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It's just better. Club Hope Radio. You're listening to Holistic Living, brought to you by EastWest Healing and Performance. And now, here are your hosts, Josh and Jeanne Rubin. [Music] Welcome everyone. This is Josh Rubin from EastWest Healing and Performance. Jeanne and Ray will be joining us in a couple minutes. Just want to welcome everyone to another show. It's been a little bit of trouble getting Ray back on, but I think the break was good. And I think we get a good show ahead of us on milk, calcium and hormones in the body.
It's such a big topic. And of course, like always, we could probably chat forever. But we got Ray anyway from 60 to 120 minutes. It's going to be a great show. We will be taking callers towards the end. The call-in number is 347-426-3546. And all I ask of everyone is if you do ask questions, please keep the questions per the topic of the show. And try to keep the questions more pertaining to the show and just general information rather than just personal self-diagnostics. Because we don't know enough to really help you.
And sometimes we're just going to keep going down the endless path and we want to take as many callers. So just keep that in mind. If you want to learn more about Ray Peat, you can visit the website at RayPeat.com. Www.RayPeat.com. Ray has got a Ph.D. in biology from the University of Oregon. He specializes in physiology. He's taught at many schools around the U.S. It was from Oregon to Montana as well as teaching in Mexico and as well as doing a lot of private nutritional counseling.
He actually started his work with progesterone-related hormones back in 1968. So Ray has been doing this for a while. And as you know from reading his articles and books and listening to him, he's quite the genius, a humble genius at that. So if you want to learn more about him, visit his site. He's got a lot of great articles on his site that you can print out and read. He's also got a newsletter that you can subscribe to. It's about, I don't know, $28 for 12 issues and it depends on where you live.
But he's actually held off on that or I think the books as well because of the volume of e-mails and orders that he's getting. So just be a little patient. And at the same time, like we've always talked about, a lot of people have been e-mailing Ray, which I think is great. He loves his work. But at the same time, mine, you know, he's got a life too. And, you know, unfortunately money, you know, rules the world. It's just how it goes.
So all we ask is if you're e-mailing him and e-mailing him and e-mailing him, please donate, you know, whether it's $5, $10, I don't know, $100. We send him some money. Just send him something just to say thanks for all the help that he's been giving him. Let's say just because you're listening to the show you have to send him money. But if you're doing a lot of dialogue via e-mail with him, you're still taking up time and unfortunately time is money. So just donate something.
And a lot of people hear me incorrectly and say, "Well, I don't have $100." You can send $5. It's the thought that really counts. So please keep that in mind. You can learn more about us at our website at eastwesthealing.com. Our website is getting a huge overhaul right now from content to upgrades. So in the next three months it's going to be changing dramatically. We're going to have some product on there, some programs, a lot of great new things going on. We have a lot of great new things going on with our business.
Keep in mind we consult physically and nutritionally with clients all over the world, you name a country. We pretty much have a client there and we get great success. So feel free to give us a call. And keep in mind there's other practitioners all over the world. You know, it's really about finding the practitioner that works for you, your personality, your needs. So keep that in mind. But feel free to check out our website and feel free to give us a call. So today's show is on milk, calcium, and hormones.
We're going to be talking about dairy, the degradation of it, where it comes from, why Ray recommends so much of it in his philosophies based on a lot of work that he's done. Talk about calcium. We'll talk about blood labs, parathyroid hormone, how do we keep those levels regulated to downregulate inflammation, and maybe if we get too much calcium what that can cause, and correlate this with inflammation in the hormonal system in our body. So it's going to be a great show. We've got a lot of questions for Ray.
And like I said, it's been a while, so I think he's got a lot to add to the show. I'm just waiting for Jeanne and Ray to pop on so I can pull them in. Our next show, we don't have it scheduled yet. I emailed Ray and asked him to -- if we could do a July show, and hopefully we can schedule it because a lot of people have been emailing us and really would like a show on serotonin, tryptophan, and endotoxin, and how that affects our gut, our behavior, psychology, and stuff like that.
So I'm hoping we get a show scheduled for July. Don't forget, of course, to check out our Blog Talk Radio show page. That's blogtalkradio.com/eastwesthealing, and you can check out what our next shows are. As well as you can Facebook us. You can look up my name, Joshua Rubin, or Jeanne Rubin, and you can follow a lot of the posts that we put on Facebook in regards to the information that we put, the articles, the YouTubes, as well as we schedule our shows on there so you can keep up to date on when those shows are.
So I am running out of things to actually say, and you didn't call to listen to me talk. You called to listen to Ray. But I'm still waiting for them to come on so I can call them in. So we have to wait a couple minutes. Oh, here we go. Hold on. Let me get them in there. Hello, Jeanne and Ray. Nope. They dropped the call. As you know with this stuff, there can be technical difficulties. Keep in mind, I just wanted to bring something up, and of course, this is my show,
and this is my perceptions, but remember that when we're educating you, and Ray's educating, I should say, we're not telling you what to do. He's sharing with you his philosophies. That's all he's doing. I don't do this show for my personal gain. I do it 100% so he can have a platform to share his philosophies, and it's not a place for him to defend himself. This is a place for him to actually share, so keep that in mind as we do this,
and I encourage you to reach out to e-mails and say, "Can Ray defend this? Can Ray defend that?" That's not the place for this. This is supposed to be a sharing place. Here we go. Let's get them on. Hi, Josh. All righty, Ray, you there, Jeanne? Yes. Hi. How's it going, Ray? Okay. Good. So today, did you want to add anything before we start the show in regards to maybe yourself or in regards to the show topic? Oh, no. I've been interested in milk for a long time, probably 55 years or so.
I've been studying what's going on with the cultural antagonisms to it. Right. It was in the '50s when the government had been collecting samples of organisms from around the world to monitor the effects of the atom bomb tests, and they wanted to know how it was accumulating in young people, and so they started collecting baby teeth, and the isotope that concentrated most in teeth happened to be strontium-90. And then after they had been doing that for years, it came out that strontium-90 was causing leukemia in children, among other cancers.
But when that got into the news, people said, "Well, baby teeth show the radioactive isotope, which is similar to calcium, and milk is rich in calcium, and milk is probably the main place babies are getting their strontium-90." So a whole wave went through the culture for a few years, advising people not to drink milk because of the strontium-90 in it. But already in the 1950s, '56 or '57, people had analyzed the composition of diets and found that the fallout into the soil produced quite a high ratio of strontium-90 to available calcium,
but plants extracted the calcium since that was what their cells needed and left behind a good proportion of the strontium. And then when cows ate the vegetation, they again extracted a high proportion of calcium and left out a lot of strontium. And so when you add up the essential nutrients, if you get them from vegetable matter rather than milk, you're getting extremely high concentrations of the fallout isotopes. And milk is a good filtering process to eliminate all kinds of contaminants, especially in a period of high radiation. It filters out the radioactive isotopes.
