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Once again, it's the third Friday of the month, 7 o'clock to 8 o'clock p.m. Eastern Pacific Time. From 7.30 until 8 o'clock this evening, we have a live call-in with people. Welcome to call-in with questions related to the topic of the show and/or some unrelated questions. We get all sorts from time to time. So once again, very pleased to join you here live from the Kmart Studios in Garboville. It's March, it's gone the equinox now and the clocks have sprung forward and we're definitely getting some sunny warm heralds of the coming spring.
That we're in now I guess, but the coming early summer. So once again, I'm very pleased to introduce Dr. Raymond Peat onto the live show. And like I said, from 7.30 until 8 p.m., we're inviting callers to ask questions related to this month's topic, which is the antiviral activity of medicinal plants and their constituents and how Dr. Peat interprets the antiviral activity, because it's not always a straightforward antiviral activity, but rather a host response. That's often the remedy or the provoking factor which stimulates the immune system into defense.
So the number if you live in the area or even outside the area or from Iceland or Australia or wherever you call in from, number 707-923-3911. And from 7.30 until 8 p.m., we'll be taking calls. So once again, Dr. Peat, thanks so much for joining us. As always, I'd like to start the show off by asking you to introduce yourself, give a rundown of your professional and academic background, so people can understand where you're coming from and later on I'll give people more information on how to find your website and your articles.
After undergraduate study in humanities and a master's degree, also in generally humanities, a thesis on William Blake, I later, about 10 years later, went to graduate school in biology, interested in brain physiology, but ended up working on reproductive physiology because the brain biology people seemed too indoctrinated with membrane theory and other stylish things at the time. So I worked on reproductive physiology and that got me interested in how the hormones affect consciousness among other things, and how nutrition and hormones interact with other environmental factors to affect our immunity and development consciousness and so on.
Okay. Well, I think to open up this month's topic, I know some of the subject matter we may have touched on in the past, I know certainly some compounds will come up repeatedly in terms of their anti-inflammatory and stress reducing potential, as well as antioxidant potential and a number of other things that work together for the good of the host. We've been intimately associated with viruses ever since we walked the face of the earth, and then I've heard various stories of viral DNA being part of our DNA, I think up to 8%.
Was that, am I right in thinking 8% is kind of often quoted proportion? Retroviral DNA seems to be around that. Okay. Alright. So firstly, given how you understand viruses and any potential benefit that they may confer, although most people consider viral illness not at all beneficial but a detriment to their health and to the health of others, obviously the World Health Organization has been campaigning a long time for things from polio eradication to the Ebola outbreaks that have been grabbing the mainstream news,
but how are we to interpret the viral inclusion in our DNA and our evolution with them if we're to understand their role and our approach to dealing with the damaging effects of coexisting with viruses, especially where they cause high mortality and morbidity? While bacteria have their own independent existence, they can generally live without us. Viruses depend on a higher organism to exist. When I was in graduate school, I asked a few people what they thought the origin of viruses was, and no one wanted to suggest anything at all.
The nature of the immune system at that time, 1970, people were still very puzzled about how we could have such an immense potential immunity to every sort of conceivable antigen. At that time, they were still thinking in terms of being born, being created with every antibody, every gene specifying an antibody, and someone worked out the numbers and saw that it would take something the size of a tennis ball for a nucleus of every cell if it was to contain genes for every antibody that we produce.
So people had to start thinking about innovation, the inventive process happening for the immune system, and the origin of viruses seemed to be related to that process of cell invention, innovation, and interaction. People have said that viral diseases became a human problem at the same time that we shifted to an agricultural economy, suggesting that diet could be part of it. Historically, wars, famines, and deforestation, all sorts of natural disasters have led to epidemics. One theory is that stress causes mutations in the virus, causing a benign virus to mutate and become dangerous.
