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Well, welcome to the Get Fit with Jodell show. I am, as usual, Jodell, and I am so excited to have Dr. Ray Peat with me today. He's someone you're about to come to love, just as I do. He graciously is sharing his time with me today over the phone. You will be amazed at the knowledge that he is about to drop. I'm sure the laundry list of credentials this man holds, as well as just his passion for helping people. Well, let's just say it's more than you or I could ever dream of holding.
So Dr. Peat has a PhD in biology from the University of Oregon, specializing in physiology. He has taught at the University of Oregon Urbana College, Montana State University, National College of Naturopathic Medicine, Universidad Veracruzana, and the Universidad Autonoma del Estado de Mexico, and Blake College as well. Over the years, he has worked with many private clients with nutritional counseling. He started his research in 1968, so long before any of us so-called nutrition nerds who make videos on YouTube, myself included, were even born, mainly 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. I'm not done yet. He also is an editor and writer of his famous newsletter he puts out, as well as the author for some fantastic quick reads, "When You Have a Moment," one of which is my favorite Nutrition for Wisdom. He's also an artist, and some of his artwork, as well as his amazing blog post, can be seen at raypeat.com. Dr. Peat, I'm so excited to speak with you today.
How are you doing? Very good. Thank you. Good. Will you please tell my listeners briefly what got you into this passion you have for all things related to stress, hormones, thyroid, and really helping people feel more optimal? In the 1950s and '60s, I was interested in psychology and language. I started a school in Mexico, Blake College. That was just a general liberal arts school for both United States students and local Mexican students. In the process, I noticed that lots of the local people in Mexico were eating a very bad diet.
A couple of my friends had family members who were very sick. Having read Adele Davis' books, I suggested some of her nutritional therapies. For example, a friend's nephew had been in the hospital for two or three days with diarrhea that they couldn't control. The third day, I think, they said she wouldn't live the night. At that point, my friend decided there was no harm in trying the vitamin B6 supplement that was one of Adele Davis' recommendations for diarrhea. He gave the little kid this 10-milligram tablet of vitamin B6. Within the hour, her diarrhea had stopped.
She was recovered in just a couple of days. No more problems. A single vitamin did what the whole hospital staff couldn't manage with intravenous treatments and so on. I realized that a lot of information wasn't getting into the medical system. I decided, after coming back to the U.S., to study biology instead of just the humanities, language, psychology, and literature. In graduate school, I ran into the same dogmatism and ignoring the really important practical information. I had planned to study brain biology, but I saw that the professors were locked into
a dogmatic view of how a nerve works. Looking through the whole University of Oregon, I found that the reproductive physiology department was actually doing open research trying to discover what causes the infertility of aging and what the real factors in fertility and maintaining pregnancy are. So I shifted from brain biology to reproductive physiology. In examining what the factors are that make it possible for a fertilized ovum to develop the whole organism and a nervous system, I found that the brain is governed and formed by the same factors that govern the question of fertility or infertility.
It's a very simple sort of a spectrum. The same things that cause infertility cause bad development of the brain. The brain is really the most sensitive part of the organism, and the same factors that make it healthy make it possible for the ovum to implant in the uterus. So I concentrated on the factors that are regulated by those hormones of fertility. I realized that the drug industry at that time, already for almost 30 years, had been propagandizing the public with the idea that estrogen is the female hormone.
In our lab, we saw that estrogen was the contraceptive hormone, not the hormone of fertility and pregnancy. The pharmaceutical industry knew that estrogen made a good contraception pill. It was actually causing abortions, but they didn't want to call it the abortion pill, so they called it the anti-conception pill. The real hormone of fertility and brain development turns out to be progesterone, which works by providing energy to the developing embryo in the form of oxygen and glucose, primarily, making energy most efficiently by oxidizing glucose. Estrogen is just one of the factors that interrupts that process.
