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It's just better. Love Talk Radio You're listening to Holistic Living, brought to you by EastWest Healing and Performance. And now, here are your hosts, Josh and Jeanne Rubin. Alright, everyone. Welcome to today's show with Ray T. Ph.D. And we'll get Emma on here in just a little bit. I want to thank everyone once again to tune in to our show every month. Last show's, uh, last month's show with Lita Lee was great. So, if you, uh, don't, didn't have a chance to look at that, go to our blog talk radio show and check that out.
Most of the links that I talk about, you can actually go to our website at eastwesthealing.com. And in the upper right-hand corner, you'll see a little YouTube, Facebook, blog talk radio show, all those things. You can click on them and directly go to those pages. So, don't forget to check those out because we have a lot of free information there for everyone. Of course, I want to talk a little bit about business before I introduce Ray. Uh, check our website at eastwesthealing.com if you want to learn more about what we do.
We actually work with clients all over the globe. So, feel free to give us a call and fill out that form. As well, if you want to check out our website, you'll see there's an on-demand tab. You can click on the on-demand tab and you'll see the Metabolic Blueprint. Check out our Metabolic Blueprint program that we're launching January 5th in regards to nutrition and healing based off a lot of different philosophies from Ray Peat, Voter Bonds, etc.
If you can't find the link, feel free to email us at [email protected] and we'll send you the link so you can check it out, learn more about it or sign up. Today, we're doing a question and answer show with Ray Peat once again. I know a lot of people have been really waiting for the show. If you want to learn more about Ray, his website is raypeat.com. He's got tons of articles on his site that will probably keep you busy for the next 50 years. He's got books that you can actually order.
You can send in your money in order form and they'll mail them to you. And he's got a newsletter as well on his site that's, I think, well worth the money. It's very inexpensive of the year and they get mailed directly to your house and they're unbelievable, just packed with information. Ray has his PhD in biology from the University of Oregon with a specialization in physiology.
He's taught at many schools including the University of Oregon, Urbana College, Montana State University, National College of Naturopathic Medicine, and a couple of the schools that I can't pronounce in Blake College. So if you want to see those other schools, you can check out his website at raypeat.com. He started his work with progesterone-related hormones in 1968. He did a paper on physiology, chemistry, and physics in 1971 and '72 and his dissertation at the University of Oregon in 1972,
outlining his ideas regarding progesterone and the hormones closely related to it as protectors of the body's structure and energy against harmful effects of estrogen, radiation stress, and lack of oxygen. So if you want to learn more about Ray, check out his website like I keep saying. It's just filled with information. You can learn more about him. And like I said before we get him on, like I've said a million times, I know from doing the show and our Facebook page and everything, a lot of people have been emailing Ray.
And he's definitely probably one of the nicest guys and will just keep answering questions. It is the holiday season and I'm not saying Ray has asked me to say this because this is 100% on me, but I've said this from day one. Whether it's a dollar, five dollars, ten dollars, whatever you feel you can send to say thank you for what he's done for answering the emails, that for us would be greatly appreciated because he's donated his time to do this and really help us out.
So you can just send the money or whatever you want to send to his house. It could be a gift, it could be whatever just to say thanks for all the help that he's done for us. So let's get Ray on. And I know a lot of people listening in, you're welcome to call in today at 347-426-3546. I have tons of questions here on email from callers that have questions about Ray's philosophies, etc. But don't be afraid to call in and just realize if you're on hold, be patient and I'll get to you.
Ray, you on the other line there? Yes. All righty. Is there anything else you want to add before we kind of get going? No, that covered everything. All right. So I got a lot of questions here and I don't think we'll have time to answer every single one of them because I have probably 50 plus questions. But I have been getting a lot of questions from people regarding iron. And a lot of people want just kind of a summary, if you can, on your thoughts about iron,
because you believe it's a heavy metal and it's toxic and it has all these effects on the body. So if you could clarify just a little bit for people on your thoughts on the dangers of iron. Wherever iron gets loose, it is available to react with things like polyunsaturated fats, but also protein and nucleic acids and such. But the reactive form of iron is the reduced ferrous form rather than the fully oxidized ferric. And that means that if you don't get enough oxygen to your tissues, the iron tends to get reduced by glutathione.
And people talk about oxidative stress, but reductive stress is really what you have to worry about in relation to iron. Alcohol, for example, interferes with the use of oxygen and causes the reduced glutathione to accumulate, to shift the ratio towards reduction. And that activates iron, reduces it to the reactive ferrous form, and then that causes the damage. And iron accumulates faster than it should under the influence of estrogen, among other things. But inability to use oxygen properly intensifies the absorption of iron.
And that seems to be what estrogen is for, to create the illusion of an oxygen deprivation so that you absorb more iron. A woman, they've tested the absorption percentage of a dose of iron in women versus men. And women absorbed nine times as much iron as men did. That's primarily the influence of estrogen. And the action of estrogen is to create the need for more iron to carry oxygen in the blood.
But unfortunately, besides making the body absorb it, it also tends to create the conditions that make iron toxic and puts it into the reduced reactive form. And one of the main things that activated iron attacks and tends to start chain reactions in is the polyunsaturated fatty acid. And that, too, strongly interacts with estrogen. If you eat polyunsaturated fats to excess, they will activate the estrogen circulating in your blood, and they will also turn on the enzymes that produce estrogen.
And then estrogen, in turn, activates enzymes that desaturate and elongate the existing fatty acids, turning, for example, linoleic acid into arachidonic acid, which, again, creates a vicious circle in which the estrogen increases the most reactive PUFA, which activate and increase the quantity of estrogen. And both of those contribute to the activation and intensification of iron toxicity. So you can break the cycle in different ways, donating blood to get rid of iron or doing things to interrupt the estrogen fatty acid cycle.
Now, with that same question, the person was asking, if you have, based on your lab, well, first off, what would be a normal lab value of iron that you'd want to see? But what if you have low hemoglobin, is it still safe to actually donate blood, or are there alternatives? Would you recommend, like, sipping coffee after a meal or, you know, etc.? There's no blood test that I know of that will really say anything meaningful about your status of iron, because the iron tends to hide in your liver and bone marrow.
And the blood tests that people often go by can go in either direction without any relation to the iron stores. And the fact that when you give someone an iron supplement, it increases their red blood cell count or their hemoglobin doesn't mean they were deficient in iron, because they used to treat anemia with doses of arsenic. The arsenic creates the stress that tells your body you need more iron and more blood. And so any stress that interferes with oxygen use will make you drive up the blood production system.
Right. And would you say, well, hemoglobin, would that be due to estrogen? Yeah, all animals that have estrogen, the female tends to look slightly anemic, because it does something to slow the production of red blood cells, partly lowering the body temperature is one of the actions of estrogen and slowing down thyroid function. So probably the most common cause of apparent anemia, as Rhoda Barnes pointed out, is hypothyroidism.
And I think he was the one that mentioned the experiment in which rats whose tailbones normally don't make red blood cells. In this experiment, they folded the tail back and made a hole in the skin of the abdomen and stitched the tail so it was kept in at core body temperature. And it quickly began producing red blood cells, just raising the temperature. And so the first, safest way to treat anemia might be to wear long wool socks to warm the extremities.
Right. Now what is copper's role in regards to iron? I mean, I know copper is important for iron uptake and utilization. Its primary role is in the respiratory enzyme, cytochrome oxidase. That, I think, is probably the reason that copper is essential for constructing the hemoglobin molecule. Right. So what you're saying, correct me if I'm wrong, that you feel that most people, because we actually can't get rid of it unless you, you know, profusely bleed, actually have higher amounts of iron in our liver and our bone marrow.