But whatever the mechanism is, it's known that viruses appear and circulate during social stresses. When you look at an individual under stress, each type of tissue or organ sends out messages when it's under stress. These little microvesicles, microsomes, various names for them, are emitted as a very fine, sub-microscopic particle which contains nucleic acids, RNA, DNA, proteins, hormones, a great variety of substances, that travel to other cells in the body and can be assimilated, transmitting differentiated nucleic acid patterns to other cells that are under stress, helping them adapt.
When the individual is under stress, this is natural. Everyone does this constantly. The sicker you are, the more of these microvesicles you have circulating around. That seems to be why old serum transmits aging. Young serum transfusions communicate a youthful physiology. So part of the stress of aging is that we're sending more and more of these distress messages around. Since viruses never could develop on their own, it's probable that they're an emission from a stressed population, escaping from this therapeutic, corrective, adaptive process that happens always, constantly within our body as part of our normal development.
Some of that escapes. Getting into an organism which is in a different state of stress, can become a virus or a microvesicle that the recipient organism hasn't learned how to deal with. Interesting. I want to go back to something you touched on that triggered a memory in me about an article that I read about the epidemiology of viruses as best we know it or we can understand it now. They wanted to link the fact that viral diseases became a lot more prevalent during organization when people and communities started living in it.
You mentioned the word agrarian. When they started getting together and growing crops in one location rather than being nomadic and population started to increase locally in a concentration that up until that point never really allowed viruses an effective means of spread. But once we started becoming community oriented and living in towns and bigger towns and cities, etc., it made it very easy for viruses to spread from one person to another. It was the grains that made that kind of civilization easy to develop. And the grains are bad for you, right? Yeah. Two things in particular.
They're very high in phosphate and low in calcium. That in itself I think is enough to damage your immunity. So you think it's just that practice of growing wheat in large quantities to feed the masses affected the nutritional status of the people enough to allow something like that negative effect of decreasing calcium and increasing phosphate to actually become an issue or develop into a problem that would be affecting a person's health and/or allow the host to become susceptible. And a high iron content in the diet is another thing that damages immunity
because most microorganisms depend on iron as one of their hosts. You've always mentioned iron as being a very damaging element in terms of its ability to oxidize things and rapidly cause that kind of damage and that high iron is always associated with disease. Yeah. And that has been one of my interests in looking at the role of milk in public health because it's very low in iron. Right. High calcium. Yeah. And babies are immune to many diseases such as malaria and viral diseases while they're being breastfed.
And so they're getting a high calcium intake and a low iron intake. So I don't mean to throw it out there to question you per se, but that's a fact, is it? That babies that are being breastfed have a statistically lower proportion of disease than children that have been weaned and are excited to eat food and... Yeah. Some of these like respiratory infections are said to be only about 20% as frequent as breastfed babies. And malaria and such in the zones where it's endemic,
babies don't get it until right after they stop being breastfed for years older. Okay. Let's hold it there for a second. You're listening to iOscuro, the doctor on KMUD, Garboville 91.1 FM. From 7.30 to 8 o'clock, we'll be taking callers. You can call in the number here, 707-923-3911. I just wanted to make a mention as well during this show, as well as you probably have heard prior in this week and will be hearing over the weekend and through next week, that it's KMUD's pledge drive.
And right now, we're at 34,170 out of a hoped for 70,000. So we are essentially, virtually halfway between 70,000 in raising the funds necessary to keep this show and all the others on the air. I just want to remind people time and time again that we have a free speech radio station here in this part of Humboldt County in Northern California. And there are not that many freely independent radio stations broadcasting pretty much what's local and pretty much what is the current pulse of things, whether it's politically or economically, etc.
So it's a very valuable resource and I know this show wouldn't exist without KMUD. So I'm very grateful for KMUD to allow this and all the other programs to exist in its free speech in its purest form. So I really appreciate people calling in and pledging whatever amount they can afford for a yearly membership or lifetime membership, if you can afford that. But anyway, please donate because it's what keeps the show going. So Dr. Peat, to carry on the kind of discourse here about your understanding, your reasoning behind disease born of a virus
and your understanding of our ability to interact or live in the presence of a virus and/or some viruses, the first is that it's not in the interest of the virus to kill the host because they can only replicate inside a living organism. And you've mentioned in the past that viruses or in fact the genetic information they contain is passed down from generation to generation through and it can be passed down through the DNA and that actually is a kind of messenger system in some way.