Estrogen creates a local inflammation in the uterus, a kind of wound that will allow the ovum to be embedded in the tissue, but if the estrogen stays dominant, it kills the ovum. So the function of progesterone is to knock the estrogen out of the tissue and shift that wound physiology, or local stress inflammatory physiology, into a supportive, oxidative, sugar-rich environment. Wow, that is not at all what we've been taught. Even from a young age, I was always taught the importance of estrogen, but now we can
clearly see, based on what you're saying, that it is like propaganda, what you mentioned. So a lot of your work is done around these specific hormones like progesterone, but also the reason I really got interested in your work is because you talk so much about stress and how it affects our system. Would you say that stress is really the driving factor behind most disease and that it contributes to the rise in estrogen? The way I define stress, I would say that it is the factor in all disease.
If you define it as a mismatch between organism and environment, then even the so-called genetic diseases are... For example, if you have sickle cell anemia in your genes, it happens that in Africa that's a defensive gene, and if the people are eating a certain type of diet that maintains an oxidative condition in the cells, there is no sickle cell disease. It's simply a defensive mutation in that environment. But when you don't have that environment, then it shows up as a disease that when you're
under stress, the cells change shape and cause pain and sickness and possibly death. So the genetic diseases turn out to be a disease of stress when the environment isn't properly supportive. So you can see even genetic and infectious diseases as a matter of stress. If you have good nutrition, then the various bacteria in the environment won't cause dysentery, for example, because your immune system takes care of them and stops the whole inflammatory process. And inflammation is the basic factor in why stress causes disease, and it's almost entirely overlooked as a factor in stress.
Now it's coming to be recognized as a matter of all kinds of disease, heart disease and obesity for example, are seen to originate with a stress physiology. But what they're missing is that stress leads to inflammation and that leads to the various specific diseases. And when you say stress, you're not really just talking about day-to-day living stress. You're talking about environmental stressors like radiation, you're talking about pollutants, you're talking about the emotional stress, the mental stress and all of that environmental stress together, right?
Yeah, it's when the environment is putting demands on you that you don't have the internal resources to meet smoothly. So if you're dealing with weather and climate and physical demand, work, exertion and so on, without any stress at all, that same activity would kill someone who wasn't well nourished or maybe who was 80 or 90 years old. So it's the matter of what kind of resources you have internally in proportion to the stress. Can you help us understand these stressors of our modernized society, like I mentioned
like radiation and even artificial light and things like that that can stress our system. What are all of the things in our modernized society that have led to this stress as the main driving factor behind disease? The drug industry, all kinds of technological industries have tried to cover up the fact that they are causing not only the disease of the people exposed to their products and byproducts, but even the offspring, descendants of those people that they're exposing. So there's a big propaganda movement over the last hundred years to try to convince
the public that pollution is not harmful. Sixty years ago the government had a campaign to tell people that radiation was good for you. You've probably heard that. Hormesis is the idea of radiation hormesis or poison hormesis. That a little poison is good for you. That is a perversion of the idea of stress. A teenager meeting a challenge, seeing for example a tennis game competition or swimming a certain distance and so on, meeting a challenge that is interesting actually builds your body and abilities of having a goal to build something.
You develop your skills in doing it so you're becoming more in meeting that challenge. That is not a stress. A stress is something that a demand that's put on you that you didn't ask for and that you don't have the ability to do easily and with pleasure. So when pleasure isn't involved in the action it's probably going to be harmful to you in some way. So just doing a boring and stupid job that many people spend their lives doing, that is poisoning your tissues constantly because you're not getting pleasure out of the activity.
I read that in Hans Selye's book Stress Without Distress. That was one of the main sentences that I underlined when I was reading that book was how the stress that we're under has a lot to do with the fact that many people live these lives trying to appease their parents or this job that they think they should do but they really don't like. At the end of their life they're left frustrated and more stressed than ever and they usually die of disease because of the chronic day in and day out life of something they didn't
choose and they didn't want to live and it was miserable existence and they didn't serve a purpose. So I don't think people think about how that is a stressor too, just doing a job that you don't love. Did you ever hear about the rat studies in which they enriched their environment, gave them toys and things to play with and explore versus the rats that lived in ordinary little rat cages and what happened to their brains? In the early 1960s at the University of California, Marion Diamond and several other people found
that the environment richness caused the brain to function better. The rats that had a playpen rather than a little box to live in solved problems better and they wondered why the brains were functioning better. They found that their enzymes had changed very distinctly and when they let those animals reproduce their babies had bigger brains and were again more intelligent than the parents. So it's an inheritable brain improvement that happens just by having an enjoyable daily routine or lack of routine, daily little novel experiences, entertaining things to discover.