So I guess it's a huge topic. I mean, there's so many people that say, "Well, stay away from it because we're not cows. We shouldn't drink cow's milk." And there's other people that say, "Well, you should only drink raw milk. Pastured milk is so bad." I guess we need to rewind it a little bit and say, "Of course, your philosophy is you believe it's very beneficial." I mean, why do you think, looking at milk, I think the biggest topic is allergies. Everyone says, "Oh, I'm intolerant to milk." And the same thing with other foods.
Why do you think there's so much degradation of milk itself, and why are we seeing so many of these allergies, and why are people so afraid of it? Actually, the United States cleaned up the commercial dairy industry 40 or 50 years ago, cut out the use of the most dangerous insecticides that had been getting into the milk and were known to cause breast cancer and other things. But in the '60s, the Environmental Protection Agency and FDA banned the use of these insecticides around cows and dairies,
and they controlled somewhat the additives going into the cow food. Israel was quite a bit slower than the U.S. to ban one of these insecticides in particular, but when they did in the '60s, their breast cancer rate plunged tremendously. But the U.S., on that particular issue, had been leading the world in cleaning up the milk supply, and that was far ahead of cleaning up the meat supply. So when you look at agricultural industry in general, the dairy is still probably the cleanest food available.
Bill, one part of your milk article in regards to like -- I think it's in regards to what they're feeding animals, and it was kind of something I want you to clarify because it didn't really make sense, and I don't even know if I'm going to pronounce the word correctly. But you talked about plants, and you talked about when plants are stressed, they produce these enzymes. How do you pronounce it, chitinases or chitinase? Or chitinase. Chitinase, okay. Can you elaborate that on that a little bit in regards to dairy?
Well, it's something you find in lots of foods that are grown in stressed plants. That's a plant enzyme that is protective against insects in particular, but it is strongly allergenic to any animal. And in small amounts, it's produced in a stressed animal under the influence of estrogen. So it's possible that that's a factor in meat and eggs and milk, but probably not in a practical sense. The main allergens that get into the milk are, for example, if they let cows graze on pastures that have lots of allergenic weeds,
that will go right into the milk, enough of the allergens that people can react. You can usually taste the funny food in the milk if you go around the cow's pasture and see what it's eating and squeeze some of the leaves. You'll often identify what it is that gives the milk a funny flavor. And some small dairies aren't very alert to what their cows are eating, and that can cause just an individual dairy's milk to be more allergenic than average.
Now, going back to the intolerances, because we know from our business, everyone's like, "Oh, I'm intolerant to dairy. I'm intolerant to dairy. I've got a runny nose. I've done a lab, yada, yada, yada." I saw you talk about how even the day of the lab having a severe blood sugar handling issue, or if you have a damaged metabolism, you can't regulate blood sugar. That can actually create the mechanism in the GI system to create the intolerance. Can you talk about that a little bit and the validity of the food intolerance lab in regards to dairy?
The tests for allergens are really just a very vague indicator of the fact that your immune system reacts to everything you are exposed to. And usually, finding the antibodies to a particular substance means that you have become tolerant to that substance. So I just don't pay any attention to the lab tests for allergies. But the intestine adjusts its enzymes within just a few weeks. Probably, usually it only takes two weeks to have a complete adaptation of the digestive enzymes. But until your intestine has adjusted its enzymes to a new kind of diet,
much of that food is going to be undigested and it will feed bacteria rather than feeding the person. And the strange new growth of bacteria will produce lots of chemicals that can be toxic and allergenic. And so if a person isn't used to eating vegetables and they eat vegetables, they'll often get a sore throat and runny nose, sore joints, headaches, and so on. And it's much of the food sensitivity issues just adapting too suddenly to a diet, failing to adapt when they change because they do it too suddenly.
So you're saying when somebody introduces milk back into the diet to take it very, very slowly for the purpose of allowing the body to adapt. Yeah. Even if a person does have lactose intolerance from a lactase deficiency, tests of that have found that if they drink a cup per meal or less, they don't have the diarrhea that could be produced by drinking a pint of milk on an empty stomach. And even if they have had biopsies that show a deficiency of the lactase enzyme,
that can be induced in about two weeks just by introducing an occasional small amount of milk with their diet. The enzymes -- the cells sense the presence of a nutrient and the enzymes are gradually induced until the intestine can then handle normal amounts. And bacterial infections and inflammation can cause the loss of lactase enzymes and probably many other important digestive enzymes. And experiments with supplementing thyroid or progesterone have found that you can induce or restore the lactase that has been deficient just by increasing those anti-stress hormones.
So, you know, does it have to do with their effect on, of course, increasing metabolism and helping to regulate blood sugar and downregulating estrogen and helping to reestablish that small intestine integrity so you can break down the lactose? Because I know you talk about how hypothyroidism can decrease lactase production and causing a lactose "tolerance." The same thing how, you know, progesterone deficiency is actually seen with people that are lactose intolerant because they're not releasing lactase. Yeah. Inflammation is probably the basic problem there. Thyroid and progesterone, by restoring energy and normal function, bypass the inflammatory processes.
And inflammation shifts the cell function to an emergency state and you tend to lose a lot of functional enzymes in an inflamed state. Right. So I guess in regards to dairy, maybe you could elaborate a little more. You know, if we read your philosophies, you're probably more than anyone so heavy in regards to dairy. Why do you feel dairy is so important and what are some of the benefits that people can get from eating or drinking dairy? Well, again, part of it, the biggest part is probably the alternatives.
Like 1960, the main focus against milk was its strontium-90 content. But when you look at the alternatives, it turned out milk was the best food for avoiding strontium-90. And it's the same with industrial additives, accidental pollutants. Just about every place you look in the food industry, things are far worse than milk. Some fruits, if you can find fruits that aren't grown in large-scale industrial orchards, bananas are an example of one of the worst products for chemical use and overproduction, bad soil, stressful conditions.
But if you can find unstressed fruits, those are very free of toxins and contaminants relative to most other food products. You know, it would be safe to say in regards to dairy, you know, just for the public listening in, that it's kind of like a complete macronutrient because it's carb, it's protein, fat in a sense. It's very balanced in regards to regulating blood sugar, downregulating inflammation. It's got a lot of prothyroid and progesterone properties at the same time. Yeah, it even contains some testosterone. Thyroid, progesterone, and testosterone are important for the young animal.
In human milk, they found that there was enough thyroid hormone in human milk that babies whose thyroids were destroyed by living near and developing near a three-mile island during the accident, they didn't suffer any symptoms of hypothyroidism as long as they were being breastfed because of the high protective hormone content of the milk. Yeah, you talk a lot about... Go ahead, Josh. Go for it. No, go for it. No, I was just going to say, I mean, you know, you talk about the proteins, the fats, the hormones,
all those really great things that milk has to offer us. But one of the things that you stress the most is the calcium that it has to offer and how the calcium, the parathyroid, all these things work together in actually assisting the body in having normal levels of calcium with chronic stress, so on and so forth. Can you elaborate on that a little bit for us and kind of... Yeah, that's really a subject for a week of seminars. I can set it up, Ray. I can set it up easily.