But can you explain that in terms of how that could possibly benefit the organism? Because I know I want to talk a little bit about viral disease and I would imagine anybody with cold sores or you know, they contract measles or they've got warts would ever imagine that this could be a beneficial thing. But in terms of what viruses do and their information that they carry and how they plug this into our DNA to affect a change, given that we've coexisted with viruses ever since we were walking the face of the earth,
how do you see viruses in the scheme of things, you know, when they're not actually just straight out killing people with Ebola or you know, other deadly viral diseases, how do you imagine that they've existed for so long and how they could be beneficial? In the big historical epidemics, there have always been some people who never caught the disease, were simply naturally immune. I think that's the way everyone is when they aren't subjugated and fed a grain diet.
I think the social invention of disease, especially viral disease, is a definite historical thing that you can see the cellular meaning in a very direct way. There hasn't been much written about the concept of reductive stress, but it simply means that when your cells are being burdened or overstimulated, more than their oxidative metabolism can deal with, they lose their oxidative, pro-oxidative balance and go into the reductive stress. That's where iron, for example, becomes toxic because iron that is harmlessly stored in the oxidizing cell suddenly becomes a source of free radical destruction
when the cell goes over into the overstimulated reductive state. I think that's the central fact of the failure of the immune system. It's something interfering with the oxidative, pro-oxidative balance of the nervous system. Calcium deficiency or phosphate excess is another thing that contributes to that reductive stress. The parathyroid hormone shifts the cells in that direction. When you're eating too much grain phosphate, you increase your parathyroid hormone. That shifts your balance over in the direction of too much reduction, activating cellular weakness and oxidative destruction.
You have mentioned fairly regularly about cell stability and how the cell's inherent stability is essential in terms of maintaining good health and that it's the reductive processes that damage cellular integrity and stability and that these things energetically lead to a weakness with results of the cells inability to maintain order, if you like. Because everything in this universe is about energy and order and entropy is the kind of opposite end of that. It's the disease, decay, chaos, state of breakdown.
Whereas in a perfect body, everything that we have is really been given to produce order and replication and cell turnover and managing cells and everything that we hear about disease, death and cancer, etc., especially cancer, is a disorganized inability to stabilize the cell and things are out of control. So from an energetic point of view, your mind sets upon that type of energetic basis for good health and it looks at viruses in exactly the same kind of light, perhaps, as many other things.
For the cell energy system, cancer and bacterial and viral infections and various types of inflammation are all the same process. It shifts from the production of carbon dioxide, which is an anti-entropic factor. The carbon dioxide spontaneously binds to all of the amino groups in proteins and shifts the acidic balance and so the mineral retaining balance of the cell, stabilizing it in the potassium retaining calcium and sodium, resisting condition of the cell, the stable confirmation of the cell proteins. And when something interferes with your ability to produce that stabilizing carbon dioxide,
instead we produce lactic acid, which adds exactly the opposite. It shifts us over into the unstable state, increased pH, ionization that attracts calcium and sodium and can't take up enough magnesium and potassium. Okay, good. You're listening to Ask Herb, Dr. K. Medeagal with 91.1 FM from 7.30 until the end of the show at 8 o'clock. Callers are invited to call in questions they'd like to post to Dr. Peat. Either about this month's subject of antivirals and viruses, their existence, etc. etc. Or unrelated subjects. The number here is the number 707-923-3911. Okay, so getting on to...
Obviously we need, I say obviously, but I think it's in most human interest not to be diseased, especially in the light of this month's subject of viruses. It's definitely beneficial not to get smallpox or not to get Ebola or etc. etc. It's not a beneficial state to be diseased like that. And so that begs the question, apart from smallpox, which apparently is the only known successful eradication, even though they have stocks of it in Russia, and I think America has stocks of smallpox, they've almost got them to destroy those stocks.
