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[Music] Well welcome to this month's Ask Your Herb Doctor. My name is Andrew Murray. For those of you who perhaps have never listened to the show which runs every third Friday of the month from 7 till 8 p.m. I'm a licensed medical herbalist who trained in England and graduated there with a degree in herbal medicine. I run a clinic in Garboville where I consult with clients about a wide range of conditions and recommend herbal medicine and dietary advice. So you're listening to Ask Your Herb Doctor on KMED Garboville 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 subject of "You Are What You Eat". The number here if you live in the area is 923 3911 or if you live outside the area the toll-free number is 1-800-568-3723. So you are what you eat. This phrase has come to us via quite a tortuous route Anthelm Brilat Savarin wrote in Physiology du Gout ou Meditation des Gastronomies Transcendentes in 1826 saying "Tell me what you eat and I will tell you what
you are." In an essay titled "Concerning Spiritualism and Materialism 1863 to 1864" Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach wrote "De Mensch ist was er ist" so that translates into English "As man is what he eats". Neither Brilat Savarin or Feuerbach meant their quotations to be taken literally. They were stating that the food one eats has a bearing on one's state of mind or and/or health. The actual phrase didn't emerge in English until some time later. In the 1920s and 30s the nutritionist Victor Lindler who was a strong believer in the idea that food
controls health developed the catabolic diet. Now that view gained some adherence at the time and the earliest known printed example is from an advert for beef in a 1923 edition of the Bridgeport Telegraph for United Meat Markets. In Australia as elsewhere nearly half of the population will experience a mental health problem at some point in their lives and this means even people who are not personally affected are likely to know someone who has experienced such an illness and research now suggests that depression and
dementia are affected by the quality of our diets across the life course. Indeed studies from countries as diverse as Norway, Spain, Japan, China, the United Kingdom, the United States and Australia show people whose diets are healthier are less likely to experience depression. The most recent evidence points to the importance of the mother's diets for the mental and physical health of their children and I know Dr. Raymond Peat has been very keen to point out that mother's nutrition is extremely important setting up the child's future
and Dr. Peat is with us in the show in a few minutes here we'll be introducing Dr. Peat and hearing his perspective on You Are What You Eat because I know he has some very unique ways and perspectives of looking at this subject. Now the role of nutrition on development is an obvious one but mostly ignored or overlooked in the perspective of health and well-being and the concept of homeostasis that is the constancy of the inner environment or internal milieu was first originally formulated by the French physiologist Claude
Bernard who was alive from 1813 to 1878 and he was a French physiologist. Well Dr. Peat thanks so much for joining us. Okay so as always people who have tuned into the show who may not have heard you I would appreciate if you would give an outline of your academic and professional background before we get into tonight's subject. After I had studied in the humanities and taught art and English and various things I decided to go back to graduate school in biology at 1968 University of Oregon and
wrote my dissertation on the age-related changes in oxidative metabolism in the hamster uterus and how it affects fertility with aging and that involved hormones and nutrition among other things and how the environment affects those factors especially the efficiency of metabolism using oxygen and since then I've been writing and doing consultations and trying to figure things out still working on some of those same themes oxidative metabolism and aging the whole idea of metabolic efficiency is one of my current themes Lindar that you just mentioned his idea of the catabolic diet was to choose
foods for their metabolic inefficiency because people eating to satisfy their appetite tend to get fat on the available foods and he found that he could get people to lose fat very consistently and quickly by choosing certain foods that increased their metabolic rate so that they could burn calories faster than they were eating them that was in the 1920s when he did that research and just by chance a few years later George Burr who was studying the effect of fats in the diet found if he made his rats deficient in the
unsaturated fatty acids they burned calories at a terrific rate as much as 50% faster than normal and he thought that was bad and he became very popular with the agricultural industry because they found that feeding those poly unsaturated fats to pigs and chickens and such they would gain weight quickly and cheaply without eating very much food just the opposite of what Lindar wanted to do was to find foods that would decrease the efficiency of the metabolism so that people would produce heat without gaining weight. Do you know
what kind of foods Lindlar advocated? Lots of fruits and vegetables including fruit juices. Okay. The standard nutritional education emphasizes the concept of specific dynamic action or the thermogenic effect of various foods and it's widely recognized that eating protein increases your body temperature and heat production. Okay. By quite a bit 15 or 20 percent and sugar a little less than that. I know you've mentioned I don't mean to interrupt but I know you've mentioned quite a lot in the past about coconut being thermogenic. Coconut oil.
