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Hello. Dr. Peat, there you are. Yes, hi. Hi, good morning. How are things with you, sir? Pretty good. Pretty good? Pretty good? What'd you have for breakfast? Oh, I've just coffee and milk. Coffee and milk. Coffee and milk. It's so funny, there's so many people out there, Dr. Peat, that tell you, "Boy, you just shouldn't drink milk." I mean, milk, we're the only mammals in the world that don't drink milk after weaning, and it's just going to kill you and all of that. It hasn't killed you.
Nope. It's actually one of the cleanest foods available because of the cow filtering it through many layers, chemically. The rumen processes the toxins out of the plant material. When you eat the same leaves that a cow eats, you absorb many allergens and toxic materials that the plant puts into its leaves defensively intended to kill bugs or anyone who would damage them, eating holes in their leaves and such. So really, there are chemical pesticides naturally in plant material. Seeds are the most precious to the plant. Their whole generation
depends on the seeds being viable and not being eaten by microorganisms or large organisms. So they have the most intense toxins and blockers of the digestive system. When you look at the chemicals in seeds, it turns out that they block the digestive enzymes of mammals and insects, but they don't affect that same type of enzyme in plants. So it's obvious that they're directed towards a defense against being eaten. Unless you have very sophisticated lab equipment, you just can't separate the good stuff from the toxins. But the cow's
rumen is such that the microorganisms do the chemistry of eliminating the bad stuff, increasing the good stuff. At the local store, they have a few choices of organic milk. I didn't want to get one of those big, huge things because I don't drink a lot of it, but I wanted to try a little. And I just got some half and half organic. Boy, that's pretty fun to drink, getting a lot of good fat in there. Yeah, I use cream or half and half in my coffee.
What's with this A2 for cows? Is there anything for that if you get a Jersey A2 cow that's easier to digest? And talk about the difference between goat milk and cow milk. There's a big difference between the milk of all species, but they still have in common the rumen milk. Camels, goats, sheep, cows, yamas, that type of animal produces the safest milk. The reason people don't drink pig milk or bear milk or such is that they don't have rumens, and so all the plant toxins go into their milk.
They don't have rumens. And explain what rumens are exactly. It's an extra stomach that the vegetable material goes in and soaks with. The body temperature favors the growth of microorganisms which ferment and degrade the plant material, basically digesting it with protozoa, fungi, bacteria, all of the major types of microorganisms get a chance to break down the plant material. Then that broken down material goes through the regular digestive system, analogous to what we have. People and bears and pigs don't have that extra stomach, and so whatever they eat pretty much goes with minimal filtering
through the bloodstream. Dr. Ray Peat is with us. He has a PhD in biology, University of Oregon, specialized in physiology. He taught in schools. He's taught in University of Oregon, Urbana College, Montana State University, National College of Naturopathic Medicine, University of Arizona down in Mexico. He's done some work in Mexico. He started his work with the progesterone and related hormones in 1968. He goes back. If you'd like to be on the show, email wise, [email protected]. Our 800 thing is not functioning today because of a long story, but we're working on that
to get that fixed. Just use the email this morning, [email protected]. You mentioned the pigs. I often thought about how they do these various testing on animals, I guess rats, I guess that they use mice for doing all these different testing. Dr. Peat, is that viable to do something on a mouse or a rat and say, "Well, then that's the way it is for humans too"? One great difference between mice and rats is that they are mainly nocturnal animals. If the experimenter is working in the lab in the daytime and they keep the rat or mouse
awake to do their experiments, they're creating intense stress in the animal. So the experimenter to do something analogous to what happens in a human has to stay up all night to work with the nocturnal animals and they don't do that. So automatically you have to question what time of day they were doing their experiments. Very often if someone is selling a product, they'll try out very different animals so they can get the kind of results they want. In the 1960s and early 70s, the estrogen industry was testing their products on dogs and they
found that estrogen would damage the dog's bones. But by using a species that lives oppositely in the nighttime rather than daytime, they found that estrogen would strengthen the bones of mice and rats. But it happens that cortisol, which weakens dogs' and humans' bones, cortisol stimulates the growth of bones in these nocturnal animals. So what they're doing is choosing the animal that is specific to get the kind of result they want. And I've often thought of the idea with the mice and the rat, these little guys are
probably surrounded by a huge amount of electromagnetic fields with who knows what kind of lights, all these weird lights that are not good for you, and then who knows what they're feeding them to. So that would, to me, would put a fly in the ointment of results and how accurate they are. - [Dr. Reagan] Yeah, and they commonly use a very standardized controlled diet. There are prejudices built into what they call the standard diet. Often they'll put in 6% of so-called essential fatty acid, which isn't all essential. When someone experiments leaving
out those essential fatty acids, they get super rats or super mice, very resistant to poisons, trauma, shock, venoms, aging diseases, very resistant to diabetes, all kinds of biological damage is less in the animals that are deficient in the so-called essential fatty acids. But since they build those fats into the diet, then when they compare an experimental diet to the standard diet, they're already biasing the experiment. They're making sick animals as their reference, and then if they're less sick when they change the diet, they say that means their recommended additive is beneficial.
