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Well, welcome to this month's May of 2019's edition of "Ask Your Rev. Doctor." My name's Andrew Murray. For those of you who have perhaps never listened to the show, they run every third Friday of the month from 7 to 8 o'clock. We also have a live call-in from 7.30 until the end of the show at 8 o'clock where people can call in with questions either related or unrelated to the topic of the month. As always, it's become very appreciated and commonplace here with the "Ask Your Rev. Doctor" show for, gosh, 10 years or more now.
We're very pleased to have Dr. Raymond Peat's expertise on the show. He has a wealth of wisdom and a wealth of knowledge. I don't think there's many things I've ever asked him that he hasn't got a good answer for. He'll be joining us, of course, and I'll be posing questions to him and getting his view and his understanding on some of those things that we'll be bringing up in tonight's discussion. We can always be reached after the show, Monday through Friday, regular business hours, 1-888-WBM-ERB.
This month's subject is a little clear up from last month to get one or two of the questions I never got a chance to ask Dr. Peat. And then we're going to carry on with pollutants, particulates and waste creating havoc with biological life as we know it. Increasingly we are armed with more and more information as time goes on. As usual, I ask people to be moderate about their information and check their sources. Obviously there's a wealth of information on the internet and there is quite a desire to attract your attention.
So take a look at the studies, but look at the background of the studies. I'm always questioning Dr. Peat when he'll come up with answers for certain things and point me to a study. And sometimes these studies are buried and you won't find them too easily. What you'll find is the hype, the media sensationalized responses, the cliche answers, etc. or the repeated dogma or even downright lies that are perpetuated in the name of science. So always check your sources and make sure that your details are coming from not vested
interests but honest research that's seeking to find the truth. And good science will always be answerable and will always put itself in the right place when better science comes up with a better answer. So science is a very good thing for science's sake. Although it's very much a holistic thrust which I go through the show with, it's definitely grounded very much in science because it's a pretty true pathway through. So Dr. Peat, thanks for joining us so much. Just in case people have tuned into the show for the first time and maybe never heard your
voice, would you please just go over your academic professional background before we get started? I studied at the University of Oregon, biology specializing in reproductive physiology and biochemistry as it related to that. A PhD in 1972 and since then continuing related study. Yeah. Okay. And you've spent a very large part of that time actively interacting with people and trying to get them to change what they've been doing and what they do and kind of steering them in a better direction given the evidence and the science that you've found out and
you've studied and you've recognized is a much better way forward than what we're normally told. Yeah. Around 1960 I decided that any knowledge should be useful. So any time I find out anything interesting I try to connect it to practical reality. Yeah. Absolutely. Well if we can just finish up with a couple of the things I never got a chance last month to question you about before we launch into the pollutant side of this month's talk. I think the figures show a 25% increase over the 38 years that the study was done from
1975 to 2012 in the prevalence of cancers in adolescents. Now this does tie into this night's show anyway because the pollutant aspect of this evening's topic very much encompasses all of these things which could be perfectly responsible for a lot of these cancers that have been shown in this study to be very much on the rise and scary reading it is too. So I found that pathologies in adolescents are accelerating and it's not like a kind of very slow increase. It's a kind of a rapid acceleration that they're seeing in the numbers of adolescents
that are suffering from cancers that never were seen before. And so what do you, I mean they have implicated obesity and I think the whole obesity linked to diet is probably a good and reasonable detail in the equation of why adolescents and/or cancers in general are just exploding. What do you think about them from a biological and physiological perspective because I know you've done a lot of work on polyunsaturates and thyroid and those kind of things that are... Yeah, I think some of it is the present diet and the present polluted environment full
of carcinogens and estrogens. But I think it was actually starting a long time ago influencing prenatal conditions even so that their parents' exposure is transmitted affecting the way they develop in the utero and affects the whole maturing process. So early childhood diseases have increased so much, colitis for example. I don't think it is likely that it's all some change in the diet that is making them so allergic, so reactive to fairly ordinary things in the environment. For example, it's known that the polyunsaturated content of the mother's diet increases the
allergies of the babies and so colitis in young children is probably a reaction to the mother's diet, maybe from earlier exposures of the parents. Right. Okay, so this would be like an inflammatory process occurring within the bowel and you always kind of use the bowel as the seat of health in terms of a good bowel pretty much will predispose you to good health and if there are changes that you need to make, your bowel will be the first place to look at.