It involves everything at every level of the organism. Calcium is potentially...it's the thing that causes all of the problems, allergies, cancer, heart attacks, and so on. But when calcium is regulated properly, calcium protects against all of those things. And one of the central things in regulating calcium is the parathyroid hormone. And when you're deficient in calcium in your foods, your parathyroid hormone increases, and it can temporarily keep your blood calcium up to the proper level, and it does that by taking it out of the bones.
And when you eat an excess of calcium, that tends to suppress the parathyroid hormone. And since they've been doing dialysis for kidney disease, that has been a way to get a better insight into how the parathyroid hormone works than had been done in just ordinary research. They have found that if they remove the parathyroid hormone, the parathyroid gland entirely as far as they can, that they can solve many of the deadly effects of chronic kidney dialysis. The hypertension and insomnia, for example, are two of the things that are immediately corrected by removing the parathyroid gland.
And when you look at the effects of the parathyroid hormone excess in such things as dialysis patients, you can get an idea of the range of things that eating extra calcium can correct by suppressing the parathyroid hormone. Insomnia is just one of them. Probably everywhere calcium is involved in an excitatory, inflammation-promoting way, you can probably reverse it most of the time just by increasing the calcium in your diet. The two vitamins that are important for making the tissue handle calcium properly also contribute to lowering the parathyroid hormone.
Vitamin K and vitamin D help to handle the calcium so that the parathyroid gland senses it and shuts down. And some other nutrients, for example, vitamin A and niacinamide, work in that same direction as vitamin K and vitamin D, helping to balance the ratio of calcium to phosphorus and restrain the parathyroid gland. Foods, when they have put animals on a vitamin D deficient diet, they find that giving the animal sugar instead of starch will keep its bones from developing rickets. It isn't that sugar has a vitamin D action, it's just that it lowers the stress
and makes the animal adapt better to a vitamin D deficiency. And if there's a calcium deficiency, letting the animal drink salty water for a long time will make up for a calcium deficiency in the diet by helping the kidneys to retain the calcium by substituting loss of sodium for loss of calcium. So you mentioned supplements, and I kind of want to go back to that a little bit because, you know, based off a reading and hearing you speak, we know that parathyroid hormone, of course, is inflammatory and we need to downregulate and figure out why.
There's so many people out there listening that think because they did a lab and their calcium levels are low, they need to start pumping calcium and you're saying a little different, it has nothing to do with the calcium, I mean it does in a sense, but we need to downregulate parathyroid hormone first. So what are the implications of just taking straight out calcium, can you take too much calcium, those things just for the listeners? I often see people with a blood calcium where it should be 9 or 10,
I see people with 11, 12, or 13 and getting them to eat more calcium, maybe take some vitamin D and vitamin K, they can very quickly get their calcium down to normal and the reason it's high is generally because they are eating too much phosphate and overdriving their parathyroid hormone. Right. Now could things like eating a lot of muscle meats and tryptophan or even taking 5-HPA, those things create the facilitation of parathyroid hormone in itself, causing more inflammation? Yes, many things do increase the parathyroid. Serotonin does have a direct action,
estrogen, cortisol, prolactin all have parallel and promoting effects on the parathyroid hormone. Progesterone and thyroid are the main things that help to inhibit the parathyroid. Part of that is that carbon dioxide produced in the cell, as it flows out of the cell that's constantly respiring, it forces calcium to leave the cell and that relaxes the cell because calcium should be outside the cell. When it's in the cell, it tends to excite the cell and cause inflammation and lactic acid production. So once you get the streaming flow of carbon dioxide out of the cell,
you're getting calcium into the safe situation and it happens that parathyroid hormone activates glycolysis and the formation of lactic acid and that's a big part of how it dissolves the bone to provide more calcium for the bloodstream. So everything that shifts the balance away from lactic acid production and towards carbon dioxide production helps to regulate, get the calcium back into the bloodstream out of cells, ready to go back into the bones. And carbon dioxide, when they do tissue culture of, for example,
a piece of a mouse skull which is very thin and can be kept in culture, the parathyroid hormone tends to dissolve it causing it to produce lactic acid. But if you increase the carbon dioxide, the carbon dioxide directly starts forming crystals of calcium carbonate and restoring the mineral structure of the bone. The first crystal laid down in bone is calcium carbonate, but as the bone matures some of the carbon dioxide is replaced by phosphate. Wow, that was awesome. That was awesome. I'm all for salivating.
You talk a lot about CO2 and I know a lot of people have been e-mailing us and asking us and I know it's a little bit off the beaten path here and I'm not sure if you even have an answer, but a lot of people are asking because you're talking about how it actually helps to regulate the thyroid and you just talked about it a lot. What does carbonated water have to do with that? Can you actually--can that be used? I mean, can we use CO2 levels to regulate the parathyroid?
Of course, by regulating blood sugar and all that food, but can we use things like baking soda or carbonated water to actually facilitate that process? Yeah, people have found that the exchange between bicarbonate and carbon dioxide is so quick that when you give a person a dose of sodium bicarbonate, the exchange of the bicarbonate to carbon dioxide is quick at the cell surface of a stressed cell and so you can actually acidify and restore to normal a stressed cell with baking soda because the sodium will quickly get lost out the urine,
leaving the body as needed, acidified with the intracellular carbon dioxide, which puts the cell back into its anti-inflammatory resting state. The excess sodium, it's the same as in the rat experiment where if you let the rat drink salty water, it isn't so desperately dependent on calcium in its diet. The alkali minerals can substitute to a great extent for each other, so that a slight excess of magnesium or sodium or potassium will help to spare calcium in a stressed situation and calcium can likewise make up for a deficiency of one of the others.
For example, if you're having cramps, it might essentially be a magnesium deficiency, but you can often stop the cramp with just baking soda or milk for the calcium or fruit for the high potassium content. You mean actually ingesting the baking soda? Yes, or salty water sometimes does the same thing because it lets you rearrange the balance of your alkaline minerals and helps to make up for a crisis deficiency of one of them.
Awesome. Well, let's kind of rewind it a little bit and let's go back to dairy a little bit and we'll go back to calcium because we just had tons of questions and that, for me, what you just talked about was incredible, was awesome. But I know a lot of people are listening and I know you talk about the two-fold of dairy. You know, you talk about raw, but you also talk about how some people can't handle raw and you actually recommend for those people because of the pasteurization of the bacteria,
the enzymes, that they actually can handle it. And you recommend that, which of course goes against what a lot of people talk about. Can you elaborate on the reason for that? For why pasteurized is better? Why some people can handle raw and some people can't and why you would recommend pasteurized? Every cow has its particular balance of bacteria, many of which will be chronically living in their udder. And it's a natural thing. A healthy cow will have a very high bacteria count in its milk.
The individual cow will change its bacterial balance according to what it's eating and the season of the year, the particular weather that the cow is having. It's extremely variable. If a person in their own bacterial ecology has a bad reaction to some of the bacteria that they're getting from the cow, they can just try a different dairy. It might still be raw, but even pasteurized milk still has enough of these individual herd bacteria that trying a different brand of pasteurized milk is sometimes all it takes.
