Paused at 0:00.
[music] You are listening to WMRW-LP Warren 95.1 FM. The following program presents the views of its participants and producers. It does not necessarily represent the views of WMRW or its license holder, Ruth's work. And then there's an ID on the other side of the bill. Lisa, keep community radio going. Call 496-4951. Click on the pig on WMRW.org. Give what you can. Give what you can. Hey, and welcome to Politics and Science. I'm your host, John Barkhausen. This week we're dipping back into the archives again when I was a talk show host at WGDR,
college radio, community radio up in Plainfield, Vermont. So this is, I'm not sure of the exact date of this when this was live, but I believe it was around the year 2000 or 2001. And it's with Dr. Raymond Peat again. I did a series of interviews there, probably. I'm not sure, maybe over 16 to 20 hours of taped interviews with Dr. Raymond Peat, who's a physiologist and an endocrinologist from Eugene, Oregon. He has a PhD in biology and specialized in physiology.
In this particular episode, we're taking calls, but because it's 13 years past the day of the show, please don't call in. We're all past that now. And he's discussing, starting out, talking about diabetes, and then it segues into various other related dietary and health issues. So I'll let it get started. I apologize for the sound quality, which is a little funky. We had, seems everywhere I go, we have funky phone systems, and this is no exception, but it's definitely hearable, and I hope you get something useful out of it.
All right, here's Ray Peat on WGDR Radio circa 2000-2001. I wanted to talk about diet again today. I think that's something that everybody can relate to. And one of the things I've been confused about is, we say that sugar is important, and I was wondering what kind of sugar is important. And I was also wondering, you've also mentioned about the Western diet and its relationship to diabetes, and I was wondering how that works. Oh, there are several things that are well known about the diet that should be important factors in causing it,
but the studies in humans aren't entirely clear on how the diet works. The animal studies are pretty clear, and then there's a little bit of epidemiological information on humans. For example, when Israel was developing, the European Jews had the regular European high incidence of diabetes, but the immigrants who had been living in Africa or other parts of the world had very low diabetes rates. And after they had been living 10 or 20 years in Israel and starting to eat the European diet, they came right up to the European high diabetes rate.
And so it shows that the old idea that you inherit diabetes is just completely unfounded. It might rarely happen, but the basic problem is strictly a dietary problem that develops in a person's lifetime. And the Argentine physiologist who got the Nobel Prize about 50 years ago, Bernardo Husai, he in the '40s was experimenting with different diets and mice and what things would contribute to diabetes. And he showed that coconut oil was the most protective food against developing diabetes caused by poisoning, for example,
and that sugar was the next most protective dietary factor, and that foods high in unsaturated fats as opposed to coconut oil didn't offer protection. And in the last five years, many studies have been supporting this association between the unsaturated fats and diabetes. And the other implications of Husai's work that coconut oil or saturated fats are protective and that sugar is protective, are still showing up in the animal studies, but people aren't really thinking very much about them anymore. I thought people with diabetes are supposed to watch their sugar intake.
Well, yeah, that was kind of a fad that comes and goes. The concept of complex carbohydrates, people advocated eating complex carbohydrates rather than sugars, and complex carbohydrates is just a silly way of saying starch, and starches are basically chains of glucose, and glucose happens to be the single nutrient that most intensely disturbs insulin production. And when you carefully look at food containing starch and food containing sucrose or lactose, the glycemic response is much greater from the starch than from the sugar. So someone trained dieticians to advocate the so-called complex carbohydrates.
Actually, they're the simplest carbohydrates in the sense that they're just a chain of glucose where sucrose is made up of one unit of glucose and one of fructose, and lactose similarly is only half glucose. And this idea that for some reason starches were slower to disturb your blood sugar caught on widely, but it's just part of the longer history in which diabetics have been put on high protein diets, high fat diets, low carbohydrate or high carbohydrate diets.
It just seems to go in periods of about 20 years each. The high fat diet, if it could be limited to the saturated fats such as coconut oil, that would probably be a very good diet if it was also fairly high in protein. The trouble with a simply high protein diet is the protein stimulates your insulin secretion very powerfully the same way pure glucose or starch does. So you don't want to overstimulate your pancreas for several reasons. It makes you store fat, for example, and it can overwork your pancreas.