So in terms of this kind of reactive allergic type condition, you've also mentioned, and I wanted to ask you this a little while back actually, why? And I think just to get it on tape as it were, you know, tape is obsolete these days, but just to get it on audio for people to hear in future, the whole rationale behind mothers being prescribed fish oils, omega oils, and telling them that that is actually good for their child's health, and I know you've rebut this or rebutted it with studies showing that
the child whilst maybe appearing more sedate and calm and relaxed when they're first birth is actually a sign of the kind of retardation in some ways and that actually there's a relationship between lower brain weight and function and intelligence associated with the same oils that you've mentioned here in terms of the mother's diet and the way that's changed in the last 30 or 40 years. Yeah, last month I think I mentioned the French study that thought they were going to demonstrate improved prenatal brain function by giving these extremely unsaturated fats to the mother
during pregnancy, and they showed just the opposite, that retarded development and retarded learning, but in the early 1970s they were already seeing that the polyunsaturated fats during pregnancy made animals develop smaller brains that learned more poorly. Yeah, alright. I think I wanted to go on with some of the cancers that were stated to be on the rise according to etiology and see if there's any link between the type of cancer and the environmental effects, perhaps, of some of these chemicals in the environment with those particular organs.
I know the figures talk about non-Hodgkin's lymphoma and then thyroid cancer is the second one here, and then myeloid leukemia and testicular cancer. And now these are things, I mean I'm looking at germ cell type cancers with testicular cancer and then in the myeloid cancers this is kind of, again, another, it's not germ cell in the terms of sex germ cells, but it's a kind of progenitor's type situation where the very fundamental cell that is being formed is subjected to this condition that it can't cope with and cancer arises as a result of disorganization.
And again with the lymphomas. What they have in common is rapid growth. The sperm is turning over constantly and the blood cells are in constant diffusion. And irritants accelerate the growth and the polyunsaturated fats, for example, break down the fish oil. It is always oxidized by the time it gets into the bloodstream. Very little of it reaches the tissues in its entire form. So you get these oxidized fragments that are toxic through rapidly multiplying cells causing a deformity, atrophy in the sperm forming tissue and derangement of the development course of
the blood cells leading to leukemia and lymphoma. How long do you think it takes from exposure to, I mean, I'm sure it depends on how healthy a subject is to begin with, how much metabolic energy they are capable of producing, how poorly they are functioning will also be detrimental to them. They'll probably go down quicker as it were. But how long do you think these things might take before they start manifesting? In these rapidly multiplying tissues, I think it's much faster than in the average cancer.
I think that's why leukemia has been seen so often in children just a few years old where the typical cancer, a brain cancer or a pancreas cancer, for example, usually takes 20 years or more from the carcinogenic primary exposure to the appearance of the fully developed tumor, sometimes 40 years. But you can definitely show that there's a cause connection to it, but it's long delayed. And that has been useful to the polluting industries to claim that you can't show the cause and effect relationship.
But animal studies make it clear that although there is a delay, it's an absolutely causal process. Do you think that younger people inherently have more resistance though to these kind of insults or do you think actually they're more susceptible? In some of those tissues, they're probably more susceptible because of their extreme speed of turning over. A little deviation in the regulatory process can send them wildly off course. But generally the extremely high metabolic rate and quick cell division lets young organisms bypass, they can find a way around the toxic problem and overcome it. Okay.
All right, you're listening to Ask Urobiotic K. Medegarbovil, 91.1 FM. From now until the end of the show, 8 o'clock, you are invited. Well, no, from 7.30 to 8 o'clock, you're invited to call in. The show does stop at 8 o'clock, but if people would like to call in with any questions, the number is 707-923-3911. So Dr. Peat, I mentioned to you in talking last month about what hasn't actually surfaced again as another sensational headline unlike Ebola, which certainly seems to be grabbing the headlines along with the measles "epidemic".
