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Well, welcome to this month's Ask Your Ab Doctor. My name is Andrew Murray. Every third Friday of the month from 7 to 8 p.m. I do a health-related topic and we are very pleased to have Dr. Raymond Peat join us and has been a very long-term guest of the show. Very briefly, we are definitely changing the seasons going from late summer, fall and the colors are beautiful and hey, we are going to get some rain at some point soon but no hurry.
Okay, so for the past 10 years, as I say, we have been blessed to have Dr. Ray Peat on this show to give his scientific perspective on what we are told is good for us medically. And from his research, we have sought to educate and light the way for others to show the many misleading claims drug manufacturers make and to expose the truth concerning many prevalent drugs prescribed without full knowledge of the science which clearly shows harm in using them.
And last month, we covered the harmful effects of serotonin which a lot of people believe is good for them and the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors which are commonly prescribed using the false justification that they are beneficial for mood, depression, anxiety, etc. Prior to that, we discussed the ongoing war on words or the ideologies concerning estrogen and progesterone with a huge amount of data showing estrogen's pro-carcinogenic activity whilst demonstrating progesterone's protective anti-cancer benefits.
And this month, amongst other things, I wanted to cover the misleading, dangerous and widespread collusion and cover-ups surrounding nitric oxide's propaganda in endothelial health and the heart attack risks associated with the infamous drug Viagra and how cholesterol once again is so important in the maintenance of good health from so many angles and that the use of statins is so dangerous.
So Dr. Peat, are you with us? Yes. Thanks so much for giving your time again this month and as usual, just tell people about your background Dr. Peat, where you came from and what you spent your last four decades doing. In the 50s, I was mostly studying humanities. In the 60s, I got involved in experimental education and then in 1968-72, I did graduate school in biology for a PhD in physiology.
Okay, and you spent the last 30-40 years that I know of basically gaining information and finding out that what you were taught or what your professors wanted you to believe was inaccurate and was not scientifically valid. When you looked at actual scientific research, you found lots of conflicting information about things that were given or tenets that were held as the truth at the time.
Over the years, I spent a lot of time in the university science library and in all those years, there were only two professors that I saw repeatedly in the library looking things up out of several dozen. Because you were there a lot. I was there a lot and they weren't. It was rare to see. Okay, I wanted to carry on the kind of discourse here about the commonly prescribed drugs that a lot of people will be very familiar with and how there really isn't any good information supporting their use.
And now, as you've mentioned in the past, the political weight behind making decisions in FDA approving drugs and the huge lobbying, financial lobbying that goes on from drug companies and right through to the indoctrination and education within the medical teaching establishments to further reinforce the ideology that they have. The ideology that they want to keep in place to support both drug manufacturing profits and, dare I say it, sick patients that don't actually get better but are just kind of hanging on.
The industry has promoted the idea that the only valid science to support a medical approach is the randomized blinded study in humans. But that requires a huge amount of financing. Not only the drug companies want to put that much money into that sort of thing. The average typical scientist actually looking for things to explain how the organism works, they do their experiments on animals at a moderate expense, maybe several thousand dollars rather than dozens of millions of dollars.
So the drug companies say that animal research isn't valid for basing medical decisions except when they don't have any valid human information. In addition, the drug companies will base everything on animal studies. For example, with estrogen, they first tested estrogen on dogs and killed them in various ways so they shifted to rats. The whole science of preventing osteoporosis by using estrogen, for example, is based on rats because they gave the right kind of result where dogs gave the opposite result. So by selecting their animal experiments, they can gather up information to support selling their product.
But if it's anything critical of their product, then it can't be accepted as to be these huge double-blinded controlled human trials. I mean in terms of getting objective results, really people are probably the only truly accurate representation of a drug's effects and the safety and efficacy of any products. I know that the animal models are kind of called akin to or they have a similar physiology. I know when they first started working with primates, obviously there was a big backlash against that after a decade or two.
And then they used, I say, beagles and things in the 70s for smoking experiments and then kind of worked their way down to smaller, cheaper animals. I think the expense of it all sometimes is probably relevant too. But in terms of trials, the trials that are done now with people, those we would hope would present the best possible documented evidence for a drug's effect.