And I know a few people who tend to get gas or diarrhea from most of the supermarket milks, but if they drink only the ultra-pasteurized milk that has been heated, I think, to 135 degrees Fahrenheit is a typical temperature, that they tolerate that nicely. The ultra-pasteurized milk has somewhat lower vitamin content and it doesn't taste as good, but some people do tolerate that better. Yeah, we've noticed that with a lot of clients, and it definitely goes against the norm, but it works. So it's just an interesting caveat there. Now what about yogurts?
I know a lot of people talk about yogurts, how healthy they are, and I know your take on fermented foods, and I know your take on yogurts and lactic acid production and stress. Can you elaborate on that for the listeners and the pluses and the minuses of that, and maybe when we should or shouldn't eat it? Well, the first worst concern is to make sure it doesn't contain carotene and gums. I think we're showing up in more and more foods, especially yogurt and kefir and cheeses and such.
I think it even shows up in some so-called plain milk products. I mean products that were intended to add the vitamin A and D to milk that contained a gum, such as alginate or carotene. So the added vitamin is one of the potential sources of contamination, but if it says that it's just fermented milk yogurt, that's the safest kind of yogurt, and still it's better not to eat more than a few spoonfuls per day because any lactic acid, especially the kind formed by bacteria, is extra work for your liver.
The lactic acid that contacts your intestine cells, for example, activates the fibrosis-producing system, stimulating collagen production, and chronic exposure to lactic acid increases a general tendency to overproduction of all of the inflammatory system, but the cumulative thing is collagen accumulation and aging. But the immediate effect of the lactic acid on the liver is that the liver is set up to turn lactic acid back into glucose, but to do that it takes energy and so it consumes glucose to get rid of the lactic acid, and so it basically is a drain on your blood sugar reserves.
So I want to talk about that a little more, but can you elaborate a little bit more on the carrageenan and the gums? Because we find them in a lot of different things. I think people need to realize what they are, what they do. I mean, I've seen them in liver pâtés. Even roast beef. They can inject a solution of carrageenan into roast beef, and I've seen advertisements. You can increase the weight of your product and decrease the meat content by 30 percent by plumping it up with this jelly made from seaweed.
And this stuff is analogous to our connective tissue, the cartilage material and the breakdown material in the bloodstream, heparin. It's a sulfated polysaccharide, and it's close enough to our own regulatory heparin and connective tissue system that it can be interpreted as a sign of damage to our own connective tissue, and so it can cause very acute immune reactions. It's used experimentally to cause the research inflammation. It's a very predictable and effective promoter of inflammation. For example, they'll inject it into a rat paw and then test anti-inflammatory things for their protective effects.
The use of it in food is justified by experiments showing that the native carrageenan, as it is prepared right out of the seaweed, doesn't induce cancer in vitro tests. But if you allow bacteria to break down the carrageenan into smaller fragments that more easily get into cells, that will cause cancer, and our intestine contains bacteria that are able to do that breakdown. But there is such a big investment in using it in the food industry that the cancer-regulating agencies don't want to acknowledge the fact that when you eat native carrageenan,
your bacteria are at risk for producing the carcinogenic degraded carrageenan, which is well known as a carcinogen. And I'm not sure if you mentioned it as well, but it synthesizes with other toxins as well, unsaturated fats and estrogen, which just compound all issue in the GI system in the liver. And I know you talked about how it's implicated, or you found that it's implicated in a lot of different GI diseases, like colitis and things like that. So I think people should be aware that this stuff is in most dairy products.
It's in a lot of beef products. I've seen it in organic liver pâtés. It's in a lot of organic goat milk ice creams. And you'll know it's in there because you're going to get a ton of gas and bloating. So start reading labels, and Ray has a lot of stuff on his website on carrageenan to educate yourself on the implications and what it does and where it comes from. Can you talk about dairy in regards to saturated fats?
Of course, we know you're huge on saturated fats, but maybe for the listeners, give us maybe some key points. You know, dairy is important because of A, B, C, and D, but also the saturated fats and maybe why we need these. There's a liver disease research group led by A.A. Nancy. He has demonstrated a curative effect on hepatitis and cirrhosis from adding the saturated fats of a great variety of them, all the way from coconut oil through the butter fats up into the waxy long-chain saturated fats.
And similarly, they have shown that fish oils and the various seed oils that are polyunsaturated exacerbate the liver diseases and inflammations. The breakdown products of the unsaturated fats produce a lot of the inflammatory diseases, and just by substituting saturated fats, you're going to have an anti-inflammatory effect generally and somewhat of an antioxidant effect by interrupting the free radical oxidation product of the polyunsaturated. Everyone's body, with aging, accumulates more and more of the polyunsaturated fats, and probably the saturated fats become more important protectively and therapeutically
after a person is metabolically slowing down in their 20s and 30s. A kid who's growing like a small two- or three-year-old kid might have twice the metabolic rate that an adult does, and they can burn up much more of the polyunsaturated fats. As the metabolism slows down, even a small amount of the polyunsaturated in the diet will tend to accumulate and increase the tissue inflammation and oxidation processes. So there's constantly some turnover, so if you can keep your food high on the saturation side, you can progressively--usually you can make some headway against those stored polyunsaturateds
and it might take years to restore a good balance, but it's worth the effort to minimize the polyunsaturates. Right. So we've seen, guys, it's a complete macronutrient, it's got saturated fats. It's low in iron, correct? Yeah. The reason it's low in iron is that during pregnancy, the estrogen of the mother is--one of its functions-- well, two functions are to cause the intestine to absorb more calcium and more iron. A woman will typically absorb nine or ten times as much iron out of her given food as a man does.
So an iron supplement is especially risky when your estrogen is high. And one of the functions of estrogen is to lower oxygen tension, and the fetus is in a situation of low oxygen tension, and so it accumulates iron partly from the estrogen exposure but partly from the oxygen deficit. So the fetus reaches its maturity and is born overcharged with iron. It typically has enough iron in its tissues that it doesn't need to eat any iron for about six months to a year.
And so milk is designed to let the baby grow into its potentially toxic overcharge with iron, and so milk is relatively very free of iron. And that's one of the protective effects that many of our foods have a potential overdose of iron, especially the meat. And men, by the time they're 50, are generally well overloaded with iron, and that contributes to free radical oxidation and is probably a big factor in heart disease and liver disease and so on. And women, to some extent, are protected as long as they're menstruating,
throwing off some of the iron every month. But when they stop menstruating, then their tissues start overloading with iron. Milk and cheese are foods that are deficient in iron, and so adding them generously to the diet will help you prevent that chronic tendency to overcharge on iron. Right. And Ray has a lot on the site, guys, about iron, and maybe we can do a show on that sometime, but that's a huge topic. So we learn so many benefits of milk. It's just amazing. What about cheeses? I know you talk about cheeses,
and we have to really watch for, of course, what type of cheese that we eat, but also what's in the cheese and the cultures in the cheese. Can you elaborate a little bit on that for the listeners? Yeah. Recently I saw an advertisement for one of the big additive companies that says that 60-some percent of the cheeses now made in the world use their cultures, and their cultures are basically from bacteria and fungus, and they're cheap substitutes for the naturally grown bacterial and fungal cultures that cheeses have.