But what did you have to say about Candida auris? I don't think you were that impressed with some of the sensational headlines claiming it to be this superbug that's going to just become the be-all end-all of... The advertising I've seen connected with it strongly suggests that it's an advertising campaign for new drugs. Okay, there you go. All right. So my last question related to antibiotics and when I was studying herbal medicine in 1990 here, they were all talking about, you know, antibiotic resistance and superbugs
and not having antibiotics to treat infections and we're all going to be in big trouble. And yeah, I think to one extent or another, that's probably happening. But what do you think in terms of the arsenal of antibiotics that we have to treat infections? In Eastern Europe and Asia, long before penicillin was discovered, people were finding that there are bacteria-killing viruses, the bacteriophage, and that technology has really developed to a high degree that it's of no interest to the countries that have a highly developed pharmaceutical industry. But these viruses infect only bacteria, kill certain species.
Bacteria never develop resistance to them and the viruses are perfectly harmless to mammals and people. All right. So you think as far as you're concerned, there's enough phage research being done to produce phage is pretty much tailored for whatever organism it is that they are looking to eradicate or deal or treat that may have become resistant to antibiotics. You think that they are? Yeah. Some people have told their stories of being diagnosed as incurably infected with superbacteria going to Eastern Europe, getting totally cured quickly. Interesting. All right.
And again, I don't know if it's the Russians or some other Eastern... Yeah, Southeast, Bulgaria and Romania, I think, have a good tradition. India too. Wow. Yeah, I know the Indians are pretty smart people. I've got a lot of respect for them. I think it's an underrated country, a lot of poor people, but some very brilliant people have come from there. Okay. So I wanted to talk about a subject that we did touch on a little bit last month, but I don't think we've really got into it at all, particulates and whether these particulates
are from diesel engines. It's been certainly mentioned in England a long time ago that the emissions from diesel engines were so fine that they posed a respiratory problem and something had to be done to make the engines more efficient or therefore the scrubbers and exhaust more efficient at pulling these things out. But I read an article saying that pollution and air pollution in particular, although we talk about other pollution later on, but air pollution is essentially causing damage to every organ in the body.
This was a big article ran through from basically from the brain saying that this particular types of air pollution can be carried and transmitted up the olfactory nerve and into the brain. Then I talked about thyroid and the lungs and in a reproductive organ saying that basically nothing was spared and that dementia and heart and lung disease were becoming increasingly prevalent and they're putting it down to air pollution and just saying that it's becoming a crisis that needs to be addressed.
Just a few months ago, the accepted number of deaths caused by air pollution was about 4 million per year, but this recent World Health Organization study says it's over 8 million, I think 8.8 million dying from air pollution. I mean, certainly in developing countries, Asia I think in particular, you see pictures of the smog in China or in other capitals of the Asian world and it looks absolutely dreadful. It reminds me of what would have been smog in the early 1900s in England.
And obviously things like coal-fired power plants are on the increase in terms of generating energy to keep the economies going. What do you think about what we're faced with? And I've always wondered about the Redwood Coast here. Supposedly California's got a really clean, I would imagine, I'd like to see the data, real data for it, but after coming across thousands of miles of ocean, I would have imagined that the air would have been relatively clean compared to if we were on the East Coast
and we're getting air from the West Coast and it's blowing across the whole of the States, picking up and carrying with it. We do get some smoke and dust from Chinese industry, but the West Coast is far cleaner than interior. Coming across the ocean, it does rain out or settle out lots of material. Okay, so from a respiratory point of view, before we get into any particular pollution, I've certainly, when I first came here in 2001, I never really thought too much about it, but it's kind of stayed with me for a while.
What they call here the Humboldt hack, and there was actually a noblest who was making a product that was called Humboldt Hack-A-Way, and it was pretty popular, I think, because there was so many people here in this area that had this persistent chronic clearing of the throat. And I didn't think too much of it, but everywhere around me, I would hear people coughing and hacking, and lo and behold, probably four or five years ago, I started doing it myself,
and I'll tell you, I don't know whether or not it's a redwood allergy or if it's an allergy to some endemic species that lives in this area or mold. People want to talk about the mold because of the fairly dense canopy of the forest here and how damp it is most of the winter, at least until the dryness of the summer comes. But what do you think about that kind of respiratory allergy or a chronic infection even? I wonder that would be responsible for such a persistent cough.