For example, in experiments they would remove part of a dog's pancreas so that the remaining part had to work more intensely and various stresses would bring on chronic diabetes. For example, one shot of cortisone would be enough to make such dogs diabetic and just a very intense overdose of starch or protein will cause such fluctuations in insulin and blood sugar that you get also a very intense cortisone reaction. Yeah, the glucocorticoids are produced by the adrenals when your blood sugar falls sharply and any stress will bring that on.
And every night causes a sort of diabetes related action in which cortisone rises during the night, both adrenaline and cortisone, and diabetics have what they call the dawn phenomenon in which they're resistant to insulin after having spent the whole night in darkness and at dawn their tissue doesn't respond to the insulin. Then during the daytime it does respond, and that's because the mitochondria in particular are damaged by darkness and stress and it creates a vicious circle in which the damaged mitochondria intensify the stress response.
That brings up the cortisol and growth hormone and adrenaline which mobilize fats from storage and block the ability to use glucose and so insulin has to rise but it's ineffective in those conditions. Could we go back a little bit and maybe you could explain what exactly happens in diabetes and how the insulin, I don't really understand it myself. Well, diabetes was originally defined, the name refers to excessive urination, and diabetics used to typically waste away because they couldn't assimilate food.
The diet of internal starvation and excessive urination was a basic feature and a lot of glucose being put into the urine was a basic feature. And in this wasting condition the starving cells produce the stress reaction and that melts down the proteiny tissues of the body and so the protein is turned to sugar and they all have high blood sugar even if they don't eat.
And the old definition of diabetes has been modified to the point for several reasons that when someone says they're diabetic I just don't pay any attention to it because the word doesn't have any meaning anymore except basically high blood sugar. And the death rate per 100,000 from diabetes increased when insulin became available and that was right in the official statistics all along.
And so people who investigated the issue by the 1930s knew that insulin wasn't lowering the death rate from diabetes and so people who studied it were very resistant to starting insulin treatment because they couldn't see any evidence that it was preventing death from diabetes. That was something like doubling the death rate in the first 20 years after insulin came on the market. That's an amazing statistic because growing up I thought that the development of insulin saved how it was utilized.
That's what the pharmaceutical industry always says that even though it often turns out differently like the cancer death rate has increased the more cancer therapy they apply is the higher the death rate is and you can't see any little change in the death rate from increasing mammography or introducing new therapies or whatever. Every time they introduce something it's saving lives but when you look at the figures a few years later it increased the death rate usually. So diabetes is a wasting disease?
Haging itself is a wasting disease and stress produces wasting. But if they really wanted to diagnose classical diabetes they would measure the insulin in the blood. When people have studied the role of insulin in regulating blood sugar they have found in one series of studies that the actual insulin molecule was only responsible for about 8% of the blood sugar disposition and other hormones and even just potassium in the food was a major factor in disposing of blood sugar. Potassium works like insulin.
And so one of the factors of a high starch diet is that starch tends to be compacted in foods as a storage molecule. And it by forming a gigantic molecule can be stuffed somewhere in the cell and the rest of the cell with its normal concentration of potassium can be small in proportion to the high starch content. So when you eat rice or any of the standard starchy foods you get very little potassium and magnesium along with your glucose equivalent.
And so it's the type of sugar which produces the most intense demands on your pancreas to produce insulin. Where if you drank orange juice for example to get exactly the same amount of carbohydrate as in eating rice or bread your glucose for one thing is only half of the carbohydrate in the case of fruit juice.
Except for grape juice that's plain glucose but orange juice is only half glucose but this glucose is accompanied by lots of potassium and fair amounts of other minerals that help to dispose of the glucose harmlessly as a substitute for insulin or a complement to insulin. What was your question? Well I was just sort of feeling our way through the diabetes issue here. The insulin itself should be diagnostic of diabetes if diabetes is to be defined as an insulin deficiency or it's a reason for taking insulin.
But when that was investigated the insulin wasn't reliably diagnostic and so it's extremely rare for a doctor to actually measure insulin before diagnosing diabetes. If a doctor prescribes thyroid hormone without measuring the amount of thyroid hormone in the body they lose their license. It happens all the time. But strangely because estrogen and insulin are such profitable big businesses no one ever bothers measuring your insulin for prescribing insulin or seldom they measure your actual estrogen before prescribing that.