Sorry. Yeah I think there are many reasons for that and the coconut is a very highly saturated fat and it happens that the unsaturated fats interfere with the mitochondrial use of oxygen in several ways by producing free radicals inflammation and by interfering in a variety of ways with thyroid hormone function. So all along the line the polyunsaturated fats slow down oxidative metabolism and so if your body is soaked in these conventional seed oils then when you eat coconut oil especially the shorter very mobile fatty acids
that are only a third or half as long as the standard fats these move in the cells very quickly and oxidize without that antithyroid effect the seed oils mostly have. Okay interesting. Okay so Victor Landler then came up with the the paper on catabolic a catabolic diet so the opposite of anabolism which is to build muscle and catabolism is to break it down with the production of heat. Yeah in the 50s and 60s people were experimenting with what kind of diet is efficient for losing fat and still maintaining your health. They did
experiments in which people would just have pure water for 10 days or 14 days and then they would analyze what happened to their bodies and they found that they lost almost pure fat a pure protein during that time very little fat right right okay and if they have eight maybe six to eight hundred calories per day during that same 10 to 14 days they would lose mostly fat and very little protein. Interesting because that's the muscle mass that a person loses when
they fast or for example if they're using like you said that water for 10 days that you touch the first thing is you lose as your muscle mass isn't it? Yeah and that's why so many women are dieting constantly and getting fatter because. Explain that a little will you. If they eat an extremely low calorie diet creating stress the high cortisol and other stress hormones cause them to break down their protein and their big muscles shrink so that a typical dieter will you can hardly see her calf muscles become so atrophied then the big
skeletal muscles even at rest burn fat to maintain themselves. Okay. Almost a pure fat diet when they're at rest. Okay. And so the more dieting they do if they do it extremely the smaller their muscles get and the easier it is to get fat the next time they eat a normal diet. Right and you said with the addition of how much how much fat was the addition that caused the the protein to be conserved in that diet? Oh they fed them different foods like a mixed diet a little
protein a little carbohydrate and not especially a low fat intake but just so that they they were able to get some of their calorie needs from the diet rather than from their tissues because when you're in the first day on a fast your body uses up the sugar that's stored as glycogen and as soon as your blood sugar falls because you've used up your stores then your cortisol rises first the adrenaline and the cortisol and the cortisol having no food available it starts converting your thymus gland and the big skeletal muscles mostly to free
amino acids which then can be some of them are converted to glucose to feed your blood cells and brain and eyes and so on because those have an absolute requirement for glucose and so even a plain sugar diet to supply that minimal amount of your brain and blood cells are required that will greatly prevent the rising cortisol and loss of good tissue. Okay you listen to Ask Your Ob Doctor on KMUD Garboville 91.1 FM and from 730 until the end of the show you're invited
to call in with any questions either related or unrelated to this month's topic of you are what you eat we're joined by Dr. Raymond Peat and he has a wealth of experience and knowledge that he's currently sharing and Dr. Peat it's it's well established I just want to jump onto this next subject of and probably spend a little bit more time on what's coming out in science about the what they call the microbiome of a person's body it's well established that your gut apparently is your second brain providing more input to your brain than
the brain provides to it and this is why your gut health is largely related in your gut bacteria including your mental health and emotional well-being so it's been there's quite a few quite a few journal articles that have come out in 2013 and 2014 about the microbiome and making links as specifically to disease processes and the microbiome and I know that you advocate several several dietary factors that I think inadvertently are modulating if you like the microbiome and I think they the science bringing about the explanation
of the microbiome is now justifying what you're saying about for example indigestible fibers like bamboo shoots carrots etc as being healthful in terms of their modulating the microbial content of the gut and along with things like cascara and now you talk a lot about cascara not just for bowel motility and improving bowel function and waste clearance but also because the cascara itself has a cyclic structure quite similar to tetracycline in terms of it being a similar antibiotic in the gut and how this affecting bacterial colonies in a positive way to remove bad bacteria