It reminds me of something that doesn't probably end in a good way. The foliage, big forests do emit quite a lot of organic material, including pollen, and probably is a cause of a lot of allergy. I know there's a region in Texas famous for its cedar tree allergies. I imagine conifer forests have people who are sensitive to their pollen. Yeah. Have you heard anything like that in Oregon? No, I haven't, surprisingly. And when I've gone away, whenever I've gone back to England, it does generally clear up
in the couple of three weeks that I have to go. It certainly makes a difference. And I'm like, wow, what is it that sensitized me to where I live? And I think there is something real about it. Anyway, OK, so getting on to plastics. I know that's another big topic. And I saw it probably the first time about eight months ago, I think, or maybe a year ago. And I'd never really considered it before. I think we all recognize just how ubiquitous plastic is and has been for quite some time
now with the petrochemical companies producing it. And the sea, the gyre, the one of five gyres in the world, the North Pacific gyre becoming this floating island of debris, bigger than Mexico. It's probably half the size of the continent of the US. And a dive was done down to the Marianas Trench, which hadn't been exceeded since the first dive in 1960. Someone went down, oh, just a year ago, I think. And lo and behold, they found down the very bottom of the Mariana Trench what appeared to be plastic debris.
And so this sparked a whole investigation into what's going on with plastics when they get into the environment. And the breakdown of the fragmentation or defragmentation here of plastics into microplastics and how just about every animal species is becoming loaded with these microplastics. I was wondering from an estrogenic perspective that these have got to be disrupting the endocrine system and being responsible for some part of the cancer makeup. Yeah, plastics are in general very hydrophobic. And so the things like the polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons that are famous carcinogens, these concentrate on the surface of the particles.
And so even the particles that are macroscopic, when they're ingested, they deliver a very big dose, concentrated dose of these organic carcinogens that are bound to the surfaces. But then there's the smaller particle is toxic in a directly structural way. The extremely small nanoparticles pass right into the -- through the cells in the circulatory system and are taken up by cells all through the body. And if you think of the scale, you know, they're extremely small compared to bacteria. Compared to proteins inside the cells, they're relatively huge.
They're very foreign to the structure of the cytoplasm. And so they're necessarily disruptive when they get in cells. And that to the degree that their size interferes with the functions of the cytoplasm, they turn on alarm reactions of different kinds. One kind of reaction is to make the cell leaky, giving up proteins like when the liver is irritated, it leaks its proteins and enzymes into the bloodstream. But ATP itself leaks out when cells are structurally irritated by these particles. And then the ATP is recognized as a danger signal by the environment.
And so it tends to be a self-perpetuating reaction. Cell gets irritated, sends out ATP, which alarms other cells. They leak ATP and you get a storm of cells losing their energy and creating excitement in their environment. Okay, even to ATP, huh? Yeah. Wow. All right. I looked at the bisphenol A and the other, what they call the persistent organic pollutants that were banned in the '70s, just because they recognized after they'd polluted everything massively that these things were so persistent in the environment that they needed to do
something about it because not only would they just not break down and be persistent for a long time, they were taken up by the fat tissue of any animal that would consume it, and so pass up the food chain and ride up to us, obviously, as we talk about the oceans being contaminated with plastics and microplastics, the fish that we eat and the shellfish that we eat. And I wanted to ask you about the shellfish. I know you're a big advocate of shellfish for micronutrients and things that you won't
typically get from terrestrial organisms, but I looked at an article talking about mussels in England and the people that would collect mussels and harvest them, and I think in Ireland also on the West Coast, it's a relatively good source of food that people can gather easily. But these little crustaceans here, they can pick up the same microplastics as well as these other compounds, and I wonder at what point does the negative effect of any of that outweigh the beneficial effect of anything that's obtained from them rather than terrestrial creatures?
Because I've always, I guess I've always steered clear of fish for the last 15 years or so since I started finding out just how much pollution there was in the ocean in terms of heavy metals and other compounds. Like the organic compounds, the plastic particles tend to be concentrated up the food chain since they aren't well detoxified. Bigger older organisms are the ones that are most polluted and dangerous. So years ago we stopped eating the large fish. Orange ruffe and halibut, for example, live a very long time and accumulate huge amounts of toxins.
Yeah, for sure. I did a similar thing about two years ago once it started becoming just more and more relevant. I think for the longest time I wanted to go fishing and was, I don't know, it has never really happened. And I think as time went on it just became more probably relevant that I shouldn't go fishing because actually the fish wasn't that good. And so in the end I ran five, I think, different types of fish that were caught here locally on the West Coast just out in Shelter Cove where we live.