When someone has pneumonia or some other viral infection and is in a stress condition turning their tissue to glucose to fight the infection they'll have extremely high blood sugar. Very often these kids get put on insulin for the rest of their life with terrible side effects from taking too much insulin just because they had hyperglycemia without trying to find out why they had such high blood sugar. And since the popularity of insulin treatment and the growing obesity of the population a new sort of official sub definition of diabetes has come into existence
which it bypasses the problem that diabetes was being diagnosed without measuring insulin. And so now they have the type of diabetes called insulin independent or it is basically the same as something called Syndrome X but non insulin dependent diabetes is really among middle aged people and older. It's the main thing that's called diabetes and it's strictly a stress syndrome brought on by the hormone disruptions that commonly begin in the 30s and 40s. And this form of diabetes is simply resistance of the tissue to insulin in the sense of disposing of glucose.
But the tissue is sensitive to insulin in the sense of turning on fat production. And so one of the failures of diagnosis still is to look at what is really happening when you're resistant to insulin. Is it real generalized resistance or is it simply that you turn everything to fat? The stress reaction will produce a resistance of your liver to insulin but your fat cells become very sensitive to insulin and will produce fat while you maintain high blood sugar from the stress reaction.
So that's how being overweight is related to diabetes is that you just start producing fat cells? The stress reaction really is the explanation for the type of diabetes that isn't dependent on insulin. In other words, insulin resistance is a stress reaction and everyone becomes relatively insulin resistant at dawn because of the stress of darkness. The mitochondria deteriorate in the dark and so there aren't as many functional mitochondria to respond to dispose of sugar. And that stress reaction and mitochondrial damage makes the body think that it's starving.
It's the same reaction that happened in classical diabetes leading to wasting away. But it happens to everyone, every animal during the night. The glucose isn't being metabolized because something is happening to the mitochondria. And so the body senses a need for glucose so it turns on its cortisone to try to handle the stress. And adrenaline always goes up when you're not getting enough glucose into your cells. And these stress-related hormones, adrenaline, cortisone, growth hormone, prolactin, and acetylcholine, these four or five hormones, for example,
will mobilize fat from storage and the fat then, especially if you have stored unsaturated fats into your fat cells, the stress reaction brings the unsaturated fats out and your mitochondria try to metabolize these fats since they aren't able to get sugar. And the unsaturated fats poison the mitochondria and intensify the insulin resistance. But everyone has an increase of free fatty acids during the night showing that night is stressful to everyone. And everyone's insulin resistance increases towards morning after they've been exposed to these free fatty acids all night.
And so the current knowledge of cell functioning and the stress reaction, this is confirming whose size work in the 40s showing that the saturated fats in coconut oil or even sugar, sucrose, would have a protective effect because it's turning out to be the unsaturated, polyunsaturated fatty acids which create insulin resistance. There's a thing called the Randall cycle, which isn't really a cycle. It just refers to the fact that your body stops metabolizing fats if it's able to metabolize sugar. But if it's given an excess of fats, it can't metabolize sugar.
And so the Randall effect or Randall cycle is really a description of what happens in the so-called non-insulin dependent diabetes. When you say sugar is protective, do you differentiate between sugars like fructose or white sugar? Well, when you study the effect of sucrose versus glucose, a given number of calories, the sucrose has a lower glycemic index, in other words, it is less disruptive to your pancreas. It doesn't stimulate insulin so intensely. And then when you break it down, it turns out not just that the fructose doesn't stimulate your pancreas very strongly,
but when you combine glucose with fructose in the form of sucrose, the fructose actually impedes the glucose stimulation of the pancreas so that you get not just the 50% lower stimulation because the fructose isn't an active stimulant, but it's actually a retardant in stopping the glucose component from overstimulating your pancreas. And the fact that sucrose so often comes with minerals is an extra factor, but it's the fructose itself which offers protection against that glycemic reaction, which is so important in turning on fat production.