naturally allows normal healthy bacteria to flourish and therefore modulate the the gut as an organism yeah and it's interesting that both imodin from cascara or a Chinese rhubarb and such and tetracycline and related minocycline and doxycycline these are anti-inflammatory as well as antiseptic and imodin and the tetracyclines have a surprising range of good effects anti-inflammatory and probably mood improving minocycline is being found to prevent possibly improve dementia Alzheimer's disease and imodin has every year it seems like there are half a dozen new functions that are found for
imodin including improving the flora of the intestine. Imodin am I right in thinking that imodin is also present in aloe vera? Yeah yeah lots of plant yeah generally they're laxative plants but the you know it isn't the typical purging kind of laxative if the imodin if the cascara isn't properly aged right it does have an irritating purging effect but aging makes it insoluble in water comparatively and it loses the irritating inflammatory property and becomes anti-inflammatory and sedative and it actually increases the production
of energy while having a nerve calming sedative effect. And this again is that red compound that you've mentioned in the past that has been is energetically favorable in terms of its both electron quenching activity and its anti-inflammatory activity? Yeah as sort of a sideline to my research in graduate school on what causes oxidative metabolism to go down with aging I would look for all kinds of plant and animals that were colored and do extracts and look for things that stimulated oxidative metabolism and I got the
interest partly from St. Georgie's work he found that the the color of cells is closely connected to the oxidative process for example the deep maroon or purple color of the liver and certain areas of the brain are deeply pigmented he knew that it didn't have any the usual functions of pigment and he found that it was related to well he knew that semiconductors are generally black because of a peculiar electronic arrangement that causes them to absorb all the light that hits them and he figured that the life process involves
semiconduction and so pigments are especially relevant to the use of energy and living things. That's right I mean in terms of transporting electrons from one phase to another and therefore carrying either electrical charge as a form of energy. Yeah I think last month we were talking about methylene blue an artificial electron transporter and it can like vitamin C vitamin C in this normal form isn't a pigment but it has some of the same electronic behaviors both of those can pick up electrons from nutrients such as glucose
and pass them into the mitochondrion even if the first two units of the mitochondrion are damaged methylene blue and vitamin C and probably many other natural pigments can deliver energy electrons down to the third complex of the mitochondrion and allow it to keep function functioning even after a serious damage and so part of that function is to stop producing free radicals which are mostly produced in the upper part of the electron transport chain as it's being damaged. Okay so getting on to the kind of wider topic
of you are what you eat I think probably just to bring out some of those things that you mentioned for many different conditions or processes that can be corrected by various I mean you prescribe a lot of dietary advice in terms of modulating the way people's physiology is working and therefore bringing people back to good health in a very natural way with no side effects it's not a drug orientated approach as very nutritional and I know obviously you're very keen on saturated fats as opposed to the polys and the poly
unsaturated being very detrimental to health obviously sugar I know you talk a lot about fruit juices and fructose in particular as an energy promoter in terms of you are what you eat the the gut bacteria and the bacteria within the bowel and what do you know from the studies that have been done on the mood for example and or autism in children that have have shown some definite correlation between gut bacteria and their intestinal flora and the intestinal flora in populations that are not suffering with autism and how how
I think in the future perhaps the the antibiotics that are very useful and I know you're an advocate of antibiotics and I know most people unfortunately have a mistaken belief that antibiotics are bad I think just from the cases where maybe females are getting thrush after using antibiotics it conjures up this kind of popular myth or popular notion that antibiotics are bad but actually we know that they're very positive influences on our physiology and especially on our gut for wiping out bad bacteria but what's your thought