And I sent it to a lab in Washington that we run our herb material through ICP-MS, which is an induction coupled mass spectrometry, and picking out specifically the California Prop 65 compounds that we need to closely watch and be in compliance with in terms of production of our medicinal herbs. So arsenic, cadmium, lead, mercury were the things that we were looking at in our herbs and I sent fish samples to the laboratory up in Washington to sample and I was staggered actually at what came back.
And there was definitely a correlation between the larger fish, so between tuna, salmon, cod and bottom fish. They were in descending order loaded with mercury. I wasn't able to speciate the mercury to see whether it was methylmercury or some other compound but they had the same thing with cadmium too in arsenic and way higher than any animal product that I sent to the same lab in terms of wild game that was hunted, whether it was elk or deer locally. That was very clean comparatively.
So it's always put me off eating fish even though it comes from California and California is supposedly really clean and we'd like to believe that our air is clean and the water's clean and we live actually in a very special place. It's so unfortunate that there is a worldwide polluted ocean. I don't think there's any real escape from it, is there? No, that information is part of why I'm an advocate of milk because you start with moderately polluted vegetation, a cow eats it and sends it to the rumen where bacteria and fungus,
various microorganisms break it down and process it, eliminate many of the toxic materials on the microbial level. Then it's filtered into the animal's bloodstream and filtered again into the mammary gland for levels of extremely efficient filtering. So milk is probably the safest food by a wide margin. All right, let me just ask the engineer, I guess I'd like to go on that but I still hear you and I still see him so I think we're all good even though the lights are going out.
I've seen the lights flashing there in the studio so I don't know if we have any callers on there or not. Oh, the lights are coming back on. We had a caller who was asking the doctor to speak to the ingredient in Roundup, the glycosylate, the glyphosate. That's correct. Well, let me just let people know, you're listening to Ask Your Obed Doctor, K.M.D. Probable, 91.1 FM, from now to 8 o'clock, callers are invited to call in with any questions either related to plastics pollution, environmental pollution, cancer, etc., etc., caused by pollution
and the rise in it and how to mitigate that. I'll be asking Dr. Peat in a bit here some of the strategies that can be probably best employed. And also, it doesn't really matter if the question is unrelated to this month's show but the number is 707-923-3911. So Dr. Peat, I think that person who hung up was asking about glyphosate and I saw that there had been massive punitive damages awarded recently for that product by people that have gotten cancer, unfortunately.
30 or 40 years ago, I knew people who had studied biology at the Oregon State University, a land grant university which specializes in agriculture and really their education is highly guided by industry, by the pesticide and herbicide industry. They were telling me that Roundup is specifically toxic to plants so it can't hurt animals. They simply were taught that there are some kind of biological ultimate distinctions between plant cells and animal cells but really we have so much in common that it's not at all surprising that Roundup is extremely toxic to animals too.
It's funny, I just got a little one line here that I saw in an article that in Germany, they say that the young men there have been found to produce only a third of the sperm that German men did 30 years ago. What do you think about virility and spermatogenesis amongst men and that probably ties into pollution and just decreased energy? Yeah, everything, many things are called phytoestrogens and pseudoestrogens and so on but anything injurious creates inflammation and the inflammation leads to the production of estrogen and so
anything that is toxic is going to reduce a man's testosterone, sperm production and in general virility. So let me ask you about phytoestrogens just for the record here because when I was studying herbal medicine, back then I was under the misguided belief that phytoestrogens were good for females with menopausal hot flashes and that they were beneficial and then I think you just said no. So what are your thoughts on your take on phytoestrogens and how they interact in the body so women that maybe might have been using black cohosh or wild yam or other phytoestrogenic
herbs are actually not doing what they should be doing because we all recognize now that progesterone is really what you need. Some of the herbs are anti-prolactin rather than specifically anti-estrogen. Right, that would be Vitex perhaps. So that can be very protective and the official concept of what's estrogenic is what sticks to the so-called estrogen receptor but the estrogen receptor, even in the total absence of estrogen, if you injure the cell or cut off the oxygen supply, the estrogen receptor
goes through its actions of acting like estrogen is present so that it's somewhat of a coincidence that a substance binds to the estrogen receptor. It doesn't mean that it's going to activate estrogen-like processes. It can inactivate the estrogen system depending on what it does to that protein. So the estrogenic substances really, a lot of them have been called phytoestrogens but what they're doing is either decreasing or intensifying the cell's energy production. Estrogen characteristically acts like the loss of oxygen and so if you have something that in effect suffocates the cell, that's estrogenic.
