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Hi, and welcome to this month's Ask Your Herb Doctor. My name's Andrew Murray. And my name's Sarah Johannison Murray. For those of you who perhaps have never listened to our shows, which run every third Friday of the month from 7 till 8pm, we're both licensed medical herbalists who trained in England and graduated there with a degree in herbal medicine. We run a clinic in Garboville where we consult with clients about a wide range of conditions, and we recommend herbal medicines and dietary advice.
Well, again, I just want to reiterate that it's become increasingly obvious over the last few years that if you really want to get the point across, you cannot just mention it once or twice. But that reminds people of the same subject and brings out the science and the proof, if you like, of what it is that is counter-culture. It is a good way to refresh people's memories that often what they hear and what they see is not always the way it is. And actually, there's more to it than meets the eye.
And that it's up to us individually to take responsibility for our own actions and our own decisions by seeing the broader picture and finding the information that is out there freely available. If only we would look. I often end the end of the show with the phrase, "To those who have ears, let them hear." Well, for those of us who have eyes and ears, let us see and hear what there is out there. Again, the program will be, yeah, what's the word, spiced up. And I can't say that in any other ways
than we're very pleased to have Dr. Raymond Peat with us here again for this month's show and to bring his wisdom and his research to bear upon the subjects that which don't always seem to be the way that we would have been told the way they are. But like I said, you repeat the question or repeat the solution more than once and time and time again, it suddenly begins to become more of a reality and especially when it's backed up with science to counter the supposed science that wants to tell us
the other way is the way it is. So, Dr. Peat, thank you so much for joining us again. First of all, I think as always, there are people here who just have never heard us before. Maybe they haven't heard of you either, but I'm not so sure about that. Would you like to just describe your academic and research background for the benefit of any new listeners? Okay. Following on what you were just talking about, my academic career went from linguistics to biology
and there was a continuity of a sort from studying grammar and the structure of language to thinking about strictly biological questions. In linguistics, I was concentrating on how culture interacts with the structure of language. I was seeing the evolution over hundreds and hundreds of years of understanding in the culture as being what shapes the way the grammar itself of language works. For various reasons, I switched over to biology thinking to understand the brain better. The brain is the organ that carries culture and language. So, when I got into biology
and went from brain work to reproductive physiology, I was still interested in those questions of how the context interacts with the structure. The focus on language made me see that there was an identity between the surrounding culture and the physical structure of the language. Then going from the brain to other aspects of physiology, I saw that the environment is a part of the organism. So, that accounts for my orientation in biology that it's really concentrating on the interaction moment by moment between the animal and the environment.
I think before we get started on to a continuation of last month's subject, which were surrounding sugars and the debunking of the cholesterol heart disease myth, this month's show is going to be a continuation of last month's show, Dr. Peat, on the sugars and how beneficial they are, just to highlight the particular sugars that we're going to be looking at that are beneficial without doubt and there's plenty of research to back it up as fructose, as a fruit sugar. But before we get into that, I think it would be useful, if for no other reason
than for me to understand that you've spent 20 to 25 years or 30 years researching the areas of academic science that you were involved in doing your PhD, which was around hormones and their interactions. How often do you find... I think it's more like 40 years. I'm sorry. Okay, well 40 years. That's a compliment, Dr. Peat. He thinks you're younger than you are. Okay, how often do you find that the mainstream science conflicts with the evidence that you find? Oh, well, that was a constant, almost daily experience in my attending lectures.
I was really surprised any time a professor said anything that I thought really related meaningfully to the biological facts. There was a book that was used as a text in genetics. It was called Classical Papers in Genetics. And reading through that, I couldn't find any case in which the facts were honestly presented. It was really a little handbook of ideology. My experience with the academic science people was that they are very heavy on ideology, very light on facts. I almost never saw a science professor in the science library.
I spent many years every day reading in the library. I think I saw maybe four professors. Two of them I saw more than once. Okay, well let's get into the meat of this month's continuing program on sugars. Again, just to reiterate the fact that the lies, I think it was Adolf Hitler who said that you have to make a lie colossal enough and repeat it often enough for people to really believe it as truth.