We store it, which in a sense is toxic, and of course along with estrogen makes it more toxic. So the only, you feel that most people are actually in an iron overload state and they might be showing up low in a lab because they have maybe absorptive issues in their hypothyroidism. Yeah. In men, it has a direct tendency to accumulate continuously with aging. Menstruation probably helps women avoid the accumulation until they stop menstruating and then the curve is maybe even steeper than men's.
It builds up by the age of 60 or 70 to pretty much rival men's, but I think the menstruation probably is one of the factors that makes women have a greater longevity. Right, right. There was a study of immigrant fruit pickers, kids in California who didn't get a good diet, but they ate lots of oranges. And they had on average, I think, a hemoglobin of 10 versus I think below 12 is considered tending towards anemia. But they found that these kids didn't get infectious diseases like the well-fed city kids who had lots of hemoglobin.
They've seen that same thing in Africa that when they would have campaigns to give iron supplements, lots of people would come down with malaria because iron activates the growth of germs and weakens our immune system. So one of the tests that's meaningful in the blood but that's seldom done is the iron saturation. And people tend to be resistant to cancer development if the saturation is somewhat low, like 25%. Right, right.
Okay, Stephanie, we've got a couple of callers. I mean, I have tons of questions. Would you like to just keep going or do you mind taking a caller? Anytime. Okay. Mr. Chris Dillon from the 908, is that you? That's me. How are you doing, Josh? Dr. Peat? How's it going? Good, brother. How are you doing? Good. All right. Shoot. All right. I have actually two separate questions. Dr. Peat, regarding ADD/ADHD and as we've been seeing a rise of these diagnoses in the last couple of decades,
do you feel that it's really sugar the problem or poly could be more of the polyunsaturated fats? I think it's the unsaturated fats. The sugar tends to move everything in the right direction away from brain malfunction. The polyunsaturated fats interfere with the tension and increase adrenaline and the sympathetic nervous system and the stress hormones. And I think that's probably the main thing, as well as hypothyroidism that keeps the front part of the brain from getting enough energy to focus.
It's funny because you hear people saying sugar is the problem and yet you hear more people saying, let's take omega-3 fatty acids to help with brain development and yet we're seeing an increase in this ADD/ADHD behavior. So, thank you for answering that. My second question is regarding Hashimoto disease. Can you explain the proper way for it to be diagnosed because again, I'm getting a lot of people claiming that doctors say they have Hashimoto,
but I realize that sometimes the antithyroid antibodies that are found in the blood really don't have any relation to the thyroid gland. I wonder if that's true. Those antibodies interact with cartilage of the joints just about as well as with the cartilage. So, it's really a connective tissue inflammatory disease which goes with hypothyroidism. The cartilage is one of the first places that you see hypothyroidism in children. It accounts for why hypothyroid kids tend to be a knock-kneed and why girls aren't good pitchers often because the cartilage in the knees and the elbows is basically swollen.
So, I've said basically a lot of people walk around being misdiagnosed for this, right? Yeah. Yeah. Okay, great. All right. Thank you so much for your time, Dr. Peat. Josh, I'll give you a call later. Thank you. Thanks. Have a good one. All right, brother. Good questions. I was actually thinking I was reading one of your old articles on Hashimoto's and thyroiditis, and I found it pretty interesting because you talk about how estrogen is affecting, and correct me if I'm wrong, the colloid,
and actually stimulates it but inhibits the exact proteolytic cells to break it down. And that's why a lot of people are getting diagnosed with Hashimoto's because it's not so much the thyroid itself, it's the altered production of the antibodies because of estrogen. Yeah, the whole idea of autoimmune disease is, I think, off the mark. The immune system, I think of as a clean-up the mess system. The antibodies help the phagocytes remove debris, and if the debris is caused by an infection, they'll get the germs too.
But if the debris is caused by low thyroid causing the connective tissue to swell, the immune system has to come in and try to help clean out the junk that builds up because of low thyroid. Right, right. All good stuff. Now, we've got another call. Do you want to answer some questions or take another caller? Anything. Okay. Caller from the 678, you're on the air. One more time. Caller from the 678, you're on the air. Hi. You there? Hello. Yeah, we're here. All right. Yeah.
First of all, I just want to thank you guys for doing this. It's a great resource. I have two questions. One is practical and simple, and that's simply how long would you say it would take someone whose body temperature has historically been in the low to mid-97s for that to stabilize if that person doesn't have very much stored fat and kind of institute some of your recommendations, right? I've seen a couple of people do it in three or four days, very skinny little people. Just who had been on a pure soy tofu diet or something.
As soon as they started eating eggs and oranges, they just popped up out of their -- a couple of people who had been diagnosed as having broken pituitary glands with no function at all, all of their pituitary hormones would pop back as soon as they started eating rationally. All right. Well, that's encouraging. My second question is more general and comes from having exhausted your articles on the website and then figuring I might as well look into some of the people you talk about.
I read some of Selye's work, and it seems like he believes that we have an absolute reserve of energy to deal with stress and that any stressful event can kind of deplete this and that people start out with different levels. I was wondering if, first of all, that's correct, and then second of all, what you think of that. No, I think where he left it is where the issue of cumulative buildup of iron and PUFA comes in. Both the long chain polyunsaturated fats and iron accumulate with aging and with stress under the influence of estrogen.
So he just wasn't looking far enough and long enough to see how those factors interacted with stress. The stress, while he was looking at the adrenal glands and first their adaptive phase and then their exhaustion phase, what happens is during prolonged adaptation, estrogen and other hormones, growth hormone and the inflammatory mediators accumulate and estrogen buildup from blocking the actions of the thyroid function, the buildup of estrogen begins to directly drive the adrenal gland. When that reaches a certain point, you can actually get bleeding in the adrenal gland
and death of the cortical cells in the adrenal under the influence of just an excess of estrogen. You get the same sort of overdriving from the direct hormonal action of the adrenal glands from buildup of iron or serotonin or polyunsaturated fats. So the systemic effect of stress, I think, is what he neglected to think about when he talked about the reserve innate amount of energy that we had. All right. Well, thank you very much. Thanks for calling in. Now, I'm not sure. I actually have a question when you're talking about disease
and I'm not sure if it's too vague or actually too big of a question. In one of your old newsletters from 2006, autoimmunity, you talked about, you were talking about Meshnikoff and you talked about how you, I'm not sure if you're talking about you or him, argued that inflammation was a pathological reaction rather than being a healthy part of a defensive immune system. So, you said... That's mostly me. Okay. So you feel that inflammation is actually more of a pathological response
where most people say inflammation is actually the body's response to helping us get back to homeostasis. For Meshnikoff, he saw the white blood cells going in and curing the problem, clearing up the mess. Right. But because of the interpretation, he was an embryologist who saw the development through evolution of the meaning of the immune system. But after the medical establishment took it over, they created the idea of inflammation being the curative process. But the swelling, the redness, the pain that are the medical view of inflammation, these, I think, are pathological.
The immune system should work like in the prenatal state. This is analogous to what Meshnikoff was looking at in his solanderates and developing embryos and so on. In the embryonic and fetal state, injury is corrected without inflammation. The cells just repair the damage in an efficient way and don't leave a scar. When you keep the carbon dioxide and sugar where they should be, you basically get fetal or embryonic healing without a scar and without inflammation.
So I see it as an inability to deliver what's needed to repair the damage that we see as redness, pain, and inflammation. That makes sense to me. That's a pretty interesting thought there. I like it. Now I have a lot of questions on weight loss. Now I know this for every individual is, there's just so many variables because we don't know people read your articles and they go crazy with dairy. They think that everyone should be pumping sugar in their body. So there's a lot of different variables going in here.
But I have a lot of questions about people beginning to follow a lot of your philosophies based off their perception of what they read. And they've noticed that, you know, their energy goes up and so forth, but they actually gain weight. Can you maybe elaborate on maybe some of the scenarios that can actually create this and maybe what they can do to actually halt this? Well, gaining weight probably isn't the issue. It's gaining inches and bulging. When you're doing everything just right, very likely you'll rebuild muscles that were damaged by stress and poor nutrition.