- [Dr. Sinclair] I wonder who came up with the term essential fatty acids. - [Dr. Reagan] That was Burr, I forget his first name, he and his wife, around the late 1920s and early 1930s, got the idea that maybe fats were like a vitamin, even though two or three research groups at big universities had demonstrated that you could have a totally fat-free diet and the animals actually lived longer. I think Osburn was the name of one of the research groups. But the Burrs got this idea and created a fat-free diet, but
at that time, the B vitamins, most of the B vitamins hadn't been discovered, and they were feeding a diet deficient in the unsaturated fats, but also deficient in several of the B vitamins. They said they had created a deficiency disease in which the animals got sore tails and areas of their face around their mouth got rashy and cracked. They said this is the fatty acid deficiency symptom. But 15 years later, Texas Research Institute, one of the universities there, demonstrated they discovered vitamin B6 and some of the other B vitamins
and they created the Burr essential fatty acid deficient animals and then gave them only vitamin B6 in addition, no fat, and cured the deficiency symptom. So they, in 1945 or '46, proved that there was no essential fatty acid. But meanwhile, the petroleum industry was working on how to make plastics and paint, the synthetic plastics were being engineered at the same time. And the seed oils like linseed oil had been the bulk of plastics and paints up until that time, but petroleum chemistry
replaced the seed oils. So there was no longer a paint and plastics market for linseed oil and cotton seed oil and so on. So they had to figure out some way to dispose of their product. The crop was being grown, but no one needed it for paint. So they decided to sell it to the public as a food. The same thing happened in the '60s and '70s with fish oil. Fish oil had been primarily used as varnish or fuel, lamp fuel, but it made
a good varnish because it hardens on exposure to oxygen the way linseed oil does. But the fish processing factories were throwing away the skin and the fatty parts when they were canning salmon or other fish, and they were causing horrible pollution of the bay areas and land areas adjacent to the factories. The EPA told them they had to figure out something to do with their waste material to reduce the pollution, and fish oil as a health food came on the market. That's great. Let's just give it to the people. They'll eat it.
Yeah. I've suggested that that might be the way to dispose of used tires. Yeah, that's right. Make some kind of food out of it. But I've often kind of conjectured that, wasn't fish oil, though, used early on, like 1800s and 1900s too? Isn't there some records of that? Yeah. For hundreds of years, it was known to make a good varnish, and whale oil was a liquid that was good for lamp oil. It was a major fuel oil for a couple of hundred years.
But I've often heard that parents gave their kids cod liver oil, like in 1900 and stuff around there. Oh, yeah. I got some when I was a kid. Okay. So it wasn't that it wasn't consumed internally, you're saying, in the '60s, so when it really busted out, right? When it really, yeah, market. That was only the liver oil, and it's very different from the regular fish oil. Fish oil has, what they're selling now, isn't from the liver, and so it has practically
no vitamin value, very small contamination with vitamin D and vitamin A, but not enough to be therapeutic like the liver oil. So cod liver oil is different from fish oil? Oh, tremendously different, yeah. Is cod liver oil then healthy? If you don't have other sources of vitamin A and vitamin D, if you live in Norway, for example, that's where it got started. The winters are so dark, people found that they benefited, and if they didn't like the taste of the fish liver, they could maybe stand the taste of the liver oil.
I see. But we can get plenty of A in our food and D in the sun, right? Yeah. Eggs are a good source of vitamin A, and getting sunlight is the best way to get your D. So you see no reason to do even cod liver oil? No, only in certain areas. In certain areas, yeah. Ray Peat is with us, and Patrick Timpone, Ray at OneRadioNetwork.com. Good to have you here. Please stick around. We have some good emails coming in for Dr. Peat. If you have one, Patrick at OneRadioNetwork.com.
Dr. Richard Ulrey, authority on minerals, talks about gut bacteria, making the vitamins, and absorbing the minerals, how it all works. We need vitamins from our gut bacteria so we can absorb minerals, and then minerals provide a resonant frequency. And those minerals carry these frequencies into the body, and multiple minerals will give you a frequency that allows all of our proteins to have individual distinct frequencies, giving that three-dimensional structure. This is where Wayne's products, Living Stream, and that's the only primary products I carry.
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In our store on oneradionetwork.com. These are creation of Wayne Blakely. Wayne has literally moved to Missouri and he's working with a huge piggy manufacturer, he's speaking to pigs with Dr. Peat, because he believes that with these probiotics properly given to the pigs, he can stop all of this weird virus, bacteria, I don't know what they're calling it, they've got all kinds of names for it around the world with the pigs. China has huge issues and the pigs are just getting really sick and their babies are coming out
and they're being born dead. So he really thinks that with the right gut terrain in the pigs that he can help these people and not lose all these pigs. So it's a big deal and it's going to be a big experiment and we're going to keep tabs on them. But he's a very smart guy making these products and I think you'll enjoy trying some. They're in our store on oneradionetwork.com. Starving for vitality, we're turning to energy drinks, stimulants, and pharmaceuticals to
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We talked with Dr. Ray Peat on OneRadioNetwork.com. It's Dr. Ray Peat. It's RayPeat.com. He's got a place there you can sign up for his newsletter. It's a very affordable thing. How much is your newsletter again? It's $28 by email. $28 for a year, right? Yeah. Cool. Cool. No, it's 12 issues, but it's two years. Oh, 12 issues for $28. Wow. That's a good thing. Cool. Good job with that one. Patrick at OneRadioNetwork.com talking about water. What's your take on water? I don't know
if we've ever talked to you about water. Of course, we have the Batman Gellich idea of one-half ounce of body weight for every pound. Talk a little bit about what your research shows and dehydration and keeping enough water in there. Salt is one of the important factors in keeping us hydrated. In the '50s, the drug companies came out with diuretic pills, new chemicals to make you lose water, and they sold them to pregnant women to prevent water retention. It turns out that that's a very bad idea because
during pregnancy, you have to retain water in your bloodstream, expand your blood volume tremendously so it can take care of the growing fetus as well as some other circulation. Whole new systems of blood vessels have to be supported, so you need more blood volume. To do that, what retains the water in the bloodstream is largely the protein albumin, but the albumin doesn't retain water unless there is an associated sort of a cloud of sodium atoms associated with the negative charges on the albumin protein. The combination of sodium albumin retains
water right within this system of atoms and molecules. If you don't have enough sodium, if you take a diuretic that makes you lose sodium, the water that goes with the sodium does not just reduce the blood volume, but it reduces the ability of the albumin to pull water to keep water from going out into your tissues. So the albumin, instead of pulling water out of your tissues into the bloodstream, the albumin itself goes out of the blood vessels into your tissues, creating a kind of edema and swelling that isn't the typical pitting
edema. It's a very firm resembling mixed edema of hypothyroidism, but it's simply caused by the lack of sodium, which is needed to keep water in the proper compartments. So without sodium, you dehydrate your circulatory system, but waterlog the functioning tissues so they don't work very well. So it's putting the water in the wrong place. In experiments, two different groups gave women with toxemia of pregnancy great water retention and high blood pressure. They gave them extra salt instead of diuretics to make them lose salt.