So it's not just small lies, but sometimes colossal lies that are put out there that are certainly things we have to watch out for when we hear whatever we hear. So let's go on to the sugars. For the benefit of our listeners, you have a bi-monthly newsletter that you produce. The last newsletter actually, we just received it, it was on sugars. I know that you've always, your father had diabetes and that was a personal experience upon which you were interacting.
There was a statement in your newsletter towards the last part of it that the addition of fructose to glucose during infusion, intra-portal infusion, increased the net glucose uptake even when the insulin secretion was compromised as in the diabetics. Yeah, they refer to that as a catalytic property of fructose. It doesn't just increase the metabolism and uptake of glucose, but it increases the whole metabolism of the animal. In several types of experiments, they've seen a 50% increase in the whole metabolic rate.
That's basically why I'm so interested in the effects of fructose because the research I did at the university had to do with aging and oxidative metabolism and the perversion of oxidative energy production with aging and with various toxins, hormones and unsaturated fats and so on. The thyroid hormone is what basically distinguishes humans from fungus and bacteria and such. The higher development of the brain goes, the more oxidative energy production is needed. The development of a baby's brain prenatally is very closely tied to the amount of glucose it metabolizes.
You restrict the glucose to the baby and the brain is smaller. You feed it extra glucose and the brain is bigger. Okay, so can I just interrupt you there, Dr. Peat, but for our listeners, just go over a little bit of sugar science here. Everybody's familiar with the white sugar and that's sucrose, which is half fructose, because you've mentioned fructose now, and also half glucose. Then all fruits contain approximately the same ratio of fructose and glucose as white sugar. It's half fructose, half glucose.
Then other sources of carbohydrates like grains, beans, starches, any other carbohydrate-like food, bread, pasta, potatoes, fruit, vegetables, they are almost all glucose, so they're devoid of the fructose. It's easy to remember fructose because it sounds kind of like fruit. The only place fructose slows down glucose is in the absorption from the intestine. The fructose itself is slow to be absorbed compared to glucose. So if you eat starch like white rice or white bread, you'll get a very sharp increase in the amount of glucose in the blood.
That will stimulate insulin to handle that rising glucose, and that stimulates cortisol to prevent the reverse reaction from too much insulin and not enough sustained glucose. But when you eat sugar, the glucose half is broken off and the fructose lags a little bit in being absorbed. That's why it's a safer sugar for diabetics, fructose or white sugar or fruits. Yeah, and so the glucose from the fructose gets absorbed, and then the smaller amount of fructose coming in accelerates the absorption of the glucose by the various tissues, not just the liver, but brain, kidney, heart, everything.
And so it's fulfilling some of insulin's responsibility without having to call on the insulin, but it actually, under some circumstances, can inhibit the release of insulin so that it prevents the spiking of insulin and takes care of insulin's work in the relative absence of insulin. So because, again, to explain to our listeners, a diabetic's problem is that they have high sugar, a lot of sugar in their blood, and they need their cells to pick that up.
And when the fructose is combined with the glucose, the fructose is actually helping the cells pick up the glucose as well as the fructose. Is that what you're explaining, Dr. Peat? Yeah, it stimulates the cells to take up glucose very much the way insulin does. And, in fact, you can't distinguish the effects on some of the crucial enzymes that handle the absorption and use of glucose. Fructose and the pyruvic acid that it turns into stimulate the enzymes that oxidize pyruvic acid just the same way insulin stimulates that same enzyme.
So really, one replaces the other perfectly. And if a diabetic eats a whole grain or beans or any other starchy type of foods, then they don't have the same ability to use that sugar because it's mainly in the form of glucose, and so then they end up with elevated sugar numbers. And elevated insulin to handle that. Or not if they're insulin dependent. But the funny thing I think, just to go back to this counterculture, is diabetics are told avoid orange juice, avoid sugar, white sugar, and eat whole grains.
And that's exactly the opposite of what I've seen work in our clinic with diabetics. Because when diabetics avoid the grains and the starches, even if they're whole grains and beans and root vegetables, and they eat the honeys, the white sugars, and the fruits, their sugar numbers become much more manageable. Yeah, and it was in 1874 that someone first published a paper on the fact that fructose is metabolized by diabetics, where glucose isn't. And at the same time, people were applying the use of sucrose therapeutically for diabetics.
