
and I'm down to negative five, so it's slowly improving. So, it's cool to hear you say that because I don't think people realize that you can actually reverse vision problems. - Yeah, I've seen that happen in girls at puberty or mid-teen years. It's very common for a girl to experience sudden onset of myopia and if they get their thyroid corrected around the same time, they no longer have myopia. So, it's prolonged hypothyroidism that causes progressive myopia. And the connection between high altitude and thyroid is that thyroid is what lets your mitochondria
produce carbon dioxide and keep the inflammatory lactate suppressed at high altitude. The simple physics of the Bohr-Haldane effect on hemoglobin, the reduced air pressure causes your hemoglobin to retain a higher level of carbon dioxide and so it's creating the same condition in your body that optimal thyroid function does. - Okay, that's awesome. I love to hear that. Next question, we're rolling through these. Okay, Tina asks, what does Dr. Peat think about molecular hydrogen? I've seen a lot in the online stores with molecular hydrogen tablets and how they improve hydration. What are your thoughts?
- My interpretation of it goes back to around 50 years ago when I was reading in biochemistry trying to understand how electrons and the reduction oxidation process works. A very well-known biochemist that did experiments in which he starved cells gave them no external source of energy but they were still oxidizing something and it was the dehydrogenase enzymes which were delivering energy to hydrogen to oxygen even though there was neither fat nor glucose provided as a substrate for these enzymes and so he called it nothing dehydrogenase and his nothing includes the gaseous form of hydrogen,
because that isn't considered biochemical substrate normally but his enzymes can actually use gaseous hydrogen as a substrate and these can not only provide biological energy but they can have the same effect on suppressing pre-radical activity that running your mitochondria under an ordinary glucose and thyroid system would produce. - So maybe like these molecular hydrogen tablets in the water or the generators that are making molecular hydrogen might not be a bad idea? - Yeah, or just sniffing gas out of a little tank of hydrogen. - Okay, cool. All right, this is a little bit loaded question.
This is the one I was talking about with the COVID-19. So please ask Dr. Peat what the specific dietary factors are that have made Americans so vulnerable to coronavirus and also what foods should we be eating to make us resistant to it. He specifically says what else can I eat to protect it once it comes around again this winter or if it comes around? It's interesting to note though that it's like how can they say that it's gonna come back around? You know, like how do they know that?
And it just makes you wonder like you said the powers that be like how do they know it's gonna come back around? - There are some interesting videos that give some of the background that had never been publicly widely discussed showing that in previous years that they called it the flu season. But influenza was never the exclusive infection thing. A large block of the so-called influenza, no pathogen could be identified at all. Sometimes it was a bacteria responsible but I think it was 14% of all of the in which they looked for the pathogen,
14%, seven to 14% were typical in previous years coronavirus infections. And three of those were the serious type that happened to overlap with laboratory-designed intensified versions of the coronavirus. But everyone, the coronavirus previously had been known as a cold virus. Several viruses were called the common cold. Several studies in just the last couple of years have, for example, the Pentagon did a study to evaluate how effective the influenza vaccine was at preventing influenza. And they found, or at least did their best to interpret an effectiveness for the flu vaccine
and concluded that it was probably 45% effective at preventing influenza infections in the following season. But during that season, the people, different studies found twice as many infections by other agents up to six times as many infections by something other than influenza. So while it was shifting almost half away from influenza, it was doubling or tripling or quadrupling the number of lung diseases caused by other agents, including the coronavirus. And so if you look at the campaign, very heavy indoctrination, pushing the vaccine on old people in both the United States and Italy
last year before the onset of the coronavirus, of the 2019, 2020 flu season, they were basically reducing the likelihood of a flu infection, but greatly increasing, according to these studies, the likelihood of catching some other lung disease. So the first thing is not to worry so much about food or supplements or whatever, but to think about what's going on with the actual publicity about protecting against lung disease, the influenza vaccine, especially in old people, powerfully increases the risk of lung diseases. There are eight or 10 studies showing that.