And as those muscles quickly grow, you should be doing things like feeling your calf muscle, seeing how big it is. You can even use calipers on the contracted muscle and see it grow as you're eating right. But the circumference of your thighs, hips, and belly should be decreasing even though your weight is increasing. When I experimented first with DHEA, I wasn't expecting anything. I was just wondering what it felt like to take a few milligrams of it. And I noticed after a week or two in the mirror that my waist seemed to be reappearing
after having been just sort of a straight-sided appearance for previous years. And it made me wonder. My pants were getting looser, and so I thought I must be losing weight. So I checked, but I was exactly the same weight having shrunk around the waist. And what happened was that I was simply growing more lean tissue and burning up some of the fat so that I had more muscles, but was smaller around the waist. So initially a lot of people, well, of course, people have to work on what they're eating, their ratios and calories.
But for a lot of people, and people hate hearing this, but it's actually a sign that your body is actually moving in the right direction and it's actually healing because you're rebuilding. Yes, but if someone is putting down fat rather than muscle, their pants are getting too tight, they're just eating probably too much fat or total calories. Yes, and that's a whole other issue in itself. I have mentioned that at times I have averaged over the years probably a gallon of milk a day,
but that's always been 1% milk because even at two quarts of milk a person doesn't want to have whole milk at 3% or 4% fat. What's interesting is when you say those things, I don't think you realize the repercussion. You have all these people walking around trying to drink gallons of milk, but they're drinking whole milk and they're like, "Why am I gaining so much weight?" But that's good stuff. Another question here, and I kind of have a feeling what you're going to say, but what are your feelings, or maybe talk about aromatase inhibitors.
What are your feelings of aromatase inhibitors? Because there's a lot of people out there that say take calcium D-glucrate or take DIMM or whatever, which we know in a sense is actually from cruciferous vegetables, so that can actually be more toxic to the liver. Basically, they're usually selling just powdered cabbage leaves and naming it for that, but that has been tested and found somewhat estrogenic in itself. It changes the metabolism of estrogen, but it has an estrogenic effect directly. The saturated fats, what I was just talking about, the estrogen aromatase activating effect of PUFA,
that's antagonized when you shift the balance to saturated fats. And aspirin, by blocking the formation of prostaglandins and reducing inflammation, and interrupting the effect of the PUFA, aspirin is a very effective aromatase inhibitor. But the drug companies don't want people to know that because they charge tens of dollars for a pill of their stuff where aspirin costs a penny. But at the same time, if people just eat a diet that's lower void of unsaturated fats, a diet of saturated fats, eat the right types of carbohydrates and the right amount of protein in itself,
wouldn't that diet through regulating cellular metabolism actually inhibit aromatase enzymes or downregulate estrogen itself? Yeah. Thyroid inhibits aromatase. The only thing that lowers cortisol inhibits it because cortisol is a major activator. Right. Interesting. Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of people out there taking those supplements and promoting them, and it's pretty interesting because they'd actually be more toxic on the liver. In talking about the liver, going back to the iron thing, so if people start to eat this way and really increase their saturated fats,
let's say they're taking a thyroid glandular or whatever, is it dangerous? Because you're kind of indirectly detoxing the liver, correct? Is it dangerous because it's storing so much iron that it could actually, you know, the new principles, the new diet, whatever, actually backfire? No, no. The iron, if it's in the oxidized state, is just sitting there doing no harm. Okay. It forms like little granules and doesn't get out or go anywhere to do anything. Right, right. Good. Now, going back to the iron things, I know you talked about this in regards to iron,
but some people want just a summary on coffee because there's so many people out there, and of course it comes down to how we use it and when it's being used, what is it being used with, but everyone says, "Well, coffee causes adrenal fatigue," and so forth. And you have you, which is probably a 180 of everyone out there, saying that coffee has a lot of benefits because it's pro-thyroid, it's pro-progesterone, it helps with iron absorption, et cetera. Can you elaborate a little bit more on, you know, why and maybe how to use it?
Yeah. Do you have any idea of who started the idea of adrenal fatigue? I've been trying to find out who is responsible for that word. I think it was a little boy in a sandbox. I don't know. But the coffee contains a lot of good things besides the caffeine. It's an extremely concentrated source of magnesium and a very good source of niacin and some of the other B vitamins, but the caffeine has an antioxidant effect. As long as you use it with food, it tends to stabilize your blood sugar and reduce inflammation.
Probably its anti-inflammatory effect is the most important thing. Now, in regards to how to use it, because there's a lot of people, of course, in America that just chug coffee all day, you know, they go to Starbucks, et cetera. And, you know, going back to the adrenal fatigue thing, and I'm not saying I'm not here to prove anyone wrong because I'm just some, you know, little guy in California, but I feel that people took Hanfelia's work and that general adaptation syndrome, those three phases,
and they ran with it and came up with adrenal fatigue, in my opinion, because the last stage is exhaustion. So I don't know where it came from. Exhaustion is where the adrenal gland dies. Right. Yeah. Yeah. You don't want to get to exhaustion. Right. But the idea of fatigue seems to be something else. Right. And if you have enough cholesterol and are eating a good diet with vitamin A and your thyroid is okay, in proportion to the amount of cholesterol in your blood, you will be able to produce pregnenolone and progesterone,
which the progesterone in itself has all of the functions of the adrenal hormones for aldosterone and cortisol, for example. So Hanfelia took out animals' adrenal glands. Right. And if they were pregnant, they didn't have any symptom at all until they gave birth, and then they had the usual shock effects. But that led them to give progesterone to animals that had their adrenal glands removed, and they lived fully normal lifespans, not needing their adrenals at all, because progesterone alone covers the spectrum. And with adequate vitamin A and thyroid especially,
you will convert cholesterol into pregnenolone and progesterone, and the adrenals are very good at repairing themselves. In some types of experiments, people wanted to have the adrenal medulla removed but have the adrenal gland be able to produce the steroids. And they would open the capsule and simply scoop out all of the contents and then sew the animal back up. And within a couple of weeks, the adrenal gland had no medulla or nervous parts left, but a whole adrenal cortex was regenerated just from the cells of the capsule. Right.
So, like I said before, the repercussions, like aspirin, everyone listening, don't go out and start popping aspirin. Same thing with coffee. It's all about how you use it. Now, you talk about when you use it or how you use it is very important, correct? Because you, and correct me if I'm wrong, sipping it after a meal would be more beneficial with some cream and sweetener because it can help with iron absorption after the meal, etc., rather than just drinking it on an empty stomach.
Yes, taking it with or after the meal has basically none of the harmful effects. I've known several people who said that just a sip of coffee would make them feel shattered and shaky for the rest of the day. But I told them to put some heavy cream in it and maybe some sugar and take it with each meal, only with each meal. Right. Within three or four days, these people were happy coffee drinkers. Yes. Most people that drink coffee are pretty happy. I actually just got an email from a listener,
and I don't know if you've ever heard this, that said, "Adrenal fatigue was coined by Dr. Lam or Dr. Wilson." I don't know that, but I don't know if that rings a bell. Another question is, what do you think about-- there's a lot of people out there utilizing supplementation, enzymes, etc. What are your thoughts on regulating metabolism, using your nutritional philosophy, and utilizing those things? Do you find them to be beneficial, or do you feel that it can actually cause more of an increase of endotoxin, etc.? It depends on where the supplements come from. Okay.