But after the publication of the paper showing that diabetics can metabolize fructose, it was fairly common for people to recommend use of fructose or sucrose to diabetics rather than plain glucose. I think another thing too that happens with sugary foods is you don't often find a food that just has white sugar or honey in it. It's usually a sugar or honey with a carbohydrate. And that's where I think the diabetics get into problems with eating so-called sweet foods. And worse than that, polyunsaturated fats are very often combined as shortening in bakery products, for example.
Right, okay, so that brings us to our good example and our bad example of sugar and fat. And then, of course, the sugar needs to be eaten with a fat as well as a protein, which is what one of our listeners asked me specifically to talk about tonight. The enzyme I mentioned before, pyruvic dehydrogenase, which is activated by insulin or by fructose to handle the oxidation of glucose, that happens to be activated also by saturated fatty acids, but it's inhibited by polyunsaturated fatty acids.
And the big overall diet change in the U.S. over the last 40 years has been contrary to what a lot of people are saying. It's been a slight decrease in sugar, a slight increase in starch consumption, and a big 7% increase in added fats to foods. And most of those fats are unsaturated because of the fear of saturated fats. And the cheapness. Now it's a cheapness, isn't it? The corn oil and safflower oil, all those unsaturated fats, canola, everything, but every liquid vegetable apart from olive oil, basically, is... It's growing en masse. Is...
Hectoes and hectoes. You're right. Already in the 1960s, the polyunsaturated fats were recognized to be the diabetogenic factors. They interfere with the ability to oxidize glucose. It's more recently that they've seen that they specifically inhibit the enzyme which is activated by fructose and insulin. And don't they also destroy the pancreatic beta cells that produce the insulin? Oh, yeah. Every place you look, the polyunsaturated fats contribute to diabetes and obesity. That's a good point and question. Dr. Peat, what's your opinion on the possibility of regenerating islet cells in the pancreas?
Sugar itself, sucrose, is known to stimulate the regeneration of beta cells. That was in my newsletter about a year ago, describing the early treatment of diabetes with glucose and then looking at the new in vitro studies in which sugar stimulates the regeneration and polyunsaturated fats kill the beta cells. And sugar often gets the blame for many other things that the polyunsaturated fats do, such as the glycation of hemoglobin, which they measure as a way of... HbA1c. But most of the glycation, so-called, is really the oxidative breakdown fragments of the polyunsaturated fats.
So a person's HbA1c, for example, could be lowered if they avoided all polyunsaturated oils. Yeah. Because then they'll be able to use their sugars better. So we came up with a really bad example of a way to eat sugar, and that's a donut fried in canola oil or sunflower oil or corn oil. Hold that thought a minute, because I know you probably go straight on to it. I just want to let people know that you're listening to Ask Your Ob-Doctor on KMUV Gallivoo, 91.1 FM.
And from 7.30 until the end of the show at 8 o'clock, you're invited to call in with any questions, either related or unrelated, to this month's Part 2 subject on sugar. And Dr. Peat is our guest speaker. And so, Sarah, would you like to carry on? Oh, I'd better get the number out. Sorry, I'm rushing ahead. The number, if you live in the area, is 923-3911. And if you live outside the area, it's 1-800-KMUD-RAD. That's 1-800-568-3723.
So a really bad example would be, you know, a donut made from white flour with also lots of fat in the donut. I think donut mixtures also have fat, so probably it would be shortening, which would be a corn oil, hydrogenated corn oil or something, and then fried in a liquid vegetable oil. So you not only have pure glucose, but then you have pure polyunsaturated fatty acids that are blocking your cells using any of that pure glucose. And a good example, Dr. Peat said, was ice cream with fruit, fresh fruit.
So there you go, there's the saturated fat and the fructose. Very practical application. Okay, another question for you, Dr. Peat. Also, there was another part in your article that caught my attention, and it was surrounding fat peroxidation, so oxidation of fats involved in the degenerative disease process. Despite the fructose increasing the production of uric acid, and you mentioned uric acid was an endogenous, that is, we manufactured it ourselves, anti-inflammatory. It's considered to be our main antioxidant, and most of the inflammatory signals come from oxidative breakdown products.