about altering the so-called microbiome of the body so that specific bacteria that are known to be detrimental to health can be eradicated and leaving the positive bacteria behind to actually influence the populations within the digestive tract about 1990 I read an article from a fertility clinic in which a lot of the women were trying to conceive and the fertilized ovum just wouldn't implant and the doctors thought that might indicate that there was an infection in the uterus so they gave all of their patients a course of
antibiotics and besides improving their fertility a lot of the patients said suddenly that their chronic headaches had disappeared and so they gave them hormone tests to see what was going on and causing both fertility to improve and headaches and other symptoms to disappear they found that the antibiotics had lowered their cortisol and estrogen production and increased progesterone their serum explaining the increased fertility but a whole range of other symptoms related to stress and following reading about that I suggested that because I knew that the estrogen which is excreted by a healthy liver in
the vial is much of it is reabsorbed and stays in the circulation if you have a sluggish intestine and so I suggested that if they eat a carrot every day to stimulate the intestine the carrot will bind the vial and lower the serum estrogen level that's now generally accepted that any fiber tends to lower your absorption of estrogen from the vial and within three or four days these people tested their estrogen cortisol and progesterone and it was doing the same thing that the synthetic antibiotics had done and knowing about
carrots and they can get very tiresome if you eat one of these for years I looked around for other foods that were antiseptic yeah I'd have that same effect and bamboo shoots are something that you don't get too tired of they don't have much flavor so you can put them in a lot of different foods and cooking a bamboo shoot doesn't destroy the fiber the way it cooked carrot does so you have to eat raw carrots or cooked bamboo shoots. Do you know of any other fibers Dr. Peat that have that effect?
Mushrooms I think. Mushrooms? Yeah because they grow underground in a very decaying environment they have to have powerful antibiotics. Interesting do you not okay I suppose you surprise me when you say mushrooms because I wouldn't have thought that would have been naturally one thing that you would have said to someone would be okay to eat but you're I don't know anything about mushrooms actually but except that principle yeah they are okay antiseptic and okay they have a high value protein and the protein happens to be pretty low in methionine which is the most toxic of
the amino acids. Methionine are the amino acids that most slow your metabolism and so you're getting two of the metabolic stimulants lowering the estrogen disinfecting your intestine. Okay hold it there Dr. Peat for a moment because we do I think we have one or two callers on the air so let's start let's just start with the first caller and see where we're going with this. Caller you're on the air and where you from? Hello is this me? Yes you're on the air where you from? Hey I'm
from Eastern Oregon. Eastern Oregon okay welcome to the show. Well thank you thank you for having me I just have a question the last month I developed very very high blood pressure that spikes very high and I don't have it running my family and I never had it before I had normal and what I did is about two months ago I had increased had my t3 medicine increased a little bit and I got heart palpitations okay so I was titrating down off of that for over a period of
six weeks and I still had the heart palpitations until I went to nothing and then I heard your show last month and I started magnesium and the heart palpitations went away. Yeah we Dr. Peat mentioned that didn't he for palpitations. Yeah thank you so much but my but I also in October went on a silly little thing where I was trying to increase my body temperature because even with the thyroid supplement it still is kind of low okay and I heard that if you
eat a lot of more sugar and salt and high dense foods that you can do that so I increased my salto quite a bit and I wasn't worried because I always have low blood pressure medium low you know normal oh my and then and then over this last month my blood pressure has just skyrocketed and it was kind of scary and I went to the doctor now I'm on medicine but I was wondering could could coming down off of the thyroid which I went back on and and also that high salt diet
could that have contributed to this really crazy high blood pressure. Well first the first thing's first let's just how much salt were you using? Quite a bit I just poured on everything and just throughout the day I don't I never measured it or anything quite a bit. Yeah. More than I normally did. Yeah. My guess is maybe three or four thousand milligrams that like almost like two days worth in one day I did that for a couple three weeks and I stopped. Okay.