But as you've pointed out repeatedly, when you actually look at the paper that's written to supply the evidence base for that use, sometimes there's fairly glaring mistakes in the setup of the trial or the inference that they get from the results. And sometimes it's just there in plain sight that what they're dealing with is something that's really not that well-known and isn't that significant.
And actually, as you've mentioned before, in the 40s and 50s, when I don't think there was such a lot of pressure financially from medical people to produce things and drugs to get manufactured and the whole circle, the whole wheel of profit, that there's plenty of evidence that they have found. And I wanted to mention the antiserotonin drugs. I think last month when we were talking about this, I don't know if I got to the article which was published in the 40s about the effects of cyproheptadine as an antiserotonin agent and antihistamine on cutaneous allergy.
And so, I mentioned the things like the SSRIs, the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, which would block the uptake of serotonin, making it more available, more prevalent. But yet here in the 40s and 50s, there was clear evidence that they were using antiserotonin drugs to benefit people and how that just gets twisted when there's a mode and a way of manufacturing and spinning a product and putting it out to millions and millions of people at great profit.
In my recent newsletter on cholesterol, I mentioned that for decades it's been known that if you lower cholesterol, you create depression, suicidal tendency, cognitive impairment, all kinds of physical ailments that are demonstrably damaging cell structure leading to these disease increases. But just a couple of months ago, a new trial was started to supposedly treat atherosclerosis and heart disease by removing cholesterol from the arteries using exactly the chemical, the cyclodextrins that for decades has been shown to damage the organism and the specific cells by removing cholesterol from them.
So, for example, one trial years ago found that just a short exposure to the cyclodextrin removed, first it removed cholesterol from the fibers of the hearing apparatus, the cochlear hair cells, causing deafness in the people. And animal studies made it clear that these things are very dangerous, damaging brain cells, muscle cells, hearing apparatus and so on. But the trial is going ahead on the really sort of crazy idea that taking cholesterol out of the blood vessels is going to improve the health and prevent heart disease.
About 30 or 40 years ago, I talked to a person who is now a well-known physiology professor. He at that time was proposing to inject very fine powdered ground glass intravenously to grind out the cholesterol from the atheroma. That really probably isn't as harmful as this current human trial using the cyclodextrins. Let me just hold you there for a second. You're listening to Ask Your Op Dr. KMU DeGarbo, 91.1 FM and from 7.30 to the end of the show.
You're invited to call in, hopefully with questions related to this month's continuing subject of collusion in the medical industry. And this month I'm going to be asking Dr. Peat a little more about nitric oxide. And then we'll get into some of the other drugs that have got lots of information about them that would have you not use them if you really knew what it was about. The number if you're in the area or even if you're outside the area or even if you're in Sweden or Hong Kong, 707-923-3911. So we'll take callers from 7.30 on.
Dr. Peat, I wanted to ask you a little bit more about and it's something that you mentioned in that last paragraph when you were talking about flexibility. You've mentioned before that cholesterol and I think I was probably correctly told this when I was studying that cholesterol introduces fluidity and flexibility into a molecule. And that when cells become rigid, they rupture and they are not able, I mean red blood cells, etc., etc. in the cell membrane.
And this is probably another example here of the kind of nonsensical cholesterol train of thought that wants to lower cholesterol artificially. And you mentioned that low cholesterol has been positively correlated with things like dementia, negative neurodegenerative effects of low cholesterol because it's such an important molecule. What do you say about the flexibility that's conferred to cells with adequate cholesterol? The best known model of that kind of flexibility is the red blood cell which has to fold up to go through the capillaries which are narrower than the diameter of the cell.
So if they are stiffened by removal of cholesterol, they just won't go through the capillaries and when they are put under pressure, they tend to disintegrate because of the brittleness. But that same stiffness has been identified in essentially every type of cell. The lubricating quality of cholesterol is something that really the foundation of what it means goes back 90 or 100 years to the work of Bungenberg de Jong, a Dutch chemist who studied emulsions and he called the complex emulsion a coacervate or a complex coacervate,
meaning a clustering together of different phases of different types of molecule. For example, a starch and a protein don't just mix, they find stability of containing different proportions of the two polymers and different proportions of water. So you get several phases with just those three substances and those phases have become stable and each phase has its way of relating to small molecules so they will segregate ions, sodium and potassium, and other molecules, sugar and urea and so on, in very complex ways.