Their traditional location and type of cow and so on has determined the type of bacteria and fungus, and traditionally they're made with bovine digestive enzymes as a way to clot the cheese, and they're now using fungal and bacterial substitutes for these beef enzymes, and that's almost all cheeses commercially now are risky because of those microorganisms that are used in substituting for the traditional methods, and that's besides any additive for modifying the texture. I think this is where dairy, and like I mentioned at the beginning, and cheeses get such a bad rap,
and it's really about looking at where it comes from, what's in it, and a lot of the times it's really not the dairy, it's the cultures, it's the carrageen, it's what the animals fed, it's all these different things, and we're blaming dairy when dairy has so many great qualities, which is kind of sad. Now what about whey protein powders? I know you talk about that, and there's a lot of people out there that just, you know, we can talk about protein and diet on a whole other show,
but there's so many people out there using protein powders, and I know you talk -- I'm sorry? About 40 or 50 years ago, the dairies that were producing cheese would give their whey in a liquid state fresh out of the cheese factory to hog farmers, and in that fresh state it was mixed with other foods for hog slop, and it produced very healthy pigs, and as a stimulant to growth when mixed with a lot of fruits and vegetables and other waste foods,
it was very good pig food compared to the corn and soybeans that pigs are now getting fed. But when it's sold, because pigs aren't eating it anymore, they have to dispose of it some way, and the process of dehydrating it, turning it into a powder, since milk products are very high in the fragile amino acids, including tryptophan and cysteine, the process of dehydrating it increases the oxidation of the protein and not only lowers the protein value but increases its toxicity and allergenicity.
So I don't recommend any dehydrated food except in emergency where they're convenient for transportation and storage, but as a regular thing, dehydrated anything is a potential risk. Can you elaborate a little bit more? I remember from your article you talked about albumin in regards to whey protein. Yeah, the casein that you get in the cheese and you throw away largely the albumin fraction, the casein protein turns out to be anti-inflammatory and anti-stress, helps hold down the cortisol production, and you get the opposite effect from the whey fraction.
So it has many direct nutritional problems. Probably the worst one is that most of the calcium stays with the cheese, and so you have a protein which is easily degraded and lacks the anti-stress factors and is deficient in calcium. Interesting. Go for it. One of the reasons a lot of people give if they have overcome the idea that milk forms mucus or is a risk for various diseases and so on, one of their arguments is that it makes them fat,
and all the research on animals and as far as it goes, the human research shows that milk is probably the best reducing food there is. The mechanisms for that are now known, not only the anti-stress effect of the casein and the good balance of saturated fats and so on, but the calcium alone is a very important metabolic regulator. It happens to inhibit the fat-forming enzymes, fatty acid synthase, and incidentally that's a characteristic enzyme that goes wild in cancer. Calcium and milk inhibit that fatty acid synthase, reducing the formation of fats,
and at the same time it activates the uncoupling proteins in the mitochondria, which are associated with increased longevity because by increasing the metabolic rate, the uncoupling proteins burn calories faster, but they protect against pre-radical oxidation. They pull the fuel through the oxidation process so fast, in effect, that none of it goes astray in random oxidation, where if you inhibit your energy-producing enzymes, you tend to get random stray oxidations that damage the mitochondria. So the uncoupling proteins burn calories faster at the same time that you're reducing fat synthesis,
and milk is, as far as I know, the only food that does both of those things simultaneously. Now what about the pasteurized milk? A lot of people say the calcium, the vitamins, they're all synthetic. Is there any concern over that, or are they so low? And of course, we're not just saying just drink dairy. We're talking about if you're using broth and gelatin and tropical fruits, you're getting all these other vitamins. Is it okay, or is it dangerous that it's kind of synthetic? Oh, well, for one thing, it's a very small amount of the vitamins,
and even though I'm allergic to just a tiny amount of synthetic vitamin A, it will give me a headache for a couple of days, just a trace of it. I can drink a gallon of milk containing their added vitamin A, and apparently other things in the milk protect me from that intense allergic reaction to synthetic A. But it is a problem that they, to anything but whole milk, they're required to add vitamin A and D in the United States. So you drink a gallon of milk a day?
Probably that's been my average for 35 years or so. I think I average probably now only two, two and a half, or three quarts when I can get lots of orange juice or other -- So I'm guessing that the good outweighs the bad when it comes to milk because it still has those high levels of tryptophan and whatnot. Is that -- Yeah, the calcium, by stimulating our metabolism, keeps us more like the teenager metabolically who can handle and balance those things. But that's where gelatin and fruit come in,
helping to shift the balance somewhat away from that high tryptophan and cysteine content. Right. Now, I don't want people to walk away from this going, "Oh, my God, I'm going to start pounding milk in a gallon of milk, and, jeez, because, of course, guys, it's all individualized. There's so many other factors that you need to be doing nutritionally. You need to start slow. You've got to find the right type." There's a lot of factors, but what do you recommend calorically? I mean, do you recommend that as like a power protein
and really getting a lot of your calories from dairy? Oh, ideally, I would get half my calories anyway from fruit. Half your calories from fruit. Yeah, and the proportion of protein, carbohydrate, and fat, it probably should be something like a third of each, but I'm not sure what the ideal is. It depends so much on the quality of each of them. Right. So, avoiding starch and avoiding polyunsaturated fats and avoiding the very high cryptophane content proteins, then you could go very high on any one of the major nutrients without problem. Wow, great stuff on dairy.
Let's kind of shift the gears a little. We're talking about calcium, and, of course, we can go back to milk and filter it in if needed. We were talking about parathyroid hormone and its inflammatory. Can, because there's so much out there on all these different diets, and this is the reason why I love your philosophy, because it's not a diet. It's really aligning with how the body works. And there's so many diets out there, of course, it's all about weight loss, and we all need to do our own thing,
but it's all about high protein, high protein, high protein. Can a high-protein diet, and this is, you know, for the listeners, or a diet that's low in carb or low in fat, can that actually create the over-stimulation of parathyroid hormone? Yeah, because most protein comes with lots of phosphate. Grains, beans are very bad protein but very high in phosphate. Meats are good protein but very high in phosphate. And the ratio between phosphate and calcium is the main thing that activates the parathyroid hormone. And so minimizing phosphate or increasing calcium is extremely important.