But anyway, I think it's the only eradication program that has been "successful". In terms of actually dealing with viruses, how... And I guess I want to bring up another point about technology that in the last four or five years has made some pretty big leaps, maybe perhaps with not enough oversight, because I know the creation of human embryos that can resist HIV is a fairly controversial subject in China, where they disclosed, or at least people found out, they've been using CRISPR technology to edit genes,
and that these gene sequences never before so easily tampered with, clipped etc. etc. and reinserted back into the embryo to do what they wanted, has become available now. I know that you've said that they just haven't had enough time to refine this, and what they're doing at this point in time is actually probably going to be a Pandora's box, but what do you think about the whole process? As I know you're not mechanistic, so that's why I'm asking you, but in terms of editing genes and inserting or reinserting or, you know, editing,
how do you look at this technology in terms of, do you think it's going to become helpful, or do you think it's still going to be plagued by the same takeover? I think it's exactly the same ideology that was imposed early in the 20th century as Neo-Darwinism, and it basically removed some of Darwin's most important ideas and called it Neo-Darwinism, but Darwin wouldn't have subscribed to Neo-Darwinism. It's a purely mechanical theory of existence in which random variations in the genetic material is the essential idea. It's randomness from the bottom up.
Random changes lead to eventually, by weeding out ones that don't work, supposedly the random changes led to something that worked, and then those by random diffusion within a cell do various things. Everything is explained in terms of random changes. Ever since Lamarck and Darwin, the practical people working with organisms have known that that doesn't work. It's only the academic ideologues who have pushed that abstract view of genetics. James A. Shapiro has worked as a bacterial geneticist. He has written books describing bacteria as perfect genetic engineers. They're perfectly designing and engineering their genetic systems,
but his view of all organisms or of nature is that life is cognitive all the way down, top to bottom. Instead of randomness, it's cognition. Cognition on the cellular level, brain level, and so on. Okay, so what about bacteriophages now as a kind of elusive point here to manipulate viruses? What was the word? Bacterial what? Bacteriophage. Oh, oh. The phage technology. Yeah, that for the intestine or wounds that are infected with bacteria. Eastern Europe and Asia have, over the last 70 or 80 years,
have developed a great collection of these viruses that specialize in destroying living on bacteria. They're harmless to people, but they will eliminate bacteria that have got out of control in our intestines or in infected wounds. Okay, cool. Okay, so I've got some specific questions about some specific viruses. I know that you've always got an alternative approach to treating conditions. But some of these conditions obviously I've asked you about in the past here with people directly even. And I've seen myself, you know, the outcome of this.
I wanted to, I guess, first start with something that is, I think they call it 30 or 35 percent of the population have either come into contact with it or are currently suffering with it. This is human papillomavirus, both in males and females. And in males, the genital warts, and in females, the dysplasia that can be seen by gynecologists, etc., on females, that can eventually lead to cervical cancer. And certainly seems to be a pretty alarming state where there's so many of the population are actually suffering.
And I know whilst things like genital warts seem to be "self-limiting" in terms of it not just progressing from bad to worse, but they eventually clear up. And potentially you don't see any further complications of it. There is and has been associated with them things like penile cancer. And so that this is one example of a virus here that's directly interfering with a host's DNA and energy and flow of electrons in the correct ways to bring about this cellular degradation to a point where the body's lost control of the organization there within the organism.
And so either cancers are rising as a result of this. And this is what they call the oncogenic, the oncogene or the oncogenic effect where this virus is actually being shown to cause a future cancer. What do you think about both of those things, human papilloma and genital warts and the kind of things they engender? The cervical dysplasia that is one of its effects can, if it persists, can become carcinoma in situ or cervical cancer and so on.