That led to many people followed up with the implication for what it means for the cell, having these different types of polymers, nucleic acid, starches, proteins, complex fats interacting in the system. And Gilbert Ling, for example, was working directly out of Bungenberg de Jong's basic research on the physics of solutions. And in this context of the actual physical approach to biology, the current work on how cholesterol relates to the various health problems, the cholesterol has a lubricating, limbering effect on these coacervate, complex mixtures of polymers and small molecules.
The cholesterol, the people who ignore that physical basis of biology talk about cholesterol as existing in cell membranes, but every protein in the cell is associated in particular ways with cholesterol. The matrix that regulates and holds the DNA in the proper arrangement, preventing certain regions of the DNA from replicating, allowing other parts to be reproduced so that the cell can express only those proteins and RNA. All of this involves intimate lubricating or relaxing effect of cholesterol on these large polymer molecules. The people who talk about cholesterol as simply a membrane substance,
some of them say that 97 percent of the cholesterol in the cell is in the cytoplasmic membrane. But that would ignore 97 percent of its real functions, which are to control the entire physiology of the cell. So that explains how these studies can be, they can seem to be sane if they ignore the actual science behind what a cell is doing. Okay, so I know we were going to talk a little bit later on about statins, but what you've just mentioned here is in relation to statins in terms of the very damaging effect of statins.
And I know that they've been associated with cancers and several of them have been pulled off the market and they're always trying to find new ways to lower cholesterol with things that they perhaps are not calling statins anymore, but by some other mechanism they'll do it. But time and time again it's shown that cholesterol is so important and actually a positive indicator of longevity when as you've mentioned over the age of 50 for example,
you're actually better off in long-term studies with a cholesterol that's right on the edge of the upper limit of the reference range or slightly over. Around 250. 250 even, there you go. I mean 200 is what they call the cut-off point, but 250 is more protective for you. Okay, I wanted to talk to you, I wanted to ask you rather about nitrous and nitric oxide. And this came up and kind of jolted me in terms of asking you about it,
because I know that around here and probably elsewhere people will understand what I'm about to say because they'll probably have seen it on the side of the road, which is commonly where you see it, little collections of gas canisters and then there will be, you know, beer cans and cigarette packets and other evidence of people hanging together and "having a good time". The nitrous oxide that's used in these little cylinders is a propellant for, oh I know, whipped cream,
so it kind of, you know, gets whipped out of the nozzle under pressure and you can do things with it. And it's also used in some dental practices, but I think it's fairly old. I remember it when I was a child in England and they called it laughing gas and some people were sedated with it. It's not the same as nitric oxide, although they're both very similar, nitrogen-containing compounds, one with one nitrogen and the other with two, but very different in their physiology.
They do both produce as a by-product of their metabolism in the body nitrate and nitrite, which are very harmful. Do you know anything about nitrous oxide? Can I start with nitrous oxide first? Yeah, it can be metabolized into the others, so the immediate effect isn't as harmful as the nitric oxide, but since the body can metabolize it into nitrate, nitrate and nitric oxide, you don't want to expose yourself to it very many times.
Yeah, because you see collections on the side of the road with 20 or 30 canisters and, you know, God knows what's going on. So people just don't understand how these things that they think are just harmless or just a bit of fun, actually have a very negative impact in their health physiologically because of the products that they metabolize into. And then let's just talk about nitric oxide. I know you've done several newsletters on it in the past, and you've mentioned it previously as being a very negative product.
I know that I wanted to ask you about Viagra, and it's obviously based on nitric oxide and how the drug companies basically managed to turn this basic poison into a medical product that they could market to a very targeted audience. And I think they've got a huge response from it in terms of sales because of its targeted use in erectile dysfunction and how its negative physiological effects far outweigh any short-term effect that might be gained from, you know, solving impotence temporarily when testosterone has another very similar effect but without the deleterious effects.
So would you speak to nitric oxide and also the people that discovered nitric oxide and got the 1998 Nobel Prize for it? From them and their research, they're obviously purporting this product to be very beneficial. You know, we can't do without it. It's used for killing infections off from, you know, white blood cells. They obviously mention it for impotence and in atherosclerosis, they're saying that it can be avoided because it's typically a symptom of low nitric oxide. In the early part of the 20th century, several gases were known and studied for their toxic effects.