People with very sensitive digestive systems have to be very careful of any supplement, just because the factory it's made in might carelessly introduce things, and there might be residue left from the microorganisms that were used in processing it. So you have to be really cautious about allergies. Right. Another big question. There's so many people out there-- and keep in mind when I bring up this stuff, I'm not here to say anyone's wrong and right. I'm just here to bring questions up. But there's people like Dr. McCuller, etc., that are promoting that fructose is death,
that fructose causes diabetes, it causes everything. And there's a lot of controversy out there, and there's a lot of people that read your article and say, "Well, you kind of promote it in the opposite way." Can you give us-- Just a few days ago I heard from someone in New Zealand who said he had been diagnosed a few months ago with non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. Right. And he said he started-- I didn't get the details of the whole diet, but it included 300 grams of fructose every day. And he now has a new diagnosis.
His liver has no fat problem. Huh. So everyone out there is saying that fructose by itself causes fatty liver, causes high triglycerides, causes diabetes. Do you feel that they're missing the boat because it's the unsaturated fats? Yeah. My article newsletter on the sugar questions two months ago goes through the history of how that fructose phobia evolved over the last 50 or 60 years. And it's very closely connected to the cholesterol doctrine of heart disease and the idea of essential fatty acids being essential. And if essential, then beneficial, and if beneficial, not toxic.
And meanwhile, the actual science was going on for basically 80 years showing that the essential so-called fatty acids are toxic and carcinogenic. Just straight-line research that was submerged by the oil industry perverting the medical establishment around the cholesterol doctrine of heart disease. And Ray brought up his newsletter, guys. He said if you want to get it, it's really cheap. And I'm not here to sell them, but they're just an unbelievable pack of information. And you can go to his website and his store and for 12 issues it's $28. $38 out of the country, $48 elsewhere.
It's actually, you know, it's well worth the money. So take a look at it. Some other questions for callers. This is kind of an interesting question. I'll kind of read it to you. Because you mentioned that pigs are fed on soybeans or other sources of poof. Their fat tends to become more unsaturated and therefore unhealthy. Barry Grove says the same thing. However, if their fat was truly unsaturated, how come it's still solid at room temperature? Which fat is that? The unsaturated. I don't know which one would be solid at room temperature. What kind is that?
I think they're talking about--I think they're saying, you know, you feed a pig, poof is a soy. That unsaturated fat technically is liquid at room temperature. And they're saying, well, if you take out a piece of bacon, they're associating the fat. It's actually solid. It's not liquid. Oh, well, it isn't. If you extract the fat, when I was a kid, I would get blocks of lard for my grandmother. And they were definitely solid at room temperature, just like butter.
But the lard that I've seen in recent years, which is now slightly over 30% poof, it's soft at room temperature. And the fat droplets in bacon naturally are enclosed in cells and connected by connective tissue. So even if it was 100% poof, it would still have a white, firm appearance. Right, right. Now, I know you've answered this question before in other shows, but it's on here, and I think a lot of people still have this question because it comes up a lot.
There's so many people out there on like a Sino-Mal or et cetera, T3 medication, and there's a lot of people being sold that Time Release is actually better for them. They want to know your opinion on Time Release versus just your basic Cytomel. Is there a difference, and is one better than the other? I've heard from several people who were having either overdose effects from the Time Release or no effects, and I got some documents from a lawyer who was defending someone,
and so they had the compounded Time Release T3 analyzed by a couple different laboratories, and no T3 could be found in it. The T3, if you compound it carelessly, it's very easily destroyed or lost or oxidized or otherwise decomposed, and with the wrong Time Release agent that might work for vitamin A or something, it might just permanently bind the T3 or it might release it as soon as it hits your stomach acid. There just hasn't been good research on how to compound the Time Release T3,
and even a lot of the generic products that they presumably have imitated Cytomel, some of the generic products have very erratic effects. Generally, I don't think the idea of a patented brand-name medicine is a good idea. It's usually mostly fakery, but in the case of T3, I haven't seen a good other product. It's interesting, there's a lot of people out there that get sold that the Time Release is the only way to go. It's just good to know you get options and what's going to be best for that person, but nutrition first if possible.
Another question about the cat seems to always come up, and I think it's a simplistic medicinal food that gets really put into a complex. People just are confused on, you talked about how to use it, shredding and etc. People, which I find kind of odd because all you have to do is eat one carrot, they're finding it hard to carve out time to eat a carrot alone. Do you recommend eating it before a meal, with a meal, after a meal? Is there any difference, or is it really that simple, just eat a carrot a day?
Usually it's just eating the carrot, but if you're having a problem with low blood sugar or thyroid irregular function, if you eat it with a meal, you might slow digestion to the point that you aren't getting your food as expected. So you might feel shaky after eating because you're not absorbing your food or activating your thyroid properly. But if a person wants to reduce their fat absorption, eating the carrot with the meal will accelerate weight loss. You have to fit it in the way that functions best.
One thing to keep in mind is that if your intestine has been sluggish for a long time, and you start stimulating it with the raw carrot, you will be changing the rhythm of the peristalsis. It takes sometimes a week to set up a new rhythm around a daily carrot. So you can get some side effects while you're adapting, creating a new bowel rhythm. Right. And do you find sometimes that it can actually constipate people? Oh, very rarely. One in a thousand or so will react to the carotene.
If you're very low thyroid, if the palms of your hands and calluses are orange, then you might want to rinse the carrot after grating it to get some of the carotene out. Right. Yeah, it's good stuff that works. And now everyone's going to start eating it with their meal because you said it aids weight loss. Everyone's going to be going crazy now eating carrots during their meal. It's great. So talking about carbon dioxide, this is huge. And I know a lot of times you're talking about it at the cell level.
And a lot of people out there, you know, eating, your philosophy, the whole goal is to increase carbon dioxide production by the cell. A lot of people want to know, besides the nutrition, if they're trying to increase their carbon dioxide levels, you know, with adding baking soda to, say, orange juice throughout the day, would that actually help? And is that something you recommend? Well, some orange juice is so sour that people tolerate it better if they put a pinch of baking soda in it.
The orange juice companies typically add citric acid if they accidentally get ripe oranges because people are so accustomed to the acidic tang of orange juice. But you tend, if you put it in acid, baking soda is going to bubble off most of the carbon dioxide. Some will dissolve in the water, and it might increase your systemic CO2 a little bit. There have been experiments where, like with bicycle racers in Death Valley, they had them take a tablespoon of baking soda before the race,
and they found that they performed better because of either the increased sodium or the increased CO2. Now, wouldn't you say that anything you do nutritionally to downregulate serotonin would actually upregulate CO2 as well? Is that correct? I'm not sure how general that is. Probably. It seems probable. Okay. Guys, don't forget to call in if you want to call in. I'm going to have a ton of questions, but you're welcome to call in, 347-426-3546. Next question is about coconut oil. If someone doesn't have a gallbladder, is that the best source of fat,
since most of the medium-chain fatty acids don't need bile to digest? Are there any other good sources? I think just eating things in a mixed form in small amounts is important if you don't have a gallbladder. The bile is still going to be there, but it's coming out in dribbles rather than surges. So mixing your fats with your proteins, carbs, in smaller amounts? Yeah. Okay. It's pretty simple. In regards to detoxing from poof, I think in one of your books or articles you talked about, I think it takes four years or something like that.
Yeah, that's some experiments in rats and people. They found that it depends on the size of the fat cell, depending on that rather than the size of the organism. It's just a slow process to randomly renew the composition of the fat cells. Right. So this person wants to know, because of starting to eat based on some of your philosophies, they feel that maybe because of the poof of detox, they're actually having initially more kind of reactive hypoglycemic reactions, and they feel like they might be getting worse.
Is that because of the poof of detox, and is there any way to make it easier? Keeping your blood sugar steady and even adding some saturated fat. The saturated fats inhibit the stress hormones, which means that they also tend to inhibit release of fat from stores. So sugar and saturated fats and niacin and aspirin and various safe nutrients inhibit the release of fat. So doing everything you can to keep the fat in place, it isn't going to completely stop the reduction of the fat. The fat cells themselves are able to slowly oxidize.