And so it's our basic antioxidant and a major anti-inflammatory factor. But the breakdown of these polyunsaturates or the oxidation of those has a very strong inflammatory effect. Is that...? Yeah. But the fish oil type breaks down much faster than the seed oils, and by the time it gets from your food into your bloodstream, there is so much free radical activity that it poisons some of your enzymes involved in immunity. And it's the anti-immune suppressive effect that people see as an anti-inflammatory effect of the fish oil type of fats.
The other, the seed oil fats, don't even have that temporary toxic apparent benefit. Flat out inflammatory. Okay. And then the last point that caught my attention was that, and this is a specific piece of experimentation that conclusively showed this effect, was that people that were given a 300-calorie drink containing either glucose or fructose or OJ, orange juice, separately, so 300 calories containing glucose or fructose or orange juice, those that received the glucose had a large increase in the oxidative inflammatory stress producing reactive oxygen species and a product nucleofactor cap of beta.
But it was absent in those receiving the 300-calorie drink with just fructose or just OJ. Yeah, that has lots of ramifications, including the immune system, which they were looking at some white blood cells, but bone cells are very responsive to the difference in carbohydrate. And about 35 years ago, someone fed different groups of rats either a high starch diet or a high sugar diet. I think it was sucrose in that case, and gave two of the groups a vitamin D deficient diet, and another group got the vitamin D and the standard food ration.
And after they had been on that diet for a while, they tested the strength of their bones, and the vitamin D deficient diet that got starch had the rickett-type bones, poorly calcified, weak, and basically defective as you would expect from a vitamin D deficiency. But those on the high sucrose diet without vitamin D had strong, well-calcified bones. Surprisingly, it apparently was the increased carbon dioxide production from the catalyzed higher metabolic rate, and the carbon dioxide is largely responsible for proper calcification of bone.
So does the higher CO2 content actually allow extracellular calcium to move into bone stores? Yeah, the first bone material laid down is calcium carbonate, even though later it turns to a phosphate compound. And in vitro experiments showed that you can have an acidic condition as long as it's based on carbon dioxide as the acid, and have strong bones, and the same amount of lactic acid, pH, will cause interruption and dissolution of the bones. So it's the fact that starch tends to produce a shift towards lactic acid rather than carbon dioxide.
Now, this is why you say that oxidative exercise like aerobics or jogging is bad for you, because the stress that that causes is counterproductive to calcium being laid down? Yeah, exercise coaches, it's taken about 40 years for the science to get to the trainers, but the East Europeans were the first ones to limit the training their athletes did, and they won a lot of Olympic medals by under-training. Because the whole aerobic exercise puts too much stress on the body?
Yeah, the testosterone goes down and the cortisol goes up, and you lose tissue and speed and coordination. So do they do a different type of exercise for their athletes? Yeah, cutting the exercise short before the lactic acid rises, enough to poison the right hormones. Which, I mean, isn't that long in aerobic exercises? It's like a couple minutes. Yeah, a minute or two is enough. A minute or two at a high heart rate, then followed by a break to let the heart rate go back down?
Yeah, and to get the lactic acid under control, because it turns on the stress hormones that destroy your muscles and nerves and bones. And the other downside of the aerobic exercises that you constantly bring up is that you deplete your own CO2 stores. Yeah, by taking too much oxygen, which is another point that oxygen is not always a good guy. I know we need it to live, to breathe, etc., but it's not the thing we need to be striving for. I think most people that we see in labs, most people's CO2 is fairly low.
The typical well-trained long-distance runner has been found to have basically defective lung function, because the chronic elevation of the lactic acid causes a thickening of the air sacs, making the path of oxygen diffusion longer, and so it poorly oxygenates their blood. Wow. So is it a type of fibrosis from inflammation, or is it a different mechanism? No, just, I think, water-logging. Right, okay. The lactic acid does lead first to water-logging, inflammation, and eventually to fibrosis. Okay, well, you're listening to Ask Your Ob-Doctor on KMU DeGarboville, 91.1 FM.