The rats had playground equipment like swings and slides and balls and things. More recently it has been found that the enriched environment rats not only had bigger more intelligent brains but their whole bodies were producing more progesterone and more recently still they were found to have lower levels of estrogen. Back in the 70s Marion Diamond found that if you gave animals a supplement of progesterone their brains were bigger and when the mother was pregnant if you gave her estrogen their brains were shrunken because it stopped the growth by causing stress.
So what you're saying is this enjoyment is what I call vitamin P, pleasure, passion, purpose and I feel like there are a lot of people that are just doing a job and not living a passion or a purpose. But that's one thing that drew me to you is you can tell that what you're doing is a passion and it certainly serves a purpose. And I found you almost two years ago when I went through a really bad toxic mold exposure
and my thyroid was hugely affected by that exposure so it was a huge stressor on my body even though I live a life that's pretty happy and I love my job and everything but my stress came from that environmental stress of like it completely tore apart my body, it completely broke down my thyroid just from that toxic mold exposure that took about a year and a half to bring my system back to full health from. So how does the thyroid, I know you talk a lot about the thyroid and you're pretty passionate
about it, how does the thyroid get affected by chronic stress or even acute stressors like a toxic mold? I was talking about the polarity and fertility and brain development of estrogen and progesterone. In the background, the oxidative sugar metabolism that is controlled on the cell level by estrogen and progesterone, in the background it requires thyroid hormone to work. You don't have any oxygen metabolism without thyroid so that's the without which not the progesterone operates. And when someone cultured, took a slice of thyroid gland, put it in a culture dish and
added hormones to it, they saw that if you added progesterone, the thyroid gland secreted the active thyroid hormone, it activated enzymes causing the thyroglobulin or colloids that stored in the cell caused it to break down into the active thyroid hormones. And when they added estrogen to the culture dish, it blocked those enzymes and stopped the secretion but it allowed the cells to go on synthesizing the thyroglobulin without being able to produce the hormones. So that single experiment explained why girls in their teens and women around menopause so often have a swollen thyroid gland.
Those are the times when estrogen has the risk of becoming dominant. If you're under stress, you can't produce enough progesterone and in that condition, the thyroid gland keeps producing the colloid or globulin but it can't convert it into the active hormone and so your pituitary keeps driving the gland harder trying to make it produce hormone and all it does is make the gland swell up. And so many women have had their thyroid gland destroyed either with surgery or radiation when all they needed was something to either lower the estrogen or give them a progesterone supplement.
Wow, I was just amazed at how my thyroid being damaged led to things like I had never had cellulite before and in three months time of an exposure to mold, the back of my legs went from completely smooth to completely cellulite ridden. What was the mechanism behind that? Well, when your thyroid isn't adequate, regardless of how much estrogen is in your tissue, your cells act as if they are under the influence of estrogen. Something I found in my research at the university was that estrogen's effects can't be distinguished
biochemically, the metabolic effects can't be distinguished from the effects of radiation, x-rays or suffocation, the elimination of oxygen or poisoning with cyanide or other things that poison your oxidative system. And interestingly at that time people had already identified polyunsaturated fatty acids as the source of age pigment and estrogen and radiation and oxygen deprivation all accelerate the formation of age pigment causing the polyunsaturated fatty acids to spontaneously oxidize and turn into a pigment which in itself consumes and wastes oxygen. So that got me interested in what the chronic exposure to polyunsaturated fats in the diet
is doing to people. And poisons such as your mold poisoning, all these poisonings of different sources chemically or physically, they all end up acting like estrogen in that they poison your ability to use oxygen. Wow, I didn't even think about that. I didn't even think about it really being like an estrogen in my body and that makes complete sense because estrogen does put weight on your body and I changed nothing. In fact I exercised the same, I ate the exact same and yet I kept putting on weight and I was like, "This is not me.