I think someone calculated that a person could just in their fat cells alone, if the fat never leaves, the fat cells will consume about three pounds in a couple of years. A very slow reduction, but the minimal release into the bloodstream isn't going to cause the stress symptoms if you're having the saturated fats to turn off the stress reactions, outweighing the pro-stress effects of the liberated fats. What about using foods or topical or powder supplements like vitamin E or niacinamide? Niacinamide is an anti-fat liberating substance. Usually 100 milligrams twice a day is all it takes,
but it's fairly safe to use larger doses if it's needed. Yes. Everyone listening, don't go out there and start popping niacinamide to something that maybe some people might need. So don't start going crazy and buying it. One of the ways that the body safely eliminates the stored PUFA is through the liver. The liver recognizes whatever is carried on the albumin as it streams through the liver. The albumin binds anything that's fat soluble and carries it to the liver. And the liver, when the albumin arrives carrying either dioxin or one of the toxic environmental estrogenic substances,
the liver will capture it and bind it as it processes it for detox. It recognizes the PUFA as toxins and will selectively attach glucuronic acid to them just as if it was dioxin and send it to the kidneys for excretion. That's the safe way to get rid of it, let your liver take care of it. Good stuff. Good stuff. I'm going to buzz this caller in. Caller from the 386, you're on the air. Caller from the 386, you're on the air. And we're going to take them off because we can hear ourselves in the background.
Guys, when you call in, make sure you're kind of in a quiet spot. I can ask you a question and I can kind of hang up on you and let Ray answer it. That's fine as well. Question about blood pressure. Can high blood pressure be looked at similar to high cholesterol, meaning more stress, so it's an adaptation mechanism? Yeah, when your body senses that it's not getting enough oxygen or glucose or other essential factor, it tells the heart to pump more blood to deliver more oxygen and glucose. That's the way it should work.
When you're loaded with PUFA, they're tending to give chronic signals to the brain that nothing is getting the glucose and oxygen that it needs because, in truth, the PUFA are interfering with the use of glucose and oxygen, but the PUFA are also telling the pituitary and the nervous system to crank up the stress signals. While we're on the topic of blood pressure, there's a couple questions about salt. And I think one of the great articles/newsletter you wrote, if people haven't read it, is about eclampsia in the real organism. It's one of my favorites.
It's a work of Tom Brewer, guys. I got kind of his name from Dr. Ray Peat. He's got some great books on pregnancy, eclampsia, toxemia, et cetera. Can you talk a little bit about just the benefits of salt and why it's so important, not only for us, but also pregnant women? Well, the eclampsia problem is very closely connected to high PUFA, and that goes with low thyroid. And low thyroid goes with the low carbon dioxide and poor ability to retain sodium. And so the sodium is constantly being lost, as well as the magnesium.
And as the sodium is lost, the adrenals try to correct things by increasing aldosterone, which does retain sodium, but at the expense of losing magnesium faster. And if your thyroid is low, you not only lose sodium through the kidneys, but your cells can't retain magnesium. And so on a low sodium intake relative to your hormonal needs, what you're doing is turning on a system that makes the problem worse by letting out the magnesium that is needed for cell energy and controlling inflammation and tension and cramps and so on.
So if you just increase your sodium intake, you're compensating for a low thyroid function, but you're turning off the aldosterone, and getting the aldosterone down directly lowers inflammation and stops some of the magnesium loss. So just by adding sodium as Brewer and the people he based his thinking on, they showed that just sodium alone would very commonly cure the whole problem, and that seems to be acting by way largely of the aldosterone system. Now what does it have to do with albumin? Does albumin play into that in regards to regulating water distribution
and how albumin is actually affected by estrogen? Yeah, estrogen interferes with the liver's synthesis of albumin, and the polyunsaturated fats under stress are going to be circulating in the blood, and the albumin is picking them up. But if you're producing less albumin and having more unsaturated fats, the albumin isn't able to detoxify them very well, but it becomes saturated with unsaturated fats. And when albumin is loaded with fats, it goes right into cells. Part of its function is to deliver saturated fats to stress tissues.
So that's part of if your fat is saturated, the albumin has a logical function to increase the energy supply during a crisis by taking it right into the heart, for example, and saving sugar for the brain to use and so on. But in the kidneys, this being overloaded with fat happens to make the albumin pass right through the kidneys into the urine, and so you tend to lose albumin as well as sodium under the influence of high stress and PUFA. And it shows up as albumin in the urine when you're under great stress.
And the albumin, one of its functions is to retain water in association with the open protein molecule. It has sites that associate with sodium, and the sodium associated with water is kept in the vicinity of the albumin molecule. But if you're low in sodium, the albumin can't work, and if your albumin is low besides, then you get a double problem of water retention. So the first thing that happens when you correct your fats and thyroid and estrogen and so on is that you let water out of your body while retaining the sodium, magnesium, albumin,
and all the stuff you need. And that's why when women are pregnant, their blood volume goes up so much. It's because of albumin, and Tom Brewer talks about estrogen lowering that and affecting blood volume and high blood pressure. So I guess-- Yeah, and the fetus and the brain are being deprived of estrogen and sugar, and so you get the signals to drive up the blood pressure, but the same thing is causing the blood volume to go down. So you've got to get the blood volume up, and salt's the quickest way to do that. Right.
We've talked about salt before, so that's great. We have a caller, a couple of callers actually. I'm going to take the caller from the 415. Hello? Caller from the 415, you're on--yeah, you're on the air. Okay. Yeah, I was just wondering what you think of heavy metal detox as far as if you get your amalgams, multiple of them out of your mouth, and the doctor or dentist wants to put you on, like, IV, glutathione, or vitamin C drips, or major doses of cilantro or chlorella.
Do you think that's all necessary, or can you get the mercury out of your tissues, which seems to be a year if people think it's saturated their tissues? Do you think you can get it out on your own, or do you need supplements? Hans Selye did experiments with poisoning animals with mercury and showed that a given dose would cause death of the kidneys and such, but then he gave them the same amount of mercury plus vitamin C, and they had no toxic effects at all. The mercury in its reduced form isn't toxic.
It's just a metal, but it's like iron. It depends on the exact state of reduction that makes it stick to things. Caffeine is associated with getting the heavy metals out of your tissues, probably as a sort of chelator, but vitamin C from regular foods is an important defense against all of the heavy metals. But if you take these reducing agents in an unphysiological way, they can activate iron. Like I mentioned in the liver, alcohol causes the reduction of iron by activating glutathione. Glutathione is the agent of making iron toxic.
So if you put glutathione or another reducing agent into the blood in an unphysiological way, it can increase the pre-radical damage. Oh, great. Okay. So don't sit there with a drip in your arm. You don't need it. I don't think so. Okay. All right. Thanks. Thanks for calling in. Sure. We've got another call. I'm going to take them to spend a whole for about 10 minutes. Caller from 386, you're on the air. Yes, this is Debbie, and I am calling from the Bray-Peat fans on Facebook with a very basic question
that's been on a running thread of ours for the last couple of days. Hi, Debbie. Hi. We want to know if there's a reason or an advantage to shredding the carrot. Oh, there have been experiments with the length of the fiber. And, for example, they experimented with different ways of milling bran, and the one that was called B-Wing bran had about 10 times better function in the intestine than the ordinary way of grinding it to a dust. And it's the same if you put a carrot in a blender.
You're destroying a lot of the water-retaining function of the fibers. Well, what about as opposed to eating the carrot whole? Yeah, your teeth leave large sections of the fiber intact. So we should shred the carrot? Or chew it. Just chewing it is very good. Okay. That is what we needed to know. Thank you so much. It's a real privilege to be listening to you today, Dr. Peat. Thank you so much. Thanks for calling in. Thank you. Good questions. I got tons of questions, and this is kind of a general question,
and if you don't want to answer it, you don't have to. A lot of people want to know if you're familiar with Weston A. Price's work. Oh, yeah. Of course. And they want to know your thoughts on it. Oh, he saw that traditional diets produced good tooth development, generally, and bone development. So his work was basically very good, seeing that you can eat a lot of traditional diets and be healthy. Okay. That was simple. Another question is regarding fertility, but not female fertility. We're going to talk about the men.