And from now until the end of the show at 8 o'clock, you're invited to call in with any questions, either related or unrelated to this month's topic on sugars. The number, if you live in the area, is 923 3911. Or if you live outside the area, it's 1-800-568-3723. That's 1-800-KMUD-RAD. Okay, so to carry on with sugars, then. I think what we probably should bring out again is that the brown sugar movement, the hip and trendy replacement to what was maligned early on as the white sugar by many people.
So it was a hip thing to produce brown sugar, raw sugar, molasses, etc., etc., and it was a health food replacement, making a better replacement for the white sugar that we always had before. Say a little bit about brown sugar, because brown sugar itself is not particularly good, is it? In an extreme situation of poverty, the crude brown foods, brown bread, brown rice, brown sugar, or molasses, those are definitely important sources of nutrients. When people start eating more fat and protein, they can tend to lose the nutrients in those,
and they're gaining some freedom from toxins and inflammation when they reduce those brown substances. In molasses, for example, it turns brown partly because the sugars are being caramelized. The minerals combined with heat and oxygen for dehydrating the juices, the minerals catalyze the oxidation, and you get reactions combining sugar molecules and changing them, and these become, to various degrees, toxic or pro-inflammatory, allergenic. And even potentially carcinogenic, that's correct, huh? Yeah. We've all heard about the carcinogenic effect of a burnt piece of toast
or eating too many French fries that are really browned, and it's the same with brown sugar. It's the caramelization of the sugar that causes the allergenic and carcinogenic effect. Okay, we've got our first caller on the air, so let's take our first caller. Hi, I heard you talking about sugar. My son's 34 now, and he drives me nuts about his sugar intake, because I think sugar is really bad for you. When we go out, like to have breakfast or something, he will pour the sugar holder into his coffee.
And I said, you know, don't you know that it causes diabetes or it affects diabetes and your teeth? And he's had kidney stunts, but whatever I say isn't going to hit him, and he just, you know, keeps using sugar. So I don't understand, because I didn't raise him particularly on a sugar-heavy diet. I believed in natural foods and everything. And so is there any information where I can get some that would, you know, influence him about the bad things about sugar? There's a natural tendency of people who have some hormone imbalance, especially hypothyroidism,
which makes your liver unable to store glycogen effectively. It causes a natural craving for sugar. Glycogen, just so you know, is a storage form of sugar. You take in dietary sugars and then it's converted to glycogen, so where everybody can store it up for later on? Uh-huh. Okay. I was always extremely craving sugar. So was I. And generally eating a lot until I took thyroid. I was probably about 40 years old when I first took thyroid. Uh-huh. And I suddenly had no more sugar cravings.
I could go eight hours without getting terribly hungry or shaky or thinking about sweet things. Uh-huh. Well, that's good to know. Well, I'll just have to tell him, you know, he's got to ask his doctor. He said he's been tested for diabetes and he doesn't have it, but, you know, it's unhealthy what he's doing, pouring sugar into, you know, coffee. And I don't know if that's just to irritate me or, you know, but it's obviously he doesn't care and he thinks it's cool. And still he's had kidney stones. Aren't those influenced by sugar?
No, I don't think so. No? Okay. Only in the sense of negative-- I can hardly hear you, doctor. When you aren't eating enough minerals, for example, if you let the sugar displace sources of calcium and magnesium and protein, then you do tend to form stones. The parathyroid hormone and other inflammatory things tend to create mineralization of soft tissues and formation of stones in the kidneys, bladder, and gallbladder. Wow. So what would be the test that would give him the information he needs? Well, a vitamin D-- Vitamin D.
-- serum test for vitamin D3 is one relevant thing. I've had that. Well, and mine came out all normal and everything, so I don't know. But anyway, that's good information. I will pass it on to my son. And the fact that he's adding that white sugar to his coffee is probably protective because coffee lowers your blood sugar, and if you have just pure black coffee, you'll actually end up lowering your blood sugar.
And if he's someone who's craving a lot of sugars, that's probably why he's just figured it out that if he has coffee, he better have sugar with it because it makes him feel better. Yeah, I take my coffee black, so I don't know. It's really weird for me. And it's going to be easier for his body to use the white sugar than it would be a big pile of pancakes. But he probably just craves all types of sugars, whether they come from starches or sugar. Is he quite lean?