I'm a nutritionist. I know how to heal my body. I know how to feed my body." And yet nothing was working. It was like I was fighting a losing battle. So that's so interesting that the mold actually acted like an estrogen. Are there other things that also act like estrogens in our body too? I know there's xenoestrogens and obesogens and things like BPA plastics and stuff but maybe there's other things that people don't think of that are acting like estrogens.
In the 1930s soot was found to be highly estrogenic and that explains why smoke is such a carcinogen. It simply is a very intense estrogen. From a gob of black soot you can extract many different estrogens that work just like the manufactured synthetic estrogens. Some of the research companies were using soot derivatives to discover new estrogen products. Soot is a type of demoxyphen, the anti-estrogen so-called, which itself has some estrogen effects. It grew out of that research of why soot is estrogenic. And any uricin, anything that stimulates the cell so intensely that the oxidative system
can't keep up or anything that interrupts the use of oxygen. My recent newsletter on particulate, especially nanoparticles, much smaller like a tenth the size of a bacteria or smaller. These things are, some of them occur naturally in sandstorms and such. But industry smoke output, traffic, the friction of tires on pavement, the condensed materials from the smoke of vehicle traffic. And not only these somewhat natural powdered materials put into the atmosphere, but the industry has discovered that nanoparticles are very convenient additives to, for example, thicken shampoo and toothpaste, even to thicken food.
And it's permitted to use them as food additives. But when they're absorbed through the lungs or through the intestine or even through the skin, they enter cells and as an insoluble particle, if they have just the right shape, they act as a constant stimulating irritant to the cell. And that sort of disproportion between stimulation or irritation and the ability to supply energy, that has an estrogenic and potentially carcinogenic action. Wow. And some of these toxins in our environment you're talking about, would those also be in supplements? Oh, that's a horrifying thing.
Some of the titanium dioxide and silicon dioxide, some of it is larger particles which are not so toxic, but still not safe. But these, even though they think they're putting in a larger granular material, these very often contain the nanoparticles that are extremely toxic. And if you look at ingredients of vitamins, minerals, all kinds of supplements and drugs, you very often see one or the other or both titanium dioxide and silica. Yeah, something to watch out for, for sure. So that's why I really like Georgi's supplements, the Idea Labs, because he uses ingredients
that are, none of those contain any sort of silica or anything that's really potentially harmful. So I appreciate his stuff and I know that you probably do as well. An example of what the particles are known to do, for just about a hundred years, vaccines have been found to be more active in promoting immunity if they contain aluminum hydroxide, which forms these very tiny particles which activate inflammation, generalized inflammation produced by those particles arouses your body to become immune to whatever germ and its infection happens to be present at the same time.
So the medical industry has known for a hundred years that nanoparticles promote inflammation, but they're very reluctant to acknowledge that we should be taking them out of our food rather than putting them in. Yeah, so there's that stressor again, and then stress is again going to elevate the estrogen as well, and people wonder why we're getting fatter as a nation, so that's interesting too. And talking about that, like, okay, so let's talk diets. Are there diets out there that are actually estrogenic too?
Are there certain diets that are kind of popular these days that could actually be hurting people as far as promoting estrogen versus helping them? Yeah, the polyunsaturated fats are made more active by estrogen, but they in themselves intensify estrogen activity. Even without estrogen, you'll get estrogen-like effects from any free radical entry, for example, but you have this very strong interaction. The estrogen that you have is made more intense by the presence of especially the omega-3 fatty acids, but both minus-6 and minus-3 polyunsaturated fats promote the effects of estrogen.