But all of the women that I've known who had cervical dysplasia or carcinoma in situ of the cervix cleared it up in just a few weeks by improving their diet and applying vitamin A, vitamin E, progesterone, taking supplements of folic acid and thyroid. Can I just hold you there? I know I personally have worked with this and helped just advising other people, you know, just being there in terms of the source of information for exactly what you just mentioned is a vitamin A, you said, and progesterone.
And I know this would be something that would be best used topically in terms of a pessary kind of treatment, right? How do you see that or those substances, and I guess we call it for the sake of the topic of this month, antiviral. How would you see that antiviral activity affecting the change in a tissue that after X amount of time comes back as being healthy tissue again and not dysplastic?
The irritation, among other things, any irritation increases the reductive balance of the cell and activation of estrogen production and estrogen tends to lock it into that reductive and dysplastic condition. And these various things in different ways, vitamin A opposes the structural changes on epithelial cells as an anti-estrogen differentiating effect. Progesterone knocks out the estrogen and its product. All of the metabolic changes shift the cell away from estrogen and inflammation towards the oxidative energy producing condition.
The mainstream medicine would hold the view that colposcopy, which is a term they've given to this procedure where they take basically a cone, they bore a cone of tissue out of the cervix in the area where they identify this dysplasia, this disorganized cell.
And that goes against all the tenets of anything that you've ever held true that cancers, you just don't start cutting into tissue around a cancer because not just from a potential of not getting it all but having any kind of spread but because the alarm signal that has been well documented or the bystander effect when cells are alarmed and in trouble as would happen during something like an excision. That's a very trigger for something to become in a state of alarm.
If you're extremely healthy, you can heal, you can stand to have a bit of tissue cut away and heal it up with a healthy almost not visible scar. But to the extent that you're not fully in the oxidative condition, any wound is going to leave its trace as a more or less defective healed area. A bad scar tissue has lower oxygen tension, puts the cells under stress, tends to attract repair cells but to damage the repair cells because the tissue is defective. So it becomes a center for cancer regrowth.
Any destruction of the tissue if you're not fully healthy which you wouldn't be if you were having the cancer in the first place. But if you can recover your good oxidative health, then you can probably stand having a bit of tissue cut out. Okay, I just want to remind people, Ask Your Herb Doctor, KMUD Garberville 91.1FM from now until 8 o'clock. The number to call is 707-923-3911 and we do have our first caller on air waiting and caller, you're on the air. Where are you from and what's your question? Hi, I'm from Arizona.
Thanks for the show, Andrew and Dr. Peat. Dr. Peat, your article on immunodeficiency mentions the autoantibodies several times. Glutamate is an excitatory amino acid and glutamate decarboxylates the enzyme that turns glutamate into GABA which is associated with relaxation somehow. My question is about how some people have autoantibodies to this enzyme and these are associated with type 1 diabetes and stiff man syndrome. I was wondering if you had any comments on the system and how does gamma hydroxybutyrate and/or passion fruit juice influence the autoantibodies in GABA?
I think the energy system should be able to use the antibodies to clean out the defective enzymes and not continue to be produced. I think supporting the GABA system with magnesium, glucose, carbon dioxide, anti-inflammatory things, the pro-GABA steroids derived from progesterone in particular, and the anti-immune steroid DHEA which helps to redirect the antibody production. Estrogen tends to make us overproduce antibodies but not be able to guide the correction process. So things that shift the whole physiology towards oxidation and the relaxed, highly energized state of the cell.
I think that's the route out of all of those autoimmune diseases. Do you have any comments on people who have adverse childhood experiences and physical injuries? I had a head injury 20 years ago. Those same things, the things that increase stability and energy production and carbon dioxide production, all of those are constantly causing cells to be born and differentiate in the right direction. Last question, is there any use for GABA supplementation? Normally it doesn't get into the brain because of the so-called blood-brain barrier,
but when the brain is very injured it is taken up because basically the brain needs it. But ordinarily I think it's enough just to eat a pro-oxidative diet, avoid the excess of phosphate, lactic acid, iron and so on. Okay, well thank you and have a good day. Thank you for your call. I think we have one or two other callers waiting here. So let's go to our next caller. Caller, where are you from and what's your question? I'm from New York and I... Hello?