No, and he works really, really hard, but he's stocky. He doesn't -- I don't know. I know he likes ice cream and stuff, but it's mainly what I just see him dump, like a sugar shaker into coffee. And we could be in an organic restaurant or whatever and having healthy foods, and he's still got to have that sugar fix. Well, his body's obviously telling him something. Yeah. He could get his thyroid checked and his vitamin D checked, and that would be a good place to start. Yeah, that would be a good start.
Well, thank you so much for your help. I really appreciate it. You're very welcome. All right, bye-bye. Bye-bye. Okay, well, we have another caller on the air, so let's take this one. You're on the air. Hello. Hi, you're on the air. Hi, guys. This is Kesha. Hi, Kesha. Hello. Well, first I just want to really tell you how much I appreciate you guys bringing this information to the airways, and I really want to encourage the listeners to really listen with an open heart and kind of put everything you've heard your whole life in the background
and just take in the information that has it come, because this isn't readily available information. But to get back to that previous caller, you know, about the whole sugar with the coffee and whatnot, maybe you could expound a little bit more on the whole key of balance and how when you do eat, consume sugar, how it is important to have it with the proper amount of fat and protein to slow down, you know, the release of the sugar, and vice versa. If you're going to have protein, you need the sugar to help the body utilize
or be able to utilize and break down the protein, as you know what I'm saying. Exactly. So anyway, I just wanted to encourage you guys to clarify that even more so that people really, as they do tune in, even if they tune in to the middle of the show and they hear all these great things about sugar, go back to the balance and also, you know, I think it's great how you were explaining to add sugar into the coffee to help boost up your blood sugar, you know, and all of that.
But anyway, I just want to thank you guys a lot. Okay. Dr. Peat? Thank you for your call, Tashian. Yeah. Dr. Peat, can you explain -- sorry, Andrew -- can you explain why it's so important to have a protein, to have it with fruit or honey or sugar because of the blood sugar lowering effect of the protein? Yeah, the amino acids in the protein themselves are strong stimulants of the insulin secretion. And when you don't take in sugar, the insulin to dispose of the protein will lower your blood sugar.
And to prevent the blood sugar going down, you tend to produce either adrenaline or cortisol or both. And if your liver didn't have the glycogen stored to release glucose under the influence of adrenaline, then you depend on cortisol to keep your blood sugar steady, and cortisol activates the conversion of protein to sugar and fat. And so you've destroyed a big part of the protein that you've just eaten. I've seen people who were eating a couple of pounds of meat a day who were having signs of protein deficiency and getting fat.
So to handle the protein efficiently, you need the glucose to make sure that your insulin isn't lowering your blood sugar. You need either glucose or fructose to steady your blood sugar. And the fat does several things. The saturated fat works with fructose and insulin to handle your oxidation of the glucose. And the fat also slows the absorption so that you don't get a surge of glucose in your blood from eating, say, a coffee with sugar. And the coffee, like the glucose, stimulates your metabolic rate.
And both of those, by increasing your metabolic rate, are going to increase your general nutritional requirements. Minerals and all of the vitamins have to be adequate. And if you substitute the sugar for things like fruit, milk, cheese, shellfish, eggs, and so on, then you're very likely to become deficient. Biotin and vitamin B6 and panthenic acid and selenium and copper are things that are among the first to become deficient if you try to run on too much coffee and sugar and not enough food.
So, yeah, as much as the fructose helps people's cells pick up the sugar and there's all these anti-inflammatory effects from eating fructose or fruit or honey or sugar, everything has to be kept in a balance, is what I guess you're trying to say here, Dr. Peat, with the correct nutritional balance of proteins and good saturated fats, coconut oil and butter. Otherwise, you will suffer a deficiency from either too much protein or too many sugars. Okay, well, just so people can get a list of some of the top fructose sources that also don't just have fructose.
They have fructose and glucose, but they're things that you'd expect, like dates. Dates are 32% fructose. They contain B vitamins, potassium, calcium, and iron. I know, Dr. Peat, you're not too big on iron because iron is a particularly inflammatory iron. But when it's with the other minerals, it does help protect you from overloading on iron. Yeah, we're not talking about over-iron consumption. Okay, and then raisins. Raisins are in the same kind of group as dates. They're 30% fructose, antioxidant-rich. And then agave. Now, what do you think about agave?