It's been known for about 40 years that their carcinogenicity involves interaction with the estrogen system. And so what are the most offending PUFAs or polyunsaturated fats? Which would you say are the most offending that people are regularly consuming? Well, around 1950, the food industry had a lot of cottonseed oil that otherwise would have been wasted because it was no longer needed for the paint industry when petroleum chemistry started producing paint bases. So these seed oils were turned into an American basic food material in the 1950s to dispose of industrial waste, really.
But it became a big industry, telling people that they were essential nutrients, and not only essential, but they were somehow to be therapeutic, preventing heart disease. So they called it the heart-protective diet, high in the omega-6 fatty acids. But a big study with veterans found that not only cancer, but heart disease itself was increased by eating the so-called heart-protective diet with the so-called essential fatty acids. That was the turning point where people started turning against the N-6 fats as the essential
fatty acids and turning towards the N-3, characterized by fish oil, for example, but produced by algae. Since about 1970, there has been recognition that the soy oil, cottonseed oil, safflower seed oil, canola, all of the N-6 rich oils are carcinogenic and cause heart disease and all other degenerative diseases. But the industry, for example, the fish industry had a lot of polluting waste. The Environmental Protection Agency criticized, said they had to do something to stop polluting the bays and surrounding landfills with the fish waste.
That was about the time fish oil was discovered to be a health food. There is one advantage the N-3 oils have over the N-6 oils, is that they are extremely unstable and they block the effects of the N-6 as far as producing pro-inflammatory prostaglandins goes. So you do get an anti-inflammatory effect for the first few months from fish oil because it interferes, poisons the enzymes that make the prostaglandins that produce inflammation. But the extreme oxidative instability of the N-3 oils means that, for example, acrolein
is one of the toxic by-products of various food preparation processes, but it's the worst breakdown product of the fish oil category, N-3, the essence. There are several others that are the breakdown products that are reactive, aldehydes, hydroxynone, enal, and several others come both from the N-6 and the N-3 fatty acids. Acrolein, for example, is known to poison sperm cells and oocytes. The development of the ovum is impaired, tending to increase the risk of birth defects, both in men and women, the acrolein and related breakdown products of the polyunsaturated
fats are poisoning the next generation as well as the person who is accumulating them. In the growth process, the placenta is a thoroughly powerful filter against anything toxic getting into the developing embryo. The energy that provides the growth of the embryo is primarily glucose, so a slightly diabetic mother is tending to accelerate the growth of the embryo because glucose is the main growth energy. But if you give the mother supplements of fish oil, some of this, enough of it gets through the barrier of the placenta to slow the development, cause a reduced birth weight
and reduced brain function. Despite the evidence going back more than 40 years in animal studies showing this toxic effect on the developing brain, they are still adding it to a baby formula and promoting it as a brain growth factor rather than a brain poison. When a baby is born, a healthy baby shows signs of being deficient in the polyunsaturated fatty acids and that's taken as opportunity to sell fish oil for baby food. But as the baby grows, it starts accumulating and building some of this polyunsaturated
fat into its brain, but as it grows, its brain is enlarging and so from birth to age 20, there is only a slow accumulation of polyunsaturated fat in the brain. But when the growth process slows off around the age of 20, the food fats tend to accumulate in the fatty tissue and in the brain, which is most of the substance is fat rather than protein in the brain. So from the age of 20 to middle age, there is a steady increase of the N-3 fats in the
brain and in proportion to the amount of PUFA in the brain, especially N-3, the metabolic rate, the oxidative metabolism slows down. So a baby's brain is oxidizing at a very high speed and the first few years of life, kids are extremely capable of learning. By the first grade, a kid knows about 6,000 words of their native language. But if you ask someone to learn that many words of a foreign language, it's going to be a lot slower at an older age.
At the age of 20, learning and oxidative metabolism both start declining at a faster rate and go on for the rest of the person's life. With the decline of cognitive ability corresponding to the decline of oxidative metabolism and the decline of being in proportion to the accumulated polyunsaturated fats in the brain, they're stored in the form of esters with cholesterol. One of their functions that is harmful is that they interfere with the natural function of cholesterol in the brain, which is a normal stabilizing factor in the brain.