Cyanide, carbon monoxide, hydrogen sulfide, and nitric oxide were in various ways found to kill cells or impair their energy production, blocking respiration. And these have over the years found to be produced inside the body. And some people say that if the body produces them, they must be beneficial. But until about 1980, when nitric oxide was shown to be produced in the body, it was mostly known as the toxic component of smog.
But as it came to be studied through the 80s, several people were showing that that toxic effect contributes to diseases such as diabetes by knocking out oxidative energy production. But in the late 80s, someone noticed that estrogen acts by way of increasing nitric oxide. For example, when uterus is exposed to either estrogen or nitric oxide, it swells up, takes on water, and goes through its oxygen resisting type of metabolism. And that sort of thing happens everywhere under the influence of estrogen. And so the estrogen industry has created a great myth about the benefit of estrogen.
And so the nitric oxide people attached themselves to the estrogen nitric oxide interactions. And then the Viagra came on the market. It was shown to intensify the effects of the endogenous nitric oxide. And that combined with the estrogen myth created a great surge of positive thinking about nitric oxide and suppressed all of those 10 years of research showing that it contributed to various diseases, brain damage, heart damage, vascular damage, and so on. And all of that was reversed. And then for the next 10 years, 20 years, it has been highly promoted as a wonder substance.
For example, women with pulmonary arterial hypertension, impairing their circulation, creating heart stress, the blood vessels were failing to open. And so they said, "Nitric oxide opens blood vessels. Let's have them breathe nitric oxide." But one of the functions of interfering with oxidative metabolism is that that causes cells to turn on collagen production. And breathing nitric oxide creates fibrosis of the lungs. And I've known people, older women, who were being given Viagra because of that mystique of nitric oxide in the lungs.
And the whole history of nitric oxide and its toxicity was reversed to the extent that in the '80s, people started saying, "Smog is good for you." In Mexico City, they found that kids who went to the beach at low altitude and got away from the smog, that they developed asthma. And they said that's because nitric oxide from the smog is curing their asthma when they're at home breathing it in the city. There really is no limit to the type of advertising phony science that we all do.
Okay, so just to let people know, 7.30 now, from now until 8 o'clock, if you'd like to call in with any questions related or unrelated to medical misinformation, poor advertising, phony advertising, drug culture that we're all subjected to in advertising, etc., numbers 707-923-3911. You mentioned also this feature, and we've talked about DNA methylation in the past, and that there is a kind of a conjoining of estrogen, nitric oxide, and increased DNA methylation,
which is heritable, and it can be passed down. So it's not just the immediate effects. It's actually something that affects the DNA and can be heritable to the next generation. Yeah, for example, it shuts down your energy producing systems, and that shuts down your expensive organs and tissues such as brain. And so you can turn off the best functions of the organism, not only in the individual, but pass it on to the next generations.
Okay, because it's basically something that's going to physically change protein transcription or other factors which are fairly defined and locked in, as it were, until such a time as the DNA is methylated. Yeah, I think anything that blocks energy production, high energy, oxidative metabolism is going to do that same transgenerational damage, shutting down the expensive but valuable organs. And you said that nitric oxide also kind of shuts down the beneficial oxidative metabolism of glucose, and that's something that gives a very energy expensive process of any energy wasteful way of producing energy.
Yeah, and in the heart, when the parasympathetic system, which is activated to an extreme in shock, that slows down your heart. And the parasympathetic acetylcholine stimulation activates nitric oxide production, and that reduces the heart's ability to use oxygen. So it's in effect creating a hibernation state. Animals in the fall increase their production of nitric oxide if they're going to go into the hibernating state. But in the heart, the stress and shock reaction can shut down the energy production and need for oxygen.
Within limits, it has its benefit because if you can't use oxygen, you don't suffer in the same way from oxygen deprivation. But what happens is that the function of the heart is restricted by that reduced ability to use oxygen. The heart becomes unable to relax. Relaxation is a high energy function. If you turn off energy availability, contractile cells such as the heart or other muscles won't be able to relax. In the heart, that will raise the diastolic pressure.
Usually, the whole circulatory system fails to relax in between beats. And having not relaxed fully, then it can't beat fully. So it creates a progressive tendency to heart failure. That's an interesting concept that relaxation is dependent on energy. We tend to think that relaxation is a passive event. Hypoglycemia or suffocation will lead to constriction of blood vessels and even seizures. The brain goes through a total activation when it's deprived of either or both glucose and oxygen. Nitrates and nitrites are basically byproducts of nitric oxide oxidation. Nitrates have a metabolic rate shutting down activity by themselves.