So when we're talking osteoporosis, because we see this a lot with people on the Web and with clients, it's this high-protein thing that's going on, and that can be actually even more detrimental. Can you correlate that with--you correlated the demineralization of the bone by the parathyroid hormone. Does estrogen and cortisol also play a part in that process? Yeah, the parathyroid hormone increases with a woman's menstrual cycle. When estrogen is dominant, parathyroid hormone is highest, and prolactin, cortisol, increase the parathyroid hormone. Serotonin increases it. It's interesting that the things that estrogen increases--prolactin, serotonin,
parathyroid hormone, cortisol--all of these are known to dissolve the bones. So it's very interesting that they promote estrogen as a bone strengthener. In the 50 or 60 years that women have been taught to use estrogen, so that almost American women have used estrogen, the rate of breaking hips has increased. So since all of the mechanisms through which estrogen affects the parathyroid hormone, serotonin, cortisol, and prolactin, those are all well established, and those bone-dissolving hormones are constantly present. For example, with aging, a person's parathyroid hormone increases as the bone mineral density decreases.
And there's a tendency for the cortisol to become dominant with aging, and prolactin, both in men and women, has an increasing tendency to become dominant in age. Right. Now, of course, that has to do with the foods we eat, and how we eat them, and regulating our blood sugar to down-regulate glucocorticoids, which is cortisol. But progesterone would play a factor in that as well, and I could be wrong with this, but progesterone in itself stimulates-- what is it?--the osteoblasts to help rebuild bone. Estrogen stimulates the osteoclasts. So if you're progesterone deficient or estrogen dominant,
you're going to see that demineralization of bone. So the progesterone itself, supplementation or through food, could actually benefit and help that process. Yes, and testosterone. Okay. The same factors that interrupt progesterone metabolism also interrupt testosterone. High tryptophan or serotonin exposure will lower your testosterone. High polyunsaturated fats will lower your testosterone, and testosterone protects against the parathyroid hormone and strengthens the bones. Now, in people that have, let's say, calcium deposits or things like that, like bone spurs and things like that, I mean, besides that, are there any other ways besides a lab
to know if you're high or low in calcium? And if you do have a bone spur, can that tell you anything about your calcium levels? I think it usually happens in people who are eating too much phosphate, not enough calcium. And sometimes a general vitamin deficiency can be involved because, for example, niacinamide and vitamin A work to regulate the phosphate calcium balance as well as vitamin D and vitamin A. But vitamin K is a very safe thing that currently is stylation. It seems to be involved in our basic energy production
the way thyroid and niacinamide are. That's interesting. I mean, I guess I always forget the whole testosterone thing, but that's an interesting fact. Now, in regards to--go for it. No, I was just going to say that testosterone is important for women too. The natural androgens, DHEA and testosterone, are protective against hardening of the arteries in both men and women. Now, would you recommend, of course, on the food side of it, but feeding the pathway from the top down, especially in women not using the testosterone? Of course, we're not saying or advocating using it,
but feeding the pathway from the top down with maybe a pregnenolone or something versus-- Yeah, and cholesterol. Cholesterol has a protective effect against excess parathyroid hormone because it's near the top, feeding your liver just what it needs so it can make cholesterol. Then the cholesterol with thyroid and vitamin A will let your glands make the pregnenolone, progesterone, testosterone, DHEA. All right. What does parathyroid hormone and inflammation have to do with anemia? Because a lot of people out there say, "Oh, I have anemia," and a lot of times they're not specifying which kind,
but is there a correlation between anemia or any of those in parathyroid hormone? I'm not sure if there's a direct connection, but the thyroid and parathyroid tend to go in opposite directions and the thyroid stimulating hormone definitely is involved in anemia, inflammation, liver malfunction, and so on, so that when a person is hypothyroid, they tend to have high parathyroid hormone and high thyroid stimulating hormone. Just looking at the individual who is hypothyroid, you can see that their parathyroid hormone must be having a role in such things,
but experimentally the thyroid stimulating hormone has a definite connection to malfunction of the bone marrow and blood vessels and serotonin metabolism, liver metabolism. Now, besides dairy and besides taking calcium pills, we know that you've talked about vitamin K, D, vitamin A, niacinamide, things like that, of course nutrition to regulate inflammation. What are some other nutritional sources of calcium besides dairy? For a person who wants a safe supplement, eggshells, if you boil your eggs to get any additives and cleaners off them, eggshells are the purest form of calcium carbonate to use as a supplement,
and calcium carbonate is probably the ideal form to use as a supplement. Crustacean shells and mollusk shells and eggshells are natural forms of calcium carbonate, but eggshells usually when they've been tested are even cleaner than oyster shells as a calcium carbonate source. Now, how would you recommend adjusting them, adding them down to a powder and taking in how much? Yeah, a fourth to a half teaspoon if a person is not getting their milk calcium. Okay. Interesting. Many years ago I had a relative who was a baseball player.
In his 30s he kept breaking his arm, throwing balls, and his x-rays showed that he had the skeleton of a very old man, this terrible osteoporosis, and his doctor prescribed a tablespoon of powdered eggshells every day. And it was just two or three months, his x-rays showed normal bones, and he went back and played ball for another 10 years or so, and he had one other bone. Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, there's so many women that are just told, and we see this in assessments, they come in, they're whatever, 40, 50,
and they're just pumping calcium into their body. Well, the counterion is really important. For some reason the drug industry wants to sell various things, calcium gluconate, calcium citrate, calcium lactate, even some fairly toxic things, calcium aspartate, things that have a toxic effect of their own. So the very thing they're taking that I think is actually helping them could be making matters worse, or if they are making matters worse. Yeah, the counterion is a significant problem for a lot of the supplements. Wow, that's amazing. This is just as simple as, of course, regulating nutrition,
but utilizing things to downregulate parathyroid hormone, cortisol, estrogen, prolactin, nutritionally, as well as adding in some boiled eggshells, which is quite cheap compared to buying all this chorocalcium on these infomercials and people just going nuts over it. You talk a lot about aspirin as well. Is there any correlation between maybe the proper use of aspirin in calcium regulation? Yeah. Aspirin has some direct effects on the bone, blocking the prostaglandins that cause the inflammation related to parathyroid hormones, glycolysis, the prostaglandins are very important factors in osteoporosis, and aspirin blocks that.
But aspirin also inhibits the pituitary stress hormones and so tends to lower cortisol, and by lowering estrogen, it reduces the prolactin, all working in the direction to strengthen your bones and keep calcium out of your blood vessels in your bones where it should be. So, of course, you've written a lot about it on your site, so you're definitely an advocate of it for those reasons. Of course, reducing inflammatory prostaglandins, but also helping kind of the cells breathe, in a sense, to help reduce inflammation. And stimulating carbon dioxide production. Right, right.
Can you talk a little bit about fibrosis in calcium, what calcium has to do with that in our body, in our arteries? Hans Selye was concentrating for several years on the process of -- he called it either calciphylaxis or calcirgy, where calcium goes wild and causes spasms in blood vessels, even shuts off circulation, causes gangrene of the extremities or of the skin, and scleroderma, in which the skin progressively calcifies rather than acutely. And he showed that serotonin was a major factor.