And I think if people will realize that the first food for baby is actually breast milk, which is 50 to 60 percent saturated fat, they would see that if there was a creator that was willing to devise that our first food is saturated fat, they'd see that the polyunsaturated really don't have a place for us, correct? Yes, and the amount of PUFA in a mother's blood corresponds pretty closely to the amount of estrogen. So if she has too much estrogen, she won't produce enough milk.
And it has been used pretty widely to stop lactation for women who don't want to breastfeed. But in proportion to the estrogenicity the woman is experiencing, her blood will be enriched with polyunsaturated fats. And so, okay, one other thing then. So we talked diet and certain foods, but what about people that are actually doing that diet of intermittent fasting to where they're fasting regularly and not eating? What kind of stressor is that on the system? Is it something that's beneficial or not?
If you're eating a very bad diet, not eating it is beneficial in the sense that you're not poisoning yourself during that time. But you have to consider the context, such as how good is the diet that you're not eating? And the hours of darkness usually are the hours when people are careful not to eat if they're in that system. And blood sugar normally falls during the hours of darkness. And that is compensated by a rise in the free fatty acids in the bloodstream.
And that's the same pattern that happens when you're under stress in the daytime. Anytime you are having more stimulation or irritation or burden of work demand, for example, then you have stored glycogen as energy to meet it. When the glycogen is depleted, you are forced to mobilize free fatty acids from storage and to start oxidizing those for energy. And that requires more oxygen per unit of energy produced. And so it tends to create a deficiency of glucose that leads to a waste of glucose because
the fat metabolism is a strain on the ability to deliver oxygen to the system. And when you aren't getting enough oxygen to the system, your body recognizes that the problem is that you aren't oxidizing glucose. And so it starts turning protein to glucose. And it turns out that lactic acid rises even in the diabetic, for example, whose problem is exactly that they can't oxidize glucose. Lactic acid, which is a waste of glucose, it appears in the blood. When you're under stress, the rise of lactic acid is a good indicator of how much stress you're under.
But every night as you mobilize free fatty acids, as your stored glycogen runs out, you start going into this stress state, producing lactate. And that causes progressive damage of the mitochondria. In aging, if you look at the loss of bone matter in women, especially in the 30s and 40s, the bone that's being destroyed shows up in the urine as calcium. Most of the day's bone destruction, which is just one sign of the aging degenerative process, most of the calcium shows up in the morning urine, showing that aging and degeneration happens during the night.
And that stress physiology during the night is because we have run out of glycogen. And the longer you go without eating, the more you can rely on the inefficient fat oxidation rather than glycogen and glucose. And a lot of people might be interested to hear that you are not really a fan of fat burning for energy. So talk to me about that. I love your philosophy behind it, but I want to hear it straight from you. If you look at the difference between a woman's blood tests and a man's, most people would
say since men have bigger muscles and bigger bones, you would assume that men have more growth hormone in their blood than women do. But someone recently saw that the methods used in testing growth hormone that showed that women having maybe twice as much growth hormone as men, that was a mistaken technology. They found an 80 times greater growth hormone in women than in men. This is an effect of estrogen. Estrogen causes chronically high mobilization of pre-fatty acids in the blood. And that is compensated by this extremely high production of growth hormone that is
why women are to a great extent protected from that chronic exposure. But that's an effect of estrogen dominance. And so to the extent that you can minimize that, you can reduce that fat oxidizing chronic degenerative process. And so in that manner, you're more of a fan of the glucose system. So you actually advocate for people taking in things that will build their glycogen and consuming carbohydrates because carbohydrates make carbon dioxide in our body. And can you tell us, you know, these are maybe some ways we can start mitigating some of
this stress and maybe how many people have been on these low carb diets that have kind of become part of the problem and maybe what they could do to mitigate some of this stress and maybe it starts with having some forms of sugar. Yes? Yes. I mean, at the end of the 19th century, first a doctor in Paris and then one in England cured several of their patients by feeding them as much sugar as they desired. The traditional method they saw patients wasting away with diabetes and craving sugar, they
called it the sugar disease and so they would lock away the sugar and feed them fat and meat and they wouldn't assimilate it properly and they would die. And these two doctors found that feeding them as much sugar as they craved, which would be about 12 ounces a day of highly refined pure sugar just added to a regular diet, cured their patients. And if you look at the function of the beta cells in the pancreas that make insulin, free fatty acids kill those cells and the free fatty acids are mobilized when you aren't
having either sugar in the blood or the ability to oxidize the sugar. So the presence of free fatty acids is constantly killing the beta cells which are constantly regenerating as far as there is glucose available. But glucose is a factor which supports the regeneration and differentiation of new insulin producing cells. And so what the French and English doctors 140 years ago discovered was that the function, all of their normal sugar regulating functions came back when they interrupted that destructive process of what happens when you're craving sugar because you are using it inefficiently.