If someone has, let's say, low sperm count or quality, could you talk about maybe some reasons for that, and what could they actually maybe change in their diet to actually help increase that or alleviate it? Low thyroid is probably the main cause of both male and female infertility, and already in the 1940s, people saw that pregnenolone alone by itself was enough to greatly increase sperm quality. And the polyunsaturated fats, which interfere with the steroid production as well as thyroid function, are a major villain in male fertility. Interesting.
So just really following consistently a lot of your diet recommendations, food, eliminating KUFAs over time will help to increase sperm count and just male fertility just like women. Yes. I've seen several people in just, I think, two or three weeks using pregnenolone and thyroid. Just the man doing that, the couple got pregnant the very next month. Okay. Now this question is from Karen MCC. She wants to know about sleep. She says, "There's a lot of people out there that are following your principles and they feel good,
but one of the things that is troubling them is sleep. They maybe fall asleep and wake up or they have trouble sleep or they wake up and their pulse is super high. Can you maybe elaborate on why and give us maybe some basic things that people could do to help alleviate that?" Yes. Taking too much thyroid too soon can do that. Your liver should store enough glucose or glycogen to let you fast for at least eight hours, especially during sleep. But before the liver has regenerated its ability to store glycogen,
the thyroid is making your brain and muscles and kidneys need more sugar and oxygen. And so you have to eat more often until the liver is able to adapt. Now let's say someone's eating the principles and not taking a glandular and they consistently have high pulses. Now we could say it's adrenaline. We could say they're hypothyroid. Do you feel that if they were to change anything in their diet, it would be the amount of carbs they're taking? They would have to increase their carbs to regulate their blood sugar more? Or would they eat more often?
Yes, eating more often and making sure that the fat is just enough to keep you from absorbing your sugar all at once and burning it, having some fat with your carbohydrate makes it absorb more slowly. So increasing the fat intake. Yes, sometimes that helps to sleep through the night to have a good amount of fat along with your carbohydrate at bedtime. And salt, I've known very young and very old people both with sleep problems who as soon as they tried a very salty snack at bedtime just had perfect sleep.
Salt is very effective at lowering adrenaline. Good stuff. We've got another call. I'm going to take this caller. Caller from the 718, you're on the air. Yes, hello? Hello. Hello. You're on the air. Yes, I have a question. I'll try to make it as brief as possible. For about a year I was somebody who was like -- at least I perceived it as being very sugar intolerant. And every time I tried taking it, it would just -- even a very small amount, I just felt terrible from it.
And about maybe two weeks ago I tried -- I was able to get pure fructose. And after about two or three days of taking fairly large quantities of fructose, I really felt great. And I noticed I had a tolerance where I could actually consume all types of sugar. And I was able to, you know, have anything from soda to orange juice or whatever. And I felt -- I was starting to feel really good after about a week from it.
And the problem is recently, maybe about two or three days ago, I started having pretty bad sleep problems as a result of -- well, I'm not entirely sure, but it feels -- it felt, you know, sort of similar to when I eat MSG and I have like a pain in the lower part of my rib cage. And so just the last maybe day I was able to -- I switched over to starch, which is similar to like what I was on beforehand. And it was, you know, like my sleep kind of normalized.
What kind of fat were you having with it? Primarily coconut oil and butter, not much else other than that. Have you had any digestive problems noticeable? Well, actually I noticed when I was on the sugar it was actually quite a bit -- I mean, it was much better. I mean, very, very noticeably better. And with the starch it's sort of like -- it's not so good, but I've maybe been on it for maybe like a day or two and the sleep sort of normalized very quickly.
And I'm just wondering, maybe it's like some sort of detox or I don't know. I think it's probably that the starch is getting digested and assimilated more slowly and that eating some fiber with your carbohydrate, fiber and fat will extend the absorption of it longer. And the normal thing is that the sugar is absorbed quickly in the upper part of the intestine and starch, if it's slow to break down, can feed bacteria lower in the intestine and cause intestinal inflammation that interrupts sleep. Okay. I mean, I have very high RT3.
Would that have anything to do with it? Yeah, that's from high stress. Okay. And getting your endotoxin and cortisol down. I've seen quite a few people just with a daily carrot get their intestine disinfected enough that their reverse T3 goes down and their cortisol goes down. So the combination of fat and fiber might be a way to make your blood sugar steadier. Okay. Well, I'll definitely try that. But the fructose is really unbelievable. That's good to hear. Well, thank you very much. Thanks for calling in. Good questions, guys.
If you still have more, you can call in 347-426-3546. We've got another question here on dental health. Question about there's a lot of people who recommend eliminating sucrose, fructose, and most fruits when people have dental ailments. And on the other side of it, you know, you talk about increasing, you know, carbohydrates, you know, for cell metabolism, et cetera. Can you elaborate a little bit on that, why there's so much conflicting information on that, and what contributes to dental issues? I saw a recent article on dental health in Sweden,
and they saw that during the time that cavities have decreased radically, sugar, candy, and soft drink consumption had actually increased, and they couldn't account for why the teeth were healthier while they were -- the basic diet hadn't changed so much, but had increased in the supposedly cavity-causing snack foods. And in my sugar article, I mention some of the old studies in which they modified the thyroid or estrogen and found that increased estrogen increased the dental decay, increased thyroid reduced the dental decay.
And one whole line of dental research has shown that stress will very quickly cause an outbreak of cavities. And mainline dentistry just thinks in terms of germ growth in the mouth and completely neglects the chemical and immunological function of the saliva. I think the saliva is the mediator of stress. Interesting. Now, kind of going on to a different topic, this question I think is in regard to -- I'm not sure if you're familiar with it, I'm not too familiar with it -- the work of Dr. Ron Vignieri, he's a PhD,
and they want to know that -- you know, he talks about fasting in -- for at least periods of protein restriction to upregulate the process of -- I'm not sure if I'm pronouncing this right -- autophagy, or autophagy, I don't know. Oh. Or the self-eating of old and damaged proteins, which is supposed to help starve off diseases, including cancer. What's your thoughts on that? Well, activating your metabolism, running things faster, is going to eat up proteins that shouldn't be there. And one of the main things interfering with the breakdown of protein is the PUFA,
especially the long-chain PUFA that accumulate with aging. And people like to talk about the membranes as where the fatty acids are active and where they make a difference, but the experimental background of what the membranes consist of is just completely ignored by mainstream medicine. Like cholesterol itself is part of our cell division apparatus, part of the chromosomes, part of many functional proteins, so are the free fatty acids and the phospholipids that they participate in. The nuclear structure and the cell division structure is regulated or deranged by the type of fatty acids in your diet.
And accumulating the long-chain unsaturated fatty acids with aging is changing the way the cell functions at the deepest levels. Now, kind of on that same note, you have people like, if you haven't heard it, Cynthia Kenyon's work and Rob Wolf, all these people that promote carb restriction for longevity. What's your thoughts on that? In the short range, just fasting itself will reduce the endotoxin absorption, and so that's always an effect that can help things like arthritis and so on. And dropping your carbohydrate intake will raise your cortisol production,
and people feel better very often from either fasting or just dropping the carbohydrate intake because the cortisol excess produces a sort of anesthetic euphoria. People can get addicted to taking cortisol pills because it makes them feel good, makes the pain go away, but in the long run, that's stressful. To turn protein into the carbohydrate that your brain and blood cells need, it requires a shift towards a higher cortisol function to break down the proteins. And so what you're doing is running on stress so that the proteins that you eat
will be converted to the sugar that you need. And if you have the carbohydrate in your diet, your cortisol is going to run lower, like the monkeys they've studied. When fruits are scarce, they have very high levels of cortisol. Yeah, yeah. I remember one of your articles, I posted something the other day about that. It's pretty interesting stuff. Now, kind of going on a different topic, someone wants to know about your thoughts on cell phones, and are they really unhealthy, or do you feel like it's just like microwave threats?