Yeah, hi. I got some kind of feedback. I'm not sure if the engineer can do anything or if it's anything of your end. No, it has nothing to do with me, but I have two questions. Dr. Peat, we've spoken before. First question relates to dry CO2. The notion of doing that in a bath or doing it in a big bag may not be ideal. So one other approach and one I've tried, just want to get your feedback on it,
is to get four different bags, put them like around your both legs up to the knee, on both arms sort of beyond the elbow, and you know, fill them up with the CO2. And actually you could do it with a shower cap too on your head without, you know, impairing your breathing. And if you go to sleep at night, I found that like four or five hours later I'll wake up and I'm over 50, so you know, the hormones are moving in the wrong direction.
I'll find that there's a lot of moisture, I mean literally in some cases a lot of wetness in those bags after four hours. If you do it for like an hour, you don't get anywhere near that amount. It can wake you up. So I'm just wondering, is that a good approach? What is going on there and does that make you dehydrated? Should you be drinking water? Because clearly you're getting rid of bad water and retaining good water.
But I just wanted to get a little more of a physiological explanation of what's going on and how it's good and how long it lasts. The mechanism is that the carbon dioxide relaxes your skin blood vessels so your skin gets pink and warm. And then the plastic bag prevents the water from leaving. So it's just natural sweat vaporization. It's an inconvenience, but it doesn't hurt anything. But is it a good thing? In other words, is it literally removing bad, you know, poorly structured water from the cell?
Well, people who have had terrible edema, keeping their legs or lower body in a bag, very, very efficiently get rid of the edema. So much of the water is going to leave through your kidneys and your lungs being breathed out. But also some of it is leaving through your warm skin. So do you think that's a good thing to do in place of the other? I mean, have you heard of that? Or what are the downsides of what I just described? No problem, except you might get mold. Might get what?
Skin fungus. If you stay too humid too long, it might favor the growth of microorganisms on your skin. In a matter of hours? I would think days, yes, but in a matter of like two hours versus an hour? It probably isn't a problem, but like just wearing sweaty shoes for several hours can favor overgrowth of fungus. Okay, second question relates to thyroid. You discussed the adrenal gland and how it can rejuvenate itself and other glands. And so it seems to me that the adrenal gland provides a multitude of different hormones in production,
whereas the thyroid only produces, you know, I guess T1 through T4, if I'm not mistaken, maybe a few others, but nowhere near the breadth of the adrenal gland. And so I'm wondering if the adrenal gland does all the things that it does and it's able to regenerate itself, why wouldn't the same thing apply to the thyroid gland? In other words, it seems that in the past, perhaps it can be useful for older people, even if they haven't had deficient thyroids, to continue to take thyroid medicine forever.
And I guess I'm thinking, why is that? Because you certainly wouldn't apply that to adrenal glands. Is it possible for the thyroid to rejuvenate itself and actually function normally, such that you could literally not have to take any thyroid medicine after some period of time, or you could take two or three other items that ultimately would provide an adequate proxy? The reason people benefit from taking a thyroid supplement isn't that their gland is weak. It's that their whole body is working to interfere with the function.
There can be enough thyroxine circulating in the body of a hypothyroid person for a dozen people, but if your body is not activating it properly, not able to mobilize the mitochondrial respiration, then that thyroxine is counterproductive. In some cases, it interferes with the formation and effect of T3. If someone wasn't happy taking that for a long period of time, they had inadequately or maybe just a minor suboptimal functioning thyroid, are there two or three things that you would say that are really important if you're not going to take thyroid medicine to proxy for that?