And with this supplement, in one case, I think it was six grams a day. In the other group, they gave them 20 or 21 grams a day of extra salt. In both cases, their blood pressure quickly came down to normal and their toxemia was cured just by getting that considerably big dose of daily salt. So the edema, puffiness around the ankles or lower legs, and I think, like you said, there's two different kinds. The kind that you press in and it keeps that little indentation
in there, and then there's some. What's the difference between those two? If you have protein leaked out of your blood vessels among the tissue cells, that protein is slow to move under pressure. And if it's from the salt deficiency causing leakage of albumin or if it's from hypothyroidism causing accumulation of sugar-containing protein, either of those makes the water stick around your tissue cells and it doesn't get easily pushed back into your blood vessels under pressure. So it tends to stay once it gets
into your feet, for example, by gravity. Then it doesn't all come out during the night. A simple edema will correct itself during the night just because the pressure is less extreme. But when you stand up, if you don't have enough sodium and albumin, your blood loses water into your lower extremities and they swell up. So people that they get the puffy ankles, they could actually just try taking more salt and seeing if that doesn't clear it? Yeah. You want to make sure your protein intake is adequate. And when you increase your protein,
you want to make sure that you're not overloading on phosphate. Phosphate is now being recognized as a kidney toxin in kidney failure. Just too much phosphate is one of the most toxic things that damages the kidneys. So if you're going to increase your protein, use forms that are not overloaded with phosphate. Meat, fish, and seed proteins are the highest in phosphate. Leaves and milk and cheese are the lowest in phosphate. So you can get over phosphate if you're doing too much meat.
Yeah, definitely. Pure meat eaters eventually, like the Eskimos, when they were on a largely meat-eating diet, they aged quickly beyond the age of 40 and their bones had 10 or 15% less mass than people in the same region who were not eating a pure meat diet. Here's an email. This is a good one. Eric, he wants to build more muscle. Who doesn't? What are some foods that we can eat to help muscle building? That's a good question. Protein is an essential thing, but you have to make sure, again, that it is not excessive
in phosphate and that it has the B vitamins, vitamin D. Vitamin A is essential for making protein, but you don't want to get too much carotene. Carotene turns off your metabolism, blocks your testosterone production, for example. So you want natural animal vitamin A, such as you get in eggs and liver. And not too much of that either, because that also is toxic to your thyroid. But it's needed for making muscle protein, other proteins, and the steroid hormones, progesterone and testosterone.
We had a fellow on the other day who's a weightlifter kind of guy and talking about hormones and said that guys could do safely a little bit of progesterone from the wild, yam, you know, on your little dab of it. Do you agree with that? Oh yeah. If you take the amount a woman would use to replace after menopause, that's about 30 milligrams a day, that can antagonize a man's testosterone and create a momentary testosterone deficiency. But if you take 5 or 10 milligrams, that's more in the range
that's normal for a man and it can actually, by reducing estrogen production in a man, it can make the testosterone effect much more potent. Both testosterone and progesterone are capable of reducing the synthesis of estrogen, but testosterone can be converted into estrogen. If you don't have the progesterone and thyroid hormone, then you're liable to convert your testosterone into estrogen and lose the masculinizing effect of the testosterone. So that's why he was saying just a little bit will do you. He didn't give a formula,
but you say about 5 to 10 grams if the guys are going to try. Milligrams. Milligrams, yeah, sorry. 5 to 10 milligrams of a little bit of progesterone cream. And it comes from wild yams, just from yammies. Yeah. Well, it can be made from several different plant steroids. I don't think the majority is now being made from yams. I think it's cheaper from soybeans. Yeah, you don't want to do that, right? Well, yeah, because it's cheap and it's all refined so that you can't tell what plant
it came from. It's chemically so purified that there's no difference between whether it comes from a ginger, I think, is one of the plants, and soy and yam. But the bulk is now made from soy, but it's all just as good. Are beans estrogenic where you want to not do too many of those? Beans? Yeah, beans. Yeah, that type of plant. Many years ago, they found that sheep would miscarry if they grazed on leguminous plants, clover, alfalfa, beans, and peas. All in the plant do have
estrogens that are enough to act as a birth control pill for animals that are sensitive, such as sheep. But in the bean itself, there are other toxins designed by the plant to make them indigestible. So people have developed technologies for cooking them properly. If you soak them for a day, any grain, if it soaks at room temperature long enough to start the sprouting enzymes, those enzymes work similarly to the cow's rumen, activate detoxifying processes to grow. The plant has to reduce its own toxins and convert them into growth
proteins. So soaking a bean detoxifies it quite a bit. Then very long cooking until it softens further reduces the toxicity of it. So there's ways to do the beans and the grains where they're digestible. Yeah, but they're still a very low-grade protein compared to leaf protein. The quality of the protein in leaf is similar to milk or about 70% as perfect as egg yolk protein. The leaves in milk are similarly high quality. Muscle meat is a little lower quality by most
definitions, but the bean and grain protein, most of them are way down on the scale of 5% to 10% in quality, meaning that for good muscle building, they function as nothing more than energy. Might as well eat sugar as beans. Might as well eat sugar. What about, these days you can get some pretty good, very good quality grass-fed whey protein. Do you think that's a reasonable food? Powder? The whey isn't quite as nutritionally balanced and safe as the casein. You separate the milk,
you get different qualities in the different proteins. But yeah, the whey is good quality protein, but for many purposes, casein is better, the solid part that goes into cheese. Oh, you mean overall, but you don't think it's a negative thing, a good quality whey protein for people? No, it's a good protein. Compared to beans, it's extremely good. Yeah. Do you have to, to do the whey proteins, do they have to ferment this at all or do they just separate it out?