I know they've been advertised now, probably through some of this information coming to light. But the meats, sausages and things that they now call nitrate-free, and when they've tried to preserve these meats also to say that these nitrates are part of a preservation process, but that these are in themselves metabolic regulators that they shut down metabolism. So in that way, they had been linked to cancers too. In 1970, they were definitely identified as cancer carcinogen formers in the stomach. And now that nitric oxide has been promoted, the nitrates have lost their carcinogenicity apparently.
Okay. And then there's also another causal link to Alzheimer's that's been shown in relation to the content of nitric oxide in a patient's body when they are suffering Alzheimer's. Yes, starting at about the age of 40, nitric oxide synthesis increases generally even in healthy people, but it's intensified in the demented brain. Okay. Now you're listening to Ask Your Doctor, K.M.D. Gabor 91.1. From now until 8 o'clock at the end of the show, you're invited to call in the questions related or unrelated to this month's subject. The number is 707-923-3911.
So I'll ask a question. My name is Michael. I'm from Redway. What is the amyl nitrate? There was poppers. I think athletes used to do them. How does that fit into all of this? Probably the same nitrogen releasing compound. Amyl nitrate used by the gay industry, actually. I think I was pretty fond of amyl nitrate. Do you know anything about amyl nitrate? No, just the legend, basically, that for a while they thought it was the cause of AIDS. And I think it's still considered to be an immune destructive chemical.
An interesting thing I saw recently was that nitric oxide stops the hair follicle renewal. So if people start thinking about baldness, they might be more interested in investigating the dangers of nitric oxide than just heart disease or dementia. Between that and neurovegetative processes. I guess we'll move on to the things like, we've mentioned the statins and lipid lowering drugs. We've mentioned estrogen and progesterone in the various trials that have been done that are showing negative effects of estrogen. Now we've mentioned nitric oxide.
I've got a few others here that are the AIDS, because it's such a, it's so vogue, but the ADD and ADHD drugs. But we'll take a caller. We've got a caller. Let's take this caller. Caller, you're on the air. What's your question? And where are you from? Mike from Connecticut. I have a quick question to Dr. Rapita. I wanted to find out what causes faces and necks of aging men to turn red, more so than women. Is there any tips to avoid that? Did you get that Dr. Peat? No, not clearly.
Well, ask the question again, caller. I wasn't too sure of what you were trying to. Yeah, just wanted to know, I noticed that aging men, their faces and necks turn redder versus women more so. I was wondering if there's any root cause and how to avoid that. What do you think about that vasodilation or the ruddy cheeks that he was saying that typically affects men or seems to affect men more than women? I think it's related to the hot flush that women get at menopause, which is clearly a surge of nitric oxide.
But I think in men that there are other things, including an actual deficiency of riboflavin. I think that's for some reason a consequence of the nitric oxide poisoning, that riboflavin, vitamin B2, is essential for the respiratory energy production. And the rosacea, cheeks, and red shiny nose and such, the vitamin B2 is usually a factor in that. I've seen almost instantaneous relief when someone got a big dose of vitamin B2, but it doesn't last long. Once you've got a deficiency, the tissue doesn't retain the vitamin B2 effectively.
So it seems to be a chronic problem of getting the diet converted so that you everyday are taking in a little more than the normal amount of vitamin B2. Okay, thank you for that. Great thing for the answer. Okay, we've got two more callers. Let's take this next caller away from you. What's your question? Oh, hi. I'm calling from the Mendocino-Coson Albion. I guess my main question is, cardiologists will frequently tell their clients taking statins to take the CoQ10 compound for fatigue. And I was wondering how that helps.
And the other thing they have them carry around with them is the nitroglycerin stuff. So I just wanted to know Dr. Peat's feeling on the CoQ10 and how that works. And why would the statins mess around with that anyway? The statins are poisoning the enzyme that makes cholesterol. And that system makes several substances other than cholesterol, including CoQ10. And so that's now widely recognized that you're poisoning the whole respiratory system. Oh, lovely. CoQ10 is one of the other essential factors for oxidative metabolism.