Agave nectar has been touted as a very good replacement. It actually contains about 43% fructose, as well as the fructans, the polymers of fructose. And they're also found in asparagus and artichokes. Yeah, the fact that they mentioned the fructans, I think probably means that it's being produced enzymically from the core of the agave plant rather than from the juice. Because that's a waste product, if you like, is it? Yeah. Of tequila production. Yeah. They're using spent raw material.
And so, Dr., can you give us some examples of some good food combining for protein, fat, and good sugar? Oh, fruit and cheese would be a basic thing for snacks as well as meals. Grapes and cheese. Actually, we have another caller on the air, so let's take this other caller. Hi, yes, great show. First, I wanted to mention, Dr. Peat, whatever you did when that woman said that she couldn't hear you, I haven't heard you better on this show than when whatever you did was that. So keep doing it.
I know Michael McCaskill does everything he can to keep everyone's levels good, but I have a little trouble hearing to start with, and sometimes it is hard to hear your wisdom, and I really appreciate what you bring to the air. You know, it's come up in recent news reports that it seems like under constant attack are the natural substances on the earth, what with raw food being attacked by the food rallies and the federal forces going in and dumping this raw milk,
and then what's going on recently with medicinal marijuana here after Obama told us it was going to be left alone if it was legal in the states where it was legal. I understand Phoenix and states all along the west in Colorado, and of course right here in our own backyard, have been attacked. It always amazes me that the people who put out chemical concoctions cooked up in a lab somewhere, call it Vioxx, say it's safe and kill a bunch of people before it's taken off the market but nobody goes to jail,
versus the people who are taken to jail because their food is inherently dangerous when it's natural. I don't get it, but you guys are on the front lines, and I really, really appreciate you bringing it back to Mother Nature and bringing it home because this is provided for us, and you all are explaining what it does as it's been provided for, so thank you. I wanted to ask specifically about dextrose. Dextrose, from what I gather in my research, is basically that spoonful of sugar that helps the medicine go down
because I don't see dextrose mixed in with much of anything else but medicine. I'm curious as to the function and purpose of dextrose, what it's really all about. Also, since Steve Jobs recently passed and pancreatic cancer was related to that, I understand he used to stay up for days at a time working on his inventions, a lot of coffee, but he also ate a lot of health food. Maybe you could address the aspects again of -- because I was having a little trouble hearing this --
of what can help regenerate those pancreatic cells and what can adversely affect them as far as benefits of coffee and keeping that in balance. So dextrose and pancreas, that's kind of the basic questions, and thanks again for all that every one of you do. Thank you. Thank you, Dr. Eccle. Dr. Peat. What do you think of dextrose, Dr. Peat? Well, glucose, it's just the other word for glucose, and starch turns into that. It's great stuff in itself when it's in the right balance with other things,
including a little bit of fructose always and saturated fat and minerals and vitamins. The dextrose or glucose itself is a factor in helping the pancreas to regenerate. It's the polyunsaturated fats which misdirect the metabolism of glucose and fructose, and the polyunsaturated fats that are creating the epidemic of diabetes and obesity and later all of the degenerative diseases, cancer and Alzheimer's and so on. This is your engineer. I have a question. Do they call it dextrose when it's being used industrially instead of a food, or how do they call it dextrose instead of glucose?
It just has to do with the optical rotation of it. It's just a different chemical history of the way they name the molecules. Fructose was called levulose because it turns the light to the left. Okay, so basically dextrose just gets broken down into glucose. It is glucose. It is glucose, okay. There's another caller on the air, so let's take this next caller. Hello, is that me? You're on the air, yeah. Hi, yeah. I would like to ask the doctor, okay, I've stopped eating meat, beef,
basically I ate a little bit of lamb and I ate a little bit of pork and I ate a lot of fish. I stopped drinking coffee. I stopped using mostly butter, and I stopped using milk altogether. And I'm curious about what is--because I have this lower back condition, but I don't have the arthritis anymore that I had from basically from beef which I think was like--I call it uric acid. But I have like a lower back condition and kind of a hip condition. And I was curious if there was--I take vitamin D3.