There are different ways of separating it. I think a lot of it now is done with an acid treatment rather than having bacteria make the acid. I think they just add an acid to cause the curdling and separation. Yeah, you want to be careful and warn which ones you get. Does Dr. Peat have any insights on leg vascular insufficiency or lipodymia? Oh, we were kind of talking about, thank you both for making these shows available. You're welcome. So did we cover the leg vascular
insufficiency and lipodymia or not? Or is it different from what we were talking about 20 minutes ago? The edema. In the legs in particular? Well, having swelling of the legs and feet, the pressure from the tissue outside the blood vessels, that simply pushes on the blood vessels and makes it very hard for the blood to get through. Just like if you put your hand into a pressure chamber and applied pressure, when the pressure equaled 150 millimeters of mercury, for example, your blood pressure wouldn't be sufficient to push the blood through the vessels. And the same
thing happens when you get swollen tissues around your blood vessels, the swelling pressure can reach the point that the blood can't get through. So it isn't just a matter of what's happening inside the blood vessels. But if you have extremely high fats in your blood, that does increase the viscosity. If your albumin, it's a very small protein, but interestingly, having high albumin increases the fluidity of your blood. Other proteins like fibrinogen make your blood thicker. So fat and fibrinogen are viscosity increasers. Albumin and salt
make your blood literally more fluid. You can correct the fibrinogen and fat content by lowering your stress basically. And that includes things like not having an excess of phosphate in your diet, making sure your thyroid function and vitamin D levels are good. Those are the three most neglected anti-stress factors in our culture. The three again are the low thyroid, low vitamin D, and excess of phosphate. And those guys come from the ones before you said, the meat, too much meat, fish. And beans and grains are also excessive in phosphate.
Corey Peat is with us, Patrick Timponi, OneRadioNetwork.com. Here is Kevin. He did a PSA test with his doc and the doc said it's high. And can Dr. Peat give us his opinion on this whole PSA testing? Is it viable? And what do I do now? Because he doesn't want to take any drugs. In the 1980s, they were looking for ways to diagnose prostate cancer and they decided that this particular antigen was a sign that something was wrong with the prostate. Actually, this particular protein is a defensive reaction to some kind of irritation or problem. It
happens that cancer does lead to an increase of this protein, but it's a defensive reaction. A company several years ago was planning to develop this as a product to sell to treat prostate cancer because in itself, it has an anti-cancer protective effect. But anyway, the main drift of the industry was to use it to diagnose prostate cancer. So it came on the market, I think, around 1991. And in the next two or three years, there was approximately a 50% increase in the deaths from prostate cancer. And that is a general effect of diagnosis.
If you're using a treatment that produces some degree of mortality in the process of curing the disease, if you suddenly start treating many, many more people, the death rate is going to increase. That's what happened. A tremendous surge in the deaths from prostate cancer in the early 1990s. In the later 90s, a journalist went to a convention of prostate specialists and asked these men who specialized in treating prostate cancer, what would they do if they discovered they had prostate cancer? Almost all of them said they would do nothing.
They were giving estrogen treatment and surgery to their patients, but they knew that they were not curing prostate cancer. So they said if they had it, they would not treat the prostate cancer. And around the beginning of this century, that became public, and the idea spread, watchful waiting after the diagnosis. In other words, not treating, not using estrogen and surgery just because you have prostate cancer. And so then the mortality rate dropped. It's okay to diagnose it if you don't treat it. Yeah, it's interesting. What's the connection between pumpkin seeds, zinc, and prostate
that's been touted to be a good thing to help the guys keep Mr. Prostate strong? Something to that? Usually people eat their pumpkin seeds well salted, and I think increasing salt for many people is an extremely beneficial thing. Years ago, when I read about the effects of pregnant women curing their toxemia by eating a lot of extra salt, I knew a lot of women who had premenstrual syndrome, and they would have swelling for a couple of weeks. They would swell up and get irritable, and they would crave salt. But they all said that they knew
salt would cause water retention. So even though they craved it tremendously premenstrually, they decided that they shouldn't eat it, but still they swelled up. And I told them about the pregnant women and said, "Why not eat the salt that you crave?" And the very first cycle that they simply ate as much salt as they craved, and they didn't swell up. Over several years, I saw that happen over and over. If they followed their tastes, their premenstrual symptoms were tremendously reduced. So I knew some old people who were told to
restrict their salt. Invariably, they developed insomnia when they stopped eating the salt that they craved, and their blood pressure was not cured. I told some of my friends about the experience of the women with PMS and the pregnant women, and a couple of my old friends tried disobeying their doctors and salting their food as their taste indicated, and their insomnia was cured. Very interesting. So this craving, and I know personally, I do, and I know other people that crave salt, is it generally we really need it because we kind of crave it? We want
a little bit more on this particular food? And how would we know if we're getting just too much and we're kind of, the craving has turned into a, I don't know, just some kind of habit or some kind of a, you know, something that's out of balance? Generally people's thyroid function decreases with aging or with stress. And when your thyroid is low, you don't retain salt properly. You lose salt in your urine very easily when your thyroid is low. And when you lose the sodium, your aldosterone increases. Aldosterone causes
increased blood pressure, and over time it causes fibrosis and degeneration of the blood vessels and heart. So low thyroid leads to these heart disease conditions, largely because of the salt loss causing aldosterone to increase. When I worked in the woods, we had a cook who was a fanatic. He knew people lost salt when they sweated, so he would put a tablespoon of salt in our morning porridge, and he wouldn't give us our ham and eggs if we didn't eat our porridge. And so everyone would gag down