If you have a so-called phytoestrogen, it might stick to the estrogen receptor but if it is an oxidant and activates, catalyzes the oxidative processes, then it's acting as an anti-estrogen. Okay, let's hold it there, Dr. Peat. There's a couple of callers online that have been busy flashing away in the studio. So let's see this first caller. First caller, you're on the air. Where are you from and what's your question? Okay, I have a question. We have not vaccinated our six-year-old and being in California now, it looks like we're
going to have to even with the doctors exempt to be in school and I'm just curious if there's any kind of like herbal or any, like if we do decide to do something with the baby, is there any kind of like herbal or any kind of like any kind of like any kind of like I'm curious if there's any kind of like herbal or any like if we do decide to vaccinate, I'm just curious if there's things you can do on the herbal medicine realm or boosting immune system or anything like that. Right, okay.
All right, well, it's definitely a controversial subject and one for which we're called anti-vaxxers because we have two children and they're both in the same situation. We never did vaccinate and we don't intend to vaccinate and they're beautiful, healthy young children and hopefully they'll stay that way. I think we've done shows in the past on vaccines and I know Dr. Peat will speak to it. Having had some personal interactions with vaccine, stroke damage and mitigating the effects of the condition. Dr. Peat, first, how do you feel about anti-vaxxers?
Oh, I think many of them are far better informed than the doctors who ran against. Suzanne Humphreys, for example, I think she was a kidney specialist who noticed that when your patients were vaccinated at admission, they got worse than the patients who weren't vaccinated and she asked the hospital to stop vaccinating her patients and had a fight with the hospital officials and decided to specialize studying what happens with vaccinations for several years. So she's really well informed on it. And the doctors I see ranting about the anti-vaxxers are generally either totally ignorant and
incompetent or they're lying. It's just a very simple question that there have been national waves like an epidemic of narcolepsy in Finland and another country following a big wave of vaccinations. It's well established that the aluminum hydroxide, which is in more than 100 vaccines, is one of the systemically toxic pro-inflammatory particles. It's added to the vaccine simply because it arouses a generalized systemic inflammation that makes the body react more intensely to whatever antigen related disease might be present. And that same generalized unfocused inflammatory reaction caused by the particles is exactly
what turns on autoimmunity and other degenerative processes. Okay. I mean, it's not a short answer to your question, Cora. In terms of, okay, so you asked what could be done early. I think as appropriate as that is your nutrition. Dr. Peat is a big advocate of getting very good whole nutrition. So your diet is very important and obviously things that lower your metabolic energy like the polyunsaturates to be avoided. You certainly want to be looking at keeping your bowel clean. So you want to be avoiding bread, gluten, etc., those kinds of sources.
But from an energy point of view, things that support your thyroid, and I'm not just saying this is going to protect you against smallpox, you know, if smallpox starts suddenly reappearing. But basically, I think the metabolic energy of our people has gotten to a point where we're on the edge of being sick. And so I think the vitality of our civilization has definitely decreased with all the environmental toxins or pollutants, the rubbish in the food chain and the kind of lifestyles that we've engendered by not working like we used to.
I think it all promotes a weaker organism. So urbanly in that regard, there are certainly things that you can do that would be supportive of biological energy production. I was going to ask Dr. Peat a question about the liver in terms of being responsible for metabolizing waste. But I know there's another couple of callers on the line here. So I want to make sure we get time for them and they can ask Dr. Peat the questions on that. But in terms of being an anti-vacciner, I think one of the most important takeaways
from the vaccination thing is it's not per se anti-vaccines. There are definitely vaccines at work. There's no doubt about it. But I think what it is, it's just the prevalence and the increasing numbers given simultaneously which have really caused the problems. And I think it's becoming a machine and very much a profit-driven machine which is actually causing the problems, not the altruistic desire from humanitarian doctors to save children from disease. I don't think anybody wants to avoid that for one second.