So I think you're saying the fructose is better because it doesn't overstimulate your pancreas. Yeah, and so the best way to gain weight probably is to eat a high starch diet and a high unsaturated fat diet, exactly the things that have been recommended by dieticians for the last 30 years. Yeah, and then they're wondering about why everybody's gaining weight, and they're just not getting enough exercise. Turns out our kids are just plain lazy. So I think they say weight is a risk factor for diabetes, don't they? They're blaming the weight for causing the disease.
Yeah, but the problem is that the diet blocks the ability to burn calories and shift the physiology to the storage of calories rather than the use of them. Right. That makes sense. So if we're all running on cortisol and adrenaline at night, does that mean we shouldn't sleep at night? No. People have done studies having a tube in a vein so they could draw blood every 15 minutes, and doing these tests through the night with the lights on or off and people awake or asleep.
If they did the tests all night with the people awake, every 15 minutes there was a steep increase in the cortisol in the blood. If the people were asleep, there was a less steep increase but still an increase. And if they were doing the measurements with the lights on, there wasn't a noticeable increase. As soon as the lights went off, the increase began. And so if you have to be up at night, it's very important to have extremely bright lights around so that your body thinks that it's not really nighttime.
But ordinary room lights don't do the job. For example, sailors who were working the dark months in Antarctica had just ordinary room lights for 16 hours of the day. And then when they went to sleep and turned off the lights, their physiology resembled that of very old people. They went into an extreme alarm reaction immediately because their bodies weren't being properly conditioned by light. The daytime light was inadequate so they were especially susceptible to the complete darkness for sleeping.
So the quality of daytime light is protective and the darkness is less harmful when you've been well illuminated during the day. The charts charged up. When you look at the mitochondria of rabbits around a 24-hour cycle, you see the mitochondria swelling up and breaking towards dawn, a progressive swelling and then exploding. And then during the daytime they get progressively more normal until at sunset they're right back to fresh functioning mitochondria. But in the winter, in the far north, these experiments were done in Leningrad where the winter nights are almost all day.
The mitochondria were in just disastrous condition and so the animals accumulated their aging decline during the winter months. But if they survived then during the almost constant illumination of summer, they were highly rejuvenated so that they could get through another winter. Yeah, it sounds like quite a roller coaster. So that's why maybe people are, those light boxes where people are using those to fight depression. Yeah, if they're bright enough. But the light that penetrates happens to be red light.
The blue and ultraviolet, it does stimulate your brain, but it happens that both blue and ultraviolet cause stress and damage to your retina. Whereas the yellow-green and red light is non-toxic to the retina. And the longer wavelength of the light, the better it penetrates. And the way when you see a flashlight shining through your hand or sunlight shining through a person's ears, the reason your hand or ear looks red is that it's the red light that passes deeply into your tissues.
So the red light at those heat lamps you can get at the hardware store, I believe? Yeah, that's red enough. Those clear-fronted so-called infrared lights, they're just designed to run on a high voltage. So when you run them on 120 volts, the filament doesn't get as hot as in a regular light bulb. That means that the light is biased away from blue towards yellow and red. And so that's the penetrating beneficial light. We have a caller, and I'm going to ask them to whisper, basically, because we have a sound-level problem where Ray is very low,
and the callers are always about three times the level. So if they could talk very softly or... Alright, this is Jim. You can tell me if I get too loud. Yeah, maybe just hold the phone farther away from you. Alright. Is this okay? That's tolerable, but you could even do better. Wow. I feel like I'm whispering. Yes, fine. We can hear you. If I understood more, I would have a lot of questions, but could you explain a little bit more what cortisol is?
If you want to write these questions down, I've got a couple. What is cortisol? And could you explain a little bit more about the nature of the mitochondria and what they actually do? I understand what happens to them when they don't get enough light, but what their real function is. Okay. Those two things. And then another completely different question that you've never addressed over all the different discussions. There's a wonderful book out called "Milk, The Deadly Poison," and I was just wondering whether Dr. Peat had read that book,
and if he has any perspective on the negative aspects of milk. But first of all, the cortisol and the mitochondria. Okay. And I can hang up. Okay. Thank you. Thanks, Jim. Han Celier, in his Encyclopedia of Steroids, summarized the tests of the different steroids, and he showed that each steroid has a curve like an upside-down V, that its peak is what people talk about as its main function. But the shoulders of the curve overlap with other steroids, and he showed that the anabolic and androgenic functions were closely related.