When you have eliminated most of the polyunsaturated fats in your tissues, then your tissues are extremely sensitive to thyroid hormone, and so your gland doesn't have to work very hard to keep you in a high metabolic condition. That's the number one thing. What you're saying is the thyroid will regenerate itself the same way an adrenal gland will, the same way any gland will, but that's actually not the point. The point is the body and your consumption of PUFA, the transport, the absorption, the cell, etc.,
it's the entire train ride to the cell that ultimately gets interfered with, not the gland production. Is that what you're saying? Yes, and by the time a person is 45, the body is really soaked in polyunsaturated fats. They talk about the N-3 fatty acids as being predominant in the brain, but that's only an old brain. A healthy, young, 5-year-old brain is highly saturated in comparison to a middle-aged brain. It's funny you mentioned just another point on the omega-3s, because Mary Enag wrote an article, and I can't remember whether you support her review or not,
but she actually said that the problem is you need some, and you need them to be in equal proportion, one-to-one ratio between 3s and 6s, but she doesn't say that you don't need them. It just seems to be, even from people that are alternative medicine people who are relatively credible and have no vested interest to deceive anybody, it seems there are a lot of sources that seem to believe that there's some benefit. So I don't know whether the goal is to get to zero, because you've also mentioned that the ratio of saturated
to unsaturated may actually be more important than whether or not you accumulate PUFA. So I'm just trying to get a little bit of perspective on that, because context, I guess, is everything, right? Yes. If you look at a newborn brain, people are now saying that all newborns are deficient in PUFA, but when you look at the brain function, the reason little kids can learn so spectacularly quickly is that their brains aren't overloaded with PUFA. The metabolic rate is extremely high in the absence of PUFA.
That's one of the things that Burr, in 1932 or '33, discovered was his animals that were made deficient in the so-called essential fatty acids, he put them under a bell jar and found that they were consuming oxygen almost twice as fast as the normal rats. So we have a terrifically high metabolic rate when we're two or three or four years old, and it's gradually suppressed as we accumulate fish oil and vegetable oil. Thank you for that, Cora. I appreciate your call. We've got a caller waiting, so let's move on to the next caller. Thank you.
You're welcome. Cora, where are you from and what's your question? Hi, I'm calling from New York, and thank you for this great show. Another New Yorker. I had a question sort of similar to the previous caller about fully hydrogenated oils. I think, Dr. Peat, I think you've recommended fully hydrogenated oils to improve metabolic rate. My question is, do you think that the catalyst that they use to hydrogenate the oils and the little maybe the particles that flake off of the screen that they use for hydrogenating them, do you think that's a serious problem?
It's definitely worrisome, and I think we should look for a much better way to get saturated fats. But the experiments like the Russians who used fully hydrogenated peanut oil and found that old mitochondria were restored to the youthful functions just with that highly saturated peanut oil, the results are so good that despite the possible danger of traces of the catalyst. Okay. All right, thank you. Do you think that the more saturated the fat is, maybe the more antiviral and antibacterial it could be? Because I know that coconut oil is, but --
Yeah, I think it is the saturated fatty acids that are most antibacterial and probably help with the viral resistance. Okay, well, thank you very much. I appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you for your call. Okay, in case there's anybody else out there wanting to get a question in before 8 o'clock, the number here is 707-923-3911. This is Ask Your Ab Doctor, KMED Galvapour 91.1 FM. And I just want to mention again that we are running our pledge drive here, folks. So for all of those people that are listening, whether they've called in or not,
we'd really appreciate your financial support, however much you'd like to give. And if you just call the same number, the 707-923-3911 number would work to get your pledge to the people waiting to receive them. And we do appreciate your support is what keeps the radio station alive. Okay, so Dr. Peat, a couple of interesting calls there. I wanted to carry on the topic here with antivirals, looking at some specific components in plants, and namely some medicinal plants that have been pulled out and have been used as trials.