So it's a kind of hot topic and I think I'd probably better leave it there for right now because we do have a couple of other callers on the line. So next caller, can we get where you're from and what's your question? Well, one of the callers asked me to ask the doctor how he feels about flax versus fish oil. Probably not much better. It's probably not quite as bad. Dr. Peat, flax oil versus? Much better in some ways. But it is slightly more stable than fish oil. The fish oil luckily is very quickly degraded.
The flax is a little more persistent and so it can be more toxic in the long run. The other question we had was whether the doctor would recommend bentonite for clay for flushing toxins. You know, the clay is slightly soluble in stomach acid and releases at least a little aluminum and other toxins and the particles, being very fine particles, are susceptible to persorption when, especially if your intestine is irritated, the contraction can force these particles right into the bloodstream and the particle size can be as much as ten times
the diameter of a red blood cell and so particles getting into the circulatory system can cause considerable microscopic damage. Okay, thanks for that. There is another caller on the air. So let me just let people know that from now until the end of the show at 8 o'clock, you're invited to call in with questions either related or unrelated to this month's subject of pollution, environmental pollution, etc. Number 707-923-3911. Okay, so let's take this next caller. Caller, where are you from and what's your question? Would that be me? Yes, that would be you.
What's your question and where are you from? Oh, nice. I'm in Phillipsville and I want to thank Dr. Peat for coming on and thank you for bringing this wisdom to us. My question is about there's new research about highly sensitive personalities and excess cortisol in the bloodstream and I'm wondering what Dr. Peat thinks about people who live with, you know, gushers of cortisol day to day. And yeah, thank you and I'll take that off the air. Okay. Dr. Peat, high cortisol exposure, what do you think is the outcome?
There are lots of things you can do starting with oxidative metabolism, doing things that preserve your thyroid function and when your thyroid is functioning efficiently, you can turn your cholesterol fairly massively into pregnenolone, progesterone and DHEA, which are the main opponents of cortisol. Cortisol stops inflammation but it activates a lot of degenerative breakdown processes when it isn't backed up by large amounts of these three anti-inflammatory stabilizing steroids. And so thyroid and good nutrition, adequate protein, vitamin A, vitamin D, all of the nutrients help you do the conversion to DHEA, progesterone and pregnenolone to block and
neutralize and reverse the effects of the cortisol. Okay. All right, Dr. Peat, I wanted to ask you personally what you think about a strategy to improve the liver's function to metabolize waste. Do you think that's, I mean, from a herbal perspective, it's a no-brainer because, you know, they would talk about hepatorestoratives, liver supportive herbs, you know, that you can find studies just everywhere showing that either milk thistle is very helpful for the liver or schizandra or any number of bitters or other compounds that are shown to have either antioxidant or hepatoprotective effects.
But what do you think of the rationale of improving the liver's function, I mean, to metabolize waste and to clear it more efficiently from circulation? Do you think that's relevant? Oh, yeah. And all of the tissues apparently have taste receptors, especially for bitter. And so the bitters are acting on these particular receptors to have a calming, stabilizing effect all through the body. But the whole energy and protein synthesizing system is involved in detoxifying it. It uses glucose or fructose, turning it into both vitamin C in most animals, but in humans
only to glucuronic acid, which is then attached to toxins for excretion. And if you're well nourished, have the B vitamins, adequate carbohydrate and protein, then your liver is pretty efficient. It can catch toxic substances, especially hydrophobic materials. It has proteins that can catch massive amounts of these things out of the circulation, holding them for as much as 24 hours while the enzymes degrade it, either break it down into other substances or attach glucuronic acid or sulfate to make it water soluble for excretion.
And polyunsaturated fatty acids can be processed and excreted in the same way to prevent the damage that oxidizing them does. All right. Now, you mentioned bitters and I just wanted to pick on that quickly because we have another caller here. So these would be the kind of things that we would traditionally use in the herbal world for increasing stomach acid, for pepsin production, to increase digestion and assimilation. And reduce inflammation. Yeah, you're saying, OK, to reduce it, bitters to reduce inflammation. So tell me how you link those two.