The estrogenic functions were anti-anabolic and anti-androgenic. The progesterone category was anti-estrogenic and anti-androgenic, and also anti-glucocorticoids, or anti-cortisol. The glucocorticoids, or the cortisol type hormones, were anti-anabolic and anti-androgenic to some degree, but primarily they are a catabolic type of hormone that, if you think of it as opposing the anabolic effects of the so-called androgens, that's probably the focus of what cortisol really is, and as having its anti-functions of the other hormones, some of the other hormones have pro-inflammatory functions, such as estrogen,
and so the shoulders of this catabolic cortisol function happen to have a lot of other functions, so that people think of it as an anti-inflammatory hormone, but that's just one of its side effects. This led to a lot of complications. People tend to name it in terms of a function rather than where it comes from. Celie said that we should talk about hormones in terms of either their structure or where they come from, because they have so many functions, but turning protein to sugar is close to the essence of what the glucocorticoids do.
They're called that because of their sugar-raising function, and sugar then has the anti-inflammatory functions, and so the connection of sugar to cortisone to diabetes relates to its central function, which is to handle stress by feeding the organism. It will turn primarily muscles to some extent skin and then liver into sugar when you're under stress, so the protective effect of the anabolic hormones is essential so that you don't turn yourself totally to sugar every time you're under stress, and for example, someone was using radioactive testosterone and thinking that they were going to produce images,
radiological images, seeing where the concentration of radioactive testosterone was. They thought it would be in the skeletal muscles, but it turned out that the heart was the most intensely concentrated focus of testosterone, and the heart happens to be a big concentrated muscle, but testosterone also protects the lungs and brain against the catabolic effects of cortisone. So the balance of these hormones governs the shape of the body as you get old and have experienced a lot of stress. You tend to get spindly legs and small muscles because you're constantly eating those, turning them to sugar,
and in proportion to your cortisone balance, you'll tend to be thick around the torso with the accumulation of fat, or at an extreme you might get a moon face and a buffalo hump from fat deposits at the same time that your arms and legs become spindly. But that's the picture of what cortisone dominance does over the whole body. In the individual cell, it blocks the ability to use glucose, and that's how it kills some cells so selectively. The thymus is probably the very first tissue to melt down under stress.
The white blood cells have their ability to get energy from sugar blocked by cortisone, and so they melt down and provide substance to make other brain tissue from. Your muscles melt down because they're being deprived of energy by the cortisone blockage of sugar use. Luckily, the muscles have a balance of amino acids which turn off your thyroid so that you don't melt down so fast. Especially if you're from prolonged stress or from aging, if your progesterone and testosterone levels have decreased beyond a certain protective level,
your heart, lungs and brain are losing some of these anti-catabolic actions of progesterone and testosterone, and cortisone will now start eating away at these vital tissues rather than just your thymus and muscles. The cortisone prevents your brain cells, if they aren't protected, from getting enough sugar to function and survive, and so they'll cause death of the brain cells and atrophy of the brain. Simply, if you provide the brain cells with extra sugar in the presence of cortisone, they'll survive.
This blockage of the ability to use sugar is central to cortisone's function, and bringing the mitochondrion in is susceptible to several kinds of interference that prevent its ability to use glucose. Nutritional deficiencies, for example, vitamin B1, a deficiency of that will prevent the use of glucose and create apparent diabetes. Too much unsaturated fat will poison the mitochondrion and make it unable to use glucose. Unsaturated fats and cortisone happen to have the same effect blocking mitochondrial respiration. I think that's what Kim wants to know. What does the mitochondrion actually do?
The essential function, as far as the whole energy balance goes, of the mitochondrion is that it is where oxygen receives the electrons from glucose, primarily. The most efficient thing is for glucose to be oxidized, giving up its electrons to oxygen, creating water and carbon dioxide as oxygen is also added to the carbon skeleton of the glucose. Fats are metabolized in a slightly different pathway, also to oxygen, but there's a competition between fats and glucose, and the most efficient use of oxygen is when you're burning glucose.