The stress combined with local irritation causes the first fibrosis, and then the fibrotic tissue absorbs calcium and creates inflammation and calcification. The inflammation with lactic acid production and the influence of lactic acid displacing carbon dioxide is what most immediately leads to the overproduction of collagen, and eventually those same factors displacing carbon dioxide will cause the tissue to calcify. Interesting. So that's a ton of information on dairy and calcium. I think I've riddled through about 35-plus questions that I had.
I'd love to take some callers if anyone wants to call in, or we'd love to take some callers. And if you've got some questions for Ray in regards to dairy, calcium, hormones, anything in itself, feel free to call in. The thyroid number is 347-426-3546. We've got a caller right here. Do you mind taking a call, Ray? I should ask you first. Okay, sure. Okay. I'm on the air, area code 111, whatever that area code is. Oh, that's -- is it me? Yeah, it is you. Oh, okay. My area code is 520.
Anyways, thanks for taking my call. I will keep it on topic. I think that Ray just talked about this, but maybe there's a little more that could be said. I know that there's the curious effect of calcification of tissues when, in fact, the calcium is low. Did I miss it, or did you already talk about that? Yeah, that's where you get increased parathyroid hormone that displaces. It takes calcium out of the bones and puts it into soft tissues. That can be offset by eating more calcium and taking vitamin K, for example. Interesting. Okay.
I don't know if you want to go off subject. I guess that's the only related one that I had. Well, go for it. Go for it. We'll see how far off topic you can go. Okay, I won't go too far. This has been a marathon, too. I'm surprised. Dr. Peat, I haven't seen anything about fluoride on your site, and I suppose that's sort of related, as I think it also has to do with calcification of tissues. I think you'd probably agree that it's a toxin that shouldn't be in our systems.
But where is fluoride on your radar? How much of a danger would you say it is in our environment? Oh, I avoid fluoridated water carefully because I, without thinking about it, during a stay in San Francisco, wasn't aware that the water was fluoridated, and I started getting extreme hypothyroid symptoms. And I realized that the water that I drank had enough fluoride in it to totally destroy the thyroid supplement that I was taking. So the first place that fluoride can act is by destroying nutrients and hormones that you might be taking.
But to the extent that fluoride circulates in your bloodstream, where T3, the active thyroid hormone, is also circulating, it just takes one fluoride atom to ruin the T3 molecule. So my own experience with it is as a thyroid toxin. But John Yamajanis and Dean Burke did some good studies pretty conclusively showing that a population that's fluoridated has a higher cancer rate. All right. Thank you. Thank you for calling. Yeah. Thanks for having me. Yeah, no problem. I appreciate you calling in. Sure. Bye-bye. Ray, do you mind taking another caller? No, it's fine. Okay.
Arico360, you're on the air. Yes. Hi. My name is Sean. I'm not sure if you've discussed this already on the show. I was tuning in about 20 minutes ago. But my question is consumption of dairy, I've noticed an increase of acne, and I'm 24 years old. It's been happening since I was about 14 or 15. I'll be quick to rule out it was a hormone thing, but I've done a lot of studies on myself. Every time I ingest dairy or cheese or anything with it, I have an increased breakout.
So what would your thoughts be about that on acne and all that? The vitamin A and thyroid and the hormones DHEA, androgens, testosterone, and progesterone balance the inflammatory and antiimmune things that aren't normally present. I suspect that the connection between dairy and acne is that it's increasing your metabolic rate and increasing your requirement for some nutrients. Usually vitamin A is the limiting nutrient. And people who do anything that increases their metabolic rate, and calcium is a very powerful stimulant to metabolism,
the increased metabolic rate makes you consume vitamin A and probably several other nutrients involved in the skin. But vitamin A is most commonly the limiting factor in acne. So vitamin A. I also wanted to ask you about the calcium in the eggshell. Do you just boil those for about 10 minutes or so is what you were saying? Yeah, like if you're going to eat boiled eggs, that already takes care of the toxins that might be on the shell. So you just kind of, right. Well, definitely looking at vitamin A.
That was an interesting answer. I've never thought about that. So thanks a lot. Thank you for calling in. Thanks. We got another caller in, but I got one quick question for you. You talked about vitamin A, but I know you talk about how it can actually be toxic to us. So when you recommend taking vitamin A, do you recommend people actually rubbing it on the skin or ingesting it? Well, my own experience with commercial vitamin A is that I used it for many years,
but then the product is constantly being changed as they find cheaper ways to do it. And suddenly something about some of the products caused extreme sensitivity. I can use some forms of vitamin A wildly and generously with no effect, but some of them have additives that make them very allergenic. And the basic toxic effect of giant doses of vitamin A, like several hundred thousand units a day, those invariably will reach a point where they suppress your thyroid. The whole range of carotenes aren't really vitamin A,
but they even more than vitamin A have an antithyroid and potentially antisteroid action by accumulating and displacing the vitamin A that's necessary for metabolism in the skin and making steroids. So you don't want to overload, especially on the carotenes, but eventually vitamin A itself can be an antithyroid, antisteroid problem. I got interested in vitamin A because I found that every time I worked outside in the summer, I got acne. And people had told me that sunlight was good for the skin, but I invariably got acne in proportion to my exposure to sunlight,
and I figured it was some toxic effect of ultraviolet light. But then one night I went to sleep reading with a very bright light shining in my face and slept eight hours with that light just a foot and a half from my eyes and woke up starting to get pimples. And I suddenly realized that it was activating not only my retinal vitamin A system, but via my eyes it was activating my hormonal system and consuming vitamin A. And I found that in proportion to my sun exposure or light exposure,
if I increased the vitamin A, I could prevent acne and it turns out to be protective in other ways. The nutrition researcher, dentist, Emanuel Churaskin, did surveys where he found that health complaints and symptoms decreased in a nice linear relation to increasing vitamin A all the way up to 100,000 units a day. But anyone who is on the borderline for thyroid function, sometimes even 20,000 units will make their symptoms worse by suppressing their thyroid. So you just have to be very cautious and probably starting with 5,000 units
and watching for allergic symptoms and checking your temperature to see if it's inhibiting your thyroid. Very often people have to get up to 20,000 or 30,000 units a day before their acne improves. You're talking about the plant source being more toxic than the animal source? Yes, because it depends on vitamin B12 to be converted and the thyroid function is inhibited if it isn't converted. But at the same time, if you're eating a lot of good quality eggs and dairy and your recommendation using fresh quality liver, could you get enough vitamin A that way?
Oh, sure. One serving of liver a week and an egg or two every day and milk, for most people that's plenty of vitamin A. Am I taking another caller? Sure. Okay. Caller from the 617 Boston, you are on the air. Thank you. Dr. Peat, I have a question for you. I've been reading about milk pros and cons and a lot of the anti-milk articles argue that actually milk drains your calcium out of your bones because it has higher phosphorous to calcium ratio than we have in the human body. What do you think about that argument?
I never really knew if it was a problem or then I heard you speak about reducing the higher phosphate foods, but would it not matter in the milk? No, the ratio in milk is very high towards calcium so that you can, even eating some meat or other foods that are high in phosphate, if you drink a good amount of milk, the high calcium will put those other excess phosphates into proportion. It should be one and a half calcium per phosphate anyway.