There is a protein, the same that we have in our tongues, the stomach and liver tissue, various lungs, the whole respiratory system can detect the bitter substance. And in doing so, it activates an anti-inflammatory process. Interesting. All right. Let's get this next caller on the air. Caller, where are you from? What's your question? I'm Mike from Connecticut. And I have a question following up on that point. Go ahead. I wanted to have Dr. Peat's view on the use of supplemental digestive enzymes like lipase,
protease, or peptase to help break down the food and help absorb the nutrients before it gets to the gut, to the bacteria that prevent from feeding them. Is that of any use? OK. Are you suffering with any malabsorption or that kind of thing that's got you interested in digestive enzymes? I have a weak digestion, so I usually have troubles in the upper stomach. And usually warm, hot foods help. Cold foods are a little harsher on my system. OK. Dr. Peat, I know you're a little skeptical on a wide range of supplements.
But how about digestive enzymes in terms of if there are any good digestive enzymes manufactured out there that are, I mean, obviously... The traditional thing was basically dehydrated animal pancreas tissue. And those are so similar to our own enzymes that they really do work. But you have to be cautious that because they're simply dehydrated, they are a potential source of infection. But I'm skeptical about the enzymes derived from fungus because in the same way you can't absolutely purify them. And so they're going to drag along some of the fungal antigens.
And you have to watch out for allergic reactions because if you're sensitive to the fungus antigens, you might react to their enzymes. OK. I know that we used to produce a product called... Well, actually we had two. We had digestive bitters, which was an herb extract from about nine different herbs. And this is for the corner. That were based on the Swedish bitters. And then, so they were mainly the bitters that we mentioned, Dr. Peat mentioned, that would stimulate stomach acid production, pepsin, lipase, you know, it get the stomach moving
and other things to break down fats, etc., etc. And I've got some very good feedback when we were producing this product. So I think herbally, it's always the rationale there to use bitters, using the taste receptors as a physiological trigger to increase motility and production of enzymes. And these would certainly be beneficial. I find people, when I consult with them, have widely differing results with digestive enzymes. But I do find a lot of the bitter herbs in the armament of herbal medicine actually very effective for poor digestion or fat malabsorption, etc. Great.
I'll look into it. Thank you. Yeah. Thank you for your call. Okay. So, Dr. Peat, I had a couple, let's do a quick question. I wanted to know, okay, probably too big for the last couple of minutes we have. But just looking at the political will of the governments to do the right thing in terms of, I saw that a figure that coal-fired power plants are actually on a decline, surprisingly, although I know the current administration had vowed to increase them from the previous administration's will to reduce them.
But that the developing countries like China and Asia and India especially are starting to produce lots of power stations to get their economies going because that's just the way it's been done traditionally. What do you think about the political will to make the world a cleaner place? If you can answer that in one minute or so, that would be great. I can mention a book that is very important on that issue called The Politics of Cancer by Samuel Epstein, written in 1978 with publication date.
And he shows that the knowledge of how to prevent most cancer has been around for almost a hundred years, but the corporations that pollute run the government agencies. And the agencies that you would think should be protecting the public, American Cancer Society, National Cancer Institute, many research organizations and universities are funded so generously by the polluting industries that they are working against the public, even though the public pays them, pays the government and these foundations supposedly for their protection, actually, that they're simply perpetuating the polluting. Depressing. Depressing.
Well, let's, on that note, let's let everyone be reminded, The Politics of Cancer, if I've got that right, by Samuel Epstein, could be well worth looking at on the internet. Maybe get a copy of it and read it. Probably really educate yourself about what Dr. Peat's just mentioned about the mechanism of it all. Thank you so much for your time, Dr. Peat. Okay, thank you. Okay, so for those people that have listened to the show and want to find out more about Dr. Peat's papers, his research, his written works, etc., www.rayPeat.com.
And for people who want to find out more about myself and our business, it's Western Botanical Medicine. I want to make people aware that there's going to be an Instagram page launched here, hopefully within the next six weeks to two months at the most, about Dr. Peat's work and put it in audio clips that we have produced since 2007 so that it's actually the words he's saying because I find a lot of misconstrued information on other, supposedly, Dr. Peat advocating sites.
So I want to set the record straight and that will be on an Instagram page called Western Botanical Medicine, I think, at this point. And thanks so much for listening. Until the third Friday of next month, good night.