the salt. And then they gave us a bottle of salt pills to take because we would sweat. I would get white salt crystals on my eyebrows and arm hairs. The body adapts by lowering the aldosterone so that the salt is lost easily, and it even comes out abundantly in your sweat. But then you lose the salt in just a few hours, and so you need the salt pills to prevent fainting. After a week of that, having to eat salt pills in the afternoon after having
a tablespoon for breakfast, I got the idea that the body was adjusting. So I told the cook over the weekend that I had seen a doctor who told me to go on a low-salt diet. So from then on, I got porridge without the toxic dose of salt. And immediately that week, I stopped sweating crystal and salt. So that was my first endocrine experiment on myself. The adrenals adjust very quickly. But the background to that is that aging lowers your thyroid function, and your thyroid deficiency causes you to lose sodium. So the craving
in most people is a very biological thing. But you could correct it by correcting your thyroid function, which makes you retain salt efficiently so you don't need to eat so much. So people like myself and others who do a lot of saunas, I do a sauna almost every day and I sweat a lot. That would be another reason why I would crave the salt, if I'm losing it through my sweat. Yeah. Right? Yeah. So when you sweat like that in saunas, is it the salt you really need? People talk about
electrolytes. What's the difference between salts and electrolytes? The main electrolytes are salt and the minor ones, potassium, magnesium, calcium. The main one in the blood is sodium and a moderate amount of calcium and potassium and magnesium. But sodium is the one that is most often correctable. But you can take electrolytes or things, right, extra if you need to. Yeah. It's good to have a generous amount of all of them. If they're pure, they regulate themselves so you can eat a huge amount of extra calcium, magnesium and potassium. If
you took a lot of potassium all at once, it could stop your heart and too much magnesium can make you unconscious. It has been used intravenously as an anesthetic. But when you take them orally, your body adjusts them so it isn't a matter of having the right proportion going in. Your body can do the sorting. Do you know that little, that company, what is it, the Electro-Mix, you know, the little emergency, you know, those little packages. Do you think those are reasonable? Do you
know that product? I think they call it Electro-Mix, the electrolytes. Do you know those? Those are all basically beneficial if they aren't contaminated somewhere along the line. Who knows about that, right? This is from a fellow in Switzerland. Oh, hi there in Switzerland. What laboratory test would Dr. Peat advise for a good health assessment? Would the following markers be a reasonable choice for a middle-aged man to do the TSH, T3, T4, prolactin, DHEA, testosterone, cortisol? So he's asking about all these different tests for vitamin A, vitamin D. Talk a bit about
people can do blood tests, some of the key things that they might want to do to help this fellow and others. Doctors are often reluctant to follow the patient's interests, giving DHEA, even TSH, they're sometimes reluctant to do often enough. Vitamin D should be done pretty regularly if you live in a northern or temperate climate where you don't get sun all year round. There are some tests that are very rarely done routinely. Free fatty acids are extremely important. Stress will increase the free fatty acids. The most common tests that people benefit
from are the ones you mentioned, progesterone, DHEA, pregnenolone, testosterone, TSH and the thyroid hormones. Prolactin is a pretty good indicator of stress and imbalance when it rises. And then of course you got the fibrogen in the A1c, the kind of classics, those are good markers of potential problems? Lactic acid in the blood is another thing that should be done more often because a lot of people, because of stress or hypothyroidism or nutritional imbalance, will chronically have more lactic, even though it isn't recognized as acidosis, a rise in lactic acid is a good
indicator of something going wrong in your body. So the ones you mentioned that are good to know, free fatty acids, prolactin, lactic acids, what are some of the other ones that you said? Well, the balance of calcium and phosphate will show up if you test the parathyroid hormone. That is reflecting your status of phosphate, calcium and vitamin D. And that's part of the thyroid panel? No, it's rarely done, it's extremely relevant to your general health. Your heart health is powerfully influenced by parathyroid hormone. So you can actually test for that? Yeah.
Now, so would some of these generally ban if somebody has a really broad spectrum test done, we have a fellow that we're working with, he does a 52 marker test, Dr. Lewis, 52. Would they be in, or would you have to ask the special generally, the ones that you mentioned, parathyroid, lactic acid, prolactin, or these would be special requests and add-ons? Yeah, unfortunately, some labs cost hugely for those specialized tests. The Life Extension Foundation now has a deal with labs around the country and in the spring,
they have extremely good prices on panels, hormone panels and some general panels. But I don't think they're yet doing some of the very important tests like lactic acid, free fatty acids and parathyroid hormone. That's very interesting. Yeah, a little plug here for Dr. Lewis. We have an ad on the front page and you all can go on there free, take a little quiz. Then if you want to connect up with him, he'll do a 52 marker. I think it's worth like 350 bucks plus an hour consultation to read and to interpret
the labs and that's worth 350 right there to most docs. So you might want to consider doing that. And then, yeah, ask him about these. I've never heard of some of these parathyroid. Wow. The parathyroid hormone again, Dr. Peat? What does that tell us if we get that tested? It is increased when you're deficient in calcium or vitamin D or have an excess of phosphate. And the parathyroid hormone happens to work closely with the aldosterone of the adrenals. So it responds to thyroid function and adrenal function and parathyroid hormone like aldosterone
poisons the function of your mitochondria all through your system. The mitochondrial respiration falls as your parathyroid hormone and aldosterone rise. Something happened to your phone. It seems like it lost a little volume and clicked on there. Nothing? Yes. Oh, there you go. You hear that? There was an echo in the profile. Okay, there we go. What is Dr. Peat? Here's another email for Dr. Ray Peat, Patrick Timpani, oneradionetwork.com, May 21st. James Corbett will be here tomorrow for Tinfoil Hat Wednesday. He's out of Japan. He's really a trip. You'll enjoy hearing some of the things.
We'll talk about all the geopolitics in the world and some of the more spooky things going on with Tinfoil Hat Wednesday tomorrow. Does Dr. Peat think there's anything to this more and more people talking about vitamin A toxicity? Seems to be a new thing that people are kind of clamoring about. Anything here we need to look at in your opinion? In 1973 and '74, the drug companies were coming out with synthetic vitamin A products. They found professors around the country to tell stories.