Well, microwaves are a threat, and so they fixed the ovens so that they weren't irradiating people so much. The ovens used to not have good seals on the doors and used to actually emit very intense fields. And the telephones, the same way. There have been experiments for over 50 years showing that there are real biological effects from even moderately weak fields. But here is the doctrine of the cell membrane. Again, the standard medical doctrine is that a cell has a fat membrane around it
because it needs something to seal in a watery solution of chemicals to isolate it from the environment because you have high potassium and magnesium in the cell, low calcium and sodium, and to maintain that balance, they visualize needing this barrier membrane. And so they see a random solution of chemicals in water as being what life of the cell is, and therefore for a radiation to affect the chemistry of the cell, it has to be just like the effect of the same radiation on those chemicals in a test tube.
And they show that you have to basically have enough microwave energy to cook an egg or something before you see damage to the chemistry of those enzymes and such in a test tube. But in the cell, the whole problem is that there is no such barrier membrane. It's the whole structure of the cell which does the regulation, not a magical barrier at the surface that keeps a random solution inside. The whole cell is so highly organized that many of the regions have an antenna-like function that responds to very low levels of electromagnetic energy.
And if you actually do the experiments, you can see that an animal's behavior, chromosome function, reproduction, and so on, will change at very low levels that aren't heating the enzymes, aren't heating the organism noticeably. But it's this very persistent doctrine in medicine that the inside of a cell is a random solution. That's the basis for saying that microwaves are harmless. Right. Going back to the thyroid, someone has a question about, you know, you say thyroid a lot, and they want to know what you mean. I assume you're always talking about T3.
And at the same time, there's a lot of people out there trying to buy glandulars because they can't take T3 or they can't get T3. So the first question is, do you recommend, if people need it, for people to take thyroid glandulars? And my question is as well, I've read somewhere, I don't remember, that if people are really -- if their adrenals are really super stressed and there is something going on with them, that if you do take something for the thyroid,
that you can actually get worse because you don't have the energy reserves to actually handle the increase in metabolism. If a person's cholesterol is down around 100 milligrams per cent, then they have to be careful with everything. They're very fragile. The cholesterol is a basic anti-stress substance. You've got to get the cholesterol up to at least normal, minimum 160 milligrams per cent, possibly somewhat higher, before you worry about increasing your general metabolic rate and energy production. And orange juice is usually the safest first way to get your cholesterol up to normal.
And then if your cholesterol is up and you're getting enough of the vitamins and minerals that are essential, then the thyroid will very quickly make your adrenal glands adapt. And with the balanced thyroid hormones that were in the traditional thyroid glands that people got in fish head soup or chicken stew where the neck included the thyroid gland, those traditional diets, the thyroid consisted of about three parts of T4 to one part of T3.
And as the liver gets energy in the form of glucose, it will convert T4 to T3 to adjust the amount of T3 and energy production. If you don't have sugar and take your glandular, you just experience about 25 per cent of the potential effect of it. Your liver is not going to activate the rest of the T4. So the glandular is in a way safer because it lets your liver handle your physiology to a great extent.
If you try to take just T3 and completely satisfy all your thyroid needs with pure T3, your TSH goes down, your thyroid stops working momentarily. But if you don't take your T3 during the night, your TSH is going to rev up and turn on a lot of inflammatory processes and you'll experience acute hypothyroidism in just 8 to 12 hours of not taking your T3. So it's most convenient for most people to have some of the T4 as in the glandulars. The trouble is the technology of making a glandular product seems to have been lost.
Armour was making their traditional thyroid product for about 85 or 90 years. And Revlon, the cosmetics company, bought the product and went through several changes of ownership. And in the process, the new owner decided to extract thyrocalcitonin to have a new product. And so they kept selling the remains of the thyroid gland minus the calcitonin and subject to whatever process was needed to separate it. The new thyroid glandular, even in the so-called traditional armour, is no longer what it used to be. And there has been research to catch up with the new product.
So if you think about the research that was done with armour for all of the 20th century, I don't necessarily say that it's going to apply to whatever is being made with the so-called armour equivalent or generic material. If the manufacturer is selling part of it separately, it isn't really the traditional product. That's good stuff right there. Can you talk a little bit more or just talk a little bit about the correlation and the roles between magnesium and calcium? And one of the questions was about they feel your diet recommendations are high in calcium.
What's the optimal ratio and where would you get magnesium? Well, coffee is a great source of magnesium. If you're not under stress and your thyroid is good, your cells have a tremendous ability to retain magnesium because it binds to the ATP molecule, becomes part of the molecule. And if your thyroid is low and you don't produce ATP fast enough, the cell doesn't have the main thing that binds magnesium intracellularly and so it tends to go out into the bloodstream and get lost in the urine.
So your thyroid status is the main thing that determines how much magnesium you need. A low sodium intake will make you lose magnesium by increasing the aldosterone production. And you can't talk about the ideal ratio of the minerals in the abstract because it's the interaction. And the same with calcium. Calcium lowers a lot of the excitatory, inflammatory things, which would tend to make you lose magnesium and sodium. And so if you have a diet that seems to be deficient in one of these,
you can very often solve the problem with any of the other four, potassium, sodium, magnesium, and calcium. William Frederick Koch, who was one of the first people to study the parathyroid gland, would remove the gland and cause the muscle contractions from the absence of the parathyroid hormone. But he found that he could cure the spasms with any of the minerals, not just calcium, but potassium, sodium, or magnesium would also cure the spasms. So it's a matter of having a total of these alkaline minerals, not an exact balance.
And one thing that is another factor that interferes is the phosphorus or phosphate intake. A lot of Americans get seven times as much phosphate as calcium. And it takes many years for the effects to show up. But one of the functions of fructose is to make you lose phosphate faster than otherwise, and that's supporting the function of the parathyroid gland to improve the ratio between calcium and phosphorus. And if your fructose intake is high, then you don't have to worry too much about the exact ratio of calcium to phosphorus.
But the ratio in milk, 1.3 to 1, is very close to a very safe ratio. But you can easily get by with two or three times as much phosphate as calcium, especially if your sugar intake is good. And then if you're getting plenty of salt and calcium, you don't have to worry much about the other two alkaline minerals. Doesn't calcium and phosphorus have an inverse relationship in the body? So if one's high, one's technically lower a lot of the time? Yeah.
And then a lot of people that do, because a lot of people will take magnesium or a CalMag supplement because they have restless leg syndrome, etc. So a lot of the times, if they're deficient in calcium, the cells have taken up calcium. By taking calcium alone, you can actually decrease that excitatory nature and upregulate magnesium itself without any take in it. Is that true, too? Yeah. That's why potassium and sodium and calcium will often prevent cramps or spasms and such. They're helping you retain your magnesium more efficiently. Right.
Just a couple more questions, and we can wrap it up. If anyone has any calls, feel free to call in 347 or any questions. 347-426-3546. Anything you want to add in, Ray? Nope. Okay. I have a kind of off-the-wall question. I didn't even know you were working on this, and I don't know if you even know you're working on this, but a caller or follower had a question about if you were working on or almost finished with your book on the thyroid. I didn't know. I'm working on it right now. Okay. That's a bummer.
Another kind of off-the-wall question. One of the listeners wanted to know if all the emails that you get from followers, if you feel supported or if they're becoming a nuisance. There are some people who ask very trivial questions that they should just think about or look up for themselves. Right. Yeah. No, that's a good point. It's a good point. And like I've said before, guys, if you're emailing him, you need to kind of compensate him for his time. And at the same time, he's got tons of articles on his site.