Was your TSH measured as part of the thyroid exam? When I first was on I've been on T4 for six months and when they first started it it was like three but then it went down to below zero yeah it's like point zero three or something it's way low. TSH causes a lot of the symptoms of hypothyroidism and so a T3 will cause your T4 to go down and if it goes too low your TSH might come up and TSH does a lot of things that go with hypothyroidism including high blood
pressure it makes your red cells more rigid your blood and serum more viscous and it tightens up small blood vessels everything it does tends to create higher blood pressure so if your TSH is currently extremely low then you probably should have your other hormones such as adrenaline checked to see what might be causing that. Dr. Peat you always advocate a TSH as close to zero as possible just because it's a fairly inflammatory chaperone molecule anyway don't you? Yeah. Yeah so it's a caller your right your question has if you if
you understood the answer or? Well I'm from what I understand is that my THC if it gets pretty low as a T3 you'll make it lower and if you increase okay I think I got mixed up I'm sorry so something about the TSH that extra T3 can cause it to start rising up again or am I incorrect? Yeah if you had lowered your TSH by taking fairly large amounts of T4 thyroxine. It was 25 micrograms. Oh well that isn't very much. No but it was still low it got low under
one it got it became 0.03 or 0.04 it was really low and then I and then they and then several months later I they incorporated T3 at 25 and I cut it in fours and spread it throughout the day and I've done really well and that went on for a month and then they increased it another 25 which we made it 50 and I split those throughout the day and in fours and then lo and behold I started having heart palpitations at night and all these other symptoms and so I
titrated down and I don't know I went to the doctor because I was a little frightened and they said they checked my thyroid and they said it's fine but you know I know that numbers their numbers might not be optimal. Were the other things like albumin and blood sugar okay? They didn't say I don't know I don't know I suppose I can find out and they probably have the record so I can find out about the albumin. They didn't say they said all my lab was fine what they
said. Do you get a fairly balanced diet like with milk and cheese and eggs? Yes I stopped doing that silly little thing I did for three weeks there with the extra with the high dense different kind of eating and prior to that and since then I I drink milk a quart and a half or so and organic fresh squeezed orange juice quart and plus and and cheese and eggs yeah and and Great Lakes gelatin. Is there anything that might be irritating your digestive system sometimes that
can cause stress and increase pressure? No but do you think that maybe that they may say that my numbers are fine and maybe they may not be as optimal as they could be like the TSH and I'm sorry what numbers did you ask? It's good to have albumin well above 40 okay and blood glucose anywhere 70 to 110 should be okay yeah and potassium and sodium should be around the middle of the scale. Okay well they put me on medicines and now I'm on medicine so I'm
a little leery about it but it was pretty scary it was up to like 200 and over a hundred and then it would kind of go down and then it would fluctuate in between that. Yeah sounds a lot like an alarm reaction a stress-related alarm reaction of adrenaline producing that kind of blood pressure because a thyroid what do you think about thyroid hormone Dr. Peat and blood pressure I mean it's actually a regulator of high blood pressure when people get high blood pressure generally they are subject to adrenaline and that other sympathetic
you know hormones that drive blood pressure up and thyroid hormones specifically antagonizes that and brings blood pressure down into it. Especially when it comes on quickly like that it's adrenaline or maybe serotonin the reason I asked about any irritating food if you don't dissolve the gelatin thoroughly sometimes that can cause gas and irritation by feeding bacteria in the intestine. I don't dissolve it I kind of put it in my orange juice and stir it and cold orange juice and drink it that way so I don't
like cook it or anything. I mix it in with the orange juice but I don't like my stomach's irritated but I don't know maybe it is and I don't know it I don't feel like it's causing gas but I thought if I started back up on the T3 like I had and I've been on it for several weeks maybe three weeks now that maybe eventually it would normalize the blood pressure is that a possibility? Is your pulse rate about where it was? About where it was prior to all this?