If you're forced to burn fats, you lose efficiency, and if they're unsaturated fats, you not only lose efficiency, but you damage the structure of the mitochondrion because the electrons are not taken up quickly enough by oxygen and they escape to oxidize the mitochondrion. If you cut off the oxygen supply or use for any reason, you tend to create damage and destruction of the mitochondria by these escaping electrons.
The thyroid function is to activate the enzymes which take up electrons, and so while thyroid intensifies oxidation, it's the proper oxidation that's pulling electrons through the mitochondrion and turning them harmlessly into water. So if you interfere with thyroid, then you have the same effects that you get from cortisone or too much pre-fatty acid, especially pre-unsaturated fatty acids. It's quite an amazing system, which I don't really understand completely, but it's quite a balancing act, isn't it?
When you take into account the effect of nighttime and daytime, the mitochondrion, it happens that red light, which penetrates into the cells, red light happens to repair the same enzyme that thyroid hormone is activating. So a light deficiency acts on the enzymes exactly the same as the thyroid deficiency, and unsaturated fats poison the same enzyme system. And so as far as mitochondrion is concerned, cortisone, unsaturated fat, hypoglycemic, hypothyroidism, and darkness, any of these things produces the same stress reaction in which oxidation is harmful rather than beneficial. Jim had a third question.
The milk book, I've read, I'm not sure if it's that one, but I've seen several of these, and there's an internet website called I Think It's Not Milk. And I'm not sure of the background of these people, but everything I've seen tends to focus on a few partial studies and make strange claims that are actually contradicted by 99% of the evidence, roughly. And I don't know why there is so much energy going into this anti-milk campaign. I think a lot of people are feeling ill and maybe all clogged up all the time.
Well, yeah, that's one of the things. About 25 years ago, they talked about the mucus effect of drinking milk and the mucus-less diet, and there was this whole thing around mucus identifying milk as a mucus or a mucin. And saying that it would give you sniffles or sinus problems and so on. But some people, mucus is a defensive reaction in your intestine and nose and so on, and when you take in anything irritating, mucus is there as a protective defense barrier.
If you take in histamine, you will have an immediate exaggerated mucus reaction, and so the antihistamines dry up the production of mucus. But I don't know where the confusion came from that identified milk as a source of chronic colds and so on. Some people are really allergic to milk. One person in 10,000 or something will get hives if they touch a drop of milk to their lip.
But the hives reaction, that's an absolute classical allergic reaction. You could produce a sniffles effect in a person who was allergic, but people are talking not about 1 in 10,000, but they're talking about it as if it's something intrinsic to milk. And back in the 50s, dairies were allowed to use insecticides and various terrible chemicals on their cows, and that showed up in the milk.
But in the 60s, American dairies were forced to keep deadly chemicals away from the cows. Israel didn't clean up their dairies, and it was found that some of the insecticides used on cows were showing up at very high levels in women's breast milk. Israel had at that time the world's highest incidence of breast cancer, and when they passed laws requiring that dairies not use these carcinogenic pesticides and come up to the standards that were being enforced in the United States,
within a year their breast cancer incidence had fallen very sharply, so it's important to know what's going into your milk. Even though you can identify poisons in meat, industrial meat, for example, Europeans don't want to import American meat because America doesn't enforce the standards of meat purity as carefully as Europe does, and they allow estrogens to be used in meat animals. But it happens that the meat and the fat are fairly easy to contaminate, but the animal's liver is an efficient organ at getting rid of these toxins.
So if a person ate just beef liver, they would not be susceptible to the contaminants. But the real answer is to use organic meat and milk and make sure that the farmer isn't poisoning the cows. Unfortunately, we're going to have to leave it there. You've been listening to Dr. Raymond Peat, interviewed back circa 2000-2001 on WGR Radio up in Plainfield, Vermont.
I hope you enjoyed the show. If you'd like to find out more about Dr. Raymond Peat and his work, you can go to his website, raypeat.com, and his name is spelled P-E-A-T, like a peat bog. So, r-a-y-p-e-a-t dot com, and you'll find, I think, over 80 or 90 articles there, all for free, all searchable for whatever issue you're concerned with, and all extremely interesting, in my opinion. I hope you enjoyed the show today. I thank you for listening, and please tune in again next week for another edition of Politics and Science.