One at, I think it was University of Oregon or Washington, put out the story that she had seen patients go blind from taking vitamin A. There were several professors with stories like that coordinated apparently through the advertising departments of the pharmaceutical companies selling synthetic vitamin A. I contacted these professors. They wouldn't talk to me. It was obviously just made up stories to make people fear vitamin A. One of the popular stories is about some explorers who ate polar bear liver and their skin fell off in the following days.
There are lots of toxic things that a polar bear's liver might contain. But they chose to blame it on vitamin A. In animal experiments, huge doses that would be greater than you could get from polar bear liver never produce symptoms similar to what the polar bear liver supposedly caused. So there's a history of trying to create panic. That's going on with vitamin E. People are saying vitamin E causes heart disease and cancer. They have products to sell that might cost $1,000 or $10,000 a month.
They don't want people taking something that costs a dollar a month. I wonder what polar bears could eat that might make the livers toxic. I mean, it's pretty pristine up there, right? No pollution and just fish? Yeah, but if there's, for example, an algae bloom that fish have concentrated, the polar bear will eat either the fish or seals that have poisoned themselves eating fish that have eaten algae. The algae toxins are a very good candidate for what got blamed on vitamin A.
Boy, there's so much stuff in Dr. Peat that if you really dig into the history, like anything on planet Earth, it's different from what we've been told. I mean, it's just amazing, isn't it? Yeah, experiments with baby chicks. I think they were giving them something like a million units of vitamin A, which caused brain deformity. Their brain stuck out of their cranium as they developed. But if they gave them a moderate amount of vitamin E, the vitamin A was no longer toxic. So what was happening was at a certain very high level, vitamin A auto-catalyzes.
It stimulates its own oxidation and degradation. And the symptoms of vitamin A poisoning become similar to vitamin A deficiency. And both of those are prevented by adding vitamin E, which prevents the breakdown. Here's an email for you. What does Dr. Peat think about reducing endotoxins from gut bacteria by using things like garlic, ginger, cloves, black cumin seeds, and things like that? They have their own allergens, so you have to be careful. They do somewhat suppress bacterial growth, but you have to watch that you aren't adding some of these seed-defensive toxins or allergens in the process.
I think it's safest to use certain fibrous foods. For some people, a clean, rinsed bran from wheat or oats is a safe way to stimulate your intestine to reduce the endotoxin production. A cooked mushroom or bamboo shoot, these organisms have antibacterial chemicals built into the organism so that they will not only act as a fiber and a bulker, but they will chemically reduce the bacterial population. Raw carrot is another thing. The carrot grows in a very microorganism-rich environment of fungus and bacteria, and raw carrot will powerfully reduce the endotoxin production.
That's why you like the carrot salads. You like the grated carrots right at night. And olive oil and vinegar are both bactericidal, so a good dressing, oil and vinegar with some salt makes the carrot more effective and tasty. So bamboo shoots, the only thing I've ever seen there in oil in restaurants are the bamboo shoots you get in a can. That's not what we're talking about. Can you get really fun, good-backed bamboo shoots somewhere? Only in places like Chinatown in San Francisco or New York.
The canned ones, you can get a quart or two-quart can of cooked bamboo shoots, and I always boil them for a minute or two to eliminate any metal from the can. But then if you make a sauce, for example, cheese and egg sauce, they can be a very tasty dish. And they're good for you, these little bamboo shoots. So here's an email from Adam Bergstrom. You know Adam, he was on the show with us one time. He says, "Accelerated lipofuscin accumulation and oxidative stress are definitely involved in autism.
Does the oxidative stress cause the lipofuscin accumulation, or is it the other way around, in your opinion?" It's both. When lipofuscin lowers the oxygen tension, it acts as a catalyst, taking fuel directly to oxygen and creating an oxygen deficiency. And that oxygen deficiency imitates what happens under stress or in the presence of estrogen. The low oxygen creates the catalytic condition to further degrade any polyunsaturated fat that's in the environment. And vitamin A can contribute to that. An excess of vitamin A without E interacts with the fish oil or other unsaturated fat
to lead to the accelerated production of lipofuscin. Oh, so the E helps with lipofuscin if you're going to do some poofers or something. Yeah, it's the main... That was one of the things that led to vitamin E research was discovering that it prevented lipofuscin and the brain toxic effects and testosterone suppressing effects and so on. So, would your fave be then one of those like mixed tocopherol kind of vitamins? Yeah, I think the mixed product is the best. Can Dr. Peat tell us how much or is sauerkraut really good to consume on a regular basis,
good for gut health, sauerkraut? The salt in it is, I think, the main virtue. Just the salt? Yeah. How about the... The saltiness of it, it's okay, but I don't think it's a health food. Would soaking wheat, I'll write an email, work for making healthier bread, soaking the wheat? Definitely. Yeah. I was a bread maker when I was in graduate school. Oh, you were? Yeah. And I experimented letting it soak for 12 to 24 hours. And I found that ordinary bakery bread would cause gas, just a slice of it would disturb
my sleep, but I could eat a whole loaf of my homemade bread with no digestive problem at all. And what did you do? Was it a sourdough? You had no starter? It was just what came out of the air. Yeah, I think, yeah. Good luck getting the right kind of yeast out of the air. But just the soaking activates enzymes and the actual protein value where wheat has extremely low value protein because of the storage gluten. Gluten doesn't have great nutritional value, but when it soaks, the enzymes turn it into
growth proteins and more than double the actual protein value so that you're getting actually some valuable protein in your bread when it's soaked properly. And these days you can even get the original organic einkorn wheat, you know, the old stuff, the old heritage wheat. You can actually get that now at Whole Foods. A lady, a friend of mine out of Italy is producing that. She taught farm. The protein quality of the older seeds sometimes is significantly higher than current. She found the seeds and talked some farmers into growing it. It's called einkorn.