Is it in the range of 70 to 90? Yeah it's always been around around that more towards the 70. Yeah it hasn't my pulse hasn't changed too much. Magnesium and calcium are two nutrients that help to lower blood pressure but potassium is probably the most powerful. Orange juice is a very good source of potassium so a quart of orange juice spread out through the day. Okay. Not a potassium. I'm taking extra magnesium since that helps with the palpitations and I drink lots of milk and orange juice. And one other nutrient that can powerfully lower blood
pressure is vitamin K. For example the drops that deliver one milligram of vitamin K per drop. I know a doctor who for several months had his blood pressure had been 240 over 140 no 240 over 70 and within two or three weeks of using a lot of vitamin K his pressure came down to 140 over 70. Okay. So vitamin K in terms of a daily a daily trial of vitamin K what do you think would be a reasonable? Well that doctor who got such extreme results was taking 40 or 50
milligrams per day. Right 40 or 50 drops of that. Yeah. Okay. Okay all right I wrote all this down thank you so much. I also too though there they put me on medicine now and I'm on lisinopril plus diuretic with it. So that might kind of add to the mix now somehow I'm sure probably. Yeah I'm sure I'm sure the it will be difficult to tell what your proper blood pressure was all the time you're using something like lisinopril. Yeah I just started it I just started
that well last two weeks and now they add and it didn't help and so now they added it with a diuretic. I don't know I didn't know what to say. You know it definitely sounds something more than anything to do with your thyroid that you've been using because it's definitely very very short and very quick to come on you know it's a very rapid onset so as Dr. Peat was saying it's much more much more indicative of something hormone or a catecholamine
based that would have a such a rapid onset. Okay yeah it's probably a little bit outside of the scope of this talk show just a comment on this any further though but I appreciate your call. Thank you so much I appreciate you you too thank you. You're welcome. Okay so what other callers we have the next caller you're on the air where you from? Missouri. Okay hi go ahead. Hello this is David from Missouri. Yeah go ahead David I didn't I think we got some
interference between you. Yeah well you know just so you know normally you would be able to hear the radio show when you're waiting on the phone and it's not doing that so I had to listen to that. Unfortunately there's some hum here in the studio that I can hear and whenever the lights flashing I also hear that too so I think there's some kind of it's it's not uncommon unfortunately. That's what I was saying normally you can hear the radio show while you have the phone
you know listening to the phone while you're put on hold and you can't do that got it some reason so they're doing something differently. I'm not sure. Yeah you know one of the things does listening to the news cause high blood pressure? Quite probably if it's bad news. That was one of the things you didn't ask her so I quit listening to the news and my blood pressure went down. There you go. But anyway you know I've heard for years that coconut oil is anti an antibiotic
and also antifungal and number one I wanted to ask Dr. Peat if that is true and then how would that work if that were the case and then also I think along the same lines is you know I've heard him or I shouldn't say him Dr. Peat I've heard you say that when you eat starch that the starch is able to get into the bloodstream and creates all sorts of problems in capillaries and different vessels and that the saturated fat helps to prevent that so how does
saturated fat help along those lines as well is it somehow coating the bacteria and the the molecules of starch? Yeah it slows digestion enough that it keeps things in an emulsion that the enzymes have time to start breaking down the starch particles. It isn't known exactly why that happens but Gerhardt I forgot his name at the moment the man who did the presorption research showed that the starch without fat would immediately in 15 or 20 minutes show up in your bloodstream but with fat it didn't show up in the bloodstream and it
probably is because it gives it time to break down a little bit but I think the most important effect of the fat is that germicidal action suppressing the bacteria that if your digestion is really working right your whole small intestine should be sterile free of bacteria and sluggish digestion low thyroid people often get bacteria growing all the way up close to their stomach and in that case when you eat any starch it feeds the bacteria the bacteria produce endotoxin which causes your intestine to produce nitric oxide
and serotonin and histamine and the nitric oxide is a very powerful poison of oxidative metabolism so the combination of bacteria especially in the small intestine and any kind of starch that isn't quickly absorbed in your bloodstream is going to feed the bacteria increase the nitric oxide and basically poison your respiratory metabolism all through your body many years ago people experimenting with germ-free animals their whole life they're isolated from bacteria and they have a very healthy life low mortality until extreme old age and they eat about 20 or 30 percent more calories than the