I'm just so happy to hear you say that because it's so common sense if people will think about it since every cell of our body requires and especially the brain runs off of glucose, that's its preferred fuel. But the mainstream now you're hearing is keto and low carb and all of that and yet the people that are coming to me off of keto and low carb are saying, "I'm exhausted, I don't feel well, I can't handle stress, I can't work out anymore, I love eating low carb but I
don't know if it's working for me anymore." What would you say to that? The brain and muscles as well as the liver have to store glycogen to work and if you're forced to make glucose to put back into those stores, you're doing it at the expense of some part of your body. Turning muscle tissue into glucose for example will keep you alive but it's degrading all of your functional tissues to use them to make glycogen. Without glycogen, your brain basically is what happens when a person is deprived of sleep.
If they're kept awake, they start becoming confused, can't think properly and finally would die if they didn't get back to sleep. Sleep is a process that allows the glycogen to be restored so that the brains can start functioning on a pure glucose regime. I'm living proof of that because any time I've ever done, even for a healing phase like of keto or carnivore, I did carnivory for a while just to try to heal because I was at a loss of how to heal from the toxic mold and my sleep always suffered but the minute
I added carbs back in, it was like all of a sudden my sleep would just dial itself back in. So isn't that so interesting that our body really is telling us in so many ways. Mentioning the meat eating, that's a very important side of what's going on when you're interfering with the glucose metabolism. The parathyroid gland is activated to secrete its hormone by phosphate and meat has an extremely high concentration of phosphorus relative to calcium. Beans and grains are similar, extreme phosphate excess. Green vegetables and milk which is made from green vegetables ultimately.
The cows harvest the magnesium and calcium rich leaves and put that into the milk. So milk has a very favorable high calcium to phosphate ratio and that suppresses calcium, suppresses the parathyroid hormone while phosphate activates it. Vitamin D is needed for calcium to do that and the parathyroid hormone when it's high, it mobilizes calcium out of your bones. That happens primarily during the night and is accelerated with aging. The action of taking calcium out of your bones happens to put it into the soft tissues, into your muscles, blood vessels, heart, brain, everything.
All the soft tissues tend to calcify as your diet is not getting enough calcium and magnesium and vitamin D but getting too much phosphate relatively. This mismanagement of calcium goes into the mitochondria, does almost exactly the same thing that the polyunsaturated fats do. In fact, the high parathyroid hormone activates the rancidity of PUFA, N-6 and N-3 fatty acids degenerate when your parathyroid hormone is high. And low thyroid function increases your thyroid stimulating hormone and the whole process of being hypothyroid and activating your pituitary, that synergizes with the parathyroid hormone.