And when that's deficient, the failure of energy can reach the point that muscle cells are lacking functioning mitochondria. If you exercise, where about 7% of the statin users have some muscle pain, if you exercise while you're under the influence of the statin, you greatly increase the risk of killing the muscle cells because the energy production can't keep up with the energy expenditure. And if the muscle breakdown is complete, that can destroy your kidneys by the flow of debris from the disintegrating muscle. Yes, thank you very much.
And so giving a good dose of CoQ10 is very protective. And it isn't just protecting the muscles because the statin is doing exactly the same thing to the brain mitochondria, the heart mitochondria. CoQ10 is protective to all systems. Oh, thank you so much. Okay, thank you. I'm going to hang up. Okay, and then what do you think about nitroglycerin very quickly for relief of angina as it was used in terms of what it is? It has similar side effects. It's something that I think should be limited to relieve the symptoms
but work on correcting the problem with such things as CoQ10 and normalizing oxidative metabolism. Okay, we have another caller. So let's take this caller away from -- what's your question? I'm from New York. And I have two questions. But on the CoQ10, you said a good dose. What did you mean by a good dose? Is that 100 milligrams or is that more? I don't think anyone really knows how to schedule the dosing. I think just by effect, if you feel your muscles and nerves are functioning properly,
don't get any muscle soreness or swelling, then the dose is probably enough, I think. Okay, so my two questions are, one, as you get older, the hydrochloric acid that's produced in your stomach seems to decline, maybe varies person to person. When it does so, even if you're eating the best food, maybe your diet, if you don't get enough HCL, literally you're not going to be able to digest it properly. You're not going to be able to actually efficiently metabolize the food in a way that ultimately allows all the functions that you talk about to occur.
What I did more recently is instead of taking a dose of like 800 milligram tablet of Betaine HCL, I took a smaller dose, like 150 to 200, just a little few capsules, and I take it with the glycine, the gelatin that you recommend, so that it doesn't cause any irritation. And I think it's improved the ability of my body to digest food. Is that possible? I'm not sure any acid -- they used to have -- drugstores would dispense a glass of dilute
hydrochloric acid with a glass straw for people to sip to acidify their stomach during meals. But even strong vinegar, acetic acid, helps the enzymes to function, and the Betaine hydrochloride definitely acidifies the stomach and works. But one long-range concern is that Betaine feeds into the methyl metabolism, and you want to look at the long-range effects of increasing methylation. Currently it's stylish to supplement methyl groups, but one of the background facts is that if you decrease the methionine and cysteine in the diet of animals,
their lifespan increases 30 or 40 percent just by the absence of those methyl donors. So I would suspect that chronic use of Betaine is going to be like increased consumption of the methionine and cysteine. Can I interrupt you for a second? Let me finish at this point. So on this point, if you're taking glycine and the gelatin, that sort of is a positive, and that's one of the ways that I think you've described to get away from those particular amino acids that are problematic.
So if one is to take not 800 milligrams but maybe a few crystals like 50 to 100 milligrams, just a tiny amount wrapped in that gelatin, it seems to me that the long-term concerns you raise is still possible. That will balance it because the gelatin doesn't have the methyl donors. Okay, so my second question relates to if someone wakes up in the middle of the night, I guess they could either use the red lamp, they could eat carrots or some milk, or they could actually take a CO2 bath.
And in the night, obviously cortisol raises up to, I guess, 5, 6 a.m. in the morning. Which combination of those would be reasonable, rational to use to try to help your body get back into a state of repair during that period of time when it's supposed to be repairing? You know, even though you might be sort of having a cortisol jump because you need enough protein during the day or whatever or you can get the right combination of foods, what's a good way during the night to -- which of those methods might be useful
or is a combination useful? Nitric oxide has the same curve rising to a peak around 7 a.m., one with cortisol. And so light, penetrating red light helps to free the respiratory apparatus from both carbon monoxide and nitric oxide. So that is a way of protecting yourself from darkness. But sugar and the thyroid function producing carbon dioxide, the carbon dioxide is the basic stabilizer against stress. What about a dry CO2 bath if you can't sort of produce in your body because it's sort of the middle of the night?
What about sort of oozing it through your skin? Yeah, if you have -- Is that another way to do it? Yeah, for example, having a big plastic box full of CO2 by your bed. If you're having night stress, you can just get out of bed and sit in your box of CO2 and absorb that for 20 or 30 minutes. Without eating that -- so if you don't eat, those are good methods. The reason I ask that is I'm doing it and I think it works.