She had kids that were having a hard time with all the gluten, you know, the whole gluten sensitivity thing. They do fine. She's a bedbreaker. So they do fine with this einkorn. Very interesting. There must be something with this new wheat on all this gluten stuff, huh? Hybridization and all that? Yeah, it makes bread lighter. If you're going to make bread in a factory quickly without leavening it the natural way, the gluten has a rubbery quality that makes it possible to inflate the loaf and have a rubbery texture.
When the grain is soaked so that it's nutritionally more valuable, it loses that rubbery quality and you get a denser moisture tending to crumble bread. So it isn't popular in the supermarkets. A few more here and then we'll let you go to work. Does Dr. Peat think that there is a fungal connection to prostate cancer and/or breast cancer? Most tumors contain fungus just because the immune system is deranged and you'll find lots of junk contributing. The fungus produces estrogen, for example, but the cancer cells themselves are producing
estrogen stimulating their own growth and I think the risk, the seriousness of a cancer increases the likelihood of finding fungus in it. There seems to be a lot going on with the prostate and the testing and they're doing it for the breast cancer too and hasn't the science shown that the more you mess around with these things, these lumps and all that, the worse it is? Doing a biopsy, if you believe that the cancer is a mutant cell that is following its own internal rules, biopsy and chemotherapy and radiation and surgery all seem logical, but
if you think of the cancer as a product of something going wrong in the organism that is failing to heal a wound, if you see the tumor as a wound which is not healing properly, then when you mess with it, you're adding to the problems of the organism rather than solving the organism's problem. So if you think of the tumor as a wound, flesh that out a little bit, that's interesting. Talk a little bit more about that idea. When you look at a healing wound, there was an article in JAMA about 50 years ago showing
that doing a biopsy of a normal wound, just a stab wound or something, as the tissue heals, doing the pathology, doing a slice of the tissue, any stage of a healing wound can be identical in structure to a cancer. A pathologist would say, "Yeah, these are cancer cells. They have all the properties of occasional abnormal cell division. The ratio of cytoplasm in the nucleus is low. It's invasive structurally." That's part of a normal wound healing process, but the problem is that the cancer lacks something
to get beyond that stage of healing, and so it just keeps growing without resolving the wound. It doesn't create an organized tissue because something is lacking in the system. So the body's... It sounds like the body's trying to heal when these cancer cells are getting together, in a way. Yeah. You can find quite a bit of research on that, but it isn't popular. The medical business is invested in their super-expensive chemotherapies and their radiation equipment, ion beam machines that cost millions of dollars, and it's not good for their investment
to question whether the whole theory of cancer is right or not. When you say this organism that's sometimes called a tumor that's trying to heal, it's lacking in something. Do we know what it's lacking in? For one thing, carbon dioxide. The person who asked about a fungus probably had heard about Simoncini in Italy. And baking soda, interestingly, very often does provide what the tumor lacks to be able to heal, but carbon dioxide is what the baking soda is providing, sodium plus carbon dioxide. And in the 18th century, people were already experimenting.
The discovery of carbonated water, partly it was closely related to the observation that carbon dioxide helps with cancer, and people were already seeing great improvement, for example, in breast cancer just by exposing it to carbon dioxide. There's a book that reviews the history of treating cancer with carbon dioxide, for example, carbon dioxide enemas, or breathing carbon dioxide, or sitting in a bag full of carbon dioxide to absorb it through the skin. When you're under stress, the characteristic feature of cancer identified by Otto Warburg
a hundred years ago is that it can't stop producing lactic acid, which is normal in an injury, but the injured tissue producing lactic acid stimulates its own growth, which is good for the healing process, but at some point the lactic acid has to stop to allow maturing of the tissue rather than continued growth. Carbon dioxide is the feature produced by the respiring mitochondria, which should turn off lactic acid, but if something is limiting your ability to produce and retain carbon dioxide, then you can't turn off lactic acid.
And Simoncini's baking soda sometimes provided enough sodium and bicarbonate or carbon dioxide to suppress the lactic acid and allow healing to proceed. And do we know why this carbon dioxide process sometimes lowered? Low thyroid, low calcium, low vitamin D, low sodium are all factors in limiting the ability to make enough carbon dioxide. Would it be reasonable, folks, every now and then, to take a little teaspoon of baking soda? I mean, would it be okay? Or help? Well, athletes find that their endurance is greatly increased with typical doses of
a tablespoon of baking soda at the start of an endurance race. That's a lot, a tablespoon. That's going to taste really, whew, man. Yeah, but even a fourth of a teaspoon of water can make a big difference in how a person feels. I've known people who always got swollen feet on an airplane trip. Taking a spoonful of soda in water, they found that they didn't have the swollen feet. What's going on there? When you take in the baking soda, your kidneys quickly get rid of any excess sodium that
you don't need, but the bicarbonate is able to be turned when it meets a cell. Enzymes turn it quickly into carbon dioxide, which is acidic, and the acidic cell quiets down and stops making so much lactic acid. The formation of lactic acid makes the cell alkaline, and the baking soda provides the carbon dioxide that will reacidify the cell and stop it from producing the lactic acid. Oh, very interesting. But you wouldn't want to do that, I guess, around food time, because it doesn't dilute the stomach acid, too? The stomach usually can quickly adjust.
Make some more. It's very powerful at producing acid and removing excess alkaline. Does stomach acid increase with stress or decrease? It depends on the person. Oh, right. It could go either way. Please ask Dr. Peed, what about A1 versus A2 casein milk? Is there a difference there? There is a difference, but I've never seen any research that really makes a convincing case that it's important for the health. The peptides do differ, and the peptides do have different effects, but our digestive systems are usually so efficient that we don't notice any effect.