So you really can't think of thyroid function and parathyroid function separately. Apparently that's why the glands are located in the same place because they're handling the same physiology. The TSH activates your parathyroid hormone and both of those are reflecting an imbalance in your diet. Too much PUFA, too much phosphate. And that's exactly what a lot of the fad diets are emphasizing. Meat and nuts and grains, for example, rather than green vegetables, fruits and milk. You know, it's almost like I had to listen to my body because when I did the carnivore
approach I felt better but there came a point in time when my body was telling me, "You have to start eating differently. You have to stop eating so much meat and you have to add in some seasonal variation of carbohydrates." So that's what I did and that's when the healing really began. So I felt like the carnivore approach helped me initially but then I felt like I knew inherently what I needed to do. And you mentioned avoiding the PUFAs and also increasing our sugar consumption.
But as far as lifestyle, dietary, environmental things, what can we do to start mitigating some of this stress and people can really begin to heal? What would your recommendations be? Frequent snacks. Not letting yourself go too long without eating is something that's helpful. Having some fruit and milk or cheese at hand so you don't get too hungry. But getting enough sunlight is helpful. The long waves, the red and orange waves that penetrate right through your tissues, reduce the free radicals that are produced by PUFA and too much phosphate and so on.
And the ultraviolet makes the vitamin D that helps you handle sugar and calcium. And what about lifestyle strategies? What do you recommend for people as far as mitigating the stress lifestyle-wise? The most important thing is to figure out what is important in your life and work towards doing what you really think is important and considering the necessities, the horrible work that you might have to do. Consider that as only a stepping stone to doing something more sane and productive. I love that.
Yeah, find beauty appreciation in everything because even if it's a job that you can't get out of that you don't love, at least you can know that it's providing for your family and you can look at it with a positive attitude. If you can have some kind of a perspective in the long range that is meaningful for your life that can make the stress attached to the immediate things disappear as long as you're well fed and have the energy to maintain that long range vision. Yeah, for sure.
And what about, since you talk about the importance of the thyroid and how important it is, what in order to kind of help our thyroids function more optimally, what would you recommend? The most important thing is to completely eliminate all of the liquid vegetable oils, canola, soy, cottonseed... all those, and to drastically reduce the seeds and nuts and natural foods that contain alot of them and to avoid the fatty fish, and the low-fat fish...cod, and sole, oysters, squid... are very low in the omega-3 fats and so they are safer.
Very good. Well I've held you here quite enough time I guess, we've been a little over an hour, but, before I let you go, how can people learn more about you? I know there is even a website called the Ray Peat forum, where there's a lot of people kinda picking up what you're putting down but I don't know that you're actually there right? No, I never participated in that.
Ok, as far as, I know they can go to raypeat.com and they can find all of your blog posts there as well, can you tell them about your newsletter as well? Yeah, it's published every other month, so a 12 issue subscription is for 2 years and that's $28 by email. Yeah, and I'll be sure to include the information for that in the show notes as well. Dr. Peat, you've been more than generous with your knowledge and your time and I just really appreciate everything you've done,
and I wanted to say, if you would be willing to share with my listeners your age, because I really am so impressed with how many years you've been doing nutrition. How old are you? Eighty-two. Eighty-two. and you are... I just wish I had a penny-sized amount of the knowledge that's in your head, so hopefully you'll keep podcasting with me if we can do this again I'd love that, because I have more and more and more of what I want to talk to you about.
Could we do that some time? Oh sure. Great! Thank you so much, and, yeah, so you guys check him out at raypeat.com and be sure to even send him an email, I know sometimes he's able to check emails if you have a pressing question, but otherwise be sure to signup for that newslettter because he's got some great topics that come out in those that are just a plethora of information. Can I mention that to get the newsletter it's [email protected]
Ok great, yeah, and i'll put that in the show notes and I think there's a way they can pay through paypal to do that too, so. Wonderful, thanks again, thanks for listening everyone, and yeah, stay tuned for the next time, bye for now! [MUSIC & ADS] Drop in FBOMM.com and use the code GET FIT to save 20% off your purchase. That's GET FIT to save 20% off your Keto Crunch purchase. You'd better hurry because the last time I checked they were sold out.
So I'm assuming they're going to be getting some more but keep checking back. These are wonderful. If not for you, then for the little one in your life to take on the go with you. [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC ENDS]