ordinary germ-burying mice but they are leaner much smaller fat deposits and they don't suffer from anxiety and how to explain that it means that the bacteria are producing something that poisons your metabolism the George Burr's research with the polyunsaturated fats he demonstrated that these fats have a similar poisoning effect on your oxidative metabolism so that without them the animals burn 30 to 50 percent more energy without getting fat so the possibly polyunsaturated fats are contributing to the nitric oxide production but definitely the bacteria eating starch are a major source of this
anti-metabolic material and you know so is the coconut oil because of the short chain and the medium chain possibly better in that action that you just described then say butter and no all of that really matter saturated fats are pretty good anti-fungal and antibacterials but I think the the shorter chain the athletes foot remedy that kills fungus very efficiently is an 11 carbon saturated fat or a mono unsaturated and the shorter they are the faster they diffuse and apparently they're they're more active as a toxin
or antiseptic if they're a little shorter than the steric acid of butter but okay so so pop traditionally known as a good antiseptic and that's usually made with a steric acid you know dr. Peat based on several things that you've recommended I you know I grow different bamboos and so I can't wait till the spring because I'm going to try this soup and I'm just curious what you think about it I'm going to use a acne juicer and I'm going to get the juice from
potatoes and then I was going to cook the bamboo sprouts in there and now that I for some reason I always thought that you didn't think that mushrooms were possibly good but I would love to have shiitake mushrooms in that soup and then put plenty of butter and coconut oil and that do you think that's a in some salt do you think that's a decent soup I think so but it's really good to make sure you don't get toxic mushrooms well you know I the only thing I grow is
shiitake which is that is that possibly a good mushroom you know I have to interject here and tell you that the only thing that I'm allergic to is shiitake mushroom I came out in a widespread body rash and I couldn't explain it first time around I thought it was very strange and I've contracted something serious I was seriously worried about it took about four weeks for it to resolve and then again about four years later the same thing happened again and I made a connection I made a connection to shiitake mushrooms and as
you know I'm a I'm a naturopathic doctor and I work with extracts and I make extracts of shiitake mushrooms and the third time around when I was handling shiitake mushroom powder the same thing happened I got a widespread rash over my face and my hands where I'd been not just handling the product but must have breathed some of it in and got it in contact with my face so I find it a very allergenic product so I would just put that out there that not just because
people were growing them for a while and eating them but I've been trying not to you know consume too many but I've never seen a direct relationship to any kind of problems that you know that's the only thing I've ever been reactive to you know dr. Peat has talked about Gerald Pollack a few times and I listened to an interview recently that I thought might be interesting for everybody he was talking about grounding which I think I've mentioned before on a show about you like walking barefoot and then the electrons flowing into the body from
the earth and one of the things that he was mentioned he said of course there's no scientific studies to validate this but he you know he's really into the idea of structured water and he was saying how walking barefoot and getting natural sunlight could very possibly be helping to structure the water in the body I thought that was pretty interesting kind of you know puts a few things that you've been talking about for a while does that make sense at all to you dr. Peat well definitely the flow of electrons is the basic thing that
structures water the when I talk about energy and structure I'm thinking about the primarily first of all the fine layers of water adjoining proteins and fat in the cells and that's created and maintained by the flow of electrons mostly from glucose to oxygen through the various catalysts and when that's interrupted when oxygen isn't able to keep pulling the electrons and this is this flow of electrons that generates the structure just like if you stir a pot of spaghetti all the strings line up in certain direction is what happens
microscopically the the energy flow generates structure and that has all of the consequences of cell diffusion I didn't mention that he had talked about which totally aligns with what you said he said the red wavelengths of light or what helped to structure the water which I thought was really interesting Oh a German researcher a young guy named Andre summer has been doing extremely interesting research showing exactly that but the red light itself organizes the structure of water interesting so I think it's important to do like Adam and