It breaks down right to amino acids, which have none of that endocrine effect. They're out there actually selling A2 milk now. Have you seen that on the shelves, or A2? It's a whole marketing thing now. Are the new digital x-rays significantly less dangerous than the older guys, or more? What they're meaning is that they have a more sensitive way of registering the x-rays, the same old x-rays, but they're claiming that their new machinery can make smaller doses. In effect, in practice, what they're doing is making more pictures, and it turns out
that the exposure per visit to dentists is likely to be just about the same, because they're so enthusiastic about making more pictures. What about this thing that was really popular over the years? I don't know. I don't hear about it much more, but they were really promoting a lot on radio where you take a picture of your chest and look at all the calcium in your arteries. What's the name of that? Do you know which one I'm talking about? High energy, a lot of big, strong x-rays. Yeah, CAT scans is one way of doing it.
It's well established that medical x-rays are a major cause of heart disease as well as breast cancer. The areas that have the best medical care, the area around San Francisco and California, a very high-income area, have the country's highest incidence of breast cancer. West Virginia has very poor medical care, so-called, but also the lowest breast cancer mortality. Very good evidence that heart disease as well as breast cancer is caused by medical x-rays. The term I was thinking of, Dr. Peter, CT scans. They're very popular, very inexpensive, right? Yeah.
They deliver hundreds of times more radiation than a chest x-ray. Yeah, a lot. More and more people have been exposed in the last 10 or 15 years. You can go in some malls and get a CT scan. In a mall? In a mall. Here's an email from Jill. "If someone has a problem converting T4 to T3 and has slightly high reverse T3, are they better off taking Armour or Cytomel? I started Cytomel at 5 milligrams, but starting getting headaches, my doctor wants me to switch to Armour."
For most people, the combination products such as Armour are very good, reliable, the dose can be adjusted if you are watchful. Women have been known to have at least five times as much thyroid disease as men because estrogen interferes with the function of thyroid at every level, at the gland and at the transport and at the cellular response level. One of the things it does is increase cortisol and the stress hormones, and that interferes with the conversion of thyroxine to T3. So women are much more likely than men to have a T3 deficiency.
Forty-five years ago when I was teaching endocrinology, there was a woman at the University of Oregon Hospital brought in unconscious from a myxedema coma, they called it. Her doctor had started her on 100 micrograms of thyroxine. That wasn't enough for her symptoms. He increased it gradually. At 500 micrograms, she went into a coma. In the hospital, they discovered she had essentially zero active T3 hormone. The pituitary had been suppressed by the high dose of thyroxine and the pituitary is able to activate the conversion, but with the resulting high estrogen and high cortisol, the conversion
was blocked. So they gave her intravenous T3 and immediately she came out of the coma and was well. But it's very common. You could say that practically all of the women with a thyroid problem are deficient in T3 because of that effect of estrogen blocking the conversion. And so they could maybe experiment with a little bit of progesterone and the wild yam thing to do, would that help? Yes. The progesterone blocks the formation of estrogen and also blocks the antithyroid effect of cortisol. Estrogen increases cortisol, which blocks thyroid function.
Progesterone blocks both of those and lets the thyroid function normally. So that's why it works for the guys with the testosterone, the progesterone. Same principle. Pretty safe too, what I understand. And do you agree? Pretty safe? Yes. No one has really found any harmful side effects of progesterone except that it can cause unconsciousness if you take a huge dose. Okay, final email, then we'll let you go on with your day here. What does your guest recommend for low thyroidism and high blood pressure at the same time?
We recently started taking some Living Streams probiotics, which seem to have helped other symptoms. Okay, thank you, but not the high blood pressure yet. I stopped taking armor thyroid when I started the probiotics. Should I just have eased off of the armor? Oh, so let's see. It sounds like Dr. Peat, they've kind of just dumped the armor, but their blood pressure has gone up a little bit. Yeah, when you're low in thyroid function, generally your TSH is very high. TSH has a pro-inflammatory effect that creates many of the circulatory problems that are blamed on hypothyroidism.
It's really hyper-TSH-ism, which goes with the low thyroid function. Keeping your TSH down is very important. I've got several dozen articles showing that hypertension was cured when they corrected their low thyroid problem. That's why she got off the armor, and then maybe why her blood pressure went up. Yeah, that's probably the largest cause of hypertension is low thyroid, but you have to watch the intestine health. It's extremely important. When your thyroid is low, your digestion is slow, and toxins from the intestine contribute to the high blood pressure. Yeah, well, Dr. Peat, good job.
Thanks for spending some time with us here today. We appreciate it. Okay. Yeah, it's always fun. Now, your website again is raypeat.com. You have lots of articles. You have 12 different, what did you say? I'm sorry, 12 different, 12 subscriptions or 12 issues of your- Yeah, 12 issues every other month. Every other month. Over two years. Yeah, two years. You want to get your special email thing, and you can do that right on his website. Again, thanks a lot. Have a pleasant day up there in the Northwest. Okay, thank you. Thank you, sir.
Dr. Ray Peat, well, always good. Boy, I tell you what, you got to take notes, right? Man, these little bodies, they are a trip, aren't they? Well, we do what we can here to keep bringing you folks that'll help you to stay out of doctor's office, take care of yourself, and do your dream, and have more energy, and all the things that we like to do here on planet Earth. We're going to have fun on Thursday. I think we're going to talk about the brain, the old brain, you know, the old brain thing.
We're going to do the brain on Thursday. Do we have somebody else too? I got to check here. I know we had somebody else, but I will. We'll find somebody. Oh, we got to get somebody else for Thursday. And then tomorrow, we're going to do a tinfoil hat Wednesday with James Corbett, who's out of Japan, and he's a fun guy. I think you'll enjoy him. If you don't know him, just check him out. So I love you all very much. Thanks for your ongoing support. Let me know if I can help in any way.
My email, [email protected]. I'm at your service here. I don't get far from my computer during the day. I'm always kind of checking what I'm doing, seeing what's going on. If I can help you, let me know. People order sulfur, and they have questions about this and that, and all these questions. So I'll see you tomorrow, and may the blessings be. From the Hill Country in Texas, this is one Radionetwork.com. [music] [BLANK_AUDIO]