I take soluble B12, which is good. I'm kind of curious about what would be good, because I don't use sugar at all. I mean, if I use anything, I use a little bit of honey, but like that. Anyway, I'm going to get off of the thing here and-- Wait a minute. --let's go in the air. Can you stay on the air because I think Dr. Peat might have some questions for you. Okay, but I can't hear. Oh, right. Can you turn him up a little bit?
Okay, Dr. Peat, can you try to talk especially loud for this next caller here? I'll see. Honey has all of the virtues of ordinary sucrose, and it has some special benefits such as antiseptic materials that the bees collect from the flowers. But basically-- I also understand that there was some old Chinese princesses that were preserved in honey that are still like okay, and honey is still edible. Yeah, ordinary white sugar has many of those same properties. They've done major surgery, like chest surgery, where they didn't have antibiotics,
and they just filled the hole with white crystalline sugar, and the person recovered and had fewer scars than would have happened if they had used antibiotics. Really? That's fascinating. Honey has-- That's fascinating. Yeah, I've got some of the references in my Diabetes and Sugar Newsletter. Did you hear my questions? Yeah, I think you probably had a slight weakness of thyroid function. Meat eaters often get--if they eat too much meat in relation to their thyroid function, they'll often get symptoms including arthritis. And the low back symptoms are very common in a thyroid problem.
So you want to check your temperature and pulse rate and maybe have your thyroid function checked. But sometimes just a daily raw carrot will help make up for the thyroid deficiency by reducing the bacterial toxins that poison your liver and interfere with thyroid function. Okay, and what about kidney? Same thing. The endotoxin absorbed from poorly digested plant material is the main thing. The endotoxin interferes with glucose or sugar oxidation and prevents the activation of the thyroid hormone. And then that leads to all of the inflammatory things,
and especially cartilage, the discs between vertebrae tend to swell or become soft when you're thyroid deficient and having endotoxin. What I was saying was that I stopped taking any basic dairy. I do a little butter and a little bit of yogurt, but I don't do any milk. I don't do any beef. What about eggs? I don't do any--pardon me? Eggs. Eggs. No, I eat eggs maybe twice a week. You want to try to get at least 80 grams of good protein every day. Oh, yeah. No, no, I understand the protein. I eat lamb.
I eat a lot of fish and stuff, but I stopped doing milk, coffee, sugar, white sugar, and beef basically. What about fruit like orange juice? I'm not too into orange juice. I can use it, but it tends to make me rather phlegmy in my throat. Well, dates and grapes, raisins, I love all that stuff. Yeah, then-- And I eat them a lot. Calcium would be the main thing to concentrate on if you're eating enough fish and lamb and eggs. Okay. You should maybe try powdering eggshells. Okay, you know what?
I'm sorry to have to break in here. Yeah, okay. I'm going to get out of here and get somebody else on. No, no, we've only got two minutes left, so we need to-- Wrap up the show. We need to thank Dr. Peat for his generous time and his wisdom. Thank you, Dr. Peat, so much for joining us. Okay. Okay, so people that have heard this evening's show with Dr. Peat, please go check his website. www.raypeat.com There's lots of scientific reference articles to back up everything that you've heard this evening and much, much more.
So his website is always a good source of impartial information, and some of it, obviously, whilst counterculture, it's just open your eyes, folks. It's out there just for the looking and for those of you who have ears to hear. So until the third Friday of November-- We've still got a minute and a half. There's only we're going to cut off too short, but until the third Friday of next month, November-- November 18th. November the 18th. That'll be-- The clocks will be going back, and it'll be dark when we come in. So for those people--
Okay, our phone number. Let's just tell people our phone number, shall we? Okay, our number's-- Sarah, how about you want to say it? There you go. If you live in the area, it's 707-986-9506, or if you live outside of the area, we have a toll-free number. That's 1-888-WBM-ERB, which is 926-4372. And thank you very much for listening. We really appreciate all of our callers calling in and all the support. Thank you. Thank you for your time. And don't forget Pledge Drive for UK Mudd listeners. Pledge Drive is coming up next week.
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