Take the time to read them. That's an important aspect of it. So if you guys want to call in, I'm pretty much out of questions. I mean, I rattled through probably 50, 60 questions. There were some general ones, but like I said, I felt like people -- I didn't ask them because I feel like people would just read some of your articles and I don't think they're questions you need to answer. So before we kind of wrap up, guys, if you have any questions, 347-426-3546. Ray doesn't really have anything else to add.
As he mentioned, I'm pretty much out of questions from people. So before we hang up, if you've got any questions, feel free to call in. We've got about 15 minutes left. It's been a pretty long show, and in my opinion, it's been an awesome show. So does anyone have any other questions? Feel free to call in. You can email me as well. I'm getting a lot of emails and Facebook from people in regards to their questions. Let me just take one more check to see if any are popping up. No, that's about it.
I think that's all. I might comment about -- I was talking about the changes in the manufacture of thyroid glandulars. Vitamin E is another thing that has undergone radical changes. When ADM bought the old Eastman distillation products factory for making vitamin E, they changed the methods and the consistency and appearance of vitamin E changed a lot, and then the FDA told them they had to start acknowledging that they were diluting it with soy oil and such. But still, the product that's commonly in use looks very different from the old material.
When I was working at the university lab, the freezer had some old vitamin E from Sigma that they had used in research in the '50s, and I tested some of that with experiments I was doing on liver extracts and got reactions that were extremely interesting that I've subsequently tried with the newer vitamin E's that I get no reaction at all. So there were chemical functions present that are interfered with by something that's appearing in the vitamin E. And the research up until about 1990, from the 1920s on,
was just unanimously about its beneficial effects except for the periodic attacks in the Journal of the American Medical Association. But then in the last 10 or 15 years, there have been more publications about ineffectiveness of vitamin E or possible adverse effects. And I've been thinking about what some of the changes from the original 1930s and '40s product might have been. And the saturated long-chain alcohols, octocosinol and polycosinol, were always associated with the original ways they made vitamin E that increased the viscosity. Wheat germ oil was a common starting material,
and that was rich in these very long-chain, completely saturated alcohols, which immediately metabolized into long-chain saturated fatty acids. And if you look up the research on octocosinol and polycosinol, you'll see that there was a lot of endurance effect, improved endurance from the use of small amounts of these. And I suspect that the original vitamin E research, which showed that it protected against the polyunsaturated fatty acids and their toxic effects, I think a large part of that might have been from adding the completely saturated long fatty acids along with the vitamin E,
sort of neutralizing the PUFA, similar to Han-Selye's research in which he showed that canola would cause death of heart cells. But if he added chocolate fat, cocoa butter, to the same amount of canola, the heart had no injury at all. So the saturated fats have a defensive antitoxic effect. I suspect were part of vitamin E's original action. Good stuff. We've got another caller. We'll take this one last caller from the area code 253. You're on the air. Hi. This is Justin from Washington. I was reading one of Ray's older books,
and I saw something in there about, very interesting on the correlation between how Mexican children didn't get polio and its correlation to the milling of wheat and such things. I was wondering if he had any comments on other vaccinations, how he felt about that, or anything to do with the infectious disease model. Oh, yeah. I suspect that the same thing that the Mexican immigrants in California, the kids were immune to a lot of the childhood infectious diseases just because of their relative iron deficiency. I think that's probably a big factor in the traditional Mexican diet.
And the traditional tortillas, interestingly, are very high in calcium because they boil it in lime. And it leaves a large amount of calcium. My dentist in Mexico tells me that her clients with some tooth problem might come in when they're 80 or 90 years old and want a painful tooth extracted. She said sometimes it takes her all afternoon to get a tooth out of one of these old people. And she thinks it's the high calcium intake for their lifetime diet of tortillas.
And that has an undoubted anti-stress effect along with the low iron intake on average. Wow. Great stuff. I just want to thank you, Ray, for doing real science. And like Josh said, everyone else that's listening, I'm going to throw together a little Christmas card and send it out with $20 or something. I hope we can all pull together and support some real science. I know there's a lot of people out there that really appreciate you, Ray. I just wanted to thank you. About vaccination, I wanted to mention Ivan Illich's books, Medical Nemesis, for example.
He does some good stuff on the history of vaccination. Cool. Okay, great. Thanks, guys. Have a good night. Thanks, Justin, from Washington. All right. Bye. Bye. We've got one last question, and I'll read it to you because it just got emailed to me. What do you feel about all the research regarding cell membrane and membrane signaling in the biotech field? Do you feel like it's a waste of time? Well, it's very good business because they can sell anything if they say it's working on signals via the cell membrane.
But basically, if a cell is stressed, it will admit things that it wouldn't otherwise and lose things that it shouldn't lose. If a fat is attached to a substance, it'll get into the cell where it wouldn't otherwise. But when they talk about surface receptors, very often, if they actually experiment, it can be demonstrated that the substance is acting inside the cell, not just at the surface. This goes back 80 years, probably. Well, 150 years if you look at the whole history.
People have been in the '30s were showing that their experiments showed clear entrance of large molecules right into the cell in large quantities. Albumin was repeatedly seen to massively enter cells of all different types and carry with it whatever it carried. But immunoglobulin, several iron-transporting proteins, a whole range of our normal proteins just zip in and out of cells freely. So the membrane is not very relevant to actual cell physiology. If you want to look at some of the mainstream research, Fritjof Sjostrand, S-J-O-S-T-R-A-N-D,
who was a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, for many years, founded the Journal of Ultrastructure Research and was the chief editor for about, I guess, 30 or 40 years. His work pretty much all by itself made the conventional ideas about plasma membranes on the outside of the cell, mitochondrial membranes, mitochondrial function. His work is just completely incompatible with the doctrine that is so popular. Well, that's interesting stuff. Definitely not something I'm too up on, but it's good stuff for everyone to listen to.
So I don't have any more questions. I know people are sending me questions. I only have so much time, guys. And some of the questions I don't feel appropriate. At the same time, send me your questions. I've definitely answered in past shows, and I'm not going to sit here and, unfortunately, ask the same questions over and over again. It's just not something I feel comfortable doing. So I thank you, Ray, for this great show and this year. I know everyone, like we keep saying, really listens to your shows, thousands of people.
They really appreciate your work. I know you probably hear it a lot, but we just want to say thank you because it's been a great year. Taking the time to share all this info has helped a lot of people. Okay, and thank you for sharing it. Thank you, Ray. Have a good day. Okay, bye. Bye. So there you go, guys. Dr. Ray Peat once again, the most humble man I've ever talked to in my life. It's a great show. Listen to it again and again. Listen to all the other shows.
I know you have a lot of questions. A lot of your questions were asked in a lot of the old shows. Definitely tune in for more shows in the new year. I'm going to send them out to Ray. And like I've said, I know tons of people are emailing him. Make sure you have to understand that, of course, he's a technical guy. So if you're sending him questions that are very basic, I know a lot of the times, like he said, you can get a lot of this information from his articles.
But if you are consistently emailing him, make sure, like I said, whether it's $1, $5, $10, whatever it is, it adds up. Send him a card. Send him $5, $10, $100 if you want to, to say thanks. Thanks for all the email questions, Merry Christmas, or whatever you want to send. And that's something that I think is very appropriate for what's been going on. So I thank all our listeners for tuning in to all the shows. Of course, I couldn't do the show without you guys. So I really appreciate everyone tuning in.
Stay tuned to our Facebook pages, Josh Rubin, Jeanne Rubin, or EastWest Alien Performance for great updates, as well as for some of the new shows starting in 2012. Wish everyone a happy holiday season and New Year, and I'm out of here.