- Yeah, and it's never a bad thing to promote immunity, like build your immune system to fight all kinds of things we come into contact with, but I agree with what you're saying. Go ahead. - Yeah, the antibody system is not our immune system. It's something that has been fixated on for more than 100 years driven by the pharmaceutical industry who wants to equate natural immunity, if they can interpret natural immunity as the presence of antibodies. They want to equate it with their magic bullet drugs. It all derives from Paul Ehrlich's doctrine,
but he shared the Nobel Prize with an embryologist who was interested in the whole body's participation in immunity, and that's the innate immune system that has been really suppressed and ignored over these 110 years, and it's our general health, especially at vitamin D and thyroid, the things that let us maintain the balance between carbon dioxide and lactic acid that activates in the proper way this innate immune system. - Absolutely, drop the mic on that one because it's like, improve your thyroid and everything else kind of falls into place,
and then also get out in the sunshine because sunshine, if we're talking coronavirus, is actually killed, it kills coronavirus in like a minute and a half according to some studies I read, so. - The action of vitamin D and calcium, it's increasingly recognized as absolutely vital, especially for viral immunity, but for immunity in general, and what it's doing is not killing viruses, it's activating our anti-inflammatory processes, so it's working with aspirin, stopping inflammation, and it's the people who have a predisposing inflammatory condition who even catch the virus or develop any symptoms from it.
Something between 50 and 80% of the population can have the virus with absolutely no harm done. It's someone with a preexisting inflammatory problem often from low thyroid, low vitamin D, low vitamin A, some malnutrition who have the inflammation that promotes the growth of the virus, so focusing on killing the virus is a completely unbiological idea. - Okay, very good. Ann says, can the doctor speak about the best way to lose 20 pounds, especially on my hips and thighs? I recently went to the doctor and was told I needed to lose 20 pounds,
and specifically I carry it in my lower body, what can I do for this? - The woman I told you had such a resistance to thyroid hormone. That was her physique. You can see her ribs and her arms were about like a five-year-old child, but her hips were so wide that she actually had trouble going through a standard doorway. So you have to look at your whole physiology, not just go by a doctor's TSH measurement, but you have to look at your vitamin D, make sure your parathyroid hormone is at the low end
of the normal range. When your thyroid and vitamin D are being interfered with or are simply deficient, your parathyroid hormone rises, just eating too much phosphate, meat and beans, for example, are characteristic excess phosphate sources. Too much phosphate will drive up your parathyroid hormone the same way vitamin D deficiency or calcium deficiency will drive it up, and parathyroid hormone poisons your mitochondrial energy-producing system, so you can't lose weight if your parathyroid hormone is in the above average range. And if you normalize that, you don't have to worry about losing weight because ordinary activity
and diet will get rid of it. - Okay, good. All right, do you have time for one more question? - Sure. - Okay. I do have a few more that we didn't get to, but I wanna give us one more little question here. I asked Dr. Peat, if one does not have access to thyroid, can other measures suffice? So I guess he's saying if he doesn't have access to thyroid supplements, how do I work around that? And secondly, I don't have a gallbladder, how can I improve my digestion?
- Well, lots of things will fill in, like I mentioned, I was using coffee to make up for low thyroid function, but vitamin D and calcium are powerful activators of the energy system because they keep your parathyroid hormone down. Having all of your minerals, both minerals and trace minerals are very important to keep your mitochondria operating properly. - Okay, good. That was easy enough. What about the gallbladder? - You don't wanna eat a lot of fat at any time, but just the small amount that helps you absorb your vitamin D and vitamin A, for example,
really just takes a minimal amount mixed in with your food. And it's a very fatty meal that will trigger the need for a gallbladder function. So a fairly low-fat diet and moderate-sized meals, people don't really suffer from lacking the gallbladder. - Okay, and do you know anything? Like I've heard that coconut oil isn't in need of bile when you take in coconut oil, it really doesn't need bile to break it down, so that could be a fat that they could take in. Is that the case? - It's still not good to trigger the reflexes
when you don't have the gallbladder. I think it could cause some kind of disturbance. I think it's better to keep that low too. - That makes sense. Okay, Dr. Peat, well, that's the time we have for today for questions, so we'll jump into the few that we missed on the next call, so I really appreciate it. It's always so interesting talking to you because you get me thinking on so many levels. So I'm gonna go check out some negative ion generators. I think I even saw one while I was talking to you
called the molecule that looked interesting and it said it had no ozone. So maybe these folks that he answered your questions, maybe you can send him a little donation and that way he can get himself another ion generator. 'Cause yeah, I like to have one too, but I'm gonna have to save up for it. They're kind of pricey, so. - I paid $30 or something like that. I think you can still find them for $35, $40. - Okay, all right, cool. Well, I'll definitely look into that. Thank you so much, Dr. Peat.
This has been fun and we'll do it again soon. - Okay, thank you. - Okay. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) [BLANK_AUDIO]