even and walk naked in the garden in the sunlight okay David I appreciate you cool that's a great idea I appreciate you cool but I think we have another one lined up here so best okay thank you best again that's cool thank you I know dr. Peat you talk about red light a lot as a free free radical quenching substance and anti-inflammatory so yeah and it desorbs nitric oxide from the cytochrome oxidase okay somebody called in during that dialogue there and I
think they've left the question with the engineer so if the question wants to be read out then perhaps we can go from there yeah she was just basically wondering now she said she's 64 years old and wondering about under eye puffiness a 64 year old lady sounds like low thyroid but dr. Peat what do you think yeah sometimes low thyroid or something missing in the diet can be a factor but most often it's low thyroid with for example if your thyroid is chronically low your cholesterol is likely to be chronically above average
right as a compensation I rate should turn cholesterol into the steroids progesterone pregnenolone and DHEA and those should regulate the water and the inside outside the cell a balance of water okay I think we have another caller who's just just called in just a moment ago so let's see let's take this next call a caller you're on here and where you from okay let me turn my radio off hang on a second okay I'm from the north coast here okay I had a question
what do you know about sulfites in wine digestive problems yeah and our wines were companies that produce wine required to stay that sulfites are in wine do you know anything about sure yeah it's a labeling recommendation for sure and sulfite free wine can be labeled sulfite free other wine that isn't normally has to be labeled contains sulfites I know dr. Peat has always mentioned that sulfites are very allergenic can cause many different symptoms from headache to rash to respiratory disorders but dr. Peat what
what else do you have to say about so for digestion well it's a potentially very pro-inflammatory and it interferes with the handling of electrons I think that's why it is so dangerously allergenic for so many people and I've I've had the experience of sulfited wines that gave me a vertigo and extreme symptoms for several days which I think were from causing inflammation of the intestine okay so just yet how the general the my question refers whether what about messing up a digestive system and causing pain in in digestion that's
why I'm wondering if it's related to that well red wines contain their own histamine which can cause symptoms in a lot of people thanks a lot okay you're welcome okay well I'd I'd stop right there dr. Peat and just thank you so much for spending your time again this month with the show I just want to let people know how to find out more information about you okay thanks so much okay well thanks to the callers that have called in and yeah again there's certainly more scope for expanding the discussion on you are what
you eat dr. Raymond Peat's website has a wealth of information where people can find lots of articles that are fully referenced scientific articles his website is www.raypeat.com and then there's like I say probably something in the order of 40 to 50 articles on various different subjects all of which are his specialism in hormones and endocrine subjects so his website www.raypeat.com we can be contacted Monday through Friday during business hours at 1-888-WBM-ERB and yeah this is a couple of days until the winter solstice the darkest time of the year Christmas is coming up I hope everybody
here is paying attention to what it is they're gonna eat over Christmas lots of hopefully no polyunsaturates hopefully people are cooking with butter and animal fats and making sure that what you eat is organic again like I said you know you are what you eat and the food chain is an extremely toxic product the whole food industry is extremely permeated with lots of different chemicals now that make food not what it used to be so when people say it's not like my grandmother used to cook that's because she was cooking with real food
and unfortunately a lot of our food now is not particularly real so yeah always eat organic source and support organic production and watch what you eat until the third Friday of next month Merry Christmas www.raypeat.com www.raypeat.com www.raypeat.com www.raypeat.com [Music] All right, thanks to the Herb Doctor for that awesome segment we had. Came out also thanks Jessica Baker of Jade Dragon Acupuncture for her support of Redwood Community Radio. Practicing and teaching Chinese medicine, herbalism, and aromatherapy, Jessica is available for conferences, workshops, and private consultations.
Located at 607 F Street in Arcata, Jade Dragon Acupuncture can be reached at 822-4300 or online jadedragonacupuncture.com. Also support for K-Mug comes from the Inn of the Lost Coast and Shelter Cove. Fireplace, spa, and sauna suites overlooking the ocean offer views of migrating California whales. Fish Tank Espresso and Delgada Pizza and Bakery are open daily. Inn of the Lost Coast, home of the Yellow Submarine, where all that's needed is love and a reservation. For more info the phone is 986-7521 or online innofthelostcoast.com