I know trials, but for trials' sake, are sometimes a little bit poorly designed or sometimes the results are skewed unfairly in one or the other direction. But obviously things like the flavonoids, and I want to mention my other question that I have for you if we get time for it, naringin and naringenin. But let's start with the flavonoids as a chemical group, especially from green tea. Now we've all heard about the benefits of green tea, not just from the Chinese, but from many other people around the world
who seem to believe and some research is showing that there's some definite clinical benefit from consuming green tea daily. As I'm sure you will say that coffee's consumption is also very useful. But the antioxidants, epicatechin and epicatechin gallate, they're said to be reducing glutamate excitotoxicity. Now you've always talked about excitotoxicity in general as being a very negative energy reducing kind of state, a wasteful state of the cell. Yeah, it puts you in the reductive stress condition. So if both of these flavonoid compounds then reduce this excitotoxicity,
then that's got to be a good thing in terms of stabilizing things and calming the cell down and reducing inflammation, right? Yeah, although they're called antioxidants, like vitamin C is called an antioxidant, but when it's in the cell, when those flavonoids are in the cell, they function as pro-oxidants. They shift the cell into the healthy oxidized condition. Right. Well, that's a good thing, obviously. So how about-- okay, so naringenin. Naringenin has received a reasonable amount of press attention here and also I've seen quite a bit of material on PubMed doing trials with naringenin.
And this obviously is one of those things in grapefruit peel. And orange juice. Orange juice, exactly. Orange juice for sure. But they certainly mentioned that the content within the peel and the membranes of the citrus family, both oranges and lemons, but specifically here in grapefruit. Yep, marmalade is a great drug. That's interesting. I don't know if my wife's listening, but I always, always started my day with-- it was bad then, it was toast, but marmalade. And every morning I had marmalade for breakfast. Anyway, so the benefits of naringenin.
Do you see any other benefits or the way that you would understand naringenin to have a kind of antioxidant, antiviral too? I mean, the research for naringenin was based on herpes virus. So they use both naringenin and hesperidin, which comes from orange and lemon peels, as well as the membranes that join the fruits within the orange or the lemon, acting as antiviral. Knowing what you know about those flavonoids, would you understand that mechanism in any other way? No, I think it's exactly the same mechanism that aspirin has for its antiviral function,
a pro-oxidative cell restorative function. Interesting. All right. So you're still very much on the side of cell energy and the organization that energy brings as being a route towards restoring the cell and restoring health. Okay. All right. I don't know if we have enough time because it's four minutes to eight, but I wanted to break into pomegranate and the extract from the rind. When they had done experiments and trials with this substance mixed with zinc against herpes 1 with acyclovir-resistant herpes virus, there was a marked increase in antiviral activity with this zinc
and pomegranate rind extract. Do you know, would you have anything quickly to say about zinc? Because I know in the past you've mentioned it topically, perhaps as being effective. I suspect that it is sort of like a cofactor for vitamin A. Both of them are very important for healthy protein synthesis. I've experienced when I was about 50, I had aging eyebrows starting to get stiff, and I found with a zinc supplement or a vitamin A supplement, either one would reverse the age properties of those eyebrows.
And I think that's because they accelerate normal differentiated protein synthesis and oppose the degraded estrogen excitation reductive process. Interesting. Okay. Well, thanks so much for your time. Next month, I think we'll carry on where we left off with some of the other antiviral medicinal plants and how you'd see their effects physiologically and how you would describe those effects as well as further work on another subject that hopefully we'll get a chance to talk about next month. Thanks so much for your time. Okay. Okay. So for those people who have listened and haven't called in
and for those people who've listened and called in, thanks so much for joining. Dr. Peat's website can be found www.raypeat.com. He's got a fully referenced library, if you like, of different diseases and how his research as well as bringing up research that was done 80 or 100 years ago, which was very valid scientific research, which unfortunately as time goes by, gets corrupted with the new paradigm, unfortunately, how that is explained scientifically, they're fully referenced. And we can always be reached, our business is Western Botanical Medicine. On our website, www.westernbotanicalmedicine.com, I've archived all of our shows.
And before long here, there will be a pretty comprehensive Instagram website also, which will have all of Dr. Peat's quotes and all of his radio show excerpts related to specific subjects. I think it will be a great free website, information place to actually go and get some current real words from Dr. Peat. There will be audio files as well as excerpts. So thanks so much for joining us. Until 3rd Friday of next month, good night.