Right, right, but for some reason they talked about the phosphate being higher in the calcium, and so they were wrong in that statement. Yeah, on PubMed you can find that discussed and basically milk is next to eggshells. It's our best source of calcium. Okay. Okay, thank you very much. There are lots of movements trying to think up something wrong with milk. One of the recent ones is to say that all animal products, beef, pork, milk and cheese and eggs,
so on, all of these contain a sialic acid form that is allergenic and so will cause cancer. That's probably just sort of a sales pitch for a genetic engineering company. Anyone with some interesting bit of research will tend to do a lot of publicity against milk. They claim that it causes diabetes and heart disease and so on, but blood pressure is one of the best researched topics that milk protects against, calcium in particular. I'll check out the PubMed.
I mean I came across like a review article and this person, and I don't have the reference anymore. It was a while ago, and this person was talking against milk, and he said, "I have studied 1,200 research articles and the evidence points against the milk." I haven't had time to research all the 1,200 articles, and I just took it for granted, which I should not have done, but thanks for clarifying this. Okay. Thanks for calling in. We appreciate it. Ray, I've got a question for you.
One of the callers just actually emailed me, and I honestly don't remember if you've already touched upon this, so I apologize if you have. But she was wondering with the increased dairy intake, what she's seeing is an increase in weight. In weight? Yes, like weight gain. Say the word again. I'm sorry. Increase in what? Body weight. Body weight. Oh, yeah, that's very definitely the mechanisms that I mentioned, inhibiting the fat-producing enzyme system and stimulating the calorie-burning uncoupling protein. Those are clearly established papers by Michael Zemel and his group, Sun and Xi and others.
They've done some very good studies on curing obesity with milk products, but there are a lot of other groups that have noticed that milk drinkers are very rarely obese, chronic users of a quart of milk or more a day. So you're saying that weight gain is actually a positive sign? Well, no, gain in obesity is not known to be produced by milk. If you ate nothing but Haagen-Dazs ice cream, you could get fat. But milk with a high ratio of protein and calcium to the fat is the best way to lose weight,
except that it does help to build muscle. Its anti-inflammatory anabolic effect helps to build muscle, which is a good way to gain weight. Of course. Great. Thank you. We've got time for a couple more calls. If you want to call in, 347-426-3546. It's been a great show. It's actually been one of my favorite shows. We'll take one more caller, if you don't mind, Ray. Okay. Dairy Code 111, Mr. E-Man, you're on the air. That's me again. Thank you.
I realize that another question I had in mind was related to dairy as well because it's about trans fats. And there's word out there that dairy is actually a source of natural trans fats. I don't know if there's a difference between natural and synthetic. And I was wondering if Ray Peat had an opinion on that and maybe on trans fats in general. Where are they in terms of danger, maybe, compared to the polyunsaturates? Have you heard about conjugated linoleic acid and its therapeutic benefits? In displacing linoleic?
Well, conjugated linoleic acid, it's being sold therapeutically because it has so many protective effects, stimulating the metabolism and being anti-inflammatory and anti-obesity and so on. But that's a natural component of milk and dairy fat in general. And the trans fats are just in process on the way to forming the conjugated linoleic acid. And I think their benefit is that they block the polyunsaturated fats, linoleic acid in particular. Linoleic acid is the anti-thyroid, pro-cancer, pro-inflammatory, so-called essential fatty acid.
And there have been studies for about 20 years showing that trans fats can have a protective effect in themselves as an inhibitor of the linoleic acid toxic effect. But more importantly, the dairy trans fats are precursors to conjugated linoleic acid, which is specifically active biologically in a good way. And the mechanism by which these are formed is bacteria in the rumen hydrogenate in a protective detoxifying reaction. They detoxify the polyunsaturated fats in the vegetable material that the cow is eating.
And if the cow is eating a natural diet rich in vitamin E, such as leaves rather than grain, the vitamin E is a cofactor in the hydrogenating bacteria turning the unsaturated fats to saturated. And in the 2% of the fats that are missed, there's a small amount of intermediate, not fully hydrogenated material, which turns out to be the trans fats and the conjugated linoleic acid. And those in themselves in small amounts, I think there's good evidence showing that they in themselves have a protective effect.
That's amazing. I would have never thought I would hear anybody say anything good about trans fats. But you did add that they were in very small amounts. So is that what makes it different than, say, partially hydrogenated oils out there? Well, the fact that they're partially hydrogenated means that there's still a lot of PUFA left in them. I think the defense of the idea of essential fatty acids, people are looking for anything to blame the toxic effects of margarine on.
But for a long time, it's been clear that even partially hydrogenated vegetable oil still has enough PUFA in it to have toxic effects. Wow, that's incredible. So do you actually think that there's any danger from just the trans fats themselves? Oh, probably in a large amount, but I'm not exactly sure what it is, because the research I've seen doesn't really clarify what it is they're doing that could be harmful. Would they possibly oxidize? Well, yeah, but less than the purely polyunsaturated fats, because they've already been partly hydrogenated. Very interesting. Thank you. I'm glad I asked.
Well, I appreciate the call. Thank you. No problem. And that was Clarence Ip, who did some of the first experiments showing a slight anti-cancer effect of the trans fatty acids. Wow. Lots of great info in this show, Ray. Knocked it out of the park, in my opinion. We have a couple minutes left. Do you have anything you want to elaborate in regards to just your work on dairy, your thoughts on dairy, work on calcium, hormones, any of that stuff before we kind of shut it down for the day? Oh, no. Oh, no?
Okay, well, Ray, once again, we really appreciate you taking the time out. We have tons of listeners and followers that are really enjoying your information, and I hope people are really respecting your time. But I know people are really respecting your information, so once again, we just want to say thanks. Okay. Thank you. All right. You have a great weekend. Okay. Bye. Bye. All right, guys. Well, there you go. About an hour and 45 minutes of Mr. Ray Peat talking about milk, calcium, hormones, fluoride, saturated fats, everything and anything, and it was quite fascinating.
Like always, re-listen, re-listen, re-listen, re-listen, and re-listen to the show, because you can learn a lot. Check out his articles on his website. Lots of great info there. You can order his books and his newsletter. He's a little bit on back order because of the quantity of orders that he's getting. But tune into our Facebook page, Josh Rubin or Jeanne Rubin, or our Blog Talk Radio Show page or our YouTube page, you can get to that from our website, eastwesthaling.com.
For our next show, hopefully it will be in July, I'm trying to schedule a show to talk about serotonin, tryptophan, and endotoxin in our GI system and how that affects our body. Don't forget, you can learn more about us at our website, eastwesthaling.com. Feel free to give us a call to set up a free consultation. We have clients all over the world. I appreciate everyone tuning in. I appreciate everyone's support. We're all in here for the right reasons. We're all in this to help people. So thanks for tuning in. You guys have a great weekend.
And go Bruins! [ι]