I'm essentially trying to verify that what you think I'm doing is not crazy, and you're telling me, "No, it's not crazy," it sounds like. No, it looks silly to sit in a giant plastic bag full of carbon dioxide. It's even in Japan they're treating cancer with transdermal carbon dioxide. Certainly better than staying up for two or three hours. Yeah, my wife looks at me like I have two heads. You're right. It does seem odd. You know, definitely not conventional. Thank you very much, Dr. Peat. Thank you for your call. Yeah, I appreciate your call there.
Dr. Peat, in the last few, six minutes or so before the top of the hour, I wanted to just quickly mention the ADD and ADHD drugs that children are so increasingly prescribed for their inability to focus and concentrate and how this is now treated as a disease for which drugs like amphetamines are prescribed for our young children. What do you have to say about that diagnosis of attention deficit disorder and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder? Things that impair the oxygen metabolism of your brain do create attention deficit,
and some of the studies found that coffee improved focus and attention, not only in those with the diagnosis, but even honors students had better focus when they had a coffee supplement. So there is benefit from some supplements, but it happens that as far back as the late 1960s, people were noticing a connection between the amphetamines and lymphoma, and I was aware of that because I had a close friend who loved his Benzedrine, and he died in his 40s from lymphoma. That kept me aware of the research, and for about 30 years,
I would admit that that connection existed, but lately, more people are recognizing that lymphoma is the result of toxic stress. Okay, and then Ritalin again is one of those drugs that most people will recognize in the prescription treatment of ADD and ADHD to young delicate brains that are, you know, they should be just growing healthily away, and you've mentioned obviously all these things in the past that are very beneficial, like sugar, which is one of the things that you want to keep your children away from, obviously improving your thyroid function with good nutrition.
It relaxes the nerves by restoring their energy and carbon dioxide production. Yeah. Well, it's just another unfortunate example of how these things that are prescribed to us are developed and weaponized, if you like, against us for massive profit, and how there's really a lot of dangerous side effects in a lot of these things, and that most people don't really question it. The doctor is the one in power, and you do what the doctor says, and unfortunately, you get on a kind of slide. Your first prescription then becomes a second prescription,
becomes a third, becomes a fourth, becomes a fifth, you know. Anyway, without laboring that point, let me just close the show. Thanks so much for your time, Dr. Peat, and thank you for those people that called in. Really appreciate you giving your time like you do. Thank you. I also wanted to just close this show, and it's a little bit close to 8 o'clock, not quite 8 o'clock, but there were a couple of things that I saw that kind of clinched it, not that talking about all this scientifically with all the evidence doesn't clinch it,
but you can go find this yourself. Two of the most prestigious journals, medical journals, journals of medicine, in the world are the Lancet and the New England Journal of Medicine. And these are two quotes that I'm going to read out now from people that were at the head of these organizations as editors, etc. Richard Horton, who's the editor-in-chief of the Lancet, said this in 2015, "The case against science is straightforward. Much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue." And then Dr. Marcia Angle, former editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine,
wrote in 2009 that "it's simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that's published or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines." She said, "I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reach slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor." So this has huge implications then, and as we've mentioned in the show before last, in August, that evidence-based medicine apparently is completely worthless if the evidence base is false or corrupted, which stands to reason. And there was another quote from Dr. Relman, another former editor-in-chief
of the New England Journal of Medicine. He said this in 2002, "The medical profession is being bought by the pharmaceutical industry not only in terms of the practice of medicine, but also in terms of teaching and research. The academic institutions of this country are allowing themselves to be the paid agents of the pharmaceutical industry. I think it's disgraceful." Okay, so for those of you who've listened to the show this evening and called in, you can find out more information about Dr. Peat online. His website is www.raypeat.com.
He has lots of fully referenced scientific articles that are not just his hearsay or his opinion, but which are quoted and referred to and in very succinct style, confer a lot of elaborate information that you can find out yourself on the web. So do your research, folks. It's all out there. And look at his website and his publications. And when you hear him and you've heard the previous shows, you can understand that he knows what he's talking about and he spent his whole life studying it.
So take advantage of it. And for those that have ears, let them hear. Until this time